HomoQuotable - David Halperin

"What makes gay people different from others is not just that we are discriminated against, mistreated, regarded as sick or perverted. That alone is not what shapes gay culture. (That indeed could end.) It's that we live in a world in which heterosexuality is the norm. Heterosexual culture remains our first culture, and in order to survive and to flourish in its midst, gay people must engage in an appropriation of it that is also a resistance to it.

"So long as queer kids continue to be born into heterosexual families and into a society that is normatively, notionally heterosexual, they will have to devise their own nonstandard relation to heterosexual culture. Gay subjectivity will always be shaped by the primeval need on the part of gay subjects to queer heteronormative culture. That is not going to change. Not for a very long time. And we'd better hope it doesn't." - Queer theorist David Halperin, from an essay adapted from his new book, How To Be Gay.