This is Eli Lake and you are listening to the re-education.

My guest today is the author of The New History of Gay Washington, The Secret City, Jamie Kirchuk.

And the topic of today's show is liberalism and gay equality.

I'm beautiful in my way, just I make no mistakes. I'm on the right that you say, I would fall in this way.

Don't have you to see.

Don't have you still the regret, just love yourself and instead.

I'm on the right track, baby, I will fall this way.

Oh, that ain't no way, baby, I would fall away, baby, I was born this way.

That was Lady Gaga's anthem, Born This Way. You can hear this song, shopping malls, inside

ubers, or on a daytime talk show as it cuts to commercial. It's almost banal, and the fact that

its popularity is caused for its banality tells us something remarkable and hopeful about America

in 2022,

because this song is a celebration of a simple concept

that people who sleep with their same gender are not perverts, traitors, or predators.

They are just being true to themselves.

They are born this way.

Now, today, this view is conventional wisdom.

For most of the 20th century, the government, the police, the medical community, the media, and our culture

treated homosexuality as a sin or a mental illness. It marked one a deviant. It was a source of shame.

It made someone a target of blackmailers,

forced gay men and lesbian women to take enormous risks every time they sought a sexual partner.

It was a kind of apartheid. The straits could marry, serve in the federal government,

...