Justice & Law Quote by George Weinberg

There’s a deliberately offhand triumph in Weinberg’s “was great,” a plainspoken landing after a list that spans activism, speech, and intimacy. For the psychologist who helped coin “homophobia” and pushed the field to treat anti-gay prejudice as the pathology, not gayness itself, the casual phrasing is doing work. It refuses the melodrama that polite society often demands from marginalized people when they narrate struggle. He’s not begging to be recognized as heroic; he’s insisting that a life spent refusing shame can also be, simply, enjoyable.

The sentence also collapses categories that institutions prefer to keep separate. “Fighting for gay rights” is public and political; “speaking out” is rhetorical and risky; “making friends, men and women” is social, even ordinary. Weinberg’s subtext is that liberation isn’t only court decisions and diagnostic manuals; it’s the slow reengineering of everyday affiliation. The small addendum “men and women” matters: it punctures the insinuation that gay life is a closed loop, and it frames coalition and friendship as part of the movement’s infrastructure.

Context sharpens the stakes. Coming of age when homosexuality was still a diagnosis, Weinberg watched psychiatry grant itself the power to define who counts as healthy. His line reads like a quiet rebuttal to that era: the supposed “illness” turned out to be a route into community, purpose, and a more honest self. “Finally” hints at time lost to silence; “great” claims the time that followed as not just righteous, but lived.