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"The Trouble With Normal" by Michael Warner | page 1, 2, 3
Warner sympathizes with the large numbers of gay men and women who look to a favorable ruling on same-sex marriage as the path to a new way of life, most of whom stop short of endorsing Sullivan's view of marriage as the "only" road to dignity and happiness. Through a thick fog of consumerism, therapy and sloganized pride, marriage in the gay community is generally portrayed as just another choice -- "not for everyone," as the saying is, but a "right" for those who want it. The position is not dishonest so much as badly thought out, denying the very legitimacy and protection marriage advocates say they want. Warner prefers the frank admission of columnist Jonathan Rauch, who argues that marriage "cannot be merely a 'lifestyle option.' It must be privileged. That is, it must be understood to be better, on average, than other ways of living." The Trouble With Normal: Sex, Politics and the Ethics of Queer Life By Michael Warner
Seen in this light, the pursuit of gay marriage takes on a distinctly coercive hue. "A marriage license is the opposite of sexual license," Warner declares. "Sexual license is everything the state itself does not license, and therefore everything the state allows itself to punish or regulate. The gay and lesbian movement was built on a challenge to this system." Warner's own politics are essentially anarchic, calling for "a frank embrace of queer sex in all its apparent indignity, together with a frank challenge to the damaging hierarchies of respectability." He prefers the term "queer" to "gay and lesbian," as many do, because the latter only confirms an artificial division in the ranks of people on the wrong end of public morality. An honest view of sex would eliminate boundaries for everyone, "gay" or "straight," by recognizing that there is no sexual norm. It would also give real meaning to chanted concepts of "tolerance" and "diversity" and the constantly repeated call for inclusion. Nothing in Warner's book will be more controversial than his fourth essay, in defense of "public" sex. Few outside the sexual underworld will ever break a lance for the right to get laid in Central Park. It's been a point of dispute since the start of the AIDS epidemic whether bathhouses and other "public sex environments" help or hinder prevention efforts, but "not a single study," Warner reports, "has shown that a new wave of infections can be traced to sex clubs." (In fact, according to widely published CDC figures, the HIV infection rate in the United States has held steady for the past 10 years, at roughly 40,000 new cases per year.) Shutting down the bathhouses, of course, has done nothing to stop sex in its tracks. No sexual crackdown ever has, no matter what the threat: "The problem is not that people have the opportunity for unsafe sex but that they have the desire and the secret will for it. No amount of policing is going to take away the opportunity. You can have unsafe sex in any number of bedrooms, where there's no danger of a monitor's flashlight or Giuliani's cops." Only by meeting those at risk where they really are and not where others think they should be can effective prevention strategies be maintained. Indeed, this is now the policy of any AIDS service organization worth its salt, where the "harm reduction" model has replaced "a condom every time" as the only kind of prevention strategy that works, however imperfectly. Warner points to the successful stabilization of HIV infection rates among gay men in Europe and Australia, where saunas and sex clubs flourish but where safer sex really is the norm, the established practice of a whole generation. In his preface, Warner acknowledges that "The Trouble With Normal" contains "arguments that many will view as extremist, if not insane." But they are arguments that urgently need to be raised at a time when "normality" is courted at the cost of human lives. Nowhere does Warner find better evidence of the "active mystification" and "widespread amnesia" that the marriage drive has induced in the gay community than in the virtual evaporation of AIDS activism. With the arrival of protease inhibitors and the consequent decline of AIDS deaths in the United States, charitable donations to AIDS service organizations have fallen precipitously, while the burden of HIV cases has risen. (AIDS was a lot cheaper when people died quickly.) Gay men, in particular, have slowed their donations, bewitched by a post-gay fantasy of mortgages, potlucks and dogs. But combination therapy is beginning to fail -- the trend is already reversing. When Andrew Sullivan declared "the end of AIDS" in 1996 he was talking through his hat. There being no realistic expectation of an adequate health-care system in the land of the free and the home of the ostrich, the onus will fall increasingly on the victims of the disease. "AIDS activists," Warner observes, "learned quickly that effective prevention cannot be based on shame and a refusal to comprehend; it requires collective efforts at honest discussion, a realism about desire and a respect for pleasure." But "normal" morality honors none of these things. When the right to marriage is finally secured, a thin, white shadow of gay liberation will drift into condos and the PTA, taking most of the money, few of the troubles and all of the credit from the untouchables left behind.
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