Properly or improperly, people ARE prejudiced against the mentally ill. Rightly or wrongly, employers will NOT hire them. Morally or immorally, the mentally ill are NOT judged as individuals, but are made pariahs. If we allow the label of sickness to stand, we will then have two battles to fight — that to combat prejudice against homosexuals per se, and that to combat prejudice against the mentally ill — and we will be pariahs and outcasts twice over. One such battle is quite enough.

Gay men had been cast as mentally disordered sexual psychopaths. The success of the gay liberation movement depended, in considerable measure, on cutting those stigmatizing ties. The strategy of attempting to attain rights and respect by distancing one’s own group from associations of stigma was far from unique to the gay rights movement. Both disability and queer studies scholars have detailed the ways in which stigmatized people have struggled to be included under the umbrella of the normal by distancing themselves from the even more stigmatized. As Michael Warner has observed, the most common strategy for displacing sexual shame is to "pin it on someone else."