TOWARD THE MIDDLE of his thin new book, The Attack Queers, Richard Goldstein unintentionally reveals what rouses the self-described "queers" among us from bed in the morning. Goldstein, a columnist for the Village Voice, recounts the "elation" he felt at having marched in the 1994 New York St. Patrick's Day Parade with a small group of Irish gays. "We strode past a million people shrieking epithets," he writes of the "frenzied" crowd that greeted the gay contingent. "It was a terrifying spectacle, but utterly exhilarating." Styled as a critique of the gay right, the book reveals far more about the nostalgia for alienation and danger that captivates the queer left.
En route from flawed premises to paranoid conclusion, Goldstein's thesis is this: An insidious alliance between the liberal media and the gay right (the "attack queers" of the title) is undermining the historic commitment of the queer community to liberationist culture and politics.
What's the evidence of this improbable collaboration between the liberal media and "homocons"? Mostly that Andrew Sullivan gets to write columns for the New York Times Magazine and queer leftists don't. It never occurs to Goldstein that the reason for this might be that Sullivan is a better and more original essayist than, say, Michelangelo Signorile. But Sullivan has now been banned from the Times, making the alliance about as durable as the Soviet-German pact of 1939.
Moreover, to sustain this dubious thesis would require a basic understanding of the "gay right." But it's apparent that Goldstein's understanding is limited to a few provocative passages from Sullivan's work (with a little Camille Paglia and Norah Vincent thrown in for gender equity).
Important authors of the gay right go unnoticed. There are only passing nods to Bruce Bawer's seminal book A Place at the Table, of which Goldstein seems to have read only the title. There is no mention of Jonathan Rauch, a senior writer for the National Journal and a regular contributor to The Atlantic. Many more such omissions mar the book.
Even Goldstein's treatment of Sullivan is superficial. There are so many references to Sullivan's "monster" pecs and glutes, as opposed to his actual ideas, that one wonders whether Goldstein's interest in him goes beyond the ideological.
Goldstein also appears oblivious to the well known differences on the political right between conservatives and libertarians. He sees a monolith where there is schism and subtlety.
Not surprisingly, when Goldstein attempts to describe the gay right he falls back on hackneyed caricatures. So he asserts in myriad ways that the gay right "deeply fear[s] difference" and that it thinks there is only one correct way to be gay.
Very nearly the opposite is true. As ideological dissenters from orthodoxy, often maligned for that difference, gay conservatives and libertarians are keenly aware of the value of diversity and of tolerance for difference.
But when queer leftists speak of diversity they do not mean the ideological kind. They mean something very prescriptive about the way gay life is to be lived. They sneer at the deepest aspiration of most gay people for normal lives, lives characterized by acceptance from family and community.
Any affirmation of that impulse is seen by the queer left as a surrender of our alien selves to the dominant culture and as somehow threatening to those who are not, and may never be, accepted.
When challenged to identify what makes gay people fundamentally different from straight people, liberationists tend to offer a short and ambiguous list. Goldstein seems to think it resides in a gay "sensibility" revealed in gay fiction writing. This sensibility comprises "a distinct aesthetic, socially acute and earnestly romantic, albeit laced with irony." Or try this formulation: gays have a "certain temperament, a sensitivity to the complexities of desire, a perspective on society."
If these platitudes mean anything, and it's unclear they do, they reveal an impoverished appreciation for life as lived outside the small circle of writers who produce trendy works like Angels in America.
If there is a distinct gay sensibility, it's unlikely to have come from pleasant parlor readings of Whitman and Proust. It's more likely to have been generated by the constant fear of police raids on gay bars, the snooping of the FBI on early gay organizations, the threat of prosecution for intimacies in one's own home, the separation from the important social recognition marriage offers. That is, it's likely to have come from the government action the dreaded gay right is most concerned to eliminate forever from our lives.
Romanticizing alienation from the norm is the nostalgia of the queer left. Consider the way Goldstein describes the recent efforts of Greenwich Village residents trying to make their neighborhood safer and to protect the value of their property by reducing the presence of drug dealing and public sex. "This has nothing to do with gayness," one lesbian resident told the media. But Goldstein disagrees: "It has everything to do with gayness as it once was, and little to do with what it's becoming."
Here we have real irony. Criticizing gay conservatives, Goldstein ends by calling for a return to "tradition": "the tradition [of 'queer humanism'] that has always held gay people together," "the tradition that consoled us in oppression." He wants us to be progressive by regressing, recapturing some imagined solidarity forged by a brutality it is our aim to end. He wants the frenzied million shrieking at him, as they once did, exhilarating him.