IGF CultureWatch

It is early yet to talk about "the moral of the story" with respect to Mark Foley. Foley, a Republican congressman from Florida, resigned last week after it was revealed that he had been sending sexually explicit e-mails and instant messages to underage congressional pages. Here's a sample (the spelling is left uncorrected):

Foley: what you wearing
Teen: normal clothes
Teen: tshirt and shorts
Foley: um so a big buldge….
Foley: love to slip them off of you
Teen: haha
Foley: and [grab] the one eyed snake….
Teen: not tonight...dont get to excited
Foley: well your hard
Teen: that is true
Foley: and a little horny
Teen: and also tru
Foley: get a ruler and measure it for me

The FBI is investigating, and criminal charges appear likely. Though initial reports involved relatively tame e-mails to a sixteen-year-old former page, the IM's (such as the one cited above) appear to involve a different youth about whom little has been reported. The age-of-consent is 16 in D.C., but it's 18 in Florida, unless the accused is under 24 (Foley is 52).

Foley was long rumored to be gay. Nonetheless, he was a popular Republican congressman who prior to the scandal was considered a shoo-in for re-election. He was also the co-chairman of the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children, an outspoken foe of sexual predators on the Internet, and a vocal supporter of President Clinton's impeachment.

Hypocrite? Almost certainly. Child molester? Probably not. Sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds are not quite children (they're not quite adults, either), and there is no evidence yet that Foley actually made or attempted to make physical contact with the objects of his Internet dalliance. Still, as the congressman surely knew, Florida law makes it a third-degree felony to transmit "material harmful to minors by electronic device" and defines such material to include descriptions of "nudity, sexual conduct, or sexual excitement."

There's also the issue of sexual harassment and abuse of power. Even former pages have strong incentive to stay in the good graces of the congressmen who employed them. While the youth in the above exchange does not seem (judging from the text) to be terribly troubled by the banter, at least one other complained that Foley's advances were "sick sick sick sick sick…"

Without a doubt, Foley did some stupid, inappropriate, and unethical things. Granted, sexual desire causes many of us to do stupid (though not necessarily inappropriate or unethical) things from time to time. Granted, the case would garner a somewhat (though not completely) different reaction if Foley were female--and particularly, if he were an attractive female. If Foley looked like Demi Moore, the pages would be telling one another "Dude, yeah!!!" instead of "sick sick sick sick sick."

But the "gay angle" on this contains an important lesson, one that is unfortunately likely to be either distorted or missed entirely amidst the partisan political drama. It is that gay people, like everyone else, need healthy outlets for sexual expression. When those are blocked--because of political ambition or a repressive church or a right wing bent on ignoring basic science--cases like Foley's (or former Spokane mayor Jim West's or former New Jersey Governor Jim McGreevey's) become more likely, as do far greater tragedies like the Catholic Church's sex-abuse scandal.

This is not to deny that Foley is responsible for his actions. There is no contradiction in holding a person fully responsible for wrongdoing and holding others responsible for enhancing the conditions that make such wrongdoing likely.

The right wing is doing just that by refusing to face some simple facts: There are gay people in the world. Gay people need love and affection like everyone else. When people repress that need in themselves or others, it tends to assert itself in unfortunate and sometimes tragic ways.

Like most people, I want to shake Mark Foley and yell: What the hell were you thinking? But I also want to add the following: It didn't have to be this way. There are young men of legal age who are not your subordinates who would have been happy to remove their shorts for you. And there would have been nothing wrong with that per se. An open, honest, consensual sex life is not only possible for gay men; it's healthy. The alternatives can be disastrous.

Yes, it is early to talk about the moral of the story. But there are lessons to be learned, and we ignore them at our peril.

First published in Christopher Street magazine, October 1994.

The lesbian and gay left has declared war against the growing numbers of moderates, libertarians, and out-and-proud conservatives (along with other ideological deviants) within the gay movement. Gays committed to fighting for equality in all spheres of life but who aren't part of the gay-left and lesbian-feminist coteries that have heretofore dominated organized "lesbigay" politics increasingly find themselves targeted and scapegoated.

Spearheading this campaign (or at least its latest round) has been a chorus of recent articles by Tony Kushner, Richard Goldstein, Sara Miles, and Urvashi Vaid, all taking aim at gay "assimilationists" for (in Miles' words) aiding the "backlash against feminism, multiculturalism, and affirmative action."

Here's a look at these attacks and what I believe lies behind them.

The Left Strikes Back
In December 1993, Pulitzer Prize-winner Tony Kushner told the Advocate that, in his view, "the serious gains we've made are gains made by people I would identify as progressive - by the Left," but that he feared the gay movement might abandon its commitment to a broad, left-wing agenda. When Newsweek asked him to contribute a major article commemorating the 25th anniversary of the Stonewall riots, Kushner used the opportunity to attempt to further marginalize gays who are not on the political left, thus giving a skewed portrait of who gay people are.

With the zeal of a true believer, Kushner wrote that "To be a progressive person is to resist Balkanization, tribalism, separatism." Unfortunately, for the last decade "progressives" have been the ones advocating identity-group based "remedies" (i.e., quotas, set-asides and dual standards) that have exacerbated racial tensions and fermented resentments between the genders, while promoting the idea that individuals needn't take responsibility for their own lives ("victims" being entitled, its seems, to perpetual government largess).

Gay white men, of course, take their lumps for enjoying the privileges of the white male patriarchy. "Will the hatred of women, gay and straight, continue to find new and more violent forms of expression," Kushner wrote, "and will gay men and women of color remain doubly, or triply oppressed, while white gay men find greater measures of acceptance, simply because they are white men?"

What an old, tired refrain! The fact is in Los Angeles and other urban areas gay men are more likely to be victims of hate crimes than are African-Americans - or lesbians. According to a Klanwatch researcher quoted in the late William Henry III's much more balanced Stonewall retrospective in Time, "People now are less likely to condemn someone for being black or Hispanic," while anti-gay bigotry "has become more acceptable."

Kushner isn't alone, of course, in suggesting that sexism and racism motivate gays - particularly gay white men - who don't embrace the left's idea of a progressive agenda. A December 1993 New York Times op-ed by Donald Suggs of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) and Mandy Carter of the Human Rights Campaign Fund (HRCF) held gay white men responsible for black homophobia. Suggs and Carter, both African-Americans, began by asserting that "leaders of the gay and lesbian movement have given highest priority to the interest of their most powerful constituents - white men," which apparently alienated gays of color from the gay rights movement, causing, in turn, black churches to support the religious right (got that?).

The piece ended with the charge that "Anyone who tries to widen the focus of gay activism is characterized in some gay publications as a white-male basher or is accused of caving in to political correctness."

This reference, I suspect, applies to me, since I criticized GLAAD in the November 1993 issue of Christopher Street, writing that "Support for greater inclusiveness in the gay and lesbian movement has been twisted into something altogether different - a rationale for bashing gay, white men."

One might, by the way, ask Suggs and Carter to explain just what they considered to be the exclusively "gay white male" issues that have dominated the gay movement: Sodomy law repeal? Domestic partnership? Employment and housing discrimination? Gays in the military? AIDS? None of which, of course, solely concern "gay white men."

What I imagine they're really criticizing is the gay community's failure to embrace what Kushner and others conceive of as a grand alliance of the radical left. Kushner's Newsweek piece lamented that the traditions of radical America are under siege, without showing the slightest understanding why Americans have grown fed up with megabuck government programs - paid for by middle-class taxpayers - that produce little and often make things worse for the supposed beneficiaries.

Time reported that according to its just-completed poll, those Americans who described homosexuality as morally wrong made up exactly the same proportion (53%) as in a poll taken in 1978 - "before a decade and a half of intense gay activism." Despite this striking failure to change popular opinion, Kushner would have gays renew their commitment to a sweeping left-wing alliance. Down that path lies ruin, for the more that the fight for gay equality is linked with the radical left, the less likely we'll be to win the hearts and minds of a nation founded on belief in individual liberty and personal responsibility.

But the politics Kushner only hinted at in Newsweek became explicit in "Homosexual Liberation: A Socialism of the Skin," the opus he penned for the July 4th issue of the Nation. Freed from the need for euphemisms, Kushner's Nation tract laid it on the line: "Homosexuals...like most everyone else, are and will continue to be oppressed by the depredations of capital until some better way of living together can be arrived at." He quoted Oscar Wilde's essay "The Soul of Man under Socialism," to the effect that "A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at."

At least it can be said of Wilde that he lived before the monstrous dystopia of state socialism cast its shadow upon the planet, depriving countless millions of life and liberty. Kushner has no excuse.

To advance his call for ideological purity, Kushner took aim at both New Republic editor Andrew Sullivan and author Bruce (A Place at the Table) Bawer - the gay left's best-loved whipping boys. He disapprovingly quoted Sullivan's statement that "Every right and responsibility that heterosexuals enjoy by virtue of the state [should] be extended to those who grow up different. And that is all."

Sullivan's thought crime was to argued that gays must demand public equality but should not seek to legislate private tolerance. Bawer, for his part, was castigated for writing that the movement for gay equal rights should not be linked "with any left-wing cause to which any gay leader might happen to have a personal allegiance."

Kushner responded that "Like all assimilationists, Andrew and Bruce are unwilling to admit that structural or even particularly formidable barriers exist between themselves and their straight oppressors...nowhere do they express a concern that people of color or the working class or the poor are not being communed with."

He added, "Such a politics of homosexuality is dispiriting. Like conservative thought in general, if offers very little in the way of hope, and very little in the way of vision. I expect both hope and vision from my politics."

Well I do, too. And, I have no doubt, so do Sullivan and Bawer. But it is not the false dream of the gay left, promising "utopia" through a socially re-engineered humankind, with its reeducation camps (or sensitivity retreats) and distribution of perks and political position according to race and gender categories (class having all but been abandoned, after white working folks proved notoriously unreceptive to the left's appeals).

Spare us, Lord, from artists and academics who dream of utopia. I'll opt for equality before the law any day, and take responsibility for making my own garden grow.

Outrageous
Also spare us from leftist lesbigay journalists offering up revelatory articles on gay centrists/conservatives. A case in point was Sara Miles "Do the Right Thing" in the July/Aug. 1994 issue of Out magazine. Ms. Miles explains it all to you, entering enemy territory to interview Kushner's bete noires, Bruce Bawer and Andrew Sullivan, along with original cold-warrior Marvin Liebman, Log Cabinboy Rich Tafel, and a host of others.

To be fair, Miles allowed these activists to speak for themselves at some length. On the other hand, she submerged their remarks into a text that is relentlessly patronizing. "These men's criticisms of existing gay politics and subculture are rooted in the same backlash against feminism, multiculturalism, and affirmative action that fuels the broader neoconservative movement," she huffed. Gee, I guess they've failed to see the light. What's more, she continues, "Adding a couple of token, respectable lesbians or a black face to the letterhead [of conservative gay groups] won't change the essential nature of an argument that pits 'good' gays against 'bad' queers, and that sneers about 'political correctness' when challenged for its elitism."

Actually, the "backlash" charge is an all-too-typical canard slung at anyone who dares point out that the multi-culti emperor has no clothes (or, at any rate, that the "diversity" gang seems more interested in dishing out perks based on gender and race than on promoting community based on equality).

Hunter (After the Ball) Madsen told Miles that ethnic separatism has been dressed up as multicultural diversity. Andrew Sullivan lamented the movement's embrace of racial gerrymandering. And Rich Tafel warned that gays lose when we appear to be the next liberal group looking for "special rights" from taxpayers. "By making an impression on traditionally conservative institutions," he said, "traditionally liberal institutions will follow or join in. The reverse is not true." But Miles was having none of it.

She claimed, in fact, that "Calling the national [gay] groups 'left' is inaccurate." Was this a stunning burst of myopia, or did she merely lack the courage of her own left-wing convictions? At any rate, she should ask NGLTF about its stand on NAFTA, the Gulf War, and welfare for illegal aliens. Moreover, as columnist Paul Varnell pointed out in the Windy City Times, the language of the movement's ubiquitous "Fight the Right" campaigns seldom seems to distinguish between religious-right extremists and the roughly half of the country that considers itself politically conservative.

Speaking of the left and gay groups, it's not surprising that the very PC and quota-obsessed organizers of the Stonewall 25th anniversary march in New York City, who employed "weighted voting" and other schemes to "empower" women and people of color at the expense of equality for all, wound up beset by mismanagement and internal turmoil. When the commemoration ended, the committee was over $300,000 in debt. Call it another victory for left-wing (dis)organizational strategy, with its "appointment-by-quota, only-leftists-need-apply," mentality, along with a fixation on "process" and consensus-based decision-making (a demand for uniformity that, in effect, stifles democratic debate).

Those who, like Miles, deny that the movement organizations are skewed to the left often point to "moderate," nonpartisan groups like the Human Rights Campaign Fund. But recently in the Washington Blade Bob Roehr looked behind some of the congressional defeats the movement has suffered. "None of HRCF's registered lobbyists are Republican, none a conservative Democrat," Roehr wrote, even though "few issues are decided along straight party lines." He added that, like other gay political groups, HRCF's staffing patterns "are dominated by a rather small, strongly left-of-center segment of the political spectrum. It is not the broad, diverse base necessary to attract and cultivate a majority of votes in Congress."

Although Miles had just argued it was "inaccurate" to label national gay groups as part of the left, she wound up doing the same thing herself. In fact, she ended her piece in Out asserting that "the decision to situate gay and lesbian rights within a progressive framework was a choice" made by the radicals who took to the streets "while Marvin Liebman was living in the closet and cheerleading for the Vietnam War."

But some of us see Stonewall as a beginning, not a permanent movement model. In today's politics, it's the hard left that repeatedly proves itself "reactionary" and resistant to evolution.

Voice Chimes In
Just when I thought the left had vented enough spleen against conservatives/libertarians (the left makes no distinction) to leave it satiated for awhile, the Village Voice appeared with a special Stonewall 25 section picking up the battle cry. Richard Goldstein's "The Coming Crisis of Gay Rights" was heartfelt but predicable. The gay political agenda is now in jeopardy, it seems, because not all gays are loyally adhering to the party line.

Goldstein took aim (surprise, surprise) at Sullivan, Bawer, Liebman, and (finally, recognition!) yours truly. We were labeled "gayocons" - and treated as if we advocated the same positions on all matters sexual and political, with no significant variances among us.

Goldstein claimed "the biggest blunder of gay conservatives" is ignoring "the vital bond between queers and feminists" and that "feminism is a movement that honors the individual." With what ideological blinders does he view the world? Contemporary feminism has become notorious for excommunicating from its ranks women who deviate from approved ideology - just look at the hatchet job the feminist leadership is carrying out against Christina Hoff Sommers, whose book Who Stole Feminism? dares suggest that radical feminism's anti-male bile is out of touch with ordinary women.

Goldstein added, for good measure, that the charge of "political correctness" made against the left is indicative of "jargon appropriated from male chauvinists" and that we "worship the sexual hierarchy that affirms male power." I'd say we're simply trying to be masculine-affirmative in the face of explicit feminist, lesbigay savaging of the very concept of manhood.

"Nearly all members of this fraternity are white. And male. And they act like it," Goldstein charged. In this, he echoed Miles, who also played the "sexism" card (you didn't think she'd let that one go by, did you?) when she called Bawer, Madsen and Liebman on the carpet for having "written books that purport to speak for the movement yet leave lesbians out entirely." But the reasons these authors didn't dwell on lesbian issues is they know (sometimes from painful experience) that any gay man who takes up lesbian-specific concerns or describes lesbian activists' views is pounded for presuming he can speak on behalf of women. So it's damned if you do, damned if you don't.

Goldstein at least recognized we're not quite as bad as our straight counterparts on the Right. Being gay ourselves, after all, presents certain "contradictions" in our thought. Goldstein even found himself complimenting me (I think): "New York Native columnist Stephen H. Miller monitors 'male bashing' by the women's movement, and regularly rails against the 'feminist-directed 'lesbigay' amalgamation' of gay life. He's every bit as bitchy as Howard Stern when it comes to identity politics, but every bit as fervent as Tony Kushner when it comes to gay rights - and every bit as out."

Ah, sweet recognition. If I write a book, I'll be sure to use it on the jacket.

Urvashi Vaid's Amerika
Last but by no means least, the gay left's escalating intolerance for ideological diversity got a boost from an old hand at this game, former NGLTF executive director Urvashi Vaid, who is writing a book from Anchor/Doubleday titled Virtual Equality: The Mainstreaming of Gay and Lesbian Liberation (hint: she's against it). As part of the build-up, a Vaid call to arms, "The Status Quo of the Status Queer," ran in the June issue of Gay Community News. The essence of her thesis: Gays and lesbians who seek to join the mainstream are sell-outs to the radical cause.

Vaid complained that recent developments on the cultural front - Newsweek's lesbian chic cover story, the Ikea ad featuring a gay male couple, Tom Hanks's praise for two gay teachers while accepting his Philadelphia Oscar - left her "feeling very uneasy." Lamented Vaid: "As more of us move into a space where we can be personally gay or lesbian...we risk being appeased."

Rather than aspiring to join the mainstream, Vaid wants lesbians and gays to radicalize American society by "building a powerful, grassroots, political movement rooted in notions of Liberation and not merely Rights."

Vaid never really said what she means by "Liberation," but judging from her speeches it's not hard to figure out. In a 1991 tour de force, she wailed that the world "has taken off its ugly white hood to show its sexist, racist, anti-gay and capitalist face" (emphasis added).

This, by the way, brings to mind a Newsday op-ed piece by Raan Medley, a lawyer and former member of ACT BLACK (the African-American caucus of ACT UP), who called the Ikea ad "the culmination of 25 years of...de facto segregation by one of the nation's best organized, most politically cohesive and, indeed, narcissistic minorities" - a sentiment shared by the religious right, no doubt.

Unreconstructed hard leftists like Vaid aren't looking to regenerate community through volunteerism; state-engineered restructuring of personal relationships is more in line with her thinking. Alas, she runs into that old leftist conundrum: the masses aren't interested in the kind of world she and her cohorts know is in their best interest.

Vaid clearly doesn't like the fact that consumers in a free market can chose to support what they like - she's upset that "Lifestyle magazines keep appearing (Out, 10 Percent) while movement driven political papers like OutLook and Gay Community News falter." She pined: "The gay and lesbian liberation movement has turned into a gay and lesbian marketing movement" and complains that "a political movement is not what is being sold."

And there's more. "Has anyone read Christopher Street lately?" she asked. "The anxiety and misogyny of the male writers read as it if is the 1970s." Now Christopher Street is about the only major gay publication that will publish serious work on men's issues - the rest of the gay magazine world having gone "lesbigay."

Maybe she had in mind pieces I've written for CS on topics ranging from the feminist/"queer" demonizing of gay masculinity and men's community to the misuse of race and gender quotas within gay organizations (gay white men, as noted above, being privileged members of the patriarchy from whom power must be wrested). Why is it that many radical lesbian feminists who hold "women's culture" sacred go ballistic at the thought "men's culture" might also be valuable and unique?

Vaid needn't agree with me, but that's not her point. Despite the gay left's dominance of lesbian and gay media (including many of the "lifestyle" magazines Vaid dismisses - like Out - and certainly the Advocate and most gay papers, as well as the Gay Cable Network), Vaid doesn't seem to think the community should abide any forum for views that aren't politically correct.

And speaking of PC, Vaid also doesn't like the term one whit, seeing it as part of the "backlash against race and gender equality - the same enemy behind the white hood." Vaid told Sara Miles in Out, "I'm so tired of hearing people throw around 'politically correct' as a term to shut everyone up. It's exactly like saying 'nigger-lover." Now, just who in the movement is trying to shut up whom by making incendiary comparisons?

To those of us who have knocked our heads against the PC inanity that riddles the movement - running afoul of the language police, enduring castigation for the collective guilt of white maledom, or being driven from leadership positions in gay organizations for questioning the wisdom of community building based on the rigid application of racial and gender quotas - Vaid's hyperbole rings exceedingly hollow.

At the conclusion of her GCN manifesto, Vaid called for "a full-scale frontal assault" against "the coming of a racist, sexist gay and lesbian Right." This is pure Stalinism - silencing anyone who opposes the hard left's dominance of the gay movement by labeling us racist and sexist. And it's typical Vaid.

I remember that when Vaid resigned from NGLTF a few years back, an article by gay journalist Rex Wockner, quoting both her fans and critics, appeared in Outweek and other gay papers. Vaid's supporters were outraged, writing letters to the editor that said the criticism of Vaid - a lesbian of color - was motivated by sexism and racism. Her defenders also pointed to a fawning assessment of Vaid's tenure published in another gay publication, holding it up as a model for how her departure should have been covered by everyone.

The problem is not that Vaid is a dogmatic lefty, but that her views now represent "mainstream" (sorry, Urvashi) lesbian and gay political thought. She is cheered when she arrives at lesbian/gay gatherings. And her lover, comedian Kate Clinton (who organized a fundraiser for Lorena Bobbitt - no joke) gives her added cache.

Bruce Bawer told me he views the recent flurry of attacks on gay centrists/conservatives as a sign that hard-left gay activists are running scared, fearing loss of their foot soldiers as lesbian and gay folks cease to defined themselves solely as marginalized outcasts.

But these remain delicate times for the gay community; the same advances into the mainstream that unnerve gay leftists have provoked fierce new attacks by the radical right. And to the homophobes, all gays and lesbians are part of an undifferentiated bloc intent on subverting the bourgeois norms that underlie social order - especially when we (horrors) demand the right to marry the person we love or serve our country in the armed forces (both of which, somehow, get lumped in with "special rights").

This means that gays who eschew the entrenched, leftover left must fight against both radical gay lunacies and homophobic right-wing bigotries - an ongoing battle on two fronts, with no rest for the weary.

First appeared January 14, 1994, in Frontiers (Los Angeles).

A HEADLINE on the coveted front page of the New York Times blared out, "County in Texas Snubs Apple Over Unwed Partner Policies." The story, which had percolated through the gay press before it was discovered by "the paper of record" and the rest of the national media, concerned the now infamous decision by Williamson County, Texas, to deny Apple Computer a tax abatement to build an $80 million office complex just north of Austin.

The deal, with the promise of 1,500 or more high-tech, high-wage jobs, was originally nixed over Apple's policy of granting unmarried partners of its employees - whether heterosexual or homosexual - the same health benefits conferred on spouses. Following intense arm-twisting by Texas Gov. Ann Richards, the county commission changed its mind - but clearly not its heart.

According to the Times account, the county's straight-laced commissioners felt Apple's policy undermined "traditional family values" and should not receive taxpayer support. The country "was not founded on same-sex lovers and live-in lovers," one opponent proclaimed. "It goes to what kind of morals you want to set for your community," argued another.

The typical take on all this is that virulent anti-gay bigotry is on a roll. "It's remarkable that in these economically difficult times, this blatant prejudice would prevail over smart business decisions," concluded William Rubenstein, director of the ACLU's Lesbian and Gay Rights Project. Now I wouldn't for one instant question that the good folks of Williamson County are deeply homophobic and homo-ignorant, but something else is also evident in their actions - omething that the gay movement would do well to consider if it hopes to start winning political victories outside major urban centers.

Some employers, such as Lotus Development Corp., provide benefits to gay partners but not to unmarried heterosexuals. But Apple, like most city governments that have established domestic partner benefits, grants them to unmarried straight employees as well. What's wrong with that? Nothing, say those who view marriage as a stifling, patriarchal institution that should be undermined regardless of whether children are involved. But plenty is wrong with it, in light of overwhelming evidence about the effect of family breakups that leave kids without fathers who provide financial support and act as paternal role models.

"As long as women continue to have relationships with, and continue to bear the children of men who do not marry them, men will continue to be absent fathers," William Raspberry, a black columnist, wrote last month in his syndicated column. "The breakdown of family really does... lead to a culture whose rules of behavior are established by unsocialized adolescent males."

While the situation is most familiar in terms of the underclass African-American family (two-thirds of black births are now to single women), family breakdown should not be seen as a racial issue. Scholar Charles Murray noted these facts on the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal last October: At the beginning of the 1970s some 6 percent of white births were illegitimate; in 1991 the figure was 22 percent. With the current growth trend implying a 40 percent illegitimacy rate by the year 2000, the prospect for a huge white underclass is looming.

It is not only conservatives who share this view. Liberal, progay columnist Richard Cohen hailed Murray's warning, declaring a host of social pathologies - including crime, drugs, poverty and hopelessness?as "a clear consequence" of illegitimacy. "Without mature males as role models (not to mention disciplinarians)," Cohen wrote, about 1.2 million American children annually are "growing up unsocialized - prone to violence, unsuitable for employment and thus without prospect or hope." He added, "It's clear that the American taxpayer is losing patience."

Which brings us back to Apple. A corporate policy which appears to condone relationships without responsibility does threaten social stability, based on child-rearing within coherent families. Again, I don't doubt the effect of anti-gay bigotry in Williamson County, but linking benefits for gay partners who are not allowed to be married with benefits for heterosexuals who don't want to make a commitment puts the gay rights movement in the position of appearing to oppose all bedrock values -- and plays directly into the hands of the religious right, which argues that the "gay agenda" is to destroy the moral foundation of Western civilization!

Alas, an otherwise positive goal - supporting child-rearing within stable families - is now bound up with the rest of the right wing's cultural program in all its exclusionary mean-spiritedness. But instead of exposing the sophistry of lumping gay rights (which would expand the range of families) with real anti-family phenomena such as unwed teen mothers and deadbeat dads, gay activists champion partner benefits for all. When New York state's top court, in response to a suit by gay rights groups, upheld the right of gay survivors to take over rent-stabilized apartments when a lover dies, activists rushed to point out that the decision also covered unmarried men and women living together?as if that made the decision "better."

How much more constructive it would be if our movement, while pushing for full marriage rights, stopped making alliances with cultural leftists favoring benefits for unwed heteros. As David Boaz advocates in the January 1994 issue of Liberty, a libertarian journal, workers should be told "if you want the benefits of marriage, get married; but if the state won't let you get married, we'll be more progressive." Benefits, he asserts, should not be seen "as one more goodie to hand out," but "as a way of remedying an unfairness, not to mention retaining valued employees."

He's right. Domestic partnership benefits should be a stopgap measure for gays and lesbians until we achieve full marriage rights (based on legally recognized commitments). And, with legislators in Minnesota and elsewhere now introducing bills to specifically prohibit recognition of same-sex marriages (even if validated in other states), that fight is just beginning.

From Christopher Street magazine, Issue 209, January 1994.

THE END OF MANHOOD
by John Stoltenberg
Published 1993, Dutton, 311 pp.
1998, hardcover reprint edition, Replica Books

Review by Stephen H. Miller

Once, I'm told, as Vito Russo and a group of friends disembarked from the Fire Island ferry, someone yelled out, "Here come the 'girls.'"

"We're not 'girls,'" Vito shot back. "We're men who fuck men."

This story about Vito (whose death from AIDS, together with the deaths of so many activists during the '80s, eliminated a generation of gay-male leadership), puts front and center a question gay men have danced around but never adequately confronted: Just what does "manhood" mean in a gay context?

The ambiguity of gay men's relationship to manhood isn't hard to understand, since so many of us grew up in a homophobic world that told us, repeatedly, that we're less than men. Add to the mix feminism's often strident assault on maleness as the root of all evil and it's inevitable gay men's assessment of their own manhood would be conflicted -- ranging from the all-out rejection of masculinity to its exaggerated, worshipful embrace.

John Stoltenberg, in "The End of Manhood: A Book for Men of Conscience," takes the former position, and boy does he take it. "The male sex is an abstract fiction. Penises exist. The male sex does not," writes the author, who goes on to laud "the radical feminist critique of gender" which has made possible "an epochal insight into sexuality and personal identity."

And what does this insight consist of? "Manhood is a personal and social hoax that exists only through interpersonal and social injustice," for one. "You can only inhabit the manhood 'I' in the act of addressing someone as 'You who are less than me.'" Still with me?

At the root of his argument, Stoltenberg postulates a fundamental dichotomy - that the social construct of "manhood" cannot possibly co-exist with what he terms authentic "selfhood." He rejects the notion that manhood can be in any way revised or redeemed through "revisioning" or "remythologizing" - one of many missives aimed at poet Robert Bly, author of the best-selling book "Iron John" and a leader of the "mythopoetic" stream of the men's movement. "That project is utterly futile, and we all have to give it up," he decrees. Manhood as an identity, in short, is driven by feelings of sexual possession and ownership. It presupposes endless competition to prove one's manhood in relation to others - a zero-sum game predicated on violence, intimidation and humiliation.

If this sounds familiar, it will come as no surprise to learn that Stoltenberg dedicates his book to Andrea Dworkin. In fact, Stoltenberg, who describes himself as "a radical profeminist" writer and lecturer (he is also the co-founder of Men Against Pornography), has shared a Park Slope apartment with Dworkin for years. Dworkin, of course, is a leading anti-porn theorist whose books contend that heterosexual intercourse is essentially a euphemism for rape.

It is widely reported that Dworkin is a lesbian and Stoltenberg a gay man. Nowhere in this book, at any rate, does Stoltenberg define himself. But since the essence of the work is that identity should not be gender-specific, this really isn't unexpected. He writes, "There is no circumscribed set of sexual feelings that are definitionally 'male.' The presence of a penis does not correlate with the definitional presumption [of maleness, as socially defined] in any meaningful way."

When he does talk about sex, Stoltenberg argues for abandoning the "manhood mode" since it's an inherently predatory identity. "Many penised humans attempt sexual relations in manhood mode as if meaningful consent can occur," he writes, arguing, of course, that it can't. "By definition the transaction must include someone's being treated as closer to nobody, otherwise no one gets closer to manhood."

Elsewhere, he writes, "Some humans born with 'male' sexual anatomy have realized that their preferred experience of coitus is an embrace, not a stab. For them, the subjective feeling that one is violating another person's body is simply emotionally impossible." To paraphrase, male lust = violation.

While a good deal of the book is devoted to a critique of sexuality in "manhood mode," just what sexuality consists of in "selfhood mode" for "penised humans" is left rather fuzzy, although at one point Stoltenberg contends, among other possibilities, "There can be orgasm without penile erection and ejaculation." Multiple orgasms, in fact. Elsewhere he recommends "choosing...not to fixate on fucking." And, of course, as an anti-pornography crusader, he warns against inappropriate visual stimulations that objectify and dehumanize.

Finally, in a virtuoso denial of any natural, underlying distinctions between the sexes (remember, "'the male sex' is a political and ethical construction"), Stoltenberg minimizes the physiological differences between a penis and a clitoris, blaming sex researchers for using "arbitrary criteria [to] fudge human experience in order to make 'scientific' distinctions between 'female and male categories' of human sexuality."

Such arguments give credence to much-maligned Camille Paglia's otherwise arch contention, in her book "Sex, Art, and American Culture," that "What feminists are asking is for men to be castrated, to make eunuchs out of them." Paglia, in sharp contrast, finds sex "a turbulent power that we are not in control of; it's a dark force. ... It's the dark realm of the night." Stoltenberg's rejection of sex's uncontrollable, Dionysian nature, his contempt of raw, aggressive, combustible masculinity, leave the impression his brave, new unisex world would be about as passion-filled as an afternoon nap.

It would be comforting to dismiss Stoltenberg as an extremist and an aberration, but (and it's a sad comment on contemporary feminism), that isn't so. In an article entitled "Feminism's Identity Crisis" in The Atlantic, Wendy Kaminer writes that only five years ago Dworkin and fellow anti-porn/anti-manhood feminist Catharine MacKinnon were leaders of a feminist fringe. "Today," reports Kaminer, "owing partly to the excess of multiculturalism and the exaltation of victimization, they're leaders in the feminist mainstream."

To understand how Stoltenberg fits into this current feminist mission, his attacks on Robert Bly are revealing. For instance, he creates a satire about the testimony of Coach "Irony" John (get it?) before a National Commission on Manhood and has his parody proclaim: "Where I come from, the Great State of Athletic Prowess, you learn there's a right way to fuck and a wrong way to fuck. The right way is when you have somebody beneath you. The wrong way is when you don't [Laughter]."

In an adoring blurb for the book, Gloria Steinem writes, "I hope Robert Bly reads `The End of Manhood' and discovers the real men's movement away from masculinity and toward full humanity." But Bly's "Iron John� is a work of brilliance, an exploration of the lost sense of the masculine soul, which is both protective and emotionally centered, and a call for men to overcome the habit of not talking together about their lives, their grief, their woundedness (much of which results from being inadequately fathered, by fathers who were inadequately fathered).

But feminist Bly-bashing has a larger agenda - to discredit the new wave of Bly-inspired male-bonding at the heart of the mythopoetic men's movement (which is seen as a threat to the so-called feminist men's movement - really a male-deprecating adjunct to the women's movement). Many feminists feel there's just got to be a sinister, anti-women slant to what goes on during those men-only retreats in the woods.

I suspect, in fact, most of Stoltenberg's readers will be feminist women looking for still another work validating their contempt for men (a special prologue has thoughtfully been included for women readers). But it's too easy to simply dismiss him. Like other manifestations of political correctness born of academic feminism, the absolutist denigration of masculinity as a concept is gaining ground. What's perplexing about all this is not so much radical feminism's war against male sexuality, in toto, but the fervor with which so many guilt-ridden gay men buy into it.

Historically, though, there are reasons, and a big one is called AIDS. The community of masculine-affirmative "clones," the sexual outlaws who redefined and celebrated gay male sexuality in the '70s, has been decimated. Lesbian feminists, having achieved a dominant role in the women's movement, rushed in to fill the cultural void - despite the fact that lesbianism and gay male sexuality have vastly different behavioral patterns and psychological dynamics.

The result: no real movement exists for gay men to focus on gay-male issues, while the "lesbian and gay movement" has assimilated some of the worst ideology of feminist male-bashing (often camouflaged as gay-white-male-bashing, to ensure political correctness).

Nowadays, there is a virtual absence of the kind of gay-male space that could facilitate deeper explorations of gay manhood and gay-male bonding (much as women-only space has done for lesbians). The anti-manhood view has been so thoroughly assimilated that no one questions lesbian-only political and social groups, while gay male groups would be viewed as an anti-women conspiracy. One example: In New York, lesbians seeking to commune with women while escaping to the country can join Hikin' Dykes. Men have the option of camping with Sundance, which is a male and female group, but there's no gay-male specific organization to combine male-bonding and rural recreation.)

Gay men contribute to the National Center for Lesbian Rights and cheer the actions of the Lesbian Avengers; there is no National Center for Gay Male Rights to focus exclusively on gay-male issues such as defending the right to child visitation (or custody) when a former spouse, backed by homophobic courts, says no. There is no gay-male direct action group. It would be deemed sexist and exclusionary.

The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, having abandoned its former policy of alternating between male and female executive directors, just appointed its third consecutive female head. "Diversity training" throughout the movement attacks the "male perspective" as a vestige of patriarchy and extols nonhierarchical, consensus-based (and often completely unworkable and nonproductive) organizational structures. (By the way, it's high time someone pointed out that demanding "consensus" is seldom a sign of democracy.)

Gay sexuality may have taken the worst hit of all from the new Zeitgeist. The Advocate magazine has banished nearly all vestiges of male sexuality from its pages. The celebration of gay eros, once so central to gay liberation, is now deemed politically incorrect by publications for "the lesbian and gay community." In fact, we've returned to the point at which the erotic, instead of being savored as a fully integrated aspect of gayness, is permissible only if segregated from all other areas of gay life (as in sex clubs or porn publications).

Even here, some lesbian feminists will not tolerate an autonomous gay-male space, and many gay men are all too willing to acquiesce without any sense of what's being lost. Witness the requirement that Mr. Leather contests simultaneously anoint Ms. Leather titleholders, or (on the admittedly extreme verge) attempts in the '80s to turn J.O. clubs into "jack- and jill-off" clubs. No wonder gay men have no sense of what gay masculinity could be.

All this is further evidence of the descent of the women's movement into sexist chauvinism of the worst sort, comparable to nationalism or white supremacism. If you think the analogy overheated, look into the Michigan's Womyn's Music Festival rounding up and expelling male-to-female transsexuals who attempted to attend. The festival's organizers determined that, due to the transsexuals' patriarchal socialization, their "male energy" polluted the gathering. (Interestingly, this may reflect the schism between feminists who see maleness as a pernicious essence and those who, like Stoltenberg, view manhood as a social construct that, while deeply rooted, can eventually be weeded out of society.)

Of course, the issue is complicated by the fact that "manhood" is often equated in straight society with anti-gay machismo. But while male homosexuality is grounded in a complex interplay of active and receptive, yin and yang, gay men are still men - including male gender-benders. Leaving aside male transsexuals, who feel they are essentially women (are you listening, Michigan Womyn's Music Festival?), most drag queens delight in the complex interplay of masculine and feminine. It's what makes them so special. Without that vital, underlying masculine component, drag queens would each be just "one of the girls," which assuredly they are not.

Liberated gay manhood - free, multifaceted, but unquestionably (and proudly) male - could contribute to revising and liberating masculinity for all men (per Bly), just as lesbians played a central role in women's liberation struggles. But this transformation will never happen if (per Stoltenberg) men are instructed that the path to nirvana lies in a rejection of all that is uniquely valuable - and vital - within the masculine archetype. What a pity if misguided feminist women and their male compatriots, alienated from the potential within their own manhood, continue to prevent such a renewal.

THE MYTH OF MALE POWER
by Warren Farrell, Ph.D
1993, Simon & Schuster, 446 pp.

Review by Stephen H. Miller

Don't expect Gloria Steinem to write an admiring jacket blurb for The Myth of Male Power, although author Warren Farrell was the only man elected three times to the board of the National Organization for Women (NOW) in New York City and, as such, was once Steinem's close comrade. The reason: Farrell is an apostate who abandoned the cause, finding that feminism took a wrong turn away from equality and toward an ideology of female victimization driven by male-bashing.

Farrell's book is chock-a-block with documentation challenging much of the accepted wisdom about alleged male privilege, including, for example:

• Income disparity: "The U.S. Census Bureau finds that women who are heads of households have a net worth that is 141 percent of the net worth of men who are heads of households," income figures for married women are lower because many choose not to work full time;
• Health funding: "Why does breast cancer receive over 600 percent more funding than prostate cancer [even though men are] almost as likely to die from prostate cancer as women from breast cancer?";
• Life expectancy: "In 1920 women in the United States lived one year longer than men. Today women live seven years longer");
• The work obligation gap: "When all child care, all housework, all work outside the home, commuting and gardening were added together, husbands did 53 percent of the total work, wives 47 percent."

Farrell, who doesn't ignore gay issues, traces the roots of homophobia to the fact that gay men were viewed as refusing to provide an economic security blanket for women. "Do we actually care less about the lives of men who are unwilling to reproduce and to protect? Our initial lack of attention to AIDS - until it became apparent that heterosexuals were also at risk - makes our attitude quite transparent."

Yes, I'm sure in some cases Farrell overstates his case, but all told the book is an overdue tonic for knee-jerk nostrums about male predation and female victimization.