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.