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Are you sure about the former? Because I've read multiple arguments from gay-supporting liberals that this was specifically not the case. Their narrative is that the talking point that homosexual men are just normal, average people like anyone else who want nothing else but to live as average people in faithful marriages and be accepted as such was manufactured by gay rights activists in the '90s for normie consumption and as a pure PR move. It's not something most homosexual men even agree on.
Well, regardless of what the wider movement thought and thinks, I personally think that the normie approach worked. I don’t really think flamboyant attention-seeking style (so to speak) changed any minds. Whereas the “we are just people too” approach seemed to win over a lot of people both secular and even religious. The flag was an attempt to avoid being memory holed and overlooked, and got people used to seeing gay rights as something normal and not something fringe. So not exactly the same as the pure PR approach sure, but the efforts I think were complementary.
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Related: Douglas Murray (a gay conservative) once pointed out, when criticising the concept of an "LGBT community", that there is no more unnatural an alliance than between gay men and asexuals.
Presumably the alliance there is not being societally forced into heterosexual relationships. But, lol.
That is very near to the issue. The LGBTQAYCFRIO7CGAEIROFHTAGN+ community is defined by their common enemy.
There exists, existed, or is believed to exist, an ideology devoted to the proposition that the only correct way to live is one person-born-with-penis-presenting-as-male, one person-born-with-vulva-presenting-as-female, in an exclusive relationship, having standard coitus.
Hence gays, lesbians, bisexuals/pansexuals, asexuals, the transgender, the gender non-conforming, the polyamorous, and those who engage in unorthodox carnal practises, form a natural alliance (The enemy of my enemy....).
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