Most Lesbian and Gay men if they ever had any vision of sexual emancipation, have long ago lost it. The idealism of the immediate post-Stonewall lesbian and gay liberation movement has been swamped by a short-sighted, short-termist realpolitik. Few homos aspire to anything more than assimilating into the hetero status quo. They happily conform to the straight system. The battle cry is gay rights/gay marriage, not queer emancipation. The gay rights agenda focuses on the limited goal of equality, which involves parity with heterosexuals within a social structure and moral framework which straights have devised and which they dominate. In other words, equal rights on straight terms. Those who advocate gay rights alone, without any deeper commitment to the transformation of sexuality, are concerned with only removing homophobic discrimination. They want to reform society, not fundamentally change it. Their insistence on nothing more than equal rights for queers, and their typical view of lesbians and gay men as a distinct class of people who are destined to remain forever a sexual minority seperate from the straight majority, have the effect of reinforcing the divisions between hetero and homo. It encourages the false essentialist idea that gay and straight are two preordained, irreconcilable sexual orientations characteristic of two totally different types of people. Such attitudes preserve society as it is, inhibiting the movement for greater sexual choice and freedom. For some, gay identity has become a sexual security blanket which is clutched tight at all times. Its loss would undermine the core of their being. They cling tenaciously to a sense of gayness, with all its connotations of invariable sexual difference, certainty and exclusivity. Anything that clouds the distinctions between straight and gay is deemed suspect and dangerous. Hence the frequent irrational hostility to bisexuality and bisexuals. Lesbians and gay men with this mind set are wedded to gay identity, not gay liberation. This particular form of gay identity is implicitly committed to the preservation of sexual difference and to solidity of the gay/straight dichotomy. Because there is so much emotional investment in being gay, there is a concomitant, often unconscious, resistance to resolving the division between homos and heteros and, even more so, an unwillingness to admit the possibility that homosexuality, in the form we presently know it, might one day cease to endure.