Originally appeared Nov. 29, 2002, in Gay Life (Baltimore).
Richard Goldstein, an executive editor of the Village Voice, has opened a new front in the gay cultural wars with his new book, The Attack Queers, in which he argues that an alliance between the liberal media and the gay right (whom he calls "attack queers" "homocons" and "neocons") is threatening the soul of the gay movement. Gay conservatism, he charges, strays from the tradition of "queer humanism" which is the ideological bedrock of our movement, and that makes it betrayal and disloyalty, pure and simple. "The gay right exists, just as Jews for Jesus do, but it stands apart from the sensibility that marks us as a people." Radicals, the only authentic queers, must expose and defeat this evil "before it's too late." Most prominent on Goldstein's enemies list are Andrew Sullivan, a conservative; Norah Vincent, a libertarian; and Camille Paglia, a Ralph Nader liberal; but he claims to see through their "superficial" differences to the underlying, frightening reality - that all of them are soldiers in a unified campaign of backlash and reaction.
This book is not serious political analysis. You won't learn anything about actual gay conservatives by reading it because Goldstein has no real interest in, or knowledge of, their political views. Instead, he goes to battle with familiar, cartoon-like stereotypes of the right - accusing his enemies of fearing differences, supporting male domination, advocating rigid gender conformity, and so on. No one familiar with the published positions of the writers listed above (such as Paglia's spirited defense of drag queens and identification with the transgendered) will recognize their actual ideas in his deliberate caricatures of them. There's also something disconcerting about a gay writer who takes other gay writers to task, not on the merits of their ideas, but because they "deviate" from a presumed orthodoxy.
What is interesting about this book is that it throws into sharp relief how much we as a culture have changed socially and psychologically in the last three decades. Goldstein is a member of the Stonewall generation (as I am), but there's something of the '70s dinosaur about him. He seems locked into the emotional atmosphere of that tumultuous time.
We often felt, then, a profound sense of alienation from American culture and political life. It wasn't clear that this country could or would make room for us, and many of us believed that only a revolutionary restructuring of America would guarantee our liberation. Despite our enthusiasm, many of us were deeply fearful, because emerging from the closet exposed us to the real dangers of arrests, beatings, firings, ostracism and ridicule. We were excited by the gains we were making, but suspicious about how long the country would tolerate our movement before crushing it in a brutal backlash.
Goldstein remembers marching in a gay contingent in a New York St. Patrick's Day Parade. "We strode past a million people shrieking epithets. It was a terrifying spectacle, but utterly exhilarating. By facing stigma in all its fury, I was finally able to see the system it created, and how crucial my suffering was to its cohesion. I was the sexual other against which masculinity could be defined...." This was "gay identity" - grim and militant, angry and hypervigilant, formed in defiant confrontation with oppression and brutality.
I, too, remember participating in such demonstrations, but the last gay march I attended was a local Pride parade this year, a day of balloons and children, corn dogs and beer, bands and floats. I was prepared, as always, for the "exhilaration" of a confrontation with the hostile masculine other against which I could exercise my authentic gay identity; but, alas, no one was shrieking any epithets, so I had to settle instead for a less dramatic afternoon of dancing and cruising.
The social environment has changed enormously in the past thirty years, and our movement, like all successful minority movements, has largely evolved from the stage of street confrontation to that of dialogue and negotiation. We're all aware that there are many challenges still ahead, and we don't have to be reminded that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. But reading Goldstein is like trying to have a conversation with a paranoiac who thinks that everyone who doesn't share his delusion that the Gestapo is running America is "naive." It isn't, and we aren't.
By every measure, the vast majority of gays and lesbians are left of center politically, so there's no need to believe the movement is about to be swamped by the right. But I think there is also little doubt that the profound sense of alienation from the larger society that formed the atmosphere we breathed decades ago has greatly diminished. Our movement has been a test of the commitment of western civilization to its professed values of liberty, diversity and tolerance. We made our case - we used the courts, the media, and the political systems - and our civilization responded. It's response remains unfinished and imperfect, a work in progress; nevertheless, we now enjoy in Europe and the United States a level of safety and freedom undreamed of almost everywhere else in the world. It turns out that we didn't have to overthrow the government or remake the economic system to move forward. Alienation has hardly disappeared, but fewer and fewer of us experience ourselves as strangers in a strange land anymore, and since 9/11 some are even bold enough to admit that they love their country. Our trust in the guiding values of western civilization has not been in vain; our loyalty to it's basic institutions has not proved to be the loyalty of fools. If these are the attitudes that worry Goldstein when he speaks of "homocons" then millions of gays and lesbians are homocons, and his cause was lost long ago.
There's a siege mentality in Goldstein's dread of the gay right, a sense that if we don't all hang together ideologically, then we'll all hang separately. He's willing to tolerate any kind of diversity except the political kind, but for those of us with more faith in the strength and vitality of our movement, ghettoes - physical or ideological - are increasingly anachronistic. We need lose no sleep if someone in the neighborhood is a Log Cabin Republican, and we can see diversity in gay political thinking as a sign of our increasing maturity, not as a betrayal of the One Truth. Let us always be skeptical of apostles of "inclusiveness" who work to create new outsiders, or any program for "liberation" which begins by fingering heretics.
The great irony of this book is that Goldstein, who imagines that he's a progressive, has written a book arguing for a return to "traditional values." As I read The Attack Queers, I sensed in its author the same deep dread that always powers such campaigns - the lurking fear that history has left him behind. Well, call me an optimist, but I believe it has.