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Simon Reynolds: You don’t think much of The Ramones, right?

Greil Marcus: No, fuck postmodernism! Give me modernism. Modernism says the world has to be changed and we’re going to draw a picture of what it ought to look like. And then you’ve got Malevich, you’ve got Cubism, you’ve got Magritte… this is the way the world really looks, and what are you going to do now? That was what you could hear in the Sex Pistols and in so many other groups, whether it was X-Ray Spex, or Lora Logic, or Gang of Four, or the Raincoats. Or the Clash in moments. In “Complete Control,” God knows. I heard that right away: this was something completely different. This was a critique of life, and the demands in this music were absolute. It was never going to be satisfied with anything. Music just happened to be the medium. And it was a better medium. The avant-garde of the 20th century had finally found its true voice. I think I wrote that punk produced better art than all the avant-garde movements before it. And I meant that. That wasn’t a provocative statement. These were singular works of art and they were coming in a torrent. For a time, anybody could stumble upon a true statement and make it. It didn’t matter where they came from or who they were.

Some have suggested that gay rights and human rights are separate and distinct; but, in fact, they are one and the same. Now, of course, 60 years ago, the governments that drafted and passed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights were not thinking about how it applied to the LGBT community. They also weren’t thinking about how it applied to indigenous people or children or people with disabilities or other marginalized groups. Yet in the past 60 years, we have come to recognize that members of these groups are entitled to the full measure of dignity and rights, because, like all people, they share a common humanity.

This recognition did not occur all at once. It evolved over time. And as it did, we understood that we were honoring rights that people always had, rather than creating new or special rights for them. Like being a woman, like being a racial, religious, tribal, or ethnic minority, being LGBT does not make you less human. And that is why gay rights are human rights, and human rights are gay rights.