Politics & Power Quote by Andrew Sullivan

There is a quiet flex in Sullivan calling his advocacy an "early crusade": the phrase borrows the moral urgency of religion while inviting the reader to see him as a lonely heretic who eventually became orthodox. That’s the first move. The second is even craftier: by framing same-sex marriage as "now mainstream gay politics", he positions himself not just as a participant but as a bellwether, someone whose supposedly unpopular fixation proved strategically and culturally correct. The subtext is a bid for authority inside a movement that often treats insider legitimacy as a scarce resource.

Context matters because Sullivan’s pro-marriage argument emerged in the early 1990s, when queer politics was still shaped by AIDS catastrophe, ACT UP militancy, and suspicion of assimilation. Marriage could look like capitulation to institutions that had excluded, policed, and pathologized gay life. Sullivan, a conservative-leaning gay Catholic, made the case anyway: not liberation from norms, but access to them; not a new sexual politics, but equal citizenship. That tension is the engine of the line.

The sentence also performs a soft rebuke. If the movement has moved toward him, it implies it once misread the moment, perhaps privileging radical aesthetics over winnable rights. And there’s an implicit warning embedded in the self-congratulation: today’s heresies can become tomorrow’s consensus. Sullivan isn’t only claiming credit for marriage; he’s arguing for his relevance in whatever comes next, by reminding readers he has been right before - especially when it wasn’t popular to be.