Similarity or Difference?

"But the most decisive turning point arrived when gay people began to band together to demand to be treated decently. The Mattachine Society was founded in 1950, named after a French Renaissance secret fraternity of unmarried men. But it couldn't agree on its central goal. The battle in that society—which created a deep split in the group within three years—runs through gay history from that point on, and eventually breaks apart Bronski's book. It boils down to this. Is the point of the gay struggle to say we are essentially the same as straight people, or is it to say we are different and glad to be so? Does history—with its slow trajectory of convergence in greater sexual openness—have any light to shed?"

Johann Hari in Slate reviews Michael Bronski's A Queer History of the United States.