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.
One of history’s most brilliant monarchs — and a leader who understood the importance of tapping into a nation’s mythic imagination long before Ronald Reagan beguiled the American public with creaky old cowboy movie clichis — Elizabeth I has had an uneven career as a screen character. In Hollywood’s classic era, portrayed by Bette Davis, she was a high-strung, fretting version of the kind of career women played by Rosalind Russell or Joan Crawford, torn between her job and the “natural” longings of a woman’s heart; this 1930s Elizabeth weeps all the way to the throne, so to speak. The memorable 1971 BBC miniseries “Elizabeth R” (starring Glenda Jackson) focused more on Elizabeth as political animal; the TV serial really is the best way to tell long, complicated, multi-character stories full of intrigue and skullduggery — in other words, to depict the Tudor court. The movies prefer bold splashes of emotion and romance, and Elizabeth herself was a bit too hardheaded and ambitious for all that.
Nevertheless, Shekhar Kapur’s “Elizabeth” offers an enjoyable new interpretation of this most enigmatic of rulers. She’s still deeply conflicted about her destiny, but she’s no longer modeled on Mildred Pierce. This time around, she’s Michael Corleone.
Magnetically played by Cate Blanchett (spookily fair-skinned, ginger-haired and with a simmering intelligence that recalls Jackson’s Elizabeth without seeming derivative), 1998′s Elizabeth is a spirited, somewhat naive girl dragged into the viper’s nest of the court and forced to fight for her throne and her life. To hang onto her head and consolidate her power she must navigate an environment as perilous as the underworld in Coppola’s “The Godfather” — the same treachery, the same butchery, the same tribal allegiances and caustic betrayals. Her predecessor and half-sister, “Bloody” Mary Tudor, has been scalping and burning Protestant “heretics” to defend the Catholic faith in England, and religious disputes have riven the nation and the aristocracy. The country is weak militarily and economically. Several different factions are scheming against her life, and black-cloaked assassins stalk the halls of her own palace. The Pope puts a price on her head. She loves the doe-eyed young Lord Robert Dudley (Joseph Fiennes), but her advisors pressure her to marry a foreign potentate — from France or Spain — to stabilize England’s position in Europe.
Some chest-thumping film critics like to sneer at the particular visual delights of costume pictures — sumptuous outfits, pageantry, lush interiors — as if these are less legitimate attractions than high-speed chases, explosions or semi-naked babes. So let me first note that I consider the above position to be fundamentally bogus before I go on to observe that “Elizabeth” smartly blends the dazzling beauties of Elizabeth’s world with its brutalities. For every ravishing brocade gown there’s a head on a spike, because, as is so often the case, the two are deeply linked: The power deployed to build castles and cover a queen in diamonds was maintained by an often lethal ruthlessness, a ruthlessness this monarch acquires as the film goes on. In a witty conceit worthy of a 16th century sonneteer (if more Jacobean than Elizabethan in tone), the queen narrowly evades the ultimate booby trap for a costume picture — a poisoned dress.
In this version of her life, the young, impulsive Elizabeth learns to calculate, to conceal her vulnerabilities, to heed the advice of her Master of Spies, Sir Francis Walsingham (a pleasingly lurksome Geoffrey Rush), and to restrain her passion for Dudley. Despite this glum, repressive scenario, “Elizabeth” does, at least, offer a few glimpses of the queen’s zest for her work. Blanchett is particularly riveting in the scene in which she appears before a counsel of bishops to argue for a crucial religious reform. After nervously preparing her speech and making a few stiff initial remarks, Elizabeth catches her stride. She reasons, she jokes, she charms, she importunes, and you can see her ignite as she watches the clerics, one by one, fall into the palm of her hand. She has discovered an appetite for the game that’s at least as ravenous as her craving for Dudley.
Although the Byzantine political underpinnings of “Elizabeth” get a bit murky, the movie is a handsome, diverting coming-of-intrigue story studded with meaty performances. Does it matter, then, that it mangles history? Don’t artists have license to manipulate facts to make the truth more dramatically compelling? They do, but in this case, the historical Elizabeth remains far more fascinating than her fictional incarnation. For example, the real Elizabeth, caught up in monarchal power struggles from her infancy, was never an innocent; and as a grown women she didn’t stifle her capriciousness. Kapur’s film depicts her as ultimately transforming herself into a living icon — the Virgin Queen — which she did do, but the triumphs of her 45-year reign owed as much to her canny and heartfelt appeals to British nationalism as they did to her ability to win English Catholics away from that other virgin. Kapur has Elizabeth deliver one of her most famous lines — “I have the body of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king” — crossly, in a stony chamber, to a handful of anxious counselors. In fact, she shouted this from horseback, wearing an silver breastplate, to her assembled troops at Tilbury — just one example of her legendary oratorical panache. The real queen, in this case, shows a superior sense of theater.
Finally there’s the matter of Elizabeth’s “virginity” (which was probably more figurative than literal) and the film’s interpretation of her choice not to marry as a sacrifice of her tender personal feelings to the rigors of ruling her country. Maybe. “Elizabeth” depicts the queen as frustrated in her wish to wed Dudley by his earlier marriage to a woman he kept hidden away in the countryside. In fact, Dudley’s first wife died, and Elizabeth had ample opportunity to marry him. By remaining unwed, Elizabeth made herself a perpetual wild card in the arcane marital poker games of the European royalty, a status she shrewdly used to keep potential allies and enemies off balance. And while it’s true that the queen expressed very little of her innermost thoughts (particularly about ticklish subjects like religion), she did once pronounce, “I would rather be a beggar and single than a queen and married” — hardly an equivocal statement on the subject of matrimony.
In short, as appealing as Blanchett’s romantic and feisty young princess may be, she’s a shadow of the real thing, that complex, tough, baffling and formidably intelligent ruler (sometimes reputed to be a man in disguise) who presided over the age of Shakespeare. Like the playwright, Elizabeth, the apotheosis of a culture in many ways more cerebral and sophisticated than our own, may be a bit too much for us — has there ever been a great movie about Shakespeare, after all? That needn’t detract from the fun of watching “Elizabeth,” with its double-crossing courtiers, fabulous clothes and radiant star, but it leaves this viewer, at least, hankering for something more.
I first noticed Erik Davis in the early ’90s when I read a piece he’d written about UFO literature for the Village Voice. It was the first uncynical yet smart piece about this phenomenon I’d encountered since I’d stumbled across Jung’s writings on the subject many years before, and his poetic use of language in the expository form was nothing short of exquisite. Since then, Davis has kept his sharp yet expansive intelligence focused on the various flavors of millennial strangeness that permeate our digitized era.
His new book, “TechGnosis,” casts a wide net, elucidating both the historical context and the meaning behind digital Gnosticism, technopaganism, William Gibson’s voodoo-haunted visions of cyberspace, the Extropians’ dreams of disembodied immortality, cyberdelia and most of the other odd phantoms of mind and spirit that seem to turn on the strange tribes at the edges of technoculture. This territory has been explored before by the likes of Douglas Rushkoff and Mark Dery, but it has never been so eloquently explained. Last month I sat down with Davis to talk about his work.
On the fringes of technoculture, there’s always been a link between digital technology and spirituality, or mysticism. Most commentators have written it off as mere eccentricity, but your book manages to make it all sound rather reasonable. Still, if you had to explain what that link is briefly, what would you say?
“TechGnosis” sets out to prove that technology and spirituality don’t exist in totally separate regions of human culture. That’s just not true. Modern technology is built on premodern dreams — whether Christian hopes for the New Jerusalem or animist ideas about electricity and the life force. Those dreams now lurk in the margins, in what I call the technological unconscious, but they continue to inform the fantasies, expectations and ideas that surround technology. For example, modern advertising is essentially a magical system of inducements deployed through technology. And it’s not simply an accident that occult material, however hackneyed, figures so predominantly in computer games.
You’re talking here primarily about technology emerging from spirituality. What about the reverse of that? Over the last century or so, human beings have taken flight, projected their voices and images across space and time and done a whole host of other things that earlier humans would have found (in the words of Arthur C. Clarke) “indistinguishable from magic.” And these things have stirred the transcendental hopes and imaginings of moderns as well. But are they actually magic?
Well, that’s a tricky question. It depends what you mean by magic. Ioan Couliano, the religious scholar who was Mircea Eliade’s greatest student, made the point that modern technology realizes dreams first imagined by earlier generations of magicians. That’s one way of interpreting Clarke’s famous quip. The fact that these things came about through the rational exploitation of natural law may be less important than we tend to think, because the social and cultural effects of technologies are often quite irrational, even mythical. One of the main aims of my book is to illustrate this. On the other hand, even if 20th century technology mobilizes these transcendental imaginings, subconsciously or not, they are also simultaneously “profane” and utterly removed from the sacred in any traditional sense. That’s the Promethean irony, the dark parody, of technomysticism. Jacques Ellul made this point as well: The machine generates ecstasy, but mechanizes it as well.
On the other hand, if combinations of digital technology, biotech, nanotech and other technoscientific forces are modifying who or what we are, what is sacred or profane might be up for grabs. Also, from the point of view of the jester or prankster — whose spirit you frequently cite — the profane is frequently sacred because it punctures the pomposity that gets attached to sacredness.
Well, you’re of course plugged into the playful animating spirit of “TechGnosis.” The archetypes that dominate technological culture today are either angelic or demonic — the New Jerusalem of the technoutopians or the evil Faustian Frankenstein monsters of the Neo-Luddites. But in my view, technology is more like a trickster: It scrambles established codes, overturns truths and constantly hoodwinks us with unintended consequences. And that’s especially true of communication technology. Remember, Hermes, the Greek god of messages, is both a trickster and a magician.
All the technological developments you name are pointing towards a future where mind — whatever that is, and we shouldn’t think for a moment that the cognitive scientists have any more of a clue than you do — can manifest itself in matter with greater and greater ease. Obviously this means values are up for grabs. But I suspect that some basic human questions, common to both practical spirituality and modern humanism, will still play a vital role in guiding our increasingly technological society. The trickster is not the only god around.
What questions, what practices, and what gods are most likely to emerge in a technoculture?
We know that information technology is changing consciousness. But the way it’s coupled with the current climate of late capitalism, it’s happening in a mostly banal way. We find ourselves living with a more multitasking, scattered, data-rich and high-velocity mind. We need to work with that mind, but also to recognize its profound limitations. Attention is the key, and any practices that refine attention will become valued in a technoculture like ours.
Now, to put on my pointed prophet’s hat for a brief moment, I’d say that fringe groups like Heaven’s Gate and Aum Shinrikyo will continue to mix up apocalyptic expectations and technology. The possibilities of artificial life and machine consciousness will also stir up all sorts of fears, fantasies and polytheistic projections, as we become more and more seduced into anthropomorphizing our increasingly animated machines. But the real questions will be raised by biotechnology and genetic engineering. We really are becoming “post-human,” and I can’t see how we can face the extraordinary turbulence and terror of this moment without asking fundamental questions about what the hell we are here for in the first place. Hardheaded humanists want those questions answered in utterly utilitarian and scientific terms; my book suggests that this rationalist fantasy may be the biggest myth of all.
Do you have a personal technospiritual practice?
Well, as I explain in my book, I think one modern idea of spiritual practice — techniques as opposed to beliefs or religious dogma — emerges partly from our experience as people deeply influenced by the pragmatic and do-it-yourself spirit of technology. We are bricoleurs of the spirit. Even the Buddha talked about his path as a kind of raft provisionally lashed together from flotsam and weeds, only to be abandoned on the other side. I just think we never get to the other side, and that our raft is constantly leaking. And so I’m interested in studying anything that helps me understand how “I” come to be: neuroscience, evolutionary psychology, cultural history, even advertising.
I think we’re only just beginning to explore the kinds of technologies — like groupware, VR and advanced biofeedback — that will really build interesting “platforms” for consciousness. Personally I’m no longer quite as interested in brain machines … or even neurotropics.
Say it ain’t so! (laughter)
Well, who knows what tomorrow will bring? I certainly haven’t hung up the sword of psychedelia. But right now I’m really into more basic techniques that awaken and alter our immediate experience: meditation, breathwork and mindfulness of the feedback loops between body and mind. That kind of moment-to-moment attention to perception and experience applies to every aspect of life, including our deeply strange relationships with technology and media. I see the Web as a Rorschach blot, automobiles as surrogate selves. E-mail lists are amazing places to watch yourself: Why do you post? Who do you think you’re responding to? Why is bug-eyed anger so close to the surface of digital disputes? Everything is grist for the mill. Even “South Park.” Ummm … scratch that. Especially “South Park.”
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.
“Our target was terror. Our mission was clear.”
– President Clinton, Aug. 20, 1998
To the litany of terrorist acts that President Clinton laid at the feet of renegade Saudi millionaire Osama bin Laden in justification of his cruise missile attacks on Afghanistan and the Sudan last week, the administration has now alleged a murky plot to assassinate the president as well.
The alleged plot against Clinton was to have taken place when he was to have visited Pakistan. The anonymous intelligence sources that have made such an industry in bin Laden revelations this week acknowledge that the plot never went beyond the coffee-shop talking stage.
But the charge helped to reinforce the president’s claims that bin Laden is “perhaps the preeminent organizer and financier of international terrorism in the world today,” and that there was “compelling” — if unrevealable — evidence that a network of terrorist groups he controlled was planning “further attacks against Americans and other freedom-loving groups.”
At a time when presidential veracity is at an all-time low, one might have wished that the president and his national security advisors had laid out in detail just what was the “compelling evidence” that led the United States to launch some 75 missiles at two sovereign nations.
As it is, the public, both here in the United States and in the more critical world at large, is being asked to take a giant Kierkegaardian leap of faith in the president’s claims. Given Clinton’s recent track record in the “trust me” department, this is a lot to demand.
For while there is little doubt that bin Laden is a sworn enemy of the United States with the financial means to put some teeth in that enmity, his exact role in anti-American terrorism is unclear. The administration’s claims are based more on conjecture — mostly bin Laden’s own braggadocio and the bad company he apparently keeps — than hard and convincing evidence.
Clinton and his security staff have now blamed bin Laden for being behind almost every terrorist act in the past decade — from plotting the assassinations of the pope and the president of Egypt to the planned bombing of six U.S. jumbo jets over the Pacific, with massacres of German tourists at Luxor and the killings of U.S. troops in Somalia, fatal car bombings of U.S. military personnel in Saudi Arabia and this month’s truck bombings of the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam thrown in. Not since the ’70s heyday of the terrorist Carlos has there been such a Prince of Darkness, if the allegations are to be believed.
But so far, for all of the accusations, no government, not even that of the United States, has established enough credible evidence against bin Laden to conclusively prove his direct participation in, much less leadership of, any of the ugly plots and acts he stands accused of. To date no formal request for his extradition has ever been made, either to the Sudanese government that once housed him or to his current hosts, Afghanistan’s Taliban leaders.
Though it was suddenly leaked this week that a federal grand jury’s continuing investigation into the World Trade Center bombing in New York City in 1993 had belatedly handed up a sealed indictment against bin Laden in June, the indictment is understood to be only for “sedition,” that is, incitement to violence, not the violence itself. That is the same charge under which the Unites States previously convicted Egyptian cleric Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, the Trade Center bomber’s spiritual leader.
The only link between bin Laden and the World Trade Center bombing seems to be the fact that the mastermind of the bombing, Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, was eventually detained by U.S. agents while living in a guest house in Pakistan reportedly rented by bin Laden. The Saudi was also implicated in a failed 1994 plan to blow up American jumbo jets over the Pacific because the plot mastermind, Wali Khan Amin Shah, reportedly was a “close friend” of bin Laden’s.
If bin Laden’s fingerprints were to be found on any terrorist acts of the last decade, they should have been on the two attacks against U.S. military personnel carried out in the years when he was still living in his Saudi Arabian homeland. Bin Laden, a wealthy Saudi engineering graduate who became a radical Muslim after joining the war against Russia’s occupation of Afghanistan in 1979, became virulently anti-American after U.S. troops were stationed in Saudi Arabia during the 1991 Gulf War.
To him the American presence in Saudi Arabia, home of the holy Islamic sites Mecca and Medina, is a sacrilege he has vowed to reverse, along with toppling the “corrupt” Saudi royal family that has allowed it. Thus, when a car bomb exploded at a Saudi National Guard office in Riyadh in 1995, killing five Americans, and another blew up at the Khobar Towers Barracks in Dhahran a year later, killing another 19, bin Laden seemed the most likely suspect.
But neither the FBI, the CIA nor the Saudi intelligence services has ever been able to establish bin Laden’s links to those crimes after years of trying. What evidence that has emerged from those ongoing investigations points the finger at dissident Saudi Shiites, perhaps with the logistic support of the Lebanese Hezbollah organization, or even Iran.
Though much has been made of the fact that from his safe-houses in Afghanistan bin Laden has forged a loose alliance with perhaps a dozen different Islamic groups in the Muslim world from Algeria to Bangladesh, he seems to be more of a spiritual leader and financier than the sort of terrorist mastermind being alleged.
“Bin Laden is a true believer and a funder of Islamic causes, rather than a planner and active participant,” says Professor Shibley Telhani, a Middle East scholar from the University of Maryland who has followed his career. “His real influence is not as a mastermind of terrorism but as a person who is using a personal fortune to encourage others to wage war against the American interests in the Middle East he finds so objectionable.”
Indeed the sealed federal indictment just handed up, it would appear, is not based on any evidence directly linking him to either of those plots or others. Instead, it seems to have been motivated by a public call to arms against Americans that bin Laden published in the London Arabic newspaper Al-Quds al-Arabi last February. Issued as an Islamic Fatwa, or holy order, even though bin Laden has no religious authority whatsoever, the broadside by bin Laden and other signers from various Islamic groups called for Muslims to “kill Americans and their allies, civilians and military” wherever they find them.
These are strong words indeed. But they are words, not deeds. And though it is all too likely that those words have inspired others to such actions as the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam last month, bin Laden himself is unlikely to have personally ordered those bombings or carried them out.
Unless the Clinton administration can come up with some hard evidence that bin Laden is in fact calling the shots of a vast new anti-American terrorist network, all the present allegations and faceless intelligence-source leaks claiming facts too secret and explosive to be revealed should be taken with a grain of salt.
Bin Laden may be a dangerous anti-American zealot with a mouth as big as his bankroll. But the evidence so far does not support him being a cerebral Islamic Dr. No moving an army of terrorist troops on a vast world chessboard to checkmate the United States.
In his appearance before Kenneth Starr’s grand jury last Monday, President Clinton testified that he had perhaps six sexual “contacts” with Monica Lewinsky, and that they all occurred in the first part of 1996, with the exception of one further contact in early 1997, according to a legal source close to Clinton. “They never had sexual intercourse, and Clinton ended it in early 1997,” says the source. “She didn’t want to, but had no choice but to accept that. They really were friends and they remained friends.”
The source added that “there was never any discussion between them that amounted to obstruction of justice. Very early on, and not in response to Starr’s investigation, they took steps — as anyone would — to keep their relationship secret.” The source described the further questions put to Clinton by Starr and prosecutors as “quite disgusting,” and said Clinton refused to answer them. Published reports have disclosed that Clinton became so angry at the questioning that at one point, he and his lawyers withdrew from the room where the inquiry took place and did not return for an hour.
After wresting a confession from Clinton about his affair, Starr’s strategy now seems to further humiliate the president by exposing each and every lurid detail of the sexual relationship. This legal gambit would indeed have been damaging against a president like Richard Nixon or Ronald Reagan — what American would have liked being forced to contemplate their passionate writhings? The public does not excuse Clinton’s dalliance with Lewinsky, but they seem far more able to put it into the context of his entire presidency, and recognize at the same time that raging hormones belong to the young. Washington had become accustomed to its aged presidents.
The last virile commander in chief was, of course, Jack Kennedy, inaugurated at 43, whose lifetime of sexual “contacts” numbered in the hundreds, according to historian Michael Beschloss. JFK was followed by Lyndon Johnson, whose extramarital adventures are said to have occurred before he became president at 55; Richard Nixon, 56, and Gerald Ford, 61 — neither of whom generated a hint of sexual intrigue, for obvious reasons; Jimmy Carter, who at 52 said he had lust only in his heart; Reagan, 69, whose own illicit affairs occurred earlier, during his Hollywood career; and George Bush, inaugurated at 64, who was rumored to have engaged in a discreet, long-term affair with a former aide while he was Reagan’s vice president, but managed to keep it out of the press.
Clinton’s aged 1996 opponent, Bob Dole, had an affair years earlier, during his first marriage, a story a Washington Post reporter nailed down before the election, with the woman in question going on the record. But executive editor Leonard Downie spiked the story. There was widespread speculation at the Post that Downie’s own 1996 affair, with a friend of his wife, was responsible for the Post blackout of the Dole affair. (Downie has since divorced and married the friend.)
At the elite dinner parties in Washington these days, there are not many people defending Clinton. “The Zeitgeist is to be against him, especially at the New York Times and the Washington Post,” says one social insider. “Anyone who says anything positive about Clinton or negative against Starr and the press is strongly and hostilely challenged.”
Within these circles, few people identify with Clinton’s vitality and promiscuity. By the time Clinton and his youthful crew arrived, official Washington had become a town of 60- to 80-year-old ex-appointees and advisors to the elderly Reagan and Bush administrations, no longer much interested in sex, especially pre-Viagra.
These Washington insiders have forgotten how sexual the pursuit of political power actually is. Most presidential campaigns bristle with erotic electricity, largely due to the immense power the candidate is seeking. As Henry Kissinger famously declared, “Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.” Washington luminaries — from senators to TV reporters — attract legions of groupies, some very aggressive, some vulnerable, some both.
Campaigns and Washington service involve long separations of married couples, and there are often brief affairs between staff members, between flight attendants and the Secret Service, between members of the press, all of whom are sharing an intense experience away from home and hearth. Coming together on a political quest, hitting the road for months and living on expense accounts in different hotel rooms every night is an explosively erotic mix. The endless and enormous temptations presented to candidates, particularly, are unimaginable to most people. It is the rare still-potent man who doesn’t succumb, and, as psychologist Joyce Brothers has pointed out, the physical energy and testosterone levels of those who seek high office far exceed the average person’s — with the possible exceptions of Richard Nixon and Bob Dole, who appear to have been fueled primarily by resentment.
The candidate’s psychology is that he has worked exhaustively, night and day, for many years to get to the pinnacle, and now he is still working night and day, fighting the Congress, fighting the press, fighting even some in his own party, locked for political reasons in what is perhaps a loving but no longer passionate marriage, and he says to himself, “What about the inner me? Where is my reward? I’m not getting any. I want sexual love!” This is the way it is.
Churchill said about being a public figure, “There is one’s public life, one’s private life and then there is one’s secret life.” But Clinton’s political enemies seethe with sanctimony, insisting against all signs to the contrary that leaders must have no personal contradictions, that their inner lives must always correspond to family and religious strictures.
Age is not Clinton’s only problem inside the Beltway. There is also creed. In an unusual article in the National Journal, media writer William Powers remarks upon the particularly harsh judgments being levied on Clinton by a coterie of liberal-to-moderate Democratic journalists and pundits who are also Catholics. The most judgmental in their commentary, says Powers, are the Irish Catholics among them. (Powers identifies himself an Irish Catholic.) The harshest is Chris Matthews, host of CNBC’s “Hardball,” who has been termed by Washington Post TV critic Tom Shales as “the screaming meanie.” Close behind in the vitriol count are New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd and Michael Kelly, editor of the National Journal and columnist for the Washington Post. Somewhat more measured is NBC’s ubiquitous Tim Russert, and more pained than censorious are Post columnists Mary McGrory and Mark Shields. Among the chorus of Catholic former Clinton staffers who have been piling on are Dee Dee Myers and Leon Panetta.
In comments to Powers, several members of this “whole gang of us” — as Matthews termed the group, many of whom are close friends — talked about the moral absolutism of their Catholic backgrounds. But what about the other Catholic tradition that emphasizes “original sin and fallen human nature?” Powers was asked by liberal Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne, a Catholic who usually supports Clinton, “Does he [Kelly] believe in the forgiveness of sins?”
In Time’s special issue last week, Myers (who is married to New York Times reporter Todd Purdum, who has been writing about Whitewater), writes of her disappointment with Clinton’s Lewinsky speech — because he wasn’t contrite or apologetic enough to suit her, because he shifted responsibility to Paula Jones and Ken Starr and because he hadn’t done right by those who gave him “their votes, their hopes, their labor and their love.”
