First published March 23, 2005, in the Chicago Free Press.
Every few years someone on the far reaches of the political and cultural left peeks out at the country and is dismayed to discover that most gays and lesbians are "embracing the values and routines of the American mainstream" and failing to carry out the supposed transformative mandate of the original "gay liberation."
Never mind that the idea of openly gay and lesbian people leading contented, ordinary lives amid their neighbors and co-workers would seem pretty transformed to most of the early leaders of gay liberation who lived in more repressive times.
This scandalizes the radical critics who then write books trying to explain for others on the far left what went wrong and whom to blame. The latest entry is Stanford University Prof. Paul Robinson's brief Queer Wars: The New Gay Right and Its Critics.
Robinson thinks "the emergence of gay conservatism as a political and intellectual force is arguably the most important new development in the gay world." Further, "the new conservatives have exercised an influence on the gay movement far in excess of the number of their actual converts." For Robinson this is something to be explained and, if possible, countered.
Queer Wars examines books by four writers Robinson alleges represent "the gay right" - blogger Andrew Sullivan, critic Bruce Bawer, broadcaster/columnist Michelangelo Signorile and former OutWeek publisher Gabriel Rotello - focusing on three issues and equating the failure to simultaneously embrace all three with "conservatism": the gay movement's supposed affiliation with the political left, the liberation of gender variance and liberated sexuality.
Then the book begins to fall apart.
Signorile and Rotello both turn out to be on the political left. Bawer, a New Deal Democrat when writing A Place at the Table, said virtually nothing about politics. Even Sullivan is described as a "classical liberal" à la John Stuart Mill - so not very conservative. For that matter, most gays you talk with are not on the far left but prefer fiscally prudent Democrats or socially liberal Republicans.
As for liberating gender variance, that seems to be a romantic fiction early gay leftists tried to sell. None of Robinson's writers endorse it, but then neither have most gay men, then or now. The gay clone style of the 1970s - and leather even more - was a clear rejection of the idea of gender deviance. Gay personal ads almost always insist on masculine partners. So if most gay men are "conservative" about gender, how are these writers discernibly different?
On the third issue of liberated sexuality, political leftists Signorile and Rotello turn out to be more conservative than the "conservative" Sullivan. For them, as for many other gays, the AIDS epidemic seems to have recommended a more cautious view. But likely even without AIDS, as gays and the gay movement matured, more gay men would have settled down anyway.
So Robinson offers supposed exemplars of "gay conservatism" who don't exemplify his definition, and supposedly defining issues that do not reliably differentiate "conservatives" from most gays. What Robinson really seems to object to are mainstream gay attitudes and writers who articulate those attitudes. But if Robinson thinks most gays are actually "conservative," then he must think anyone who is not a radical leftist is a conservative.
Just as Robinson's thesis falls apart, so does his mode of explication. He says he intends to "identify the tensions, even contradictions in their thinking." But contrary to Robinson, for instance, Sullivan's sexual liberalism hardly contradicts his mildly libertarian politics: they are parallel. Nor is it contradictory for Bawer to note that sexual orientation is all that gays have in common while opposing the idea that gay people are nothing but their sexuality.
Worse yet, while failing to find contradictions in his opponents, Robinson commits some whoppers of his own. First he says Sullivan and Bawer are less interested in enlightening right-wingers than in correcting leftists. Then he admits Bawer's book "is as much an attack on conservative homophobes as on gay radicals" and that Sullivan's book attempts to persuade conservatives to "amend their views of homosexuality."
Likewise, first he says Larry Kramer is an ancestor of the gay conservatives but later says he represents "the whole tradition of gay radicalism." First he says the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force is "mainstream" but later admits it is part of "the institutional gay left." So was he not candid earlier?
Robinson clearly dislikes these writers. Writing a book about them was "a challenge to my tolerance." He finds some of their views "downright repugnant." He accuses them of being "grubby advocates for their own material interest." He asserts that they feel shame about homosexuality, feel "self-disgust and anxiety," are prudish, dislike sex or have low sex drives. And so forth.
The war over the word "queer" is over, Robinson says. "Queer" lost. So did the concept. All Robinson can do now is draw a mean-spirited caricature of the victors and make cheap personal attacks. Ultimately, this is a badly confused and dishonest polemic and no credit to the author - or the University of Chicago Press.