WeirdRepublic on the Matthew Shepard nonsense:
By the year 1998, stories about gays in the liberal media had become formulaic. The blueprint for talking about gays and gayness had been spelled out in black-letter text in the formative queer-activist essay The Overhauling of Straight America published in 1987 by the seminal queer theorists Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen (aka Erastes Pill). Every liberal journalist in America, many of them gays, knows that Step Two is to “Portray Gays as Victims, Not as Aggressive Challengers.”
It begins with the sentence, “In any campaign to win over the public, gays must be cast as victims in need of protection so that straights will be inclined by reflex to assume the role of protector.”
Step Four commands liberals to “Make Gays Look Good” and Step Five instructs activists to “Make the Victimizers Look Bad.” “To be blunt,” declared Kirk and Madsen, “they must be vilified . . . we intend to make antigays look so nasty that average Americans will want to dissociate themselves from such people.”
That Marshall Kirk was quite a fellow:
Marshall suffered from severe migraine headaches that were preceded by a strong desire to talk in a rapid monologue. He found that if he gave into these “babbling fits”, the headache would be alleviated. He had other medical problems and suffered from bouts of depression that required electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) on three occasions. Because of the negative effects on his memory, he considered ECT to be the last alternative to avoid death. In part due to this medical history, his knowledge of pharmacology was usually greater than that of anyone who treated him. When he died, he was found alone in his apartment by two friends. The cause of death has never been publicly revealed. During years at Edward Little High school Marshall complained of stomach nausea and seldom ate. He was extremely under weight.
