Bradley Manning’s pre-trial hearing ended last month, winning the self-confessed WikiLeaker a mere seven days’ prison credit for nine months of human rights abuses. If that hardly seems like just reward for the young man whose moral sense made him the Guardian’s “person of the year,” it’s at least more clemency than mainstream gay politics has shown him.

From the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and the Human Rights Campaign to GOProud and the Log Cabin Republicans, Gay Inc. has shown indifference at best and contempt at worst for the country’s most famous queer political prisoner. Fierce dissidence and valiant organizing haven’t been enough to bring gay property’s resources — the very networks of funding and patronage that made Don’t Ask Don’t Tell repeal possible — into play. As the Gay Liberation Network’s Andy Thayer put it to the New Republic earlier this year: “If we don’t have the solidarity for our own community, then how are we going to go farther than that? I would hope that we would at least look out for our own.”

For many gay leftists, this call for queer unity in the face of state oppression may seem like an intuitive strategy. It’s certainly a well-pedigreed one. Thayer and his ilk are heir to a long tradition which posits a special liberatory potential for gay life and sex, one with roots at least as deep as the Walt Whitman whose Democratic Vistas envisioned an “adhesive love” characterized by “manly friendship, fond and loving, pure and sweet . . . carried to degrees hitherto unknown” and having “the deepest relations to general politics.” If the reference seems musty, one need only look to contemporary post-grad ultraleftism for something fresher: “In the post-war period, it was gay men who constituted the most innovative and advanced revolutionary subject. Or rather, despite failing to bring about a revolution, they registered the most successes in actually living communism.” For generations of gay radicals used to rolling their eyes at Marx and Engels’ Victorian moral arthritis, this homoerotic utopianism is swoony stuff. For those who have swallowed it whole, how can the Manning case look like anything but a betrayal of some mythically lusty democratic fraternity?