Another Gay Party Line : A Quiet Revolution: A Backlash to Strident Activism of the ‘80s Has Created a Small Army of Gays Who Just Want to be Ordinary Americans

One Saturday last spring, the same day that marked the kickoff of West Hollywood’s annual Gay and Lesbian Pride Celebration, a small group of conservative Republican activists got together for an alfresco fund-raising brunch in a Hollywood Hills home. The setting seemed like heaven--ripe oranges and lemons on curving branches, mockingbirds burbling arias beneath an azure sky--and the dozen or so guests seemed perfectly cast for their roles as Grand Old Party stalwarts.

Prosperous and casually dressed, most of them were a decade or more older than the host, a 37-year-old television producer and distributor named Ritch Colbert. The guest list included a judge, a financial adviser, a retired aerospace engineer and an attorney active in the National Rifle Assn. Food and wine was followed by a brief pep talk, a discreet pitch for money and genial chitchat.

Still, the fund-raiser was not your ordinary conservative Republican conclave, for these were not your ordinary conservative Republicans. They were gay men, members of a national gay-and-lesbian conservative lobby called the Log Cabin Republicans, and they had come to meet the group’s national director, Rich Tafel, an ordained Baptist minister determined to make his soft voice heard by the GOP hierarchy.

“I don’t say the Republican Party is better than the Democratic Party,” Tafel, 32, says after the brunch. “My focus is that for 30 years we’ve concentrated on the Democrats, now let’s concentrate on the Republicans. When I go around the country speaking to groups, I hear people say, ‘I’ve always been involved in gay politics but I’ve had it with listening to someone talk about saving the whales or the spotted owl.’ My role is to be out there putting a face on gay Republicans and showing the real diversity of our community.”

Several of the brunch guests were scheduled later in the day to man the Log Cabin booth at the Gay Pride festival, where the presence of gay Republicans would provoke as much shock as it would at an American Legion convention. Tafel acknowledges this with a grin: “When you’re working the booths, people always ask, ‘How can you be a gay Republican?’ I say it’s easy to be a gay Democrat, but being a gay Republican is really hard.”

Diversity is a key word here. After 25 years of a tumultuous, often anguished, struggle for freedom, self-esteem and civil rights that began with a riot at Stonewall Inn, the celebrated gay bar in Greenwich Village, some gay and lesbian Americans are marching off in unexpected directions, while others are declining to march at all. One of the most intriguing debates involves homosexuals who have no interest in organized politics, either of the right or the left, and who want to live unexceptional lives in mainstream American society. Their main spokesman is Bruce Bawer, a forthright polemicist whose new book, “A Place at the Table,” is in its fourth printing.

The conflict is a classic one in the history of American minorities: unabated self-assertion versus efforts to assimilate. Not surprisingly, the emergence of a conservative gay consciousness has provoked impassioned criticism from gay activists of the left. “Any gay who says he’s conservative is not a gay,” says playwright and author Larry Kramer. “To be a conservative is consorting with the enemy, all the people that hate us.” Recently, in this magazine, writer Paul Monette referred to “a particularly nasty subspecies of neo-con(servative) dissent” and characterized the dissenters as “prim and smug and Puritan by choice. . . .” These men, Monette wrote, “have no sense whatsoever of the legacy of Stonewall--of the multifaceted community we have forged like pioneers or the systems we have put in place to care for our own, or the common vow we have made to stop the silence.”

Every movement contains the makings of its own backlash, if not the seeds of its own destruction; witness the reaction in the women’s movement to the perceived excesses of radical feminism. Indeed, backlash is all but inevitable in a media-dominated culture, where the lingua franca of social activists is noisy overstatement. Yet there is more to the new dispute between gays of the left and right than meets the eye or ear. Behind the rhetoric of the nascent conservative movement lies a common concern that, far from being new, or unique to the gay community, is as old as human longing: Where do I belong in the world, where can I find my true home?

FOR THE LOG CABIN PEOPLE, THE ANSWER IS CONCISE--THE REPUBLICAN PARTY. “Logically speaking,” says Colbert, the TV producer who is also president of Log Cabin’s Los Angeles chapter, “gays and lesbians should be Republicans, given the basic tenets of the party: right to privacy, personal freedom. In reality, Democratic Party membership has become almost an artifact in the gay and lesbian subculture. People register as Democrats and declare themselves liberals without having any idea what it means.”

Thus far, Log Cabin, which started in California and went national in 1990, claims about 8,000 members, distributed among 40 clubs in 31 states. Though no breakdown is available for race and gender, the membership is predominantly white male. Yet the organization aspires to reflect the diversity of the gay population. Its new slate of officers, elected last month, includes a president, Abner Mason, who is African American, and a vice president, H. Evelyn Kotch, who is a Jewish lesbian. “We don’t have as many women as we’d like,” says Kotch, a middle-school principal in Trenton, N.J., “but there are Republican women out there, and I’m planning to go around the country and be as visible as I can.”

The obvious paradox is that these thousands of gays and lesbians are taking the Republican plunge just when religious zealots are expanding their influence in the party. Anti-gay rhetoric is nothing new; it marred the 1992 Republican convention in Houston, where Pat Buchanan proclaimed a religious and a cultural war for the soul of the nation. But gays, along with those who favor abortion rights, are now targets of ceaseless opportunity for extremists in Virginia--where Oliver North, with support from the radical right, has won the Republican nomination for the Senate--and in six or more other states, including Minnesota, where conservative Christians have taken control of GOP party organizations.

Here in Los Angeles, gay Republicans got a harsh lesson in Realpolitik last spring when the executive director of the California Republican Party, Bob Carpenter, and his wife, Pat Giardina-Carpenter, the state party’s finance director, attended a Log Cabin membership meeting at Luna Park in West Hollywood. A modern Republican in the style of the late Lee Atwater, who envisioned the party as a big, hospitable tent, Carpenter gave a speech in which he described some right-wing Republican extremists as “probably the most intolerant people” he had ever spent time with.

Less than a month later, after the speech had been initially reported in the weekly San Diego newspaper Gay and Lesbian Times, Carpenter and his wife found themselves unemployed. Although Republican state chairman Tirso del Junco said they resigned from their posts voluntarily, it seemed clear, from sharp criticism of the speech by Del Junco and others, that if the Carpenters jumped, it was only to avoid being pushed. They have made themselves unavailable to reporters, and Republican National Committee Chairman Haley Barbour did not return phone calls for this story.

As a loyal Republican, Colbert downplays the incident’s importance. “Here’s a guy (Carpenter) who was as sick and tired of the direction of the state party infrastructure as we were and washed his hands of it. By the time he left he was ready to go,” he says. Yet Colbert, an attractive, impeccably tailored man who exudes self-confidence, also sees recent developments in state Republican politics as a wake-up call. “We are now mindful that we have to take some responsibility for having allowed this radical right-wing, so-called religious fringe to take over a leadership position in the California Republican Party structure. For Republican moderates like Log Cabin--and I use the term moderate because conservative evokes an image of the radical right wing--our job is to give voice to our concerns about this infiltration and declare: ‘You are not Republicans; you may be some radical right-wing, nut-case, fringe person, but you are not a Republican.’ ”

To back up these fighting words, Colbert and his Log Cabin colleagues are trying to match the radical right at its own game of grass-roots organizing. Last year, 30 Log Cabin candidates across the state ran for seats on Republican county committees. Nearly two-thirds of them lost, but Colbert is unfazed, since his long-term hopes turn on two main articles of faith.

According to the first, most gays are still in the closet, living straight lives, but are open to voting Republican and, to a surprising extent, already do. “In the (Dianne) Feinstein-(Pete) Wilson race, the gay and lesbian vote was split 50-50,” he says of the 1990 state gubernatorial race. “Now that’s a wild statistic, but it’s supported by any number of political consultants.”

Like all articles of faith, it can’t be verified because no one can prove or disprove that a given voter is a closeted gay. One consultant who rejects the supposed 50-50 split is Bill Carrick, a prominent Democratic strategist and media consultant in Los Angeles. “I went through every number there was to look at after we lost that race,” Carrick says, “and I’ll bet you Dianne must have gotten at least 80% of the gay and lesbian vote down here in West Hollywood. In San Francisco, it was even bigger. In some of the precincts in the Castro, they’d come in 953 to 6.

“I guess Wilson may have done better outside the urban centers, but that’s only because there are small enclaves of affluent gay and lesbian voters in places like Laguna, Santa Barbara or Palm Springs. On the other hand, I think it would be very healthy if gays were represented inside the Republican Party. If we leave it to the people who were representing it in Houston, the Republican Party will be overrun by homophobes.”

Results of exit polling by the Los Angeles Times also contradict Colbert’s electoral claims. When respondents were asked in 1992 about their political ideology in a national poll, 11% of gay men and 12% of lesbians described themselves as conservatives; in California that year, the percentages were 12 and 8.

Colbert’s other belief, which resonates with the title of Bruce Bawer’s book, holds that grass-roots activism gives gay Republicans a chance to show other Republicans who they really are. “When they see that we’re sitting at the table and not wearing leather jockstraps, their whole image of gays and lesbians will shift. We don’t think this shift will occur overnight. It’s taken 20 years of nurturing and developing and fund-raising and power-seeking just to get a seat at the table of the Democratic Party, and the battle can’t be won within the Republican Party without the same plodding, day-to-day effort.”

FAITH ALSO SUSTAINS RICH TAFEL, LOG CABIN’S NATIONAL DIRECTOR, AND not because of his Baptist upbringing, or his master’s degree from the Harvard Divinity School. The movement is so young that he must measure his progress by such intangibles as how many cities he manages to hit (13 in May, 6 in June and July), how many people in Congress he’s able to lobby (22 visits to Capitol Hill in July) or how well he performs in TV debates with fire-breathers of the radical right, including the Rev. Jerry Falwell on “Larry King Live” (extremely well, thanks in part to his ability to quote Scripture with the best or the worst of them).

On the road, his fund-raising appearances are fraught with paradox. He runs into people who are openly gay but afraid of coming out as Republicans. He receives contributions--occasionally as much as $50,000--from closeted gays, some of whom use money orders instead of checks for fear of being outed. He meets secretly with closeted gay Republican staffers on Capitol Hill who give him tactical tips, and on the road with straight politicians who want to support gay causes but not in public. In fact, the night before the brunch in the Hollywood Hills, he attended a Log Cabin fund-raiser for 160 people in Laguna, but reporters were barred at the request of one straight Orange County candidate who was also there.

Tafel keeps his sense of humor. “I’ve got the power of Moses,” he says with a smile. “As I walk through the room at fund-raisers in Washington now I split the group into two camps, and the sad thing is a lot of people on the side that moves away from me are closeted gays.” But where do he and his colleagues actually stand, and what are the prospects for gays, and lesbians, finding new avenues of influence and expression anywhere on the political right?

Clearly, the short-term answer is linked to the outcome of events like the Senate race in Virginia, recently described by the conservative commentator Kevin Phillips as a sideshow so enormous that the idea of a tent becomes a misnomer. In the meantime, the subject of conservative gays is one that Republican leaders would like to avoid. Several phone calls on the subject to the office of House Minority Whip Newt Gingrich of Georgia went unreturned, and when a reporter struck up a conversation with Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole as Dole walked from the Senate chamber to his office, the Kansas senator was glad to make small talk about baseball--”the Red Sox are playing tonight, you know, George Mitchell’s favorite team”--but he seemed to blanch at the prospect of talking about gays and the GOP; his response was to turn the reporter over to his press secretary, who never called back.

On the other hand, Barney Frank, the gay Democratic congressman from Massachusetts, was characteristically outspoken in his conviction that conservative gays are barking up the wrong tree.

“There are only a handful of Republicans who aren’t hostile to gay rights,” Frank insisted recently during a break between votes in the House chamber. “The Log Cabin people say don’t be partisan. OK, I don’t want to be partisan, but if you vote for gay rights, you’ll vote Democrat 90% of the time. The Log Cabin people keep saying, ‘We’re new, give us a chance.’ As far as producing GOP support, though, they don’t, they just don’t. Right now they’re putting more of their energy into selling the Republican Party to gays than gay rights to the Republicans.”

A different perspective is offered by Andrew Sullivan, editor of the New Republic and a self-declared conservative on social issues. “Log Cabin is a small little faction in a large struggle. It’s a very important faction, but in the long run we’ll see deep changes all across the conservative spectrum. This current attempt by the fundamentalist wing to take over the Republican Party is doomed. What they’re trying to do is deny the existence of gay people and their integrity in every town and every state in America, in the very families they claim to defend. All they have going for them is fear and panic and deception, so, in fact, I think there’s no way the Republican Party in the medium or long term can successfully continue this strategy.”

In the last Republican Cabinet, says Sullivan, who is homosexual, “four or five members had gay sons or daughters. At some point, the cognitive dissonance must end.”

Even in the short term, tremors are registering in conservative territory. Tafel and other gay strategists have played substantial roles as consultants in recent campaigns that elected New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman and New York City Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani. And in Los Angeles, Tafel advised the campaign staff of Richard Riordan on the delicate business of taking gay votes away from the Democratic mayoral rival, Michael Woo, without losing Riordan’s own conservative base.

Another change was signaled recently by the Human Rights Campaign Fund, the country’s largest gay organization (whose membership of 85,000, as opposed to the million or more members of the Christian Coalition, suggests not how many but how few homosexuals belong to political action groups). In June, the fund released a list of 71 senators who had signed a statement that they do not discriminate against gay people in the “hiring, promoting, or terminating of employees in their Senate offices.” The figure represented nearly three-fourths of the Senate and majorities within both parties, including Republicans Dole, Alan K. Simpson of Wyoming, Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas and Thad Cochran of Mississippi, and Georgia Democrat Sam Nunn, who had fired two gay staff people over a decade ago.

The fund released a similar list of 234 members of the House--also a majority--last February. President Clinton, in a Valentine’s Day letter to the Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund, said: “Those who would legalize discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or any other grounds are gravely mistaken about the values that make our nation strong.”

The impact of these pronouncements varies greatly. The President’s letter was dismissed by some in the gay community as damage control after he failed to deliver on his campaign promise of ending discrimination against homosexuals in the military. As for the anti-discrimination statements signed by members of the Senate and House, their practical importance is limited, since many federal employees have some protection against discrimination. But the symbolic importance of the statements is great, since there is no federal civil-rights law, in public or private employment, that explicitly prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation; only recently has new legislation to that effect been introduced by Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), with about 30 co-sponsors in the Senate and more than 100 co-sponsors in the House.

IN THE SHORT TIME THAT gays and lesbians have participated openly in conservative politics, no one has demonstrated the hopes and confusions of this position more dramatically than Marvin Liebman. At 71, Liebman is the great-grandfather of gay conservatives. Yet that’s a misleading title, because it suggests that he has shown the way for younger generations over the course of decades. In fact, Liebman has spent most of his years searching for the way himself.

In earlier times, he was a member of the Young Communist League, a private in the Army Air Corps, a castoff from the Army Air Corps, a husband, an ex-husband, an ex-Communist, a Republican and a pioneer in direct-mail fund raising for anti-communist causes. Later, this perpetual pilgrim staged conservative political rallies, founded Young Americans for Freedom, helped elect Ronald Reagan to the White House and, converting from Judaism to Catholicism along the way, took his place as a prominent insider in conservative circles. Then, in 1990, at the age of 67, he came out.

He did so in a letter published both in his old friend William F. Buckley’s National Review and in the gay magazine the Advocate. The letter was notable for the warmth of its personal revelation and the power of its warning about homophobia within the ranks. “The conservative movement,” Liebman wrote, “must reject the bigots and the hypocrites and provide a base for gays as well as others.”

Buckley’s response was pinched. “There is, of course, argument on the question of whether homosexuality is in all cases congenital. But let us assume that this is so, and then ask: Is it reasonable to expect the larger community to cease to think of the activity of homosexuals as unnatural, whatever its etiology?” His answer was a haughty no.

Soon after coming out, Liebman joined forces with Log Cabin, which was just setting up a national organization: He was chairman and Rich Tafel was president. Then came a falling-out, with the Log Cabin people convinced that Liebman, who also created a conservative gay think tank called the Lambda Conservative Foundation, was trying to set up a competing organization. Despite the toll taken by such gyrations,which are endemic to new movements, Liebman has achieved, however belatedly and improbably, a genuine eminence. He has shown the way by providing a role model of personal integrity and by moderating the political climate, making it easier for younger gays and lesbians to call themselves committed conservatives.

For a man who was forced to conceal his sexuality in the Communist Party, which considered homosexuals untrustworthy and therefore undesirable, and who fell from grace in mainstream conservative politics when he finally came out, Liebman betrays a startling absence of bitterness or animosity. And for a prominent gay conservative, he reveals anything but a conventional view of the political scene.

“My politics now are independent. The Republican Party lacks compassion, it just does, but it is the second party, and you can’t ignore it.” He sees no point in being a gay Democrat--”there are already so many of them”--but he voted for Clinton because he felt he couldn’t vote for George Bush. Now, like many gays, he feels betrayed. “Clinton said that the day after he was inaugurated he would sign a presidential order saying gays are OK in the military, and that’s all he had to do. Even if Congress had overturned it, he would have been a hero, and we need heroes, but now he’s a punk.”

Living in the District of Columbia, Liebman takes unabashed delight in the on-again, off-again D.C. mayoral campaign of Luke Sissyfag, a young AIDS activist and self-created media creature whose flamboyance makes some buttoned-up gay conservatives squirm. Liebman says there’s no such thing as a real gay conservative movement--”the Log Cabin clubs aren’t conservative, they’re liberal at best”--but he cheers gay movers and shakers in their assault on the GOP.

“Politics is the worst thing in the world,” Liebman says. “It’s full of thieves, crooks and liars. But you’ve got to get involved, and Log Cabin is doing a wonderful service by trying to get involved in the Republican Party. Will they succeed? I don’t know. I only know they’re doing a service to the community, they absolutely are, just like Luke Sissyfag is doing a service to the community.”

If Liebman is short on doctrinaire coherence, his views reveal a generosity of spirit that may have been wrong for partisan politics from the start. “I embraced everybody but myself,” he reflects ruefully. “When I learned to embrace myself, I became truly all-embracing.”

Whether gay conservatives constitute a movement is an intricate question. Sullivan of the New Republic doesn’t think they do either, but for different reasons; his outlook is that of a social critic with a deep belief in the importance of gay rights in the military, and the need to accord full legal status to gay marriages. But that outlook also includes an abiding sense of the limits of political and legal action. “The definition of someone who is conservative with a small ‘c,’ ” he says, “is someone who doesn’t believe in movements.”

Sullivan does see significant changes in the political climate, however. “Fifteen years ago, deeply closeted, completely closeted gay people were running extremely right-wing organizations like NCPAC, the National Conservative Political Action Committee. That just cannot and does not happen anymore. Now we have openly gay people like David Brock, the pit bull of the American Spectator (magazine), their hero who brought down Anita Hill and helped try to bring down Bill Clinton.”

More important, Sullivan believes that the gay community as a whole is going through a period of great change. “There’s nearly a critical mass of people who’ve begun to challenge the leftist analysis of sexual issues, or rather emotional issues,” he says. “As far as I’m concerned, that’s what this is all about--the possibility of people’s emotional orientation being fully encouraged and accepted. To restrict the debate to sexual activity is to play into the hands of the political left and right.”

SULLIVAN’S MAGAZINE RECENTLY ran a controversial cover story called “The Stonewall Myth” and pegged its mid-June publication to the start of the anniversary festivities. Written by Bruce Bawer, the piece seemed at first to be a critique of political action. Bawer took issue with what he called the mythologizing of the Stonewall riot. Many gay men and lesbians, he wrote, recite the name Stonewall “with the same reverence that American politicians reserve for the names of Washington and Lincoln.” Describing this as “the politics of nostalgia,” he charged the gay movement with living in the past and said “the Stonewall sensibility--like the Stonewall myth--has to be abandoned.”

In fact, the story offered no alternative political strategies, for Bawer is not a political thinker. What he proposed was nothing more--or less--than sweeping attitudinal change. First, according to his agenda, homosexuals must change the way they view themselves; that will change the way they’re viewed by others and hasten the reality of “an America where gays live as full and open members of society, with all the rights, responsibilities and opportunities of heterosexuals.”

Yet the very absence of specifics helps explain Bawer’s sudden prominence in the gay community. Instead of handing his brethren a political program and sending them back to the barricades, where the pain of otherness can be acute, he encourages them to re-examine who they are and what they feel; it’s a self-help approach to the integration that many gays seek.

Bawer himself has been feeling the pain of otherness. Since his book came out last year he’s taken some brutal hits in the gay press. “The intelligent ones, like the Advocate and the Lambda Book Report, gave me very good reviews, but the stupider the publication, the stupider the reviews--some of these little bar rags and other weekly newspapers got very nasty.”

For the record, Bawer is 37, lives with his companion in a small apartment on a chic-free street on Manhattan’s East Side, doesn’t claim to be a Republican or a conservative and, dressed in cut-offs and a sweat shirt on a recent hot day, looked as casually grungy as everyone else on the block.

He insists that homosexuals need not live in gay ghettos or be narrowly defined by their sexual preference. “Ghettoization doesn’t get you anywhere,” Bawer says, “marginalization doesn’t change society. By being on the margins you don’t engage as much as you should with the people who occupy the rest of the space in society.” He rejects the notion of gay sex as a radical act and the concept of coming out as transformation. “Coming out is extremely important. It’s a breaking through, a feeling of living with the truth, rather than living a lie. But it’s not becoming something other than who you are,” he says.

In Bawer’s lexicon, much of gay politics adds up to “street therapy.” The radicals, he says, “call this gay visibility. I mean, the level of thinking in the movement is so low that gay visibility is good no matter what kind of visibility it is. I say, ‘OK, now we’re visible, what do we want to do with it, what image do we want to project?’ ”

His question betrays a singular faith in the open-mindedness of mainstream straight America. Bawer wants gays to be the ones who change the dialogue. “It’s like teaching a language. You do it patiently, methodically, meticulously. You don’t teach it by screaming strange words in somebody’s ear that they don’t understand.

“If you really talk to most people and give them a chance they can change. They can change . They may not change as quickly as you want them to or come along as far as you want them to, but I’ve had some very positive results talking to people calmly and patiently. And it spreads. That’s the way we can get society gradually used to the idea that homosexuality is one facet of life, and that, in and of itself, it isn’t a big deal.”

Nevertheless, Bawer’s tendency to de-dramatize homosexuality is anathema to those gays and lesbians who can finally say, after epic struggles with themselves and the culture around them, that it’s very much a big deal, that their sexuality lies at the core of their being. Many of those he scorns as nostalgic see him as yet another gay conservative turning his back on history.

“It took guts for the Mattachine people and the Stonewall people and the odd Quentin Crisps of the world,” says Robert Dawidoff, a professor of history at the Claremont Graduate School, referring to early activists in the movement. “Bawer is angry with people who made him possible, made us possible.” As a gay man, a longtime Democrat and co-author with lawyer Michael Nava, of “Created Equal: Why Gay Rights Matter to America,” Dawidoff finds nothing good to say about the gay conservative cause. “I think the problem with people who talk about gay conservatism is that they tend to assign the values of Aristotle or Aquinas to essentially political disagreements. The real issue is not conservative or liberal but what strategy are we going to use in a civil-rights movement. Because for people like me who are uneasily but professionally gay, we know it’s a civil-rights issue. We know it’s a fight.”

Yet he sounds much less certain when he looks inward. “Anguish seems to be the particular terrain of my generation, and I’d surrender it with great reluctance. There are aspects of queer life, gay life, whatever, that vividly show what we’ve had to undergo, and continue to undergo, because I’m not so sure it’s gotten better. By the same token, you see these younger people who are so incredible, so competent and humanly attractive. Maybe they’ve absorbed less damage and their gayness is less a site of pain, but I still don’t think it’s that simple. You know, you look at all these guys with big bodies in West Hollywood and say, ‘Well, sure they feel good about themselves, they’ve got the physique.’ But isn’t it also armor?”

Nothing is simple in the fight for gay rights. One faction seeks a place at the table, the other fears banishment to the sideboard. Sometimes it seems as if everything--evolution, revolution, counterrevolution--is happening at once: homosexuals turning up ever so insouciantly in Ikea commercials at the same time they’re being bashed all over the map by the radical right; the radical right taking over the Republican Party in Virginia at the same time the Virginia Court of Appeal decides that homosexuality doesn’t make a parent unfit.

What seems clear, however, is that the battle lines are in flux, new ideas are in the air and a small army of gay Americans is making an extraordinary spectacle of itself by seeking the right to be proudly, perfectly ordinary. That, in itself, is some sort of revolution.