Since 1990, when Andrew Sullivan exploded into the American publishing world as the 28-year-old editor of the New Republic, the Oxford-educated Wunderkind has become a lightning rod for debates about the meaning of gay culture in national political life. With his first book, “Virtually Normal: An Argument About Homosexuality,” he positioned himself betwixt and between the orthodoxies of the left and the right, calling for the gay community to move toward integration in a way that maddened many gay activists who had devoted themselves to building a separate gay culture. Arguing that equal access to marriage and military service should be the primary focus of gay civil rights activism, Sullivan seemed to be advocating conventionality as a healthy alternative to radicalism and promiscuity.
Or at least that’s the message many gay opinion leaders and literati took from his work. Some of the more traditional (i.e. liberal) elements of the gay community are content to paint Sullivan as a token gay poster child for conservatives and a self-hating gay man who is grappling with his own demons in the pages of the nation’s most influential magazines. But Sullivan’s multiple personalities — as a Catholic, gay politico, libertarian and freelance intellectual — defy attempts to caricature him.
At times intensely confessional, Sullivan’s writing delves into his own and his friends’ psychological and physical struggles, and uses these stories as launching pads for his speculation about love, homosexuality and justice. Many of his ideas — his feelings of shame, his abiding faith and his willingness to use a word like “pathological” to describe promiscuity — fly in the face of the gay conventional wisdom. But he is also just as quick to “marvel at the exotic beauty of other men, at the literal unbelievable sense of having them.” As a passionate Catholic, he’s blasted what he sees as the church’s implicit wish that he as a gay man “would not exist,” even as he continues to turn to the Bible for spiritual sustenance. As a libertarian who promotes small government, he’s often been dubbed a reactionary by gay activists, even as he’s writing scathing critiques of the Christian right for their moral puritanism.
Sullivan’s new book, “Love Undetectable: Notes on Friendship, Sex and Survival,” was written after he was forced out of the editor’s chair at the New Republic in 1996 by publisher Martin Peretz, who reportedly objected to Sullivan’s swashbuckling editorial style and his focus on sexual and cultural themes. (Perhaps Sullivan was simply ahead of his time; the Beltway elite would later come to share his obsessions.) “When Plagues End,” the first of three interrelated essays in the book, explores his own HIV-positive status and the psychological ramifications for the gay community of outliving the plague in the new era of viral inhibitors. “Virtually Abnormal” poses the now-taboo question — is homosexuality normal? — through a survey of Freud and current therapeutic literature aimed at “curing” gays. “If Love Were All” looks at friendship as the most neglected love of all, and the way the gay community has survived chiefly through this simple unsung relationship.
During a recent visit to Salon’s San Francisco offices, Sullivan, clad in a red and white rumpled shirt and khaki pants, seemed to have the mild-mannered countenance of a man who has never known controversy. But when he opened his mouth, his Anglo-American accented speech strummed with a vulnerable, heated momentum as he warmed to his subjects: the attacks on him by Peter Kurth and other gay critics, his disillusionment with President Clinton, the importance of gay marriage and why he’s not a moralist.
What do you think of Peter Kurth’s critique of your work?
It doesn’t merit the word “perspective.” It is so mindlessly dumb. It’s typical of a certain type of person whose arguments are challenged — rather than engage in an argument, they demonize a human being in the most personal and offensive way. It’s the mark of the decadent left that it cannot argue, it can only demonize.
Can you give an example?
Well, the very epithets “overgrown schoolboy” or “Tory moralist.” These are just stupid insults. The idea that I am somehow morally judging or promoting a way of life for gay people is nonsense. Anybody who has read my books is completely aware that that is the opposite of what I do, it’s not even in the same universe as what I’m doing. I’m talking honestly about myself, my own difficulties with sex, my own issues with love, my own attempt to frame a debate that is between either “you are a promiscuous slut” or “you are a good boy.” It’s precisely that dichotomy that “Love Undetectable” attacks, pointing out that almost all of us are somewhere in between.
The last thing I am is a moralist. I just wrote a piece for the New York Times Magazine attacking moralism as a political endeavor (“The New Scolds”). Any simple analysis of anything I have written about politics will betray the fact that I am someone who believes in small government, and does not attempt to impose morality upon any group at any time. I have never urged marriage or monogamy on wayward brothers and sisters. Never. I have argued for equal marriage rights. In fact, I got into trouble in Britain by saying that some gay relationships are not monogamous. In this book, I specifically do not wag my finger at anybody who is “promiscuous.” I talk about my own sex life in a very candid way, and talk about moving beyond it.
And do I decry the cult of masculinity? No! The central part of my new book is about restoring people’s sense of their own masculinity and reclaiming their own gender. There is almost no sentence in Kurth’s essay that has even a scintilla of intelligence. He says of me: “[Sullivan] never writes a declarative sentence that isn’t surrounded by acres of explanation.” Well, doesn’t any attempt to say something true and complicated require more than a simple declarative sentence?
He says I downplay the ongoing significance of the AIDS epidemic. He says, “It is a slap in the face to anyone living with HIV infection.” Like I’m not? My book begins with someone who dies of AIDS. There is a specific story of someone who is not doing well on these [anti-viral] medications. So it’s simply absurd. How does one respond to an utterly unreasoned personal attack? It is loopy.
I think your gay critics assume that because you talk positively about gay marriage, in some way you are against people who aren’t married.
If I were standing and judging these people, I wouldn’t be writing about how many men I have had sex with in this book, and the impulses that lead you to do that, or the feelings of shame and difficulty that those things bring up in a lot of gay men and women. There is a tendency to believe that if you divert one inch from what is essentially a sort of reactionary dogma — which is that gay men have to be, and always will be, defined by what a minority did in 1973 — then you are somehow attacking gay men.
My book says we have to understand promiscuity, not condemn it, as a failed search for intimacy. As an aborted attempt at something bigger, deeper and richer. Not, in and of itself, to be condemned and thrown out, but signs of a deeper searching among a group of people who have been stigmatized and punished and beaten down. I have never written a thing, for example, saying you should shut down a sex club. You will find a consistently libertarian politics on my part, through all of this, which is why it is simply bizarre to be accused of this.
Why have you made gay marriage so essential a part of your work? Is it more because of its symbolic value, rather than its real value in men’s lives? You, for instance, haven’t been married.
No. I’m not likely to be.
And, after all, marriage is rather a beleaguered institution, even among straight people.
So, why the resistance among straight people to give it to gay people? It is still a very powerful symbol about the quality of love. And in my mind it is first and foremost a very basic symbol of political equality and simple equality, period. Simply under the law it is astonishing that a country would deny a group of citizens a right like this.
Does it strike you as contradictory that Americans have apparently decided that it is OK to let President Clinton off the hook on adultery, adopting a much more tolerant view of sin and marriage and human nature, and at the same time are still not prepared to grant gays the legal right to marry?
Well, I don’t know. I think we are making progress on same-sex marriage. It was hardly mentionable five years ago. It’s just going to take time, just as it took time for women’s suffrage or for interracial marriage. The other answer is that maybe those two things are related. That in order to reassure itself that the society and marriage isn’t falling apart, the American public uses gays to keep its sense of security intact. We’re blamed for the collapse of heterosexual marriage — the one group of people who have never been part of it are held responsible for its decline.
After Salon broke the story on Henry Hyde’s adulterous affair, Barney Frank told him, “Henry, you have done more to damage the American family than I ever have!”
It is absolutely true. Bill Clinton was signing the Defense of Marriage Act, and Henry Hyde was supporting it. Bill Clinton was defending marriage while he was screwing Monica. It shows you in their mind what the place of homosexuals really is, which is beneath even the opportunity to be moral or immoral. Beneath even that.
What do you think of the political strategy to put gay marriage on the ballot? Some gay activists fear this is leading to an anti-gay backlash and a hardening of lines between gays and religious conservatives.
That is a huge problem. Part of my strategy has been, from the beginning, not to concede the religious ground, to say we are part of the religious debate, and we are part of mainstream religion. And secondly, to listen to what religious conservatives are saying — partly because I think we have better arguments, and in a calm atmosphere we tend to win the debate. But partly also because there is a kind of sick relationship between some elements of the religious right and some elements of the queer left, they need each other to give themselves both relevance and money.
But it is not as if we are going around the country putting all these things on the ballot. In some cases, the religious right has. In terms of Hawaii, it was the court that ruled. In fact, if the gay establishment had their way, it would never have happened. In fact, no gay group would support that legal suit. It had to be a straight guy from the ACLU. These things are happening whether we like it or not because ordinary gay people in various parts of the country, whether in the military or suing for marriage rights, are way ahead of where the country is. You have a classic confrontation between some Americans and others. We are going to get dumped again and again until one day we won’t be dumped.
Now the idea that somehow a civil rights revolution happens because you just make your case and then poof! you win, and you pass all the laws and you get a round of applause, no way. What normally happens is you raise an issue and you not only get dumped, you get whacked, in fact you get killed. You get attacked and you lose. Then you try again, and you lose again. Then you try again, and somewhere something breaks, and you build on top of that. And you build your own self esteem and movement from the base up, as you do this. That is happening. It is messy, it means we’re often going to lose, but I don’t see the alternative.
Look at what happened to gays in the military under Clinton, the don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy. There is no doubt about it, it has been a disaster. It doubled the rate of discharge. But look at the polling now. You have this amazing thing. Two-thirds of the American public are now in favor of gay people in the military, which is almost a complete reversal of five years ago. Why? Because even when we lost, we were able to frame the debate, and make the point that people resist when they first hear it, but it sinks in. And now further down the line, when people are more used to the idea and less knee-jerk in their response, they tend to agree when you say, “Why should the government stop gay people from making something of their lives and making a commitment to their country?” And you get Jesse Ventura — a straight, pro wrestler in Minnesota, a former Navy SEAL — standing up and saying, “I have no problem with this.” He is just like, “I don’t get it. The government should not be stopping people from serving their country.” Which is exactly the right way to put it.
The debate over whether homosexuals are born or made has been heating up again. What’s your position?
Well, I go into it in great detail in the book. The whole second section is an examination of the case studies and writing of all the so-called reparative therapists, these people who want to “cure” homosexuality. My view is kind of obvious and banal. Which is that homosexuality is caused by both some genetic predisposition and early environmental influence. That sounds extremely boring. On the other hand, it is almost certainly true. The idea that you are born, like a minute after you pop out of the womb, and you’re gay, seems to be completely ludicrous — no serious geneticist will agree with that, anyway. It is a total political fiction, a misguided political agenda, which is to take off the table the interesting and complicated debate about the origins of homosexuality. Which doesn’t do gay people any good either. It is fascinating to us to figure it out. When you look at what the environmental influences might be in the first 18 months to two years, Freud has as interesting an answer as any of these reparative therapists, these “cure” people. Freud asks why is homosexuality a pathology? Why isn’t it just another way of being human. Let’s say your mommy loved you a lot and that is why you’re gay. The only sane response to that is “So what?”
Well, but the implication is that by smothering her little boy with love and attention, there is a psychological deformation. That homosexuality is a case of immature emotional development.
It is worth reading Freud, and my book is an attempt to rehabilitate Freud. Freud is two things at once. Which is why his legacy is contested. On the one hand, he says, very firmly, there is no correlation between male homosexuality and effeminacy. He knocks that one on the head. He also says there is certainly no natural law that a homosexual cannot be completely functioning as a person. He makes that absolutely clear. And yet at the same time, homosexuality to Freud is somehow an “arrested sexual development.” It is not a “perversion,” it is an “inversion” to Freud, which means it hovers somewhere between perfectly OK and yet not OK. And yet, once again, the right is using psychology to pathologize us. And the left is refusing to discuss it.
You’ve been attacked by some gay activists for criticizing Clinton. Why target a president who is widely perceived to be the best friend that the gay community ever had in the White House?
Well here is a man who doubles the rate of discharges from the military; who signs the Defense of Marriage Act, with alacrity, and actually gets out ahead of the Republicans on that in a completely cynical way; who signs a bill ejecting HIV-positive people from the military; who signs a bill stopping HIV-positive people from entering the country. At some point, you’ve got to say that the argument “Well, there are worse politicians” becomes “We’ll put up with anything.” The choice that it’s either Clinton or Pat Robertson is a bogus choice. We’re big enough and strong enough to tell them both to go screw themselves.
In a presidential race between Al Gore and George W. Bush, where do you think gay interests would lie?
I think gay interests lie where black interests lie, in having both candidates feel that they have something to gain from wooing us. I don’t think you should go out ahead of time to support one or the other. Especially when it seems to me that one of the ways in which a new Republican candidate will tell Middle America that he’s not a right-wing crazy will be in taking some tolerant position, like Bush did in Texas, saying, “I’m not going to allow name calling against these people.”
Look, the exit polls in the last election showed that 36 percent of those who identified themselves gay voted Republican. That is down from 1994 when a record number voted Republican, somewhere in the low 40s. This is a very heterogeneous community. Every generation of gays includes people throughout Middle America, in the most conservative places. Unlike any other minority, it cannot reproduce its own culture. It is constantly thrown to the winds. Every generation is reborn in the mainstream. It is the most mainstream minority you can be for simple, practical reasons.
“We are your sons.”
We are you. That is the weird thing about this, is that the people who are closest to you are the ones who have been thrown furthest away.
When the history of gay life in the 20th century is finally written, a small chapter might be devoted to explaining how an overgrown schoolboy and Tory moralist named Andrew Sullivan managed to emerge as the most prominent voice of the gay rights movement in America; how, in fact, the whole issue of gay liberation was hijacked in the wake of the AIDS epidemic by a band of reactionary, middle-class gay commentators in a dither over “gay promiscuity,” urging marriage and monogamy on their wayward brothers and decrying “the cult of masculinity” as the source of all evil in homosexual life.
If it sounds schizophrenic, it is. The famously conservative, famously English, famously Catholic Sullivan first made a name for himself in 1991 as the openly gay editor of the New Republic, at a time when British editors were thought by American magazines to be essential to the production of “buzz.” In a tenure that reflected nothing so much as a lack of coherent vision, Sullivan won plaudits from the chic and trendy for “pushing the envelope” at TNR, and round condemnation from almost everyone else for his role in wrecking what had once been a respected American institution. When he resigned his position in 1996, at the same time disclosing that he was HIV-positive and on treatment with protease inhibitors, Sullivan announced that he was “not stepping down because I’m sick and going away and dying.” Far from it. Responding well to combination therapy, with a sudden reprieve from almost certain death, he embarked on what he plainly sees as a holy mission, arguing for the complete assimilation of gays and lesbians into American life while chastising male homosexuals for their hedonism, their immaturity and their persistence in regarding themselves as “different” from everyone else.
“The one thing I insist upon,” Sullivan declared, “is that [homosexuality] should not be determinative … This is the argument of my life, and I have to win it.” Already at the New Republic and in his first book, “Virtually Normal: An Argument About Homosexuality” (1995), Sullivan was blaring the assimilationist horn, outraging gay activists with his purportedly “post-ideological” insistence that “being gay isn’t about sex as such” and his sophistic efforts to reconcile his Catholic faith with the unconquerable demands of his libido. Like many Catholics, Sullivan is an expert at putting his thoughts into separate boxes, embracing the central mystery and seductive trappings of his faith — “the crisply starched vestments that I prepared for the priest in the sacristy, the grimy dark wood we gripped in the pews” — while banishing Catholicism’s odious position on homosexuality to the realm of informed debate.
“It matters to me what the Vatican thinks,” Sullivan has said, “even if I disagree with it. I don’t like stylizing institutions into enemies.” He is noteworthy also for his insistence that homophobia in the mass of humanity is “natural” rather than bigoted, and that government should take no action whatsoever on gay issues apart from ending its own discrimination against gays and lesbians by granting them open access to the military and full marriage rights, thus paving the way, through some miraculous trickle-down effect, for complete acceptance of gays by society at large. No further legislation, Sullivan thinks, would be needed.
For Sullivan, marriage — legal, state-sanctioned, church-blessed marriage — is “the deepest means for the liberation of homosexuals, providing them with the only avenue for sexual and emotional development that can integrate them as equal human beings and remove from them the hideous historic option of choosing between their joy and their dignity.” Or, as he says in reference to himself, between “a life of suffering or a life of meaningless promiscuity followed by eternal damnation.” So sold is Sullivan on the most repressive of all social institutions that he actually delights in the prospect of becoming “banal,” arguing that “what we need is a Christian ethic for how to live one’s life as a homosexual,” and that “what is valuable is not sexual gratification but informing sexual desire with love and commitment.”
What’s changed in Sullivan’s work since he left the New Republic is not his belief that marriage will save the fallen, but the rock on which he has built his vision of a new gay identity — “the end of AIDS,” as he boldly declared it in a 1996 cover story for the New York Times Magazine. Sullivan’s notorious tract, in which he visited a gay “circuit” party at the Roseland Ballroom in New York and barely survived the assault on his sensibilities, raised a storm of protest in the gay community and among AIDS professionals and activists, with its insistence that “AIDS is over” and its horrified commentary on what Sullivan calls the “libidinal pathology” of gay life.
“Some of them glided past, intent on some imminent conquest,” Sullivan wrote of the men at Roseland, “others stumbled toward me, eyes glazed, bodies stooped in a kind of morbid stupor, staring at the floor or into space; others still stood in corners, chatting, socializing, their arms draped around each other, a banal familiarity belying the truly bizarre scene around them … Beyond, a mass of men danced the early morning through, strobe lights occasionally glinting off the assorted deltoids, traps, lats, and other muscle groups.”
From this “conflicting puzzle of impulses” Sullivan emerged with a
theory, arguing that the apparent resurgence of promiscuity, drug abuse, quick affairs and shattered lives in the gay community is a symptom of mass denial, “the need to find some solidarity among the loss,” as Sullivan sees it, “to assert some crazed physicality against the threat of sickness, to release some of the toxins built up over a decade [sic] of constant stress. Beyond everything” — and this is Sullivan’s central point — “the desire to banish the memories that will not be banished, to shuck off — if only till the morning — the maturity that plague had brutally imposed.” Where AIDS once equaled death, Sullivan says, it now demands “responsibility,” clean living, and an end to empty, meaningless sex.
“The meeting of two human beings in a sexual encounter can never be a neutral or casual phenomenon,” Sullivan explains, despite all evidence that, indeed, it can. What Sullivan means is that sex shouldn’t be casual, that gay men’s marginalization from traditional society has trained them in “appearances” and “deceit,” that promiscuity is always pathological, and that there are upright citizens in those nasty dancing bodies just yearning to bust out. In the Gospel According to Andrew, “maturity” is needed not only to stop the spread of HIV, but for gay men to realize their full potential as humans and children of God.
Despite heated criticism from AIDS treatment and prevention workers, and despite CDC figures that show the rate of HIV infection among gay men is neither higher nor lower than it was, Sullivan found support for his position from a handful of conservative gay pundits, all of them white, all of them male, thumping and braying about the dangers of sex and the glories of matrimony. That marriage has never put a dent in the promiscuous nature of men is of no concern to the “neo-culturalists,” as they like to call themselves. Bruce Bawer, Gabriel Rotello, Michelangelo Signorile, and the inevitable Larry Kramer have, with Sullivan and a few others, secured a virtual lock on gay commentary in the American media, appearing with depressing regularity on talk shows and op-ed pages, spinning out books and magazine articles in what amounts to an incessant rant about the crippled psyches and empty lives of male homosexuals. Bawer is the author of “A Place at the Table,” one of the first pleas for mainstream acceptance in exchange for the marriage vow. The icy Rotello argued in “Sexual Ecology” that unsafe sex among urban gay men is still firing the AIDS epidemic, and called for a “new taboo” on anal sex. Signorile is a pumped-up, heartthrob columnist for Out magazine, widely remembered as the father of “outing” in the media but currently clean as a whistle. And Kramer is Kramer, still screaming, “We’re dying! We’re dying!” but shifting the blame for the holocaust from society at large to gay men themselves (and angrily parting company with Sullivan on the end-of-AIDS idea).
Now, in “Love Undetectable: Notes on Friendship, Sex, and Survival,” Sullivan returns to the field, in what is partly an expansion of his Times Magazine piece, partly a rumination on the roots of homosexuality and partly an Augustinian-style confession that closes with a paean to friendship. As a confession, “Love Undetectable” is scarcely open to criticism, exalted though it is and sentimental to the core. Sullivan is given to the pious revelation. He doubts the goodness of God on the beach at Cape Cod, then realizes that this is when his faith matters most. He hears his friends say, “Andrew, Andrew,” when they learn about his HIV infection, then opens the Bible at random to that passage where Jesus admonishes Martha of Bethany — “Martha, Martha” — in “one of those many details that convince me that so much of the Bible is true.”
“It is not simply the tone of love,” writes Sullivan, “it is the tone of friendship, an unmistakable tone, a tone that I did not only recognize but suddenly, heartbreakingly, knew.” The virtues of friendship over sexual and romantic love are a new kick for Sullivan, who pointed out recently on “Good Morning America” that “family is great, but what did Jesus do? He left his family and hung out with 12 friends … We always hear the great phrase from the Gospels, ‘Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends’ … It’s not lay down his life for humanity, or for this, that and the other, but for his friends” — a nifty escape hatch for a man who writes about AIDS as if he and his friends were the only ones who ever had it.
“It is true,” says Sullivan, in what is arguably the most offensive statement in AIDS literature, “that something profound in the history of AIDS has occurred these last two years. The power of the new treatments and the even greater power of those now in the pipeline are such that a diagnosis of HIV infection in the West is not just different in degree today than, say, 1994. For those who can get medical care, the diagnosis is quite different in kind. It no longer signifies death. It merely signifies illness.”
This bald-faced remark, on its merits indefensible, is a slap in the face to anyone living with HIV infection. Nothing about AIDS is “merely” anything, not even the chronic diarrhea and endless fatigue that Sullivan himself reports as a side effect of his toxic medications. Pick his sentences apart and all you see are the disclaimers (“in the West,” “for those who can get medical care”). At this writing, some 30 million people around the world are estimated to be infected with HIV, with 40,000 new infections each year in the United States. Sullivan will doubtless be the first to pounce on the recent news that the rate of U.S. AIDS deaths has declined 47 percent in the last 12 months, solely as a consequence of advances in treatment. But since only a handful of people around the world have access to medications, and as no corresponding decline in mortality has been seen outside developed countries, the plague is not only not “over,” but is actually soaring ahead. In the United States, women, blacks, IV drug users and the young, whether gay or straight, are increasingly victims of the disease, and there is scarcely an encouraging word to report about community efforts to protect them.
Sullivan acknowledges all this while sticking stubbornly to his point. He never writes a declarative sentence that isn’t surrounded by acres of explanation. Yes, he concedes, huge numbers of people will still die from AIDS: “Nothing I am saying here is meant to deny that fact, or to mitigate its awfulness. I am not saying here (nor would I ever say) that some lives are worth more than others, or that some lives are worth more attention than others.” On the other hand, in “Love Undetectable,” as in all of his work, Sullivan is incapable of imagining the lives of anyone outside his own privileged circle: good, clean, smart, professional, mortgage-paying, dog-owning, safe-sex-practicing white boys, whose stricken hearts and tender embraces have shown them the error of their ways. “Living … is not about resolution,” Sullivan concludes; “it is about the place where plague can’t get you.”
And that is the heartless ruse at the center of “Love Undetectable.” It isn’t about AIDS at all. It’s only about Andrew. Just as he once called for an end to welfare as a means “to break through this culture of idleness, poverty, illegitimacy, and crime,” so he now consigns whole sections of humanity to a permanent netherworld of illness and despair. Everything he says about AIDS is elitist and condescending, from his disclosure to POZ magazine that he “interviewed five doctors” before finding one that suited him — a luxury denied to the vast majority of people with AIDS — to his explanation that he contracted the virus “accidentally,” not through “reckless behavior” or, God forbid, “unprotected anal sex.”
It was Tony Kushner who remarked in this magazine that Andrew Sullivan is “like the E. M. Forster character, Maurice. His homosexuality gave him a streak of decency and compassion that leavened his Thatcherite horseshit, and Catholic horseshit.” But with the publication of “Love Undetectable” it’s time to end the charade. For Sullivan, decency is only personal. The private is all that matters.
“Charity is the friendship of man for God,” Sullivan sniffs, quoting his hero, Thomas Aquinas. We may assume that Sullivan and God have reached some sort of understanding about the dubious company this epidemic has obliged them to keep, and that when Sullivan stands all washed and scrubbed before his Maker at the end of the day, his conscience will be as pure and prissy as his politics are evil and his judgments insulting. Imagine the service he and the rest of his pampered friends might have performed by calling for a moral crusade against AIDS, for sufficient government funding to help the victims of the disease, for a worldwide mobilization of the scientific community in the search for a vaccine, for an end to the obscene profits of the pharmaceutical industry, for corporate donations in the name of humanity, health care for all and a national conversation about homosexuality stripped of fruitless psychologizing and Christian mumbo-jumbo.
But that wouldn’t be “responsible.” That wouldn’t be “mature.” That just wouldn’t, couldn’t be Andrew.
Editor’s Note: The death early Monday morning of a young gay man, Matthew Shepherd, from a vicious beating in Wyoming underscores the tragic toll homophobia and hate crimes continue to take across the United States. This November, there are initiatives on the ballot in various places that will affect the overall progress of gay rights in America. Today’s Newsreal examines one of those initiatives.
After returning home to Fayetteville, Ark., this summer from Gay Games V in Amsterdam, I made my customary Saturday visit to the Farmer’s Market. Dazed by the late-summer sun — bright and hot compared to the diffuse sun of Amsterdam — I ignored the gluttony of flowers that festoon our fair square and stumbled toward the outstretched tailgate of a farmer’s pick-up. The tailgate was laden with the day’s last overripe tomatoes, sun-spotted peppers and grande zucchini.
I was mulling my choices when a man strode up, excited about the Campaign for Human Dignity’s ballot initiative to extend Fayetteville’s fair employment policy to homosexuals. My ears pricked to the conversation between activist and farmer. Before I left for Amsterdam, I had managed to ignore the whispers of my conscience: “Get involved, get involved.” I’d watched the entire spectacle unfold from the sidelines.
It began in December 1996. Sixteen-year-old Willy Wagner was walking down the street on lunch break from Fayetteville High when a throng of teenage boys pummeled him with fists and the epithet “faggot.” They picked the wrong person. Wagner’s mother, Carolyn Wagner, was an activist waiting to happen. “I have no words to explain the anger that was and still is inside me,” says Wagner. “I have always felt close to the Holy Mother. Now I understand what it’s like to have a son treated like an outcast. I take time to reflect upon how Mary responded to the mistreatment of Jesus, and I try not to hate the haters. I have to work on it every day.”
At first, she battled the local school board, but it took a threat from the U.S. Department of Education to wrest an amended sexual harassment policy from the addled board. When Wagner realized a token statement was as far as the board would go, she decided to take her cause to the City Council. She collected 160 non-discrimination ordinances and resolutions from other U.S. communities and went to see Councilman Randy Zurcher. In a community starved for, but not necessarily appreciative of, bold leaders, the fresh-faced 28-year-old Zurcher fills the gap. A graduate of nearby John Brown University, a bastion of Christian education, Zurcher knows his Bible. More importantly, he isn’t afraid to stick his neck out, an unusual quality in our community, which like so many others suffers from what Martin Luther King Jr. called “the appalling silence of the good people.”
Before meeting with Wagner, Zurcher had been drawing a line between Willy Wagner, the subsequent hate-murder of a local gay man, David Alan Walker, and the homosexuals among his own friends and family. Zurcher and Wagner formed an alliance, built coalitions and introduced the Human Dignity Resolution to the Fayetteville City Council on April 21, 1998. Going into the meeting, Zurcher had only two sure votes. Then the hate began. During the public comment period, “The people who got up to talk were open bigots.” Zurcher frowns. “It was ugly.” Later, several councilmembers confided to Zurcher that the hostility woke them up: The vote was 6-2 in favor. On April 26, Mayor Fred Hanna dusted off his rarely used “veto” stamp and whacked it against the resolution on the grounds that it was divisive.
On May 5, City Hall was again center stage. The stalwart six held flanks, overriding the mayor’s, veto 6-2. Fayetteville inhaled for a collective sigh of relief, but before the community could exhale, an organization called Citizens Aware was organizing in several Baptist churches and collecting signatures to put the resolution on November’s ballot. It quickly succeeded. Citizens Aware has no central office or phone number; its spokesman lives two cities away in Rogers. Printed campaign materials focus on “the homosexual agenda” in the same dark tones Sen. Joe McCarthy used against communism.
That Saturday morning at the Farmer’s Market, I struggled with an impulse to go home and shut my door. But I was still bedewed by an epiphany I’d experienced in Amsterdam Arena, where I sat on Aug. 1 among 45,000 global citizens gathered for the opening ceremony of the Gay Games. The ceremony had revealed a geographic breadth and historic depth to civilization’s march toward tolerance that dwarfed America’s ultra-right and its hostility toward different people and ideas. The clock on Old Main at the University of Arkansas chimed in the distance. I knew that turning my back on what was at stake in Fayetteville would be pure hypocrisy.
The next day I was sitting in one of a dozen metal folding chairs circled for the monthly meeting of PFLAG (Parents, Family and Friends of Lesbians and Gays). Dan Hawes of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force in Washington put the local campaign in its national context: In June, Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott had likened homosexuals to addicts and kleptomaniacs. In mid-July, the ultra-right bought full-page advertisements in the New York Times, Washington Post and USA Today for a “Truth in Love” campaign overtly aimed at converting queers. In addition to Fayetteville, Nov. 3 features three other showdowns on gay civil rights. Fort Collins, Colo., faces a similar nondiscrimination vote. Alaskans will choose whether to outlaw gay marriage. In Hawaii, anticipating that the Hawaii Supreme Court may legitimize same-gender marriage, the ultra-right orchestrated a preemptive referendum that, if passed, will authorize the Legislature to ban the marriages.
Nov. 3 will resolve two things for Fayetteville: first, whether homosexuals get fair employment opportunities; second, whether the city actually is the progressive, university town it has built its reputation around. Several things make Fayetteville’s vote worth watching. Fayetteville is a small town in a region nearly devoid of expansive civil rights legislation. The resolution originated from the “straight” community. This is the first time a chapter of PFLAG has championed a ballot issue. The two-sentence resolution focuses on one eloquent point: the inherent worth and dignity of each individual.
The outcome is hard to predict. Our Baptist contingent is huge, and they truly seem to believe that what Jesus would do today is condemn queers. On the other hand, a coalition of 10 non-fundamentalist religious leaders held a “love-thy-neighbor” press conference. Prominent queers and a swath of the good people have been silent. Fayetteville is skilled at using fear to keep people in line — Councilman Cyrus Young’s boss tried to strong-arm him into upholding Hanna’s veto. One of the stalwart six, Young asserts, “If the resolution goes down the tubes, Fayetteville will stagnate. The University of Arkansas won’t be able to recruit quality students and faculty.” No high tech-firm, no major businesses, he adds, will want Fayetteville’s stain to rub off on them.
Another segment of Fayetteville is angry about the disturbance to the city’s aura of tranquillity. At one point I, too, wondered if the fight was worth it. Such referendums raise a community’s intelligence quotient about homosexuality but they can also increase hate crimes. But sometimes we overvalue tranquillity. King knew that. He argued that constructive, nonviolent tension is necessary for growth. Without it, he said, a society is unlikely to rise from the depths of prejudice and racism to the heights of brotherhood.
I helped move the Campaign for Human Dignity into an empty 18-by-18-foot office in late August. A month later, the accretion of office equipment, sodas, stacks of paper and boxes is astounding. It’s a typical campaign with phone banking, door-to-door canvassing, plotting and strategizing. Carolyn Wagner is a blur of activity. She counsels suicidal teens, tries to ignore threats, weaves people together, consults with advisors. Mostly, she pleads for money. Dashing out the door to testify at a special hearing before the U.S. Civil Rights Commission in Little Rock, Fayetteville’s Patron Saint of the Dispossessed is emphatic: “Fayetteville is no way the end. Arkansas is my home state. I want a non-discrimination law on the books for the entire state.”
John Paulk used to be gay. So was his wife, Annie.
In a supposedly growing wave of success, conservative Christian groups
calling themselves Exodus and Transformation and Courage use prayer and
therapy to help unhappy gay men and lesbians “return” to heterosexuality.
John and Anne Paulk are the poster children of this movement, posing stiffly
in front of two incongruous plates of fried eggs and bacon in media all over
the country. Gays supposedly can convert to heterosexuality because
homosexuality is nothing more than a misapprehension of emotional needs caused
by one’s parents and Satan, in that order. (Conveniently set aside is the
concurrent belief that gays can also convert heterosexuals to homosexuality –
the well-known phenomenon of “recruiting” — which would seem to indicate that
heterosexuality is also a rather malleable condition. When Anne Heche,
after years of sexual relationships with men, fell in love with Ellen De Generes,
everyone from Newsweek to CNN decided she had “become” a lesbian.)
The techniques used are not the height of sophistication; in Exodus
workshops, gay men are encouraged to play sports and gay women to wear makeup.
At least some of the converters don’t really expect prayer, therapy and makeup
to work for everyone. They don’t all claim to end homosexual attraction or
create heterosexual attraction; the most many hope for is an end to homosexual
activity. Their “patients” are simply sentenced to abstinence and frustration,
and conservative politicians can point to the vast minority of people involved
as “proof” that being gay is choice, not chance.
I first had sex with a man when I was 16. But I wasn’t heterosexual — I
was still attracted to women. Mad about them, actually. I first had sex
with a woman when I was 18. But I didn’t come out of the closet,
hurrah! I thought about it, anguished about it. But the terrible fact was
that I was still attracted to men. I was just a mess, loving men and women
both, and so I spent about 10 years wondering what the hell was wrong with
me.
One word: bisexual.
No one, bisexuals included, loves the word. It sounds divisive when it means
inclusive. It has a laboratory ring to it. What it means to me and to the many
bisexual people I know is simply the ability to find emotional and sexual
satisfaction in people of both genders. This broadly based sexuality, one
enjoying but not bound by gender, explains much.
I do, in fact, believe it’s possible for a person to spend years in sexual
relations with people of one gender and then find true happiness in the
other. What I find sad is how many times people feel they need to either repudiate the past or deny the present. Whether a woman who considers herself a lesbian but occasionally sleeps with a man continues to call herself a lesbian, or a long-married woman still in love with her husband finds herself also in love with her best friend and then thinks she has to call herself a lesbian is
something of the same thing. Closets are closets no matter what they’re
called.
The mainstream media lately has accepted and used the phrase “converted gays” as if it were a statement of fact. Newsweek devoted a recent cover story
to the conversion movement without using the word “bisexual” once. I believe
it is bisexuality that allows any so-called conversion — or recruiting — to
take place, because what is happening is only the awakening of something
dormant in many people.
I’m not one of those obnoxious people who go around saying, “Everyone’s
bisexual,” either. I think most people are actually mostly heterosexual, and
some portion of the population is exclusively so. I also think a significant
percentage of people are mostly homosexual and a portion of them exclusively
so. It’s the mostly that interests me, because within that lies the
possibility of surprise and change and something not at all like conversion.
I suspect there is a genetic template of sexual orientation made unique by
environmental details. People don’t change their sexuality. Sexuality just
changes, period. Sometimes in big ways; more often in small, slow ways,
throughout each person’s life. But stark change is rare.
I am concerned with the sudden visibility of the conversion movement because
I think homophobia should interest everyone. But I’m especially concerned
that the response of the gay community not be one of increasing rigidity
inside itself. Misunderstanding isn’t the special province of the
conservatives and the converters. The gay community sometimes acts a little
like the “reparative therapists” in its insistence that sexual orientation is
defined at birth and we are all sentenced to one side or the other of a fence
too high to climb. In that worldview, there is nothing in between; in-between does not exist. On one side of this fence, your sexual and
psychological intimacies are met by people of one gender, and on the other
side, those same intimacies are met by people of the other gender. All or
nothing.
Many gay activists see any talk of bisexuality as diluting the coherence of
the community, particularly damaging in a time of attack. James Collard,
editor of OUT, recently tried to start a discussion of what he calls “post-gay” sensibility — a community identity not based entirely in sexual
orientation — and was met with anger. We have met the enemy, and it could be
us if we’re not careful.
Others simply don’t believe in bisexuality, seeing through the lens of their
own difficult coming-out experience. To those who’ve claimed their own
sexuality the hard way, bisexuality sometimes looks like internalized
homophobia, confusion, shame — or sexual opportunism. Bisexuals hear the
same things from straights and gays, friends, lovers and perfect strangers:
You can’t be both. You can’t be neither. You just haven’t faced the truth.
You’re secretly wishing for A or B. Insert gay, insert straight, and it
comes out the same — something essential is denied.
The conversion movement claims to be big and growing bigger, but Exodus
International (why does that name sound so much like a swinging singles club
to me?) has had to close 13 chapters because the directors returned to
their gay “lifestyles.” Two of the founders of Exodus — men who had left
homosexual relationships, married and had children — fell in love with each
other. And yes, they ran away together and seem to be living happily ever
after.
It is normal to me to have a flowing and unpredictable sexual orientation, although in my case it hasn’t been entirely unpredictable — there are patterns of who and when and
how I am attracted to people, of who populates my dreams, and there are patterns
in what I’ve chosen to do and not to do about those patterns. But my
experience of attraction is nothing like a fence between opposing camps. My
sexual self feels more like a winding river, going only vaguely in one
direction, with gentle curves here and there, fast water and slow, occasional
storms.
I have often wished to be another way, to “convert” fully and completely into a person whose community would be obvious — and welcoming. But there is
something wonderful in this, too. The only limit is how tiny the word “bi”
sounds, as though I lived in a world of two and not billions. What I live in
is a world where sexual attraction can surprise me in the middle of doing the
laundry, where I have discovered myself drawn to a person who didn’t meet a
single one of the multiple criteria by which I had previously judged partners,
where sexual attraction can disappear without notice and reappear where it is
least expected, where in the course of the many decades of my life I have come
to expect a library of possibility. I don’t know where the converters would
even begin.
