I asked my friend who was in Queer Nation and Act Up if your version of how things changed is accurate. He said he thought that the Love is Love campaign was relatively new and that it postdated most of the significant advances in LGBTQ rights. I think what really happened is advocates started pointing out that LGBTQ are not "others" but your children and grandchildren, your uncles and cousins, and other people that you love. And even though they gained some rights, including marriage, there is still a huge and growing anti-gay sentiment in this country, so it's not like it's all hunky dory. There's still a lot of discrimination and anti-gay rhetoric coming from schools, the Catholic Church, etc.
This notion that advocates ought to be "nicer" is largely a mirage and a misdirection in my opinion. We live in a dominance-based hierarchy that firmly believes that if you don't win you lose and that dog-eat-dog is the normal way to establish pecking order. In the face of that, being nicer makes you look like a chump who is not going to get any respect.
"Not only are those with more historic access to power unlikely to be willing to just give something to someone else because it may disturb their interests, but due to the elements of stratification that are inherent in a dominance-based hierarchy they undoubtedly don’t see why they should have to concede anything to someone “weaker.” A dominance hierarchy is a might makes right system. No one in such a system is going to just voluntarily cede some of their authority or privilege to someone who hasn’t taken it from them by force or by exerting concerted pressure over time.
Even among the suffragettes, there was a clear element of class awareness and snobbery. Susan B. Anthony was primarily interested in the rights of middle and upper-class white women, and the legacy of that is still being felt in modern feminism, where even today black women have legitimate grievances about the way that they have been marginalized within the feminist movement. Whether this is outright racism and classism or something more subtle and more subconscious is not really relevant because it has the same impact on those who are harmed by it.
Having a less stratified system feels deeply uncomfortable to many people, and one need only look into the headlines to see that being played out. After all, what else are The Proud Boys? What else are the people who were deeply offended when a black man was elected president or a woman played in a football game? In their minds, the stratification is set, and people who are supposed to be on the lower rungs are way out of line for imagining that they are on their level — because in their belief system, only one of them can “win.”
If you want less “culture war.” If you want fewer marchers in the streets. If you want fewer pointed fingers, then it’s incumbent upon those with more societal cache to overcome some of their territorial instincts and listen and to encourage others like them to listen, and then to use their power to act in response to what they’ve learned.
And if you don’t want to do that, then you’ll have to be prepared for the loud and uncomfortable demands for a more egalitarian system to keep taking place. If you want to preserve a system rooted in a dominance hierarchy, then what you can expect is the fruits of that. Marginalized and oppressed people know that being “nice” is never going to get them anywhere. They’ve tried that already, sometimes for hundreds of years and they understand, even if you don’t, that this is not how a dominance hierarchy works."
So, from my perspective the two options are, we either change the entire social system to one that is more egalitarian and less entrenched in a dominance-based hierarchy, or advocates are going to have to keep loudly demanding that their voices be heard until at last they are.
Edit: My friend further notes that most advances came through the judiciary and not public opinion/legislative means anyhow. It was a lot harder to deny rights when “neutral” legal standards were being invoked. He said of his time as an activist, “We infuriated people because we demanded equal treatment and they saw as taking something away from them. We knew they wouldn’t give us anything is we asked nicely. We knew that beyond any doubt because we had been asking nicely for years.”
