As Murray Knuttila points out in the article male privilege is ultimately damaging to men. It severely restricts the range and depth of feelings and attitudes one is allowed to express or even experience. So while I retreat sometimes, I come back to the struggle partly because I can’t take for long the company of men, living unexamined lives with all our privileges. As a passionate amateur basketball player for about 50 years I have had more that enough of racist, homophobic and sexist jokes and attitudes.

I also agree with Kevin Ballie that the role of straight, white male privilege is important in contexts other than male/female relationships. This is certainly an important question in the struggle for equity and inclusion for lgbt members of society. It is also true in the struggle for equity and inclusion for people of colour, people with physical and/or intellectual disabilities and for poor people.

For me the broad question is not whether or not there is a place for men in ending sexism, or white men in ending racism, or straight men in ending homophobia and heterosexism or able bodied men in ending the labeling and exclusion of people with disabilities. The question is how we as persons with privilege can be effective allies in liberation struggles for oppressed people. How can we exercise our leadership role with other people of privilege while being accountable to those who are oppressed?

As one who sees immigrant men of colour strongly over represented in our abusive men’s programs (themselves both oppressed and oppressing)and as a key decision maker in distributing always scarce resources between straight and lgbt programs I can vouch for the complexity of exercising that leadership.
Peter Crosby

We never really debated the question “Should straights by in the LGBT Movement?” with quite the intensity that can be seen in the feminist movement. This is mainly out of simple demographics: At BEST, the LGBT population in America is 10%. Even with our outreaching and enrollment of straight pro-LGBT activists, our detractors and oftentimes the mainstream media equate the gay rights movement as run by gays, for gays.

Our greatest challange is getting it across that the LGBT movement is overwhelmingly consisting of straight supporters, and that LGBT equality does not help only LGBT people, but all people (just as LGBT discrimination hurts all). The feminist movement could learn a bit from the LGBT movement, in that reaching out to every possible supporter as well as focusing on the women component of the movement can be done at the same time. They both need to be done at the same time after all.