IGF CultureWatch

I've been trying hard to justify writing about the Terri Schiavo saga for a gay publication. Gay groups, very sensibly, did not take a stand on the specific question whether the woman's feeding tube should have been removed. It wasn't a "gay" issue, although individual gay persons face similar grave circumstances. The Schiavo case is, however, part of the larger agenda of the religious-conservative groups that moved political and legal mountains to have their way. That agenda is gathering momentum under the banner of promoting a "culture of life," an idea whose central precepts, as articulated by religious conservatives, strongly oppose gay equality.

There are two easy questions raised by the Schiavo mess. First, should Congress have intervened by passing a law giving federal courts power to review this case alone? Absolutely not. Laws are not tickets "good for this ride only." A law is respectable as law when it deals with a wide range of cases. This requirement of generality helps ensure that law results from a deliberative process, one not dominated by momentary zeal and favoritism towards particular persons. Congress acted on passions, not reason, and on partiality, not sound public policy.

It is Congress's constitutional responsibility to make sure that the states do not take life without due process of law. Nobody would suppose Congress must remain silent if states were starving healthy people picked randomly from the street. But there is no plausible claim that the decision to remove Schiavo's feeding tube, made some 10 years after she entered a persistent vegetative state, was insufficiently litigated. There is no evidence that the state courts generally are not giving due consideration to such cases. So there was no justification for Congress to act, much less to act precipitously.

The second easy question is this: Should a competent person be able to refuse medical intervention, including a feeding tube, designed to prolong her life when she enters a hopeless state of pain or incapacity? Yes, absolutely. Prolonging a person's life under such circumstances against her will is a direct affront to her dignity and personal autonomy. It is a paternalistic declaration by the state, enforced by physical invasion of her body, that it knows what's best for her.

The hard question raised by the case was whether there was sufficient evidence of Schiavo's wish to remove the feeding tube. There was no living will, a legal document in which a healthy person clearly makes the choice in writing. The only evidence of her desire to decline medical intervention was the testimony of her husband, testimony that a state trial court found "clear and convincing" after hearing from numerous witnesses on both sides of the question. I'm not in a position to say the trial court was wrong. Neither were the numerous state and federal judges who reviewed the matter on appeal. Neither were Tom DeLay and "Dr." Bill Frist.

I can imagine a state law that says, "No feeding tube shall be removed unless the patient has executed a living will," or, "In the absence of a living will, no feeding tube shall be removed unless at least two family members testify that is what the patient would have wanted." Either of those might be good rules, erring as they do on the side of preserving life. But neither rule is the law in Florida, or any other state, and changing a law after the fact to suit one case cannot properly be called "law" at all.

What does all this have to do with gay rights? Just this: Suppose Terri Schiavo had been gay. Many things about the case would have been different.

To start with, the parents' wishes - whatever they were - would likely have been respected by the Florida state courts, despite whatever her unmarried partner might have said. As a practical matter, Schiavo's husband enjoyed a strong presumption of believability and authority simply by virtue of their marital relationship. Absent special legal arrangements, that is something unavailable to gay partners in Florida.

Imagine that our hypothetical case made it to the stage where a judge ordered the removal of the feeding tube. What reaction would there be from the "culture of life"? Would religious conservatives appear en masse outside a homosexual's hospice bed to pray for her life? Would they get themselves arrested trying to take her food and water? Would they hold press conferences pleading with the governor and state legislature to intervene? Would the Congress convene in extraordinary session to save a homosexual vegetable?

While a few principled people might show up, I doubt a mass movement would emerge. As for intervention by the state government, Florida is the only state in the union that bans adoptions by homosexuals. Forget Congress.

One could conceive a "culture of life" that affirmed the equality of gays. Such a culture might even show a special concern for the dignity and equality of gays, as it would for any marginal persons, like the disabled or the dying.

But that is not the culture favored by religious conservatives. Their culture of life opposes equal treatment of gays in just about every important area of life - in marriage, the military, and employment. Its devotees would bring back sodomy laws if they could. They seek for us only stigma and discrimination. They seek, damn the law, to overwhelm our autonomy just as they presumably did Terri Schiavo's. They seek to impose their vision of what's best for us, even if that means force-feeding us a life we can't bear to live.

First published March 30, 2005, in the Chicago Free Press.

Back in 1999 a group called the Publishing Triangle issued a list of what they considered the best 100 books of gay and lesbian fiction. Some of the choices were eccentric, many were second rate and the list seemed too politically correct, but if it prompted people to read some gay fiction it had some value.

Then last June they issued an equally eccentric list of the 100 best gay non-fiction books. Always eager to be helpful, just as I offered a gratifyingly shorter list of the 10 best gay fiction back then, I belatedly offer my own list of the 10 best non-fiction books relevant to homosexuality.

Alfred C. Kinsey's Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and its female sequel (1953) seem to be classics no one reads. But the long chapters in each book on homosexuality as well as the rest of the books are valuable reading for what Kinsey actually said as opposed to what people think he said. And Kinsey shows a deeply humane concern for the meaning of sex in people's lives and all varieties of sexual expression.

Stephen O. Murray's American Gay (1996) offers a comprehensive sociological analysis of the reasons for the development of group awareness by gays and the subsequent growth and diversification of the gay community as "a quasi-ethnic group." Murray also explores the issues of sexual promiscuity, the community response to AIDS, the formation of same-sex couples and ethnic gay communities.

Of the many books on gay history, Louis Crompton's magisterial Homosexuality and Civilization (2003) is clearly the best and most exhaustive. Beautifully written and illustrated, the book traces the oppression and resilience of gays and lesbians from the ancient Jews and Greeks, through the Dark Ages, the Renaissance, up to modern times, correcting the accounts of John Boswell and Michel Foucault among others.

C.A. Tripp's The Homosexual Matrix (1975, enlarged 1987) remains the most insightful book on the psychological origin and expression of homosexual orientation and desire. Like his mentor Kinsey, Tripp harshly dismisses Freud and clearly explains the futility of all change therapy - since there is no "illness" to "cure" and desire is resistant to change. He also discusses the psychology of gay relationships, sexual interaction and effeminacy, laying waste to a host of stereotypes in the process.

With a title taken from President Clinton, Bruce Bawer's A Place at the Table (1993) stakes out a gay-assertive middle ground between the religious right and the deconstructionist left, insisting on the full acceptance of gays in the American community. Bawer does not argue for an identity-sacrificing "assimilation" but for a welcoming social "inclusion" in which gay people can contribute their own perspectives.

Stephen Murray's Homosexualities (2000) is the anthropological counterpart to his sociological American Gay, a wide-ranging survey of just about everything currently known about same-sex relationships in scores of other cultures and societies. Murray develops a useful typology of the predominant gay relationships in different societies - in which partners are differentiated by age or by gender roles or are egalitarian.

Because homosexuality cannot be understood without understanding sexuality itself - and most heterosexuals don't, and too many don't want to, which is part of our problem - there are a few books on sexuality generally that must be included in the gay top 10.

Murray S. Davis's cheekily titled Smut (1983) is the most fascinating book on sex you'll ever read. Rejecting the idea of sexual desire as instinctive, Davis explores the conceptual and experiential sources of desire. He examines the effect of sex on people's perceptions of the self and partner as well as the different sexual ideologies of religious conservatives, "naturalists," and liberationists - explaining, among much else, conservative fears of contamination by other people's sexual behavior (e.g., homophobia). A great book, unaccountably obscure.

Richard Posner's Sex and Reason (1992) uses an economic, rational choice model to stress the volitional elements that influence sexual behavior and social policy on topics such as sexual regulations, homosexuality, marriage, pornography, reproduction and the sexual revolution. The approach produces surprising insights and gay-supportive conclusions.

Paul Robinson's The Modernization of Sex (1976) is an insightful reading of Havelock Ellis, Alfred C. Kinsey, and Masters and Johnson to bring to light their fundamental premises and contribution to modern ideas about sex. Robinson omits Freud, but best critique of Freud's obsolete, tangled myth-making is Ernest Gellner's patient demolition, The Psychoanalytic Movement (1985, revised 1993).

That's nine books. For the 10th choose any one from eight runner-ups: Jonathan Rauch's Gay Marriage, Ronald Bayer's Homosexuality and American Psychiatry, Bruce Bagemihl's Biological Exuberance, Richard Mohr's Gays/Justice, John D'Emilio's Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities, Randy Shilts' And the Band Played On and Conduct Unbecoming, and Andrew Sullivan's Virtually Normal.

[Editor's note: You can help support IGF by ordering available books through our links to Amazon.com.]

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.