A white middle-class couple in a domestic relationship, Tom and Michael show little interest in a more systemic critique of social injustice, racially motivated violence, or inadequate access to health care systems. Instead, their version of gay politics, if they would subscribe to the notion of politics at all, is a politics of consumption, a demobilized and decidedly private effort to assimilate into the neoliberal mainstream that governs contemporary US society. For Tom and Michael, being gay means shopping for the right kind of lamps, retreating from the public spaces of urbanity to the privatized lawns of the suburbs, and waiting placidly for their marriage license, the ultimate entry card to the heterosexual social matrix. To them, the crucial challenge posed by the last Sunday in June, by the legacy of the gay liberation movement following the Stonewall riots in 1969, is by no means a challenge to participate in civic debates about fundamental citizenship rights; the challenge presented to Tom and Michael is of a more profane nature—“How do you think we get to Pottery Barn?
— Leopold Lippert, “‘How do you think we get to pottery barn?’ Mainstream Gay Drama, Homonormativity, and the Culture of Neoliberalism”
