Two notes on gay moral purpose

One inspired by Aaron Broadwell, one by Steven Levine; I get a little help from my friends. Broadwell. First, a shameless exploitation of a friend’s life story to make a point. On Facebook yesterday (8/2), Aaron Broadwell to me, about my 8/1 posting “Aaron Broadwell: the sequel”: — AB>AZ: Wow — thank you, Arnold. — AZ>AB (lightly edited): You know, of course, that you’re part of my project to provide encomia to deserving people while they still live, especially for gay men and for women, who are both likely to be discounted — in the case of gay men, in the common belief that we lead morally purposeless lives of sexual indulgence. (Here I give three wild cheers for sexual indulgence but note that that still leaves us plenty of time to work on repairing the world, and some of us care a lot about that too.) It is a sorrow that I didn’t get to celebrate Ron Butters (who was, among other things, the editor of the journal American Speech during the 1990s) — and I still have a funny-sweet…