IGF CultureWatch

Today's L.A. Times contains a commentary titled "Susan Sontag and a Case of Curious Silence," which notes:

It seems that editors at what are, arguably, the nation's most respected (and liberal) newspapers believe that one personal detail cannot be mentioned in even the most complete biographies - being a lesbian....

The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times found ample room to discuss Sontag's cancer and subsequent mastectomy, which were not seen as lurid details but as necessary information in understanding the work of the author of "Illness as Metaphor." ... However, her relationships with women and how they shaped her thoughts on gay culture and the larger world of outsiders and outlaws (a Sontag fascination) were omitted.

Meanwhile, the conservative Frontpagemagzine.com characterizes Sontag as "a doyenne of radical chic." Yet as a leading light of the intellectual left, her decision to remain closeted raises questions in need of answers.

And aside from Sontag's own motives, why would the liberal media choose to aid in her cover-up? Among the commentators (and tormentors) on yesterday's blog item, "Pillar" offers this:

If a public figure such as Sontag (as opposed to a nebbish congressional staffer who is not a public figure) wanted the liberal media to keep quiet about her being a lesbian, that's worth noting and asking why she didn't want to be identified as gay. Did she think it would have impeded here being taken seriously as a leading anti-American polemicist? If so, doesn't that tell us something about the left and its unacknowledged homophobia (just as quotas tell us something about the left and its unacknowledged racism)?

That's about as good a guess as any I can come up with right now.

Update: Andrew Sullivan weighs in on the brouhaha, writing:

Sontag understood that her lesbianism might limit her appeal in a homophobic culture - even on the extreme left, where she comfortably lived for decades. That was her prerogative. But that's no reason for the media to perpetuate untruths after her death.

Occasionally forthcoming about her relationships, Sontag would then retreat into denial. But in covering public figures in this day and age, the media shouldn't treat being gay as something so "sensitive" it can only be mentioned with the figure's expressed authorization (which is moot, in any event, when that figure is deceased).
--Stephen H. Miller

A brouhaha is brewing over the fact that such liberal bastions as the New York Times, the L.A. Times and Washington Post failed to mention that recently departed author and "public intellectual" Susan Sontag had lived for many years in a lesbian relationship with photographer Annie Leibovitz that was not, shall we say, kept secret. According to an item in the N.Y. Daily News:

Don't look for gay ladies in the Gray Lady. The New York Times paid tribute to the late Susan Sontag yesterday with a beautifully written obituary, plus a moving tribute by Charles McGrath, totaling almost 4,000 words. But apparently that wasn't enough space to mention that she was the partner of celebrity portraitist Annie Leibovitz for 20 years.

Writes reporter Steve Koval on the Houston Voice's blog:

Whatever Sontag's reasons for remaining coy about her sexual orientation, why is it that in 2004, the obituary of a famous gay (or bisexual) social critic gets de-gayed?

He then quotes gay firebrand Larry Kramer defending Sontag's public silence on the subject; in Kramer's words:

"Susan is...beyond being a lesbian. I know I'm probably saying something very politically incorrect, but, except for the fact that she has affairs with women, she doesn't really fit into that category.... What she is more than anything else is an 'Intellectual,' with a capital 'I.'

Says Koval, "With all due respect to Larry Kramer, I don't know what 'beyond being a lesbian' means. Apparently, the New York Times and other straight publications do."

The Miami Herald and Chicago Tribune, by the way, were among a number of newspapers that did refer to Leibovitz as Sontag's "longtime companion."

For those unfamiliar with Sontag, according to ABC News:

Writing in the 1960s about the Vietnam War she declared "the white race is the cancer of human history." Days after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, she criticized U.S. foreign policy and offered backhanded praise for the hijackers.

But when it came to gay equality, she kept mostly silent. Even her famous essay on gay men and "camp" sensibility, Paul Varnell notes, was full of caustic observations:

"Homosexuals have pinned their integration into society on promoting the aesthetic sense," she wrote. "Camp is the solvent of morality. It neutralizes moral indignation. ..." A decade later Sontag viciously attacked Camp and its aesthetic sensibility because it was corrupting and "the ethical and cultural issues it raises have become serious, even dangerous." But for those who read carefully, that was her view from the beginning.

So what does this all add up to? I'm not sure. I don't believe in outing, but if a very public person is living openly in a same-sex relationship that's widely recognized within her social circle, then keeping that fact out of her obituary seems, to me, unacceptable. Yet apparently many on the liberal left are quite willing to play "let's pretend" when it comes to one of their own.

As far as we've come since the sexually repressed America portrayed in the movie "Kinsey," ignorance about sexuality continues to fuel much of the antipathy towards gays in this country. Evidence: Rick Sincere (who recently launched his own blog), alerts me to an item defending gay unions on the blog of a straight Republican, Tony Iovino, who observes:

When we see a heterosexual couple, we see them as Dick and Lynn, individual adults who are a couple. We don't think of them as a couple engaging in sex. Think about it -- what if the first thing you thought of when you saw the Cheneys holding hands on a stage was their sexual activities? You'd gag. As you would with just about any couple, other than Jennifer Aniston & Brad Pitt. But when we see gay couples, we are immediately focused on their sexuality, like you would be drawn to the hair of someone wearing a giant orange Afro wig. And it freaks us out.

That is, I think, the crux of the matter -- the deep sense of unease associated with gay sexuality, seen as legitimatized and promoted by legal recognition of gay unions, along with the strong fear of unleashing sexual anarchy if traditional is altered too rapidly. In any event, chanting "bigots" and "haters" and feeling smugly superior won't make the problem go away.

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12/26/04 - 1/01/05

Long-time anti-gay neo-con Midge Decter shows she's still full of venom in "Civil Unions: Compromise or Surrender?", in the newsletter Imprimis. Decter fumes:

The term "civil marriage" or "civil union" has become a euphemism for both the legal and social legitimation of homosexuality....

The right to legal marriage that they are demanding is not about them - it is about the rest of us. It is, and is meant to be, a spit in the eye of the way we live. And whatever the variety of efforts to oppose it - another law or even a whole set of laws, let's say, or a constitutional amendment - none of it will matter unless and until all the nice and decent people in America begin to understand that we are in a crisis, and it must be up to them to sustain, and with all good cheer defend, the way they lead their lives....

For it is not compromise that the homosexual rights movement is after. Nor do they even want the standing in the community that heterosexuals have. They are radicals. What they want is not a room of their own; they want to bring the whole damned house down.

As nice as it would be to simply dismiss such vitriol, it's important to realize that this is what a lot of folks actually think, and not just members of the fundamentalist Christian "religious right."

Joe Perez's Gay Culture and Spirituality blog looks at the dangers of criminalizing hate speech (or even "hate thoughts"), explaining why "the mainstream gay movement in the US needs to be more vocal in our opposition to hate-crime laws that include the 'crime' of offensive speech." But don't expect the movement LGBTers to embrace that idea anytime soon.

Lesbian writer and columnist Beth Elliott, on her webpage, shares some sharp observations about being a nonlefty lesbian in the San Franscisco Bay Area. For example, she writes:

A young friend doing the standard turning-up of her nose and saying she hoped Bush couldn't get anything done. I retorted that, for her sake, she should hope he succeeded at giving her a shot at a private retirement account. She immediately launched into a tirade about how she, working McJobs while going up against unemployed dot-com transplants with only her fresh bachelor's degree, really needed the money she was being taxed to pay for other people's Social Security benefits. My point exactly, I confirmed.

Bitingly, she also notes of the recent death of anti-gay footballer Reggie White, at age 43, that:

A lot of Reggie White's bigot friends have been trying to pass of as scientific research the notion that "the homosexual lifestyle" is so destructive that our average life span is...43. Far be it from me to make sweeping statements about anybody else's karma . . .

Worth bookmarking.
--Stephen H. Miller

Our own Jonathan Rauch scores with an important Wall Street Journal op-ed today, "Saying No to 'I Do'." He writes:

Gay couples and their children (more than a fourth of households headed by same-sex couples have kids, according to the 2000 census) need the legal protections and the caregiving tools - not, mostly, "benefits" - that marriage uniquely provides. Gay individuals, coupled or not, need the prospect of marriage, with its sustaining promise of a destination for love and of a stable home in a welcoming community. In 13 states the dream of marriage has, for gay Americans, receded far over the horizon.

So, what is to be done? Rauch continues:

This year may be remembered as the time when civil unions established themselves as the compromise of choice. For an indicator, watch whether there is an outcry if state courts narrow the scope of the new amendments to allow civil unions and other partner programs. My guess is that few people will fuss.

One reason is the long-term trajectory of public opinion. The fact that 60% of voters support some legal provision for same-sex unions represents a sea-change. Still more significant are the issue's demographics. Americans of middle age or older overwhelmingly oppose same-sex marriage, which they view as a contradiction, if not an abomination. Among people under 30, the situation is reversed....

Rauch concludes, "I am dismayed by the [state] amendments' passage, but I can't complain about the process. Nov. 2 showed that our federalist system is working exactly as it should, and it made the case for federal intervention weaker than ever."
--Stephen H. Miller

I'm not a lawyer, but it does seem that doubts are rising over the lawsuit by the national office of the Log Cabin Republicans seeking to overturn the "don't ask, don't tell" military gay ban without any named plaintiffs, when there is already a competing suit underway by the Servicemembers Legal Defense Team regarded as far more promising, on behalf of 12 gay men and women expelled from the military (see the Washington Blade's "Experts Fault Log Cabin Lawsuit").

Meanwhile, Gay Patriot West asks why the national LCR is suing the Bush administration instead of working to find ways to work with the GOP, and to promote the GOP among gays, which might help distinguish the group from all the other liberal gay advocacy lobbies.

Why did Bush do so well with the over-60 crowd? Scott Turow, writing in the Washington Post's Sunday Outlook section ("A Dominant GOP? How So?") finds gay marriage, even apart from "moral values," can't be dismissed as a significant factor. Citing analysis by Mitofsky International, he asks why men in the 60-and-over group supported Bush by 60 to 39 over Kerry:

Mitofsky looked at the issues that might have keyed those different responses. Older voters did not cite "moral values" any more often than other Americans (22 percent in general, 21 percent among the over-60s). But three other issues seemed to cut in the president's favor with this age group: gay marriage, resistance to the idea that government should do more to solve problems, and Bush's handling of the economy. Of the three, Mitofsky said, gay marriage mattered most. In short, Bush's key success was with older -- and old-fashioned -- male voters.

Today's older voters' opposition to gay relationships stems from the intense antipathy toward homosexuality that permeated society as they came of age (and among men, the belief that male homsexuality was a threat to their masculine self-identity). In other words, these voters didn't become anti-gay as they aged; they just brought their prejudices with them.

Turow notes, "Time will take a heavier toll on the older group." Indeed it will. Which is why the tactic of using gay marriage to ignite older voters will, if deployed in future years, produce diminishing returns.

Word to the GOP wise: Be wary of fighting the next war (or campaign) with the tactics of the last. But it looks like the Arnold bashers on the right, going nuts over the Governator's call for a more inclusive GOP, may have to learn this the hard way.

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12/19/04 - 12/25/04