Reddit Reddit reviews Victory: The Triumphant Gay Revolution

We found 3 Reddit comments about Victory: The Triumphant Gay Revolution. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.

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3 Reddit comments about Victory: The Triumphant Gay Revolution:

u/freezoneandproud · 4 pointsr/scientology

The answers are (sometimes) different based on whether someone is in the CofS or an Indy.

The CofS won't ever quite say that it's wrong to be LGBT, but that's part of the culture. Certainly that belief system is enforced by Science of Survival (SoS), which says outright that homosexuals are "covertly hostile" (1.1 on the tone scale, where 2.0 is Anger and anything under that is considered a contra-survival attitude).

(I'm not sure that SoS says that they should have their rights taken away, but then it's been a while since I read the book. And note that the rewrite of the Basic Books changed a lot of what Hubbard himself wrote.)

What many in the CofS (and its critics) fail to take into account is that Hubbard was a man of his time. And if he had any moments of enlightenment about how free (and Clear) people might operate in society, it wasn't evident in 1951 when that book was published. SoS also criticizes independent women and suggests they should be home taking care of their families -- even though when I joined the CofS in the 70s, it was Hubbard's wife who was running the organization.

In this particular case, I think Hubbard was mixing up cause and effect. In truth, a homosexual in 1951 almost certainly was covert about his or her behavior. Such people had to be. If you were openly gay, you almost certainly would lose your job; your family would disconnect from you; you were treated as mentally ill (with the most vivid example being Turing, who died of the "treatment"). So of course such people hid their sexuality. And when you hide something so essential about yourself, it's not going to be great for your emotional well-being. I'd be hostile, too. (For those who don't "get" the attitude of the time, I recommend watching the movie, A Single Man with Colin Firth, and reading Victory: The Triumphant Gay Revolution for a full history of the LGBT movement. Doing so taught me quite a bit about what makes "movements" succeed and fail, too... lessons the CoS never learned.)

Minshull's book naturally reflected what Hubbard said. It wouldn't have been approved otherwise. I don't know what she personally believed.

Also, the question of why Quentin died (and evidence suggested suicide or other bad juju) has never been satisfactorily answered. Several people have posited that Quentin was gay, and that may have been the case, but I wouldn't say that anyone "knows" it. He apparently wanted to be an airplane pilot and was told he couldn't follow that dream -- for a lot of people, that's enough reason to give up on life. ("I can never be the person I want to be" isn't only about gender affiliation after all.)

In any case, the CofS attitude certainly was not a unique one in the 50s and 60s, and by the 70s much of that attitude/culture was baked into the organization. If a member was anti-gay, the culture told him he was okay to have that attitude. (If the CofS member didn't care, generally it didn't matter because few gay people joined, or at least hung around for long. If you're not welcome, you leave. Looking back at my time in the CofS, I don't think I knew a single person who was gay.)

In case it isn't obvious from my remarks here, I never understood why the CofS (or its members) would care if someone is gay even if he was 1.1. You aren't disdained because you're in Fear (which is lower on the tone scale!) or Anger; why should this tone level be different? You audit the individuals to help them address the problems in their lives. If you do the job well, they get happier and they go uptone. If someone decided along the way that he should stop being gay, fine. If not, so what?

The attitude in the Indy field is -- as with so many other things -- a question of who you talk with. I know several people who adhere strictly to "whatever LRH said" and quite a few of them hold onto the anti-gay attitude. (Though knowing those people, they'd find some reason to be bigoted if they didn't have that justification.)

In contrast, the set of people who actively question the tech ("what part of this do I keep? what do I reject?") generally don't care if someone is LGBT. Or almost emphatically don't care. After all, if you're a spiritual being, who cares what plumbing your body has? Or what turns you on? It's hard enough to find True Love; why should we care what kind of package it comes in?

So I've been told by several Indy/FZ auditors that quite a few of their clients come to them because it's safe to be openly gay.

u/CashewGuy · 1 pointr/gay

> you end up with a cultural association that manliness = fucking women, which leads to not fucking women = unmanly, which leads to homophobia.

I think that's a remarkably simplistic and rather shallow way of thinking about sexuality and homophobia.

Culture has to have a foundation somewhere. To suggest that basing it from biology [is a bad thing] is to suggest that it have no foundation at all. The problem is when cultures become averse to augmentation and evolution. Cultural stagnation is what leads to homophobia, not the reality of biology.

There is no one single cause behind homophobia, and anyone telling you that is just plain wrong. There are, however, a few bigger causes of it. Now, my focus in research for the last few years has been in homophobia in a high school setting - so what follows is mostly associated with that (specifically, US high schools).

One of the larger causes of homophobia goes way back to our more primal roots: pack behavior. We are codified to align with a larger pack, because throughout history those outside of the pack aren't treated well, and (going way back) end up dying of starvation or exposure.

So, skipping a whole lot of time, let's turn the page to the high school setting - which is probably more like the old pack behavior than any other time in one's life. Many / Most kids haven't an inkling of what they'd like to be - and not just in career trade, but in what sort of person they'd like to be. So, packs form around social custom. Much of this - and this is the point you were trying to make - comes from how they observe others behaving. And, naturally, much of this comes from the media. (Sidepoint: HS is also where the gender divide begins but that's a whole different paper).

The harsh reality is, fucking women does equate to a higher social standing. It is codified into our systems, through centuries of natural selection. There were points in our evolution that said, "If you don't spread your seed, you'll be pointless." That's a pretty important thing to have in the genes when you're trying to establish a species.

We're no longer at the point where we need that in our mentality, but it is still codified in there, like it or not. Social customs and social obligations are two different things. Two hundred, even a hundred years ago, you were socially obligated to pump out a few kids to help in the fields. A few decades ago you were obligated to pump out some kids to complete the Nuclear Family (two children, minimum, generally).

As much as the Conservative Right here in the US wants [you to believe], you're no longer held to these obligations. Thankfully.

But all of this time with these obligations which have now become customs has left us with a bit of generational lag. My mother, for instance, has a seven brothers and sisters. I've got one younger sister - that's a good indicator of how much generational obligations/customs have changed.

Part of that generational lag occupies a large part of the media, for several reasons. 1) Sex is codified, and because of that, sex sells. As the media is discovering, all kinds of sex sells - so this little media lag will be going away in a generation or two. 2) It becomes part of the cycle (we're still seeing what's socially acceptable to the previous generation on TV - we're just now seeing that change, just like it'll change again at the end of our generation / set of generations).

Let's get back to our high school kids, who've been organizing themselves into their little wolf packs (thankfully, the French gave us a better word: clique). They see these social customs in the media, and naturally use them as a boilerplate for their own behavior.

Now, here's the important part: evolution.

Turns out, a lot of people get sick of these social customs in the previous generation, and they end up passing those protests on to their kids. That's why you have a generation of women who, when told to stay in the kitchen, respond with, "Go fuck yourself." Over a few generations, this leads to some pretty profound social change. That's how you go from women's suffrage being proposed in 1878, to proposed as an amendment in 1919, to ratified in 1920, and to having the first woman <insert_pretty_much_anything> about a generation (give or take) later. 96 years between "Women? Voting? Sure, I guess." and "Hillary 2016!" seems likt a lot, but think about it. That's the rough lifespan of one person.

And each time a huge social change sweeps through, it makes the ones that follow even easier. Just look at LGBT rights. It didn't take 100 years for a massive amount of change. It seems slow to those of us who get to see the worst of it - but it's remarkably fast.

The other, and in my opinion slightly more important factor in social change, comes from the "Defense of the Different."

It's easy to lose yourself in the articles about cruelty - and that needs to be dealt with. But what we very rarely take note of, is how often it happens that things go well.

Another natural, codified, part of our humanity, comes from saving face, both of ourselves and for our friends. When we form bonds of any sort with another person, we expect those bonds to stay intact [and will take lengths to defend them]. The act of "coming out" is a pretty big change in those bonds, and the reason the process is so painful is that you know you're changing the relationship, because - in a way - you're changing your character. Most of the time, these things go just fine. Horror stories scare us so much because, well, they're horror stories.

Anyway, without going on that particular tangent for another six paragraphs, I'll get back to the simpler point: people like their friends. So, say you've got our little pack of high school kids. Say one of them comes out. The natural reaction of the group may be to cast out the injured individual and keep moving. This is where our evolution comes into play, and when we're supposed to say, "So what?"

Friends have the ability to grab back onto that person and pull them back into the group. The group changes. The group evolves. And as that group grows up and gets out into the world, that little interaction shapes the way they deal with people in their lives.

All of this is very complex, and I'm leaving a whole lot out for the sake of brevity.

The West Wing addresses this group behavior with a nice little DADT discussion that I'm quite fond of.

My points are:

  1. There are things codified into our system. One of those things is "fuck women procreate, be powerful."

  2. Codified behavior is the basis of our social structure.

  3. The evolution and adaptation of our base social structure is what leads to social change.

  4. Social Change comes in many shapes and sizes.

  5. Homophobia doesn't come from "fuck women, be powerful." It comes from, "This is something I've never encountered before, and I'm scared of it."

  6. We, as a species, get over it^1 by saying, "Oh, this is what that is. That's not so bad." ^1 - "it" can be replaced with anything: women voting, blacks in the military, gays being a thing, gays in the military, etc.

  7. Having social obligations and social customs doesn't lead to a problem. The species neglecting to evolve those social customs is a problem. (We're doing a damn good job of evolving).

    ---

    Some further reading:

  8. "Dude, You're a Fag: Masculinity and Sexuality in High School", an ethnographic study conducted and authored by C.J. Pascoe. (Read this even if you're not interested, it's good.)

  9. "On Facework" - Goffman. One of the best papers on social identity and obligations we hold to each other.

  10. "Victory" - Linda Hirshman. Documents the LGBT community's rise from minority outcast, to one of the strongest and fiercest social movements in the world.

  11. "Queer Bullying" - Tracey Peter & Catherine Taylor. "How Homophobia, Biphobia and Transphobia Hurts Students".

  12. "The Ideology of "Fag": The School Experience of Gay Students" - George Smith.

  13. Hallway Fears & High School Friendships: The complications of young men (re)negotiating heterosexualized identities" - Michael D. Kehler.

    These are only a few of the papers you could read, there's an absolute mass of research out there on homophobia and heteronormality. All it takes is some patience, some reading time, and the ability to coherently form a message from combining and understanding a mass of other content (which is what I do!).

    --

    Some edits, noted in strikethrough or [additions].
u/MatthewDLR · 1 pointr/LGBTeens


Sorry if there’s it’s mostly mlm stuff, this is just the media I’ve used to comfort myself.

Books:
Victory | A great telling of the history of the LGBT movement


Movies | I don’t really know too many, but I think these two are good
4th Man Out | A movie about a “bro” coming out to his friends, it’s definitely not for everyone, but I found it pretty funny
Handsome Devil | Just a really cute movie about a two boys in boarding school


Music | (If you want more, I made this thread)
Twin Fantasy - Carseat Headrest | A little weird, but I still really like it
Flower Boy - Tyler, The Creator | My introduction into Hip Hop music and still one of my favorite albums, I’d highly recommend
American Boyfriend - Kevin Abstract | A great album and if you enjoy it, you should probably check out Brockhampton’s albums
JUNKY (track off of SATURATION II) - Brockhampton | The verse by Kevin is the LGBT part, the rest of the song is great too
Kiss The Boy (Single) - Keiynan Lonsdale | It’s just one song, but I think it’s a great song
Blue Neighborhood - Troye Sivan | Probably the most “basic” álbum here, but still a solid pop album
Expectations - Hayley Kiyoko | If I’m being honest, I didn’t really like this album, but all of my other gay friends loved it, so you might too
Channel Orange - Frank Ocean | A solid album, my favorite track being ‘Bad Religion’

Also, I found this list of LGBT rappers