In advocating for positive rights, gay activists began to reorient their
activism away from “sexual liberalization” and toward “social integration.”
Key to advancing social integration was mainstreaming homosexuality
by adopting the norms of society at large—most notably, marriage.
This mainstreaming agenda, which constituted a third wave of
gay-rights activism, was promoted by a new cadre of gay-rights orga-nizations led by the Human Rights Campaign, founded in 1980 to elect
gay-friendly candidates to state and federal offices, and by conservative
gay intellectuals such as Andrew Sullivan, who argued that “gay marriage”
was not a radical idea intended to destroy heterosexual society
but rather a conservative one that would work for the betterment of both
gays and society overall. A noticeable change in rhetoric accompanied
the justification for same-sex marriage by advocates of mainstreaming.
While early demands for marriage equality were couched in terms
of equal rights, the new argument stressed that gay people’s desire for
marriage was rooted in love, commitment, and responsibility—the same
reasons that heterosexuals give to justify their own desire to marry.