Gloria Steinem says gay rights and feminism are "the same thing"

In a recent interview for Queerty , feminist icon Gloria Steinem says that feminism and gay rights are "completely the same thing." She goes on to explain:

“On campuses, people will say, ‘why are the same right-wing people against lesbianism and birth control?’ They find that bizarre. It’s not bizarre. It’s because the right wing is against any form of sexual expression that can’t end in conception. So we have the same adversaries and the same allies.”

As cliched as this sounds by now, I have a love/hate relationship with second-wave feminism: I acknowledge  its influence as well as its failures. I can't really disagree with her -- I mean, it's true: the same groups fighting against gay marriage are the ones forcing laws that deny women access to birth control and safe, legal abortions, but to imply that feminism is arm-in-arm with LGBT rights is ignoring an entire history of feminism's transphobia.

Gloria: In Her Own Words (And Ours)

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HBO's documentary on feminist icon Gloria Steinem, Gloria: In Her Own Words , is a fine "primer," so to speak, of the activist and the movement she has become the face of, but leaves out the very important issues of race, class, and sexuality that plagued second-wave feminism, and continue today. Andrea Plaid from Racialicious:

The reason why I called this doc “precise” is because I didn’t expect it to be nothing more and nothing less than a reflection of the mainstream Second Wave feminist movement…which was, in reality, notoriously short on analysis of race and racism as it functioned within it. When it was addressed, the rhetoric talked about white men and their race vis-à-vis “male privilege.” Some of the white women within that movement may have deeply empathized with and felt themselves in solidarity with the struggles of people of color—Steinem presents herself as such a person—but, as cravenly cynical as it seems, those struggles were also a media-friendly “hook” so people could grasp why women were fighting for, say, equal pay and the right to safe abortion. And, as critiqued again and again, loaded with white female privilege.

Maybe I'm being unusually optimistic, but I had hoped the second-wave's lack of women of color, working-class women, and sometimes outright disdain for queer women would have been addressed, but befitting a mainstream documentary, it was only briefly given lip service. It's too bad, because those problems still plague feminism today. Granted, this was more a personal look at Steinem herself, and in that, the film excelled, but being that her identity is intrinsically tied to the second-wave feminist movement, I expected more.