«The gay movement’s insistence on breaking the old social contract with heterosexuals and renegotiating its terms — by asserting gay people’s right to live their lives openly — was also profoundly shaped by the sexual revolution of the 1960s and ’70s. All around them, lesbians, bisexuals, and gay men saw their heterosexual friends decisively rejecting the moral codes of their parents’ generation, which had limited sex to marriage, and forging a new moral code that linked sex to love, pleasure, freedom, self-expression, and common consent. Heterosexuals, in other words, were becoming more like homosexuals, in ways that ultimately would make it harder for them to believe gay people were outsiders from a dangerous, immoral underworld. Moreover, the fact that so many young heterosexuals considered sexual freedom to be a vital marker of personal freedom made lesbians and gay men feel their quest for freedom was part of a larger movement. Ultimately, both gay people’s mass decision to come out and heterosexuals’ growing acceptance of them were encouraged by the sexual revolution and became two of its most enduring legacies. I think this did not represent the assimilation of gay life into the Normal so much as the transformation of the Normal itself.»
— Professor George Chauncey at Yale’s Gay and Lesbian Alumni Reunion, from “Why They Call Yale the ‘Gay Ivy’”, Yale Alumni Magazine (via lenachen)