The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for
Gay Freedom.
By Michael Bronski, St. Martin's Press, $24.95. 294 pages.
THERE ARE TWO basic schools of thought as to what the gay rights movement should be about. Some of us, who are often erroneously described as assimilationists but who should more accurately be called integrationists, feel that the movement should seek to achieve acceptance, equal rights, and full integration into the present social and political structure. We believe that gay people are not terribly different from straight people, and that we have a realistic hope of achieving (if you will) a place at the table if we intelligently and responsibly address the ignorance and fear of homosexuality that are our chief barriers to full acceptance and equality.
Others, who are usually known as liberationists, maintain that the movement should seek to transform society in radical ways. In their view, gays differ profoundly from straights; our homosexuality represents an extreme challenge to the established order, and obliges us to be instruments of revolutionary social transformation. If we integrationists have sought to shape a practical gay politics -- a politics capable of effecting real improvement in the lives of gay people -- many liberationists cheerfully admit that their own politics are impractical and unrealistic. Among these is Michael Bronski, who in The Pleasure Principle admits that his own "vision of human liberation" involves "an almost utopian desire to remake the world." Some liberationists envision a Marxist heaven; Bronski's utopian dreams are not about economics but about sex.
There is much in this book with which many integrationists will readily agree. Bronski is right, for instance, when he says that Americans have hang-ups about sex, and that these hang-ups play a role in shaping straight attitudes toward homosexuality. When heterosexuals think of homosexuals, in short, they tend to think of sex. They think we have more sex than they do, or better sex than they do, or both, and many of them resent and/or fear us on this account. Most integrationists feel that the best way to address this problem is to get out the word that gay lives are not necessarily any more about sex than straight lives are. Bronski takes the opposite tack: he embraces the notion that homosexuality is all about sex and that gays know more about sexual pleasure than straights do. For this reason, he insists, we should become "pleasure-teachers" who seek to transform society's attitudes toward the joys of the flesh.
Only in a culture with strong Puritan foundations and a deep streak of native romanticism could so smart a writer argue such a silly thesis. It's in the nature of Puritanism, after all, that it spawns not only extreme sexual repression but also, in reaction, a childlike conviction on some people's part that the answer to all of life's problems lies in sexual freedom. (If only!)
In recent years, as more and more gays have come out, it has become increasingly clear that most of us lead more or less conventional lives and hold values far more traditional than stereotypes would suggest. Nothing could be more threatening to gay liberationism, the fortunes of which are tied to the image of gay people as radically different, threatening, and hypersexual. Accordingly, when integrationists have dared to make the simple point that most gays aren't very different in most ways from most straights, liberationists have felt obliged to shoot them down. Bronski, for his part, trains his sights on a passage from my 1993 book A Place at the Table in which I recalled a clean-cut teenage boy whom I had seen in a bookstore, nervously picking up a gay publication that turned out to be full of drag and S&M photos. "Bawer's presumption," writes Bronski, "is that the young boy would be so frightened by images of overt gay male sexuality that he would panic. This conjecture is indicative of how readily the assimilationist trend in the gay movement would separate sexuality from gay identity and from manifestations of gay culture."
"Frightened" and "panic" are Bronski's words, not mine. As I made clear in the book, my concern was not that the boy would be "frightened by images of overt gay male sexuality" but that he would not relate to the particular sexual variations depicted in that publication and would think either "Well, if that's what it means to be gay, then I guess I must not be gay" or "Well, I'm gay, so I guess I'd I'd better try to become like that" or "Well, I'm gay, but I refuse to become like that, so I guess the only alternative is to repress it and marry." As I wrote in the book, "Don't let anyone, straight or gay, tell you who you are." The anecdote resonated with scores of readers who told me in letters and at public appearances: "That boy was me."
Indeed, that boy is legion. But to gay liberationists like Bronski, he needs to be denied, ridiculed, misrepresented, rendered invisible. The survival of gay liberationist ideology depends on it. Bronski denounces conformism - but what The Pleasure Principle reflects, more than anything else, is its author's manifest anxiety over the growing number of gays who fail to conform to his favored model of gay life and thought. Bronski would have us all fall into lockstep and become models of social transgression; but that's not any fairer than pressuring us all to stay in the closet.
Fortunately, there is much in this book that is genuinely valuable and that you don't have to agree with Bronski's thesis in order to appreciate. His discussion of American attitudes toward young people's sexuality, the highlight of which is his analysis of the downfall of Pee Wee Herman and Father Bruce Ritter (of Covenant House fame), is particularly discerning. Bronski is, it must be said, a much better thinker and writer than most liberationists. Yet his program for gay America is so far removed from the reality of most American lives as to be useless. I've gone on more radio call-in shows than I care to remember and fielded calls from evangelical Christian mothers who, in dulcet tones, have told me that as a gay man I'm a tool of the Devil; I tremble to think of what it might be like to grow up gay in their homes. To my mind, gay politics must seek to make things as good as possible as fast as possible for young people in such situations. Bronski's sexual utopianism, alas, fails that test miserably.