Originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times, October 31,
1999.
Review: Children, commitment and consequences
are among the forces that press straights to shoulder the full
responsibilities of adulthood. Being a parent may not be an
obligatory part of the formula, but it's still time gay male
culture got in touch with its inner grown-up. [Books reviewed:
Dudley Clendinen and Adam Nagourney, "Out for Good: The Struggle to
Build a Gay Rights Movement in America"; John-Manuel Andriote,
"Victory Deferred: How AIDS Changed Gay Life in America"; Daniel
Mendelsohn, "The Elusive Embrace: Desire and the Riddle of
Identity"; and Robin Hardy and David Groff, "The Crisis of Desire:
AIDS and the Fate of Gay Brotherhood".]
TO BE A HOMOSEXUAL in 1999 is to stand on the curb during the
New York gay pride parade and feel your eyes water, faster than you
can stop them, as row after row of openly homosexual police
officers march by, in full uniform. Behind them, supporting them,
the NYPD marching band:this from a police force whose members, some
of them, had been known to turn their backs on their homosexual
colleagues in earlier marches. To be a homosexual in 1999 is also
to watch as, later in the same parade, a flatbed truck rolls past
bearing a banner proclaiming WWW.RENTBOY.COM. On the platform, a
dozen or more dancing hustlers wear only biker shorts or briefs. In
due course they liberate themselves from their clothing altogether.
They cover their crotches with their hands but offer generous
glimpses of the goods. Later, some of them are told by on-duty
police officers to leave or face arrest.
It was odd to see these two species, the men (and women) in
their NYPD blues and the boys in their birthday suits, marching in
the same parade, as though they had anything to do with one
another. Odder still was that they had a great deal to do with one
another. Some of these homosexual men become gay boys when they
take off the blue uniforms after work and go down to the bars in
Chelsea. Some of these gay boys become homosexual men when they put
on creased trousers and report for their day jobs.
In individual gay men, the tension between the competing
identities of ordinary adult citizen and "boy" - as in, "He's one
cute boy, for 35" - can be energizing and endlessly amusing.
Individual people, after all, can have it both ways, up to a point.
In the struggle to define the public image of homosexuality in
America, however, the two make war. The gay establishment tells
heterosexual America: "We are just like you." And the boys,
grinning, say just as loudly: "Like you? The last thing in the
world we want is to be like you!" For 30 years, the identity
paradox - the uneasy coexistence and sometimes open warfare of the
adult culture with the "boy" culture - has turned the gay rights
movement into a battle with itself.
"No book before has attempted to follow the germ of rebellion
which began with Stonewall, as it blossomed in other cities into a
national political movement," write Dudley Clendinen and Adam
Nagourney, both of the New York Times, in their introduction to
"Out for Good." Having conducted about 700 interviews with 330
people over seven years, they intend, they say, to record "a
definitive history of the movement," beginning with New York's
landmark Stonewall riots of 1969 and ending in 1987, when the AIDS
crisis was in its ghastly full bloom. No book as ambitious as this
one can be perfect. On the whole, however, the authors have
succeeded in what they set out to do. The story - and it is a big,
dense, messy, colorful, kaleidoscopic, exhilarating, depressing
story - is told with political acumen, reportorial vividness and
narrative flair. The book is a remarkable accomplishment. Not least
remarkable is its demonstration that the gay rights movement has
been at least as decisively shaped by its internal struggles over
identity as by its struggles with its opponents on the outside.
Though some black civil rights leaders huff and puff to
repudiate any resemblance between their struggle and the gay-rights
movement, the similarities seem hard to deny. Homosexuals faced
legal discrimination and Jim Crow-style laws: As recently as 1967,
the New York State Liquor Authority forbade bars to serve
homosexuals, and one of the first activist campaigns in 1969 sought
to "integrate" a Los Angeles restaurant (Barney's Beanery) that
displayed a "Fagots [sic] Stay Out" sign. Police harassment was a
constant feature of gay life, and a sex arrest often meant the end
of a job or a career. (This problem is not yet solved. In Texas a
year ago, two men were arrested for having sex at home.) In 1977,
citing Leviticus, the Ku Klux Klan called for the execution of all
homosexuals.
Particularly in the 1970s, gay churches were burned by
arsonists, rebuilt, burned again. In 1973, 32 people died when an
arsonist torched the UpStairs bar in New Orleans; one man who
survived was notified on his hospital bed that he had been fired
from his job as a schoolteacher. There was, and is, a drumbeat of
violence, which is a sort of terrorism. Although it is true that
homosexuality is not a race and, unlike ethnicity, has behavioral
components, it is also true that, since the 1970s, racial
discrimination and anti-black sentiment have been driven not by
skin color racism, as such, but by fears of a stereotyped "black
lifestyle." The supposed "black lifestyle" centers on crime, drugs
and idleness, whereas the supposed "gay lifestyle" centers on
promiscuity, disease and political extremism; but the aversions
engendered by the two clusters of anti-social stereotypes are not
so very different.
Why, then, has the gay movement so utterly failed to attain the
gravitas and moral traction of black civil rights? A lot of
reasons; and boys prancing around in the altogether must be
prominent among them. To the consternation of many straight people
- and many lesbians - gay men were doing everything in their power
to be seen as sex-obsessed party animals. "Gay liberation," say the
authors, "had somehow evolved into the right to have a good time -
the right to enjoy bars, discos, drugs and frequent impersonal
sex." One gay leader is quoted as saying, "Never forget one thing:
What this movement is about is f-ing."
The party ended in July 1981, only 12 years after it began.
"Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals," said a New York Times
headline on July 3. Even before AIDS, as John-Manuel Andriote, a
Washington-based journalist, notes in "Victory Deferred," urban gay
men were infected with diseases - gonorrhea, syphilis, hepatitis -
at rates otherwise seen only in Third World countries. By the late
1970s, even before AIDS emerged, one doctor with the San Francisco
public health department was warning, "Too much is being
transmitted here."
"Victory Deferred" does not deliver quite what its subtitle
("How AIDS Changed Gay Life in America") promises; its real concern
is how AIDS changed gay activism in America. About "gay life in
America" - about the sick and the dying, and about the hearts and
lives and tears of homosexual men and women - Andriote says little.
Rather, his book is a comprehensive survey of institutional
responses: how care-giving organizations, arising overnight,
strained to the breaking point and beyond; how a few hardscrabble
AIDS groups became, after the government started spending big
money, 18,000 organizations, many of them run by expense account
professionals; how, with astonishing success, desperate and
outraged homosexuals created what amounted to their own Food and
Drug Administration. Andriote is more diligent than literary, and
he has a weakness for bureaucratic sentences like, "AID Atlanta was
the only gay community-based ASO among the eleven RWJ sites to be
selected as the program's coordinating agency." Still, he is
encyclopedic and knowledgeable. People who want to know how a
community mobilized in the face of an unprecedented crisis will
want to start here.
In recent years, as the epidemic has receded toward
survivability, homosexual thinkers and activists began to rise from
the bedsides of the ill and consider the questions that AIDS had
only temporarily suppressed. The boy culture seemed deeply
implicated in the health crisis. But was it really to blame? In
1997, a group of activists and academics, calling themselves Sex
Panic!, argued that AIDS hysteria and conservative backlash, among
gays as well as straights, were reviving sex phobia and repression.
Robin Hardy, writing with David Groff in "The Crisis of Desire,"
takes this view. Hardy was a writer and activist who was
HIV-positive but died, still healthy, in a hiking accident in 1995.
He left behind an unfinished book, which his friend Groff, a writer
and editor, has completed with skill. Sometimes the book rages,
sometimes it ponders; to Groff's credit, however, its moods seem to
belong to one author, not two, and the writing is never less than
accomplished. For Hardy, gay identity and gay promiscuity are more
or less the same thing. The unfettered exploration of sexual
pleasure is liberating not just for homosexuals but for everybody,
representing "progress toward a society that values pleasure."
Before AIDS, he says, "We believed we were at the beginning of a
new age in human relations - and we were." Even today, promiscuous
but safe sex is "far more effective - not to mention affirming -
than strategies of closure, repression, penalization of promiscuity
and enforced monogamy put forward by the state and by some of our
big-time thinkers." Hardy regrets having HIV, but he does not
regret the sex that gave it to him. "Communal sex," he writes, "is
to gay men what golf is to, well, other kinds of men: they find
beauty and bonding in it."
It must be said that Hardy is, for the most part, more
thoughtful than that. But it must also be said that Hardy's vision
seems strange to those of us who lead a different sort of life, who
put commitment ahead of sex and who consider ourselves no less
authentically gay for doing so. One wonders, too, if it isn't
childish to condemn medicine, government and society for their
indifferent and moralistic responses to AIDS while complaining
about the loss of the sex.
To Daniel Mendelsohn, a classicist and a writer of distinction,
falls the task of confronting the paradox that Hardy pushes to one
side. "The Elusive Embrace" is that rare thing, a genuinely
beautiful essay: a musing meditation on gay culture, on Greek
language and myth, on his own family and life, that is not so much
written as braided. The voice is intimate, probing, often of a
loveliness that brings you up short: "His nostrils were delicate,
like snail shells; they trembled when he spoke, if you got that
close. I asked him out. His dark hair, when I finally kissed him,
was glossy and smelled sweet, like a child's."
Mendelsohn writes: "For a long time I have lived in two places."
One place is at the edge of New York's Chelsea, the Mecca of the
gay boy culture; the other is in a town an hour away, where
Mendelsohn and his friend Rose are raising her young son Nicholas.
In the city he is a cosmopolitan who can melt into the anonymous
adventurism of the streets; in the town his intimate encounters are
with spittle and pediatricians. Why, he wonders, does he never
think of straight men as "boys," which is the way he would think of
them if they were gay? The answer, in a word: Nicholas. "Children
are the secret weapon of straight culture: they have the potential
to rescue men from inconsequentiality. Fatherhood has the power to
confer authenticity on men; it can be what saves them from
eternally being boys themselves."
Playfulness, says Mendelsohn, is what distinguishes gay style
from straight style. "Desire and sex are just an expression of an
almost willful insistence on constant play," he writes. "Without
anyone but yourself to be responsible for - to wait for - there is
no reason, really, not to play." Yet he is glad to have Chelsea,
the playground, to return to between long visits with Nicholas.
"You move between two places," he says. "Gay identity hovers
between strange extremes."
This will always be true. The boy culture will never vanish, nor
should it. Straight men have poker nights and football outings; gay
men have dance clubs and the Halloween high heel drag race. But the
balance will shift and is shifting already. Any culture is
infantilized, necessarily, when its members are denied the power to
enter into adult commitments - to own, to vote, to defend one's
country, to marry. Black men, recall, were once "boys," when they
were denied the full prerogatives of citizenship and of adulthood.
For gay life in America, the epochal change going on just now is
the emergence of an agenda advancing not the right to have fun but
the right to assume responsibility; to serve in the military, to
mentor and rear the young and to marry.
Of those, marriage is the most important. One day America may
allow homosexuals to enter into the single most important
commitment that adults make, the formal bond to another human being
for (one hopes) life. When that happens, gay culture's long
adolescence ends. Mendelsohn is right: Children make men out of
boys. But so does the bond of marriage. So, for that matter, does
feeding your wasted partner, carrying him up the stairs, wiping the
vomit from his mouth and embracing him in the darkness. "In
sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death us do
part": These are words spoken by grown-ups.