|
By: James Kirchick
https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/the-first-amendment-created-gay-america?s=r
Rich Tafel and Urvashi Vaid had almost nothing in common.
Tafel is a white Christian minister, an entrepreneur, and the founder of the Log Cabin Republicans, the leading group for gay and lesbian GOPers. Vaid, who died earlier this month at the age of 63, was an Indian-born progressive activist and a former director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, the “intersectional” wing of the gay-rights movement.
During their heyday in the 1990s, when issues like gays in the military, gays in the Boy Scouts, government funding for HIV-AIDS research, and same-sex marriage dominated headlines, the buttoned-down Tafel and the crunchy Vaid perfectly embodied their respective factions of that amorphous constituency known as the “LGBT community.”
But despite their many differences, this unlikely pair was united by a then-radical notion: that, as Tafel put it, “gays and lesbians deserved the right to live their lives as they wanted to.” Neither had any illusions about the other. “She knew I opposed her post-modern progressive Marxist agenda for the movement,” Tafel told me in an email, “and she opposed what she saw as my hetero-normative, neoliberal agenda, but we genuinely liked each other.”
| 
