The fringe
Hiding the fringe (or what mainstream culture may consider the fringe) may very well promote civil acceptance by the "don't care what they do as long as they don't do it in front of me" crowd. However, it seems to me like there's a better solution.
What good does the fringe do for civil acceptance? It pushes out the
boundaries of "acceptable." Everybody's a little bit different from
the norm -- the question is, how much deviation is okay? The more of
us who can demonstrate that we're outside of "acceptable deviation,"
the more people will start rethinking their definitions of acceptable
and deviation.
This post is dedicated to Pat Califia, who's made this point more clearly more than once (most notably, in my mind, in the introduction to _Doing_It_For_Daddy_).
