I don't see that you have anything to apologise for, Eric. If anyone should be doing any apologising here, it's TheatreDiva90016, but that would require him to get what I'd call an old gay man's chip off of his shoulder - and there's no way that's going to happen.
Yes, the young gays of today should be grateful to the old gays and the battles they fought so that we can live the lives we live today. I certainly am, and going by what Eric has written in this thread, so is he. It's not like the world today is without it's own battles for the LGBT community, but heaven forbid that any of these be mentioned in the same breath as the battles of old. If that's the basis for the fight in which we're going to trap ourselves, then they were all moot, old and new.
No, Eric and I and everyone else born since 1978 can't have the same experiences you had, but we can empathise with them in the same way that all of us can emphathise with what happened in the Holocaust without having experienced it ourselves, and, yes, that empathy can be extended through not only non-fictional accounts of the past, but also through literature that illuminates it. That's one of the things that art, in whatever form it takes, is able to achieve.
That's all that Eric's been trying to say in his most recent posts, but all of the pearl-clutching and posturing that's been going on in this thread has completely obscured that. Of course, that was the point all along, wasn't it, TheatreDiva90016? It hasn't been at all about proving some point about how the gays of today stand on the shoulders of the gays of the past without gratitude or that empathy from the younger generations towards the older generations is impossible. Watching these posts appear has been like being an audince to some kind of personal vendetta being played out against someone whose only crime was to be here and articulate his feelings at a time when he was obviously vulnerable due to the manner in which he experienced the death of someone who is an icon in his life.
I hope that you can see that, Eric, and take what has been said from whence it comes. It's clear to me and many others here, I am sure, that you don't just copy and paste what you find on Google in your posts and that you are a deep thinker and that you feel things very deeply, no matter how much some people here might try to negate that. It is they that are being churlish, not you.
What a mess of a thread this has become, from a topic that should have been about celebrating the talent of a woman who meant a great deal to many people, including many gay people, despite whatever personal views she may have held, views that in any case were subject to change over time and part of a complex process that she had to work through on her own terms. I hope that somehow we can steer this back in that direction once again. In fact, I'm going to post a link that attempts to achieve just that.
Donna Summer sings MacArthur Park
Musical Cyberspace: a tribute to the musicals of Broadway and beyond.
