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"Fortune's Rocks" by Anita Shreve
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Horowitz singled out Warner as an example "of how the universities routinely provide a political platform for extremists, especially sexual extremists," offering Warner's notorious pronouncement on the joys of anonymous sex as evidence of his moral lassitude and Foucaultian perfidy. "The phenomenology of a sex club encounter is an experience of world making," Warner had said. "It's an experience of being connected not just to this person but to potentially limitless numbers of people, and that is why it's important that it be with a stranger. Sex with a stranger is like a metonym." Thus did crack-brained theory justify what Horowitz called "the real source of the problem: the re-emergence of a bathhouse-sex club culture that fosters large cohorts of promiscuous strangers spreading the infection in urban gay centers."

The Trouble With Normal: Sex, Politics and the Ethics of Queer Life By Michael Warner The Free Press, 229 pages Nonfiction Buy this book at B&N.com

In "The Trouble With Normal: Sex, Politics and the Ethics of Queer Life," Warner turns the tables on his critics, offering both a sharp-witted defense of "sexual autonomy" and a prescription for "sexual ethics" that rests on the real experience of individuals rather than the imagined wisdom of the group. In four overlapping essays, Warner lambastes the current course of gay activism, arguing that the drive to marriage and the illusion of normality are founded on a phony morality that will only further stigmatize the queer community at large. In rushing to embrace the marriage vow, Warner asserts, and condemning anyone who challenges their vision of normality as a threat to public health, America's gay media pundits have betrayed the movement that first gave them the freedom to speak, divorcing sex from sexuality and pleading for acceptance at the expense of their purported constituents.

"What we inherit from the past," Warner writes, "in the realm of sex, is the morality of patriarchs and clansmen, souped up with Christian hostility to the flesh ... medieval chastity cults, virgin/whore complexes, and other detritus of ancient repression. Given these legacies of unequal moralism, nearly every civilized aspect of sexual morality has initially looked deviant, decadent, or sinful, including voluntary marriage, divorce, and nonreproductive sex." It's the central premise of Warner's book that these legacies stigmatize all sexual expression outside the false norm of legal marriage -- "false," among other reasons, because the institution turns a blind eye to the variant sexual practices within it, provided those practices are kept under wraps. Thus marriage merely "sanctifies some couples at the expense of others. It is selective legitimacy," and as such it will privilege gay couples who enter it while leaving "unmarried queers looking more deviant."

Tracing the history of the American gay-rights movement, Warner demonstrates that the demand for marriage rights never sat high on the gay agenda before now. Indeed, the notion was actively opposed, on the grounds that "the state should [not] be allowed to accord legitimacy to some kinds of consensual sex but not to others, or to confer respectability on some people's sexuality but not others." But the AIDS epidemic, the dominance of mass culture and advertising and the abduction of gay identity in unsexed "lifestyle" magazines such as Out and the Advocate have led to the vision of a "post-gay" world, where all good consumers can live and play without regard to sexual orientation. Marriage is the "pseudo-ethics" that cloaks the messy truth of sexuality in the raiment of propriety -- it's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" on an epic scale.

"It does not seem possible to think of oneself as normal without thinking that some other kind of person is pathological," Warner observes. Yet normality itself is a hallucination, a mixture of statistics, concealment and received "common sense," bearing none but a comparative and usually intimidating relation to any individual's actual life. Heterosexuals, too, are imprisoned by the illusion, and nothing scares them more, Warner thinks, than a discovery of the full range and possibility of sexual expression. The demand for marriage rights will inevitably increase hostility to gays and lesbians, because straight married couples know they enjoy a protected position conferred by no other social institution: "They want marriage to remain a privilege, a mark that they are special." In that sense, marriage isn't "normal" at all.

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