Originally appeared in the Advocate on October 18, 1994.
WHILE CHANNEL SURFING one day a few months ago, I came across a gay public-access show on which an interviewer fired names at gay activist-journalist Michelangelo Signorile, asking him to respond with the first word that came to mind. "Bruce Bawer," the interviewer said. "Confused," Signorile replied.
The answer made me laugh -- and it also made me do some thinking about confusion. There's a lot of it around. Indeed, the more I've talked to other people -- both gay and straight -- about homosexuality and related subjects, the more I've come to recognize how important a part confusion has played not only in the perpetuation of homophobia (which, after all, involves in many cases a confusion of homosexuality with pederasty or subversion or misogyny) but also in the conflicts that are raging in gay circles between, well, people like me and Signorile.
Certainly a lot of confusion has arisen from the fact that many of us use the same words to mean different things. Take gay and homosexual. Most of us use these words to designate a natural orientation. Some gay activists, however use them to refer only to a natural orientation that's acted upon and openly acknowledged -- you're only gay, in other words, if you're out loud and proud. Some, like Larry Kramer, have additional criteria: "Any gay who says he's conservative," Kramer has maintained, "is not a gay."
Meanwhile a lot of straight people, as we all know, genuinely think that homosexuality is a subversive choice -- that gay people choose to be gay and could, if they wished, choose to be straight. We need to correct this confusion -- but the task isn't made any easier by the fact that we can't even get it clear among ourselves what we're talking about when we use the words homosexual and gay.
Nor are we clear among ourselves about the goals of the gay rights movement. Do we want social acceptance and respect, equal rights under the law, sexual liberation, increased self-esteem, Marxist utopia? All of the above? Or do we simply want to vent our anger at society, get the rage out of our system? Is the movement's role to provide gays (or, perhaps, the world generally) with a more ambitious vision of sexual pleasure or human relations than that reflected in the relationships of our parents? Or do we just want an excuse to throw condoms at priests or run naked up Fifth Avenue?
Different people have different answer to these fundamental questions. Many have never really figured out what their answer is; for some, the answer seems to vary according to mood or the weather or whoever they've listened to most recently. And some think they know what their answer is but contradict themselves. A certain gay person may say, for instance, that the proper goal of gay politics is to achieve equal respect and acceptance, but if he hears you speaking to heterosexuals about homosexuality in a way that'll help them understand and accept it, he'll accuse you of sucking up to the enemy, of caring too much about what straight people think. Or another gay person may say she wants equal rights, then engage in blatantly counterproductive forms of protest and defend her actions by saying, "Well, I felt like it" or "All gay self-expression is good." I see this kind of confusion about first principles constantly, and it's a big reason, I think why our movement seems so terribly out of focus and so much less successful than it should be.
One corollary of this widespread confusion is an often unconscious tendency to obscure the lines dividing several closely related but decidedly different topics of discourse. Homosexuality, gay culture, the "gay community," gay sex, your or my personal life, gay politics: these are all different entities. To talk about one does not oblige you to talk about the others. This may seem a simple and obvious point, but if you listen to some gay political leaders on TV or read books by some queer-studies scholars, you're liable to find these entities hopelessly confused with one another.
A famous gay writer, in an important piece about gay politics for a major political journal, devotes several sentences to describing the physical attraction of two other gay writers with whom he disagrees. A noted queer-studies scholar, in the essay on gay literature in an influential history of the American novel, spends several paragraphs on his own childhood. This is not just run-of-the-mill inappropriateness-it's the product of a sensibility that refuses to honor the distinctions among the various entities listed above.
We've been encouraged to see such rhetorical practices as displaying a fabulous irreverence, an impertinent refusal to observe distinctions or social niceties, that's distinction gay -- and indeed there's a place for irreverence and for personal references in public discourse. But in routinely failing to observe the distinctions I've mentioned and discuss subjects in an appropriate tone, we only increase the confusion of straight people who are making a sincere effort to "get it." And that doesn't get us anywhere.