Historical quote of the day – those who don’t seek to be masters

“I must lose in a world where only the winner is a Man, a human being. I was not a real Man. I was a queer, a half-Man, a pseudo-Man, like a woman…. Men fought and won, they fought other men for the ownership of the rest of creation, lesser peoples, the losers, women, the Third World, as well as the natural environment. I could never be a real Man.

We must not give up our humanity to become like the Man. We must not seek to conquer, to become the master. Our gayness, our ability to love one another, is our humanity, and it must not be sold for the Man’s mastery over others. And if the straight Man’s revolution is based on mastery and conquest we will have no part in it. But we are going to make a gay revolution, a revolution that will be an assertion of humanity. And remembering what you taught us of our humanity, we gay men, together with women, and all the other victims, those who don’t seek to be masters, can create it.”

- Mike Silverstein, “An Open Letter to Tennessee Williams,” Gay Sunshine, October 1971, quoted in Mark Grief, The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in America, 1933-1973 (2015)