Last month [June 1999], Slate - Microsoft's Web-based magazine - featured a four-part debate between Urvashi Vaid, director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Policy Institute, and David Brooks, senior editor at the conservative Weekly Standard magazine. Vaid has for many years been a leading light of the lesbigay left, and is known for inveighing against gay and lesbian "mainstreaming." Brooks is a conservative Republican, but one who hasn't engaged in gay-baiting. Their exchange, although ostensibly about recent books on the lesbian and gay movement, illuminated the difficulty that the gay left and the straight right have in finding a common language to discuss gays and society. But aside from that, I'd argue that both sides managed to score points that non-dogmatic gays might benefit from keeping in mind.
To show what I mean, I'll do my best to briefly summarize and quote the views put forth by Vaid and Brooks on two primary subjects: sexual liberation and economic liberty. And I'll try to explain why I think the "progressive" Vaid is mostly right about the former, while the "conservative" Brooks has the better argument about the latter.
First, let's talk sex. Vaid argues there are "two competing visions of sex in America" over whether sexual pleasure is "inherently dangerous" or "inherently morally neutral (or even good)." She observes that "a redefinition of sexuality and its relationship to morality and spirituality is at the heart of the challenge that homosexuality poses -- and part of why it is so threatening." As if to prove Vaid's point, Brooks responds that "anybody -- straight or gay -- who has more than five sex partners in a year is probably doing something sleazy," and adds, "I think promiscuity is the key issue....People like me who believe that homosexuality can become a respectably part of the society we have inherited believe that it must uphold monogamy, without always living up to it, just as straight culture does."
To this, Vaid responds by asserting there isn't anything wrong with "responsible promiscuity" and that "ethical behavior in sex involves not doing harm to others or yourself, it involves behaving in a responsible manner. If my partner and I decide to open up our 11-year relationship and have other lovers, while continuing to live together, why should it render us any less decent than you? Private consensual adult sexual activity is the business of consenting adults."
Brooks shoots back, "Anyone who can come up with the phrase 'Responsible Promiscuity' should be living here in Washington occupying a senior post in the Clinton administration" (a pretty good retort). He adds, "I want to live in the same community as you," but "without shared norms -- about consensual adult sexual activity too -- community erodes.... Trust is gone and life is nasty, brutish, and short."
For my part, I think it's too simplistic for conservatives to charge that non-monogamy, in "open" relationships or otherwise, is too great a threat to society to be acquiesced to. Conservatives are going to have to accept a "live and let live" reality in order to co-exist with those, gay and straight, who have a radically different attitude from theirs on sexual pleasure. Accepting personally responsibility for ones actions IS important--a point that liberals too often fail to grasp--but responsiblity and monogamy are not synonymous.
But if my libertarian sympathies lead me to side with Vaid on sex, I found her totally disingenuous (and even dishonest) when the debate turned to economics. Vaid didn't raise the topic, but an offhand comment she made about the "pro-Nicaragua lesbian movement" leads Brooks to respond that, on Nicaragua, Vaid "took the side of a Communist kleptocracy that the people of Nicaragua booted out of office as soon as they got the chance (and elected a woman besides!)."
He explains that he was looking through the Web site of the Independent Gay Forum, which publishes writings by centrist, conservative, and libertarian gays and lesbians. At the site, he came upon an article about corporate America's efforts to reach out to the gay market, in which Vaid is quoted as saying that America has "taken off its ugly white hood to show its sexist, racist, anti-gay and capitalist face." He sums up by saying that "If gay and lesbian liberation means a New Left-style assault on mainstream American values and institutions, like the regulated market system we now enjoy, then I will be against the gay and lesbian liberation movement and so will many of the people who would otherwise be sympathetic to the cause."
A confession here. The article Brooks refers to is titled Corporate Liberation, and was written by none other than me (although Brooks doesn't name me).
Vaid responds testily that, although she did in fact make the statement attributed to her, it was lifted "completely out of context" because she wasn't referring to marketing per se, as Brooks seemed to suggest. She then accuses him of "McCarthyite red-baiting crap." Vaid asserts that although she is "proud to be a leftist," what she believes in is "socially responsible capitalism."
This, as I noted, is disingenuous, for Vaid has written in left-wing publications that she not only is a socialist, but a socialist on the radical left "syndicalist" fringe to boot. That's why her quote, lumping "capitalism" in with racism, sexism, and all the other social evils, was so revealing. Why doesn't she have the courage to defend her economic convictions when addressing a general audience?
rooks understands that a free economy is the basis for all other freedoms. Vaid believes that "society" should make economic decisions for its members (based, no doubt, on "consensus"), rather then letting individuals decide for themselves. On the other hand, Vaid believes that adults should be free to lead the sexual lives that give them pleasure, as long as their relationships are consensual and among adults. Brooks thinks that the "community" should enforce social norms and stigmatize those who aren't monogamous and relegate them beyond the pale.
Responsible folks might reasonably conclude that both sides of this debate uphold one form of freedom only to vilify another.