In a 1999 article, "A Book that Made a Difference", author and attorney Dale Carpenter noted that in the 1990s, the defining gay political causes were not revolutionary in nature but instead "sought to weave gays into the larger fabric of American life" and that "No author better crystallized this deep and widespread yearning than Bruce Bawer in... A Place at the Table, the decade's most important book on the gay movement." The book, claimed Carpenter, "articulated better than any book before or since gays' rightful place in our culture" and "fueled a self-conscious movement of gay moderates and conservatives that is still redirecting gay politics". Largely as a result of Bawer's book, a "new generation" of gays entered politics and "insisted that gay organizations put issues like marriage at the top of the agenda". To be sure, "A Place at the Table wasn't solely responsible for all of this... But the book brought it together, nurtured it, and sent it on its way. Bawer's world, to a very large extent, is now our world; his methods, our methods; his goals, our goals. He wrote the book of the decade and changed gay politics forever." In a 2019 article commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall riots, James Kirchick stated that gay-rights activists had long been divided into integrationists, who "argued for the incorporation of gay people into all aspects of American society", and separatists, who "believe that American society itself should be upended", and referred to "A Place at the Table" as "the integrationist founding text".