Hollibaugh’s main point in this paragraph is that the queer political movement has shifted from a struggle for freedom and sexual liberation to a movement for extensions of heterosexual rights to homosexuals. She complains that the current political movement is aimed towards “gay nuclear family rights and for serial monogamy” while it once aimed for sexual liberation. She concedes that there has been a great deal of progress in the current trends of the movement, with gender conforming gay people trying to fit in with the rest of society, but thinks that the gay liberation movement has lost something in it’s attempts to normalize queer people. She says that the gay liberation movement has shifted from a movement about a diverse culture’s freedom to a movement about normalizing a conforming subset of that community.
Wilchins claims that white American culture is one of the only cultures that splits sexual orientation from gender (27). On page 19, Wilchins discusses how this distinction might be questionable, giving the example of sexual orientation impacting gender expression in the form of clothing. She quotes a woman who wants the right to be a lesbian in her sexual orientation and also to look like a stereotypical lesbian in her gender expression with clothing. The first time I wore a tie around my parents, they exclaimed that it was for boys. That made me feel insecure and vulnerable. I think that the links between sexual orientation and gender expression are most obvious in people who fit into male/female, homosexual/heterosexual categories as binary oppositions, and that the connections between those aspects of identity become extraordinarily difficult to parse out for anyone who falls outside of either, or both, of those binaries.