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People undergo profound historical cataclysm when there’s a mass death experience and they get the message very clearly that they live in a world where no one cares what happens to them. … And then you have a large traumatized population. And what they do is assimilate into the dominant culture that allowed them to be destroyed. So this is an historic pattern that we’re in now. And I think in part, this moment is a consequence of AIDS trauma.

I also think that straight people make it very clear that the only grounds that we’re going to get anything is the grounds in which we resemble them. And we’ve internalized that. So people go around saying, ‘I deserve rights, I’ve been with my partner for 30 years. We deserve rights.’ Nobody deserves rights because they’ve been with their partner for 30 years. People deserve rights because they’re human.

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