Originally appeared May 17, 2000, in the Chicago Free Press.
Allan Bloom, subject of a new novel by Saul Bellow, stood head and shoulders above most critics of modern education and contemporary culture. But many of the conservatives who lionized him did not know, or did not want to know, or did not want it known that they were admiring a gay man.
SAUL BELLOW is one of America's most distinguished novelists. Whenever he publishes a new work it is a literary event.
But his most recent novel "Ravelstein," based on Bellow's long friendship with University of Chicago political philosopher Allan Bloom, is something of a political/cultural event as well because it reveals to the general public that Bloom was gay and, apparently, died of AIDS.
Bloom himself became a cultural phenomenon back in 1987 when he published his famous polemic "The Closing of the American Mind," a scathing criticism of modern American university education for its shallowness and triviality.
Bloom expected the book to sell a few thousand copies. To everyone's amazement, sales took off placing the book on the best seller lists for months and making Bloom, as he put it, "The academic equivalent of a rock star."
Bloom's fame arose from the way he corrosively attacked universities for failing to open students' minds by exposing them to the philosophic quest for understanding that enriches the human spirit. The result of that failure, he said, was that students' minds were stunted, their emotional capacities dulled and their souls impoverished.
His critique was sharp; his arguments were cogent.
Because he attacked modern education and contemporary culture, he was adopted and lionized by conservatives who saw him as a supporter and a spokesman.
The "scandal" then of Bellow's new novel is his disclosure that all those conservatives who praised Bloom, quoted his book and cited him as an authority were praising, quoting and citing a gay man. And not only a gay man, but one who led a fairly active "homosexual lifestyle."
That Bloom was gay was hardly a secret. He was comfortable with his sexuality and lived his life openly. His sexuality was common knowledge among his students, friends and colleagues. He lived with a companion to whom he dedicated his last book.
But many conservatives who admired Bloom did not know, or did not want to know, or did not want it known that they were admiring a gay man or that openly gay people might have any value or deserve any credibility.
And so they have accused Bellow of impropriety and betrayal.
They prefer not to "scandalize the faithful" by telling the truth. To do so might weaken people's homophobia or their own legitimacy among other homophobes.
Nothing could better illustrate that just as most social conservatism at the popular level consists of little beside ignorance and fear, at its highest level it consists of little except mysticism, obscurantism and hypocrisy.
But there is no "betrayal" of Bloom. Bloom repeatedly asked, urged, pushed, ordered Bellow to write a fully explicit memoir about him. So any "betrayal" must be must be of other people who are embarrassed by the fact that he was gay.
Bloom would have enjoyed their embarrassment. He experienced anti-gay sentiment at first hand and was treated with condescension and hostility by homophobes who did know of his homosexuality.
One such fierce - perhaps deranged - conservative attacked Bloom's failure to criticize "the so-called 'gay rights' movement, which ... has emerged as the most radical and sinister challenge, not merely to sexual morality, but to all morality." Etc., etc.
But, in fact, most conservatives failed to notice that the philosophic quest Bloom urged cast doubt on all orthodoxies, conservative as well as liberal ones. Bloom repeatedly explained that he was not a conservative at all. "My teachers," he wrote, "Socrates, Machiavelli, Rousseau, and Nietzsche-could hardly be called conservatives."
For instance, despite his broad criticism of modern culture and its failures, Bloom dismissed the conservative view of family values: "I am not arguing here that the old family arrangements were good or that we should or could go back to them."
And there is virtually no criticism of homosexuality or gays in his books. Promoting the acceptance of gays was not one of Bloom's major goals, but he certainly surrendered no territory to homophobes and he pushed back against them without hesitation.
"Neither bourgeois society nor natural science has a place for the nonreproductive aspects of sex," he wrote, and then proceeded to make perfectly clear his distaste for bourgeois society and his hostility to drawing lessons from natural science.
When criticizing Freud, Bloom recommended Plato's "Symposium" instead with its Platonic "myth" explaining the origin of homosexuality as well as heterosexuality: "Anyone who wishes to lay aside his assurance about the superiority of modern psychology might find in Plato a richer explanation of the diversity of erotic expression."
And finally, for those who still did not get the point, "There is certainly legitimate ground to doubt their [men and women's] suitability for each other. ..." But far more conservatives cited Bloom than actually read him.
Readers of Bellow's new "Ravelstein" meet a tall, balding, boisterously funny, stammering, obsessive smoker with trembling hands and sloppy habits.
But they also meet a man of great learning, extraordinary psychological insight and generosity of spirit, who lived by his ideas and was devoted to helping his friends and students understand themselves.
Bloom wrote four thoughtful and fascinating books, including his great work "Love and Friendship," and he translated three others, among them Plato's Republic. One happy outcome of Bellow's memoir would be if people who read about Bloom the man were led to read Bloom the thinker himself.
We could think of "Ravelstein" as Bloom's last work, the Preface you write when the book is finished.