The Queer Fellows

...In MacKinnon's formulation: "Women and men are divided by gender, made into the sexes as we know them, by the social requirements of its dominant form, heterosexuality, which institutionalizes male sexual dominance and female sexual submission...

...Oppressed by its lack of property, the proletariat could accomplish its liberation only by the abolition of property...

...Queer politics is no longer content to carve out a buffer zone for a minoritized and protected subculture," an academic manifesto proclaims...

...They are mere social creations...

...King's dream was the American dream: inclusion and opportunity for all...

...On this brave new horizon, humanity will realize its potential as a self-creating species able to defy its own sexual gravity...

...Callen, who later founded People With AIDS, reflected on this revolutionary path: Unfortunately, as a function of a microbiological . . . certainty, this level of sexual activity resulted in concurrent epidemics of syphilis, gonorrhea, hepatitis, amoebiasis, venereal warts and, we discovered too late, other pathogens...

...The diseases were being transformed as well...

...It is the idea that human reality is "socially constructed" and thus can be socially molded to virtuous ends by a vigilant (and armed) political elite...

...Bisexual activists claimed a more revolutionary status than comrades who were straight...

...Oppression lies in the very idea of the "normal," the order that divides humanity into two sexes...

...These attitudes may be "oppressive" to homosexuals, but no more so than are Christian attitudes towards Jews as souls condemned to eternal damnation...

...because it appears to be free, while failing to live up to radical expectations...

...Amidst the din and clatter of utopias crashing messily to earth, the true believers are once again burnishing the agendas of social revolution...

...For radicals, accepting the idea of a democratic norm¡ªor any norm at all¡ªis merely to collude in one's own oppression...

...In the early eighties, the AIDS epidemic was still confined to three cities with large homosexual communities...

...Many communities and religions do view homosexuality as immoral...

...For it is this rejection that defines them as radicals...

...In a typical "contribution" to the new feminist theory Catherine MacKinnon crudely substituted sexual categories for Marx's economic terms, ignoring the absurdities that this intellectual sleight-of-hand inevitably produced...

...he war against civilization and nature, which is T at the heart of the radical enterprise, inevitably ¡¡¡¡¡¡produces monsters like AIDS...

...Aggressive public health methods might have prevented the epidemic's outward spread...

...The epidemic has now taken a toll of 200,000 Americans, with a million more infected...

...To provide an exit from the impasse of this political fragmentation, the idea of "queer" was proposed as a unifying con cept...

...segment where a person changes ethnicity and sex in rapid succession...

...Democratic societies institutionalize change and accommodate the unexpected...

...In the years 1967-1969¡ªthe flowering of the sexual revolution¡ªthe incidence of amoebiasis, a par asitic sexually transmitted disease, increased fifty times in San Francisco because of promiscuous oral-anal sex among gays...

...Studies of identical twins indicate that upbringing has little bearing on homosexual development...

...Its goal was to include black Americans in the existing social contract, especially in the segregated South, where the constitutional covenant had been restricted to whites...

...At the recent tenth anniversary conference of the National Council for Research on Women, its feminist president cited the term "unwed mother" as an example of "androcentric" bias because "it presupposes that the norm is to be a wed mother...

...According to the best statistics available, between two and five percent of a population will be homosexual in any given society, whether that society is tolerant or intolerant of homosexual behavior...

...Formally, the state is male, in that objectivity is its norm," explains the author of an essay titled "Fear of a Queer Planet...

...Identity¡ªin terms of race, ethnicity, gender or sexuality¡ªis no longer seen as stable or even coherent...

...T o the constructivist, all identities, gay and straight, are the product of a socially imposed ideal¡ªheteronormativity which also structures the system of oppression...

...In One Hundred Years of Homosexuality, David Halperin, a leading queer theorist, describes the contribution of the father of structuralism: "Foucault did for 'sexuality' what feminist critics had done for 'gender.% . . He divorced 'sexuality' from 'nature' and interpreted it, instead, as a cultural production...

...Led by activists whose outlook had been shaped in Marxist polemics, radical feminists quickly appropriated the moral aura of the civil rights epic...

...tonically, the point of entry for the revived radical impulse in the United States was a traditionalist movement for social reform...

...As opportunistic but still treatable infections flourished in the Petri dish of the liberated culture, gay radicals merely increased their defiance...

...The effect of this radical agenda was immediate and unmistakable...

...Thus women have been historically excluded from certain roles not as a result of biological realities¡ªfor example, the hazards of childbirth before the development of modern medical techniques¡ªbut because "patriarchal society" has defined their roles in order that men can oppress them...

...Liberty ordered by the rule of law, and market constraints...

...As novelist Saul Bellow observes, "The idea is to clobber everything that used to be accepted as given, fixed, irremediable...

...During the next decade, the tolerant American civil order made room for the sexual revolutionaries...

...Heteronormative, androcentric, Euro-centric: for the radical, the very idea of the normal community¡ªthe nonqueer¡ªis the mark of its oppression...

...Thus, even as the ashes of the Communist empire grow cold, the lessons of the disaster have not been learned...

...Far from causing radical activists to rethink their agenda, the burgeoning epidemics prompted them to escalate their assault...

...W ho would not have known in 1969, the year of "Gay Liberation," for example, that promiscuous anal sex was unsanitary for individuals and a potential danger to public health...

...But because they were mere objects in the historical past, they are also objects in the radical future...

...To provide a theoretical underpinning, she simply abandoned the dialectic of history that had provided Marxism with a complex if erroneous view of human praxis, favoring a vulgar Lamarckism in which environment not only determined but actually created gender: "The molding, direction, and expression of sexuality organizes society into two sexes: women and men...

...Theirs is the consummate Nietzschean fantasy: a world in which humanity is God...

...Gay men made up about 80% of the 70,000 annual patient visits to [San Francisco's] VD clinics...

...Not only do democracies not suppress their opposition, but they provide a haven even for those who hate the System...

...At a public meeting in the year preceding the first AIDS cases, Edmund White, co-author of The Joy of Gay Sex, proposed that "gay men should wear their sexually transmitted diseases like red badges of courage in a war against a sex-negative society...

...This revolutionary act would re-constitute as a liberated class not only the proletariat, but all social classes...

...The democratic founders understood the inevitability of second thoughts...

...Overloaded VD clinics became trysting places in the liberated culture...

...This is the gender-patriarchy system through which heterosexual males oppress women and gays...

...Yet, gay liberation was defined by its theorists as just that: promiscuous anal sex, a challenge to the repressive "sex-negative" culture of what queer theorists now call "heteronormativity," i.e., the heterosexual and monogamous norm...

...For these revolutionaries, not even biology grounds possibility or can limit human hope...

...The "dichotomies" are already being obliterated in liberated zones of the popular culture...

...Only the successful are historical subjects...

...lesbians rebelled...

...W here were public health officials, as these epidemics took their toll...

...lesbianism is the ontology...

...Why didn't they intervene, sound the alarm, close the bathhouses, undertake vigorous education campaigns among gays to warn potential victims of the danger in their path...

...When Dr...

...No one believes any longer in the revolutionary myth of the proletarian international, but Marx's discredited paradigm has been resurrected by his epigones in the American academy...

...For the concept of queer is really the modern revolutionary idea distilled into crystalline form as the cry of the Unhappy Consciousness: That which is normal oppresses me...

...This is now the prevailing"explanation" of sexual identity in elite universities across the United States...

...Behind each of these theories lies a version of the constructivist idea: the social construction of a race, class, or gender creates the premise that it is socially "oppressed...

...If sexuality is a "cultural production" and can be shaped to fit a conscious design, what area of human endeavor or desire cannot...

...Gay liberation was identified with asexual agenda that did not seek civic tolerance, respect, and integration of homosexuals into the public order of bourgeois life...

...It should be obvious that radical theory is, in fact, a radical depreciation of the humanity and dignity of ordinary people...

...It is this very principle of tolerance that queer revolutionaries and radicals most reject...

...The civil rights movement, under the leadership of Martin Luther King, was guided by a conservative agenda...

...This is a secular idolatry identical to that of the Communist apocalypse...

...As a matter of description, homosexuality appears to be both a fact of nature and abnormal...

...Says the Village Voice: "It isn't enough to become parallel to straights...

...King's victories were achieved under the banner of "inte gration" into the very system that radicals despised...

...It is the Hobbesian dilemma resolved...

...The reform of institutions is written into law as a necessary part of the democratic process, just as tolerance for difference is its central value...

...No doubt a shrewder one of his judgments...

...It was the worst nightmare of the rejuvenated left...

...The claim that homosexuality is socially abnormal does not lead to any conclusion as to whether it is immoral or not...

...To violate this norm, to break the law of America's social contract, is to invite terrible consequences, as the bloodiest and most shameful pages of America's history attest...

...No natural or moral barriers were recognized to the realization of the radical project...

...Nothing could be more self-defeating than to be counted one among many...

...Once the idea of a universal class was discarded, there was no logical cutoff for new pretenders to the revolutionary throne...

...Callen's attitude was emblematic...

...Indeed, it was predicted by contemporary critics of Lenin and Marx, who saw how the revolutionary ideal bore within itself the seeds of its own undoing...

...All theoretical relativisms, beginning with Nietzsche and culminating in Derrida, have this absolute in common: there is no objective value, no natural standard, no insurmount able obstacle to human desire...

...For the new radical theorists, the enemy is no longer a ruling class, a hegemonic race, or even a dominant gender...

...Led by racist demagogues like Stokely Carmichael, the new left rejected King's leadership (deriding him as "Uncle Martin") and embraced the violent racism of Malcolm X. The banner of integration was replaced by the call for separatism and "black power...

...E pluribus unum...

...When homosexuals object to the term "abnormal," they are objecting to its proscriptive use¡ªfor example in the claim that homosexuality is unnatural or immoral or should be illegal...

...Dan William, a gay specialist, warned of the danger of continued promiscuity, he was publicly denounced as a "monogamist" in the gay press...

...the rest are mere objects of others' "oppression...

...To radicals, democratic government is not "a reflection on human nature" (as the authors of the Federalist maintained), but an instrument of class/gender/race oppression that social liberators like themselves are obliged to destroy...

...To the alienated radical, however, democracy is a diabolical form of social oppression because of the freedoms it permits...

...The pluralistic norm of American democracy requires that the deviant community and the abnor mal citizen (black, homo sexual, immigrant, Jew) be equal before the law and enjoy the same inalienable rights as everyone else...

...The ideal of American pluralism¡ªthe political norm that governs the behavior of its citizen democrats¡ªis the necessary embrace of diverse commu nities: even communities in fundamental conflict...

...The totalitarian state was not an aberration of the progressive spirit, but its apotheosis...

...It is the task of the sexual revolutionary to overthrow the norm that structures this oppression...

...The collision of feminist factions was replicated throughout the radical ranks...

...This is the intellectual ground of a leftism that¡ªto paraphrase Lenin¡ªis an infantile disorder...

...Instead it is the sexual order of nature itself...

...To establish their primacy in the revolutionary pecking order, radicals came up with a catchy slogan: Feminism is the theory, lesbianism is the practice...

...He writes in his book, Surviving Aids, that when he heard White's triumphant defiance of nature's law, he thought: "Every time I get the clap I'm striking a blow for the sexual revolution...

...to embrace a "false consciousness" inplace of a revolutionary vision...

...We want to obliterate such dichotomies altogether...

...Underpinning the new vision was a bastard version of the old paradigm, as the discredited Marxist categories were recast in racial terms...

...From Berkeley to Cambridge, lesbian and gay activists busily work to unveil the latest weapon in the intellectual armory of the tenured left...

...Lesbians clashed with gays...

...No sooner had radical feminists grasped the revolutionary laurel, however, than the hierarchy of the oppressed asserted itself within the revolutionary ranks...

...To the rest of humanity, the institutional forms ?of capitalist democracies appear as liberating structures in whose environment individuals can achieve, breathe free, and realize their desires, without engaging in anarchy and chaos...

...T he paradox of progressive intentions and reactionary consequences is as old as the left itself...

...Under intense pressure from gay activists, for example, the director of public health of the City of San Francisco refused to close bathhouses, maintaining that they were valuable centers of "education" about AIDS, even though their only purpose was to facilitate promiscuous sex...

...N ormality can be a descriptive term, a proscriptive term, or both...

...As soon as the civil rights movement achieved its goal of ending legal discrimination, the radicals acted to push King aside...

...Radicals, in short, do not want integration into a democratic system or equal status in a democratic state...

...As one queer writer recently summarized: In this age of deconstruc tion, the notion that sexual identities are "essential" that is, constituted by nature¡ªis under.attack [by revolutionary theorists...

...Despite the consequences, a Toronto leftist paper defended the practice in an article titled "Rimming As a Revolutionary Act...

...First it was syphilis and gonorrhea...

...In rejecting America's normative institutions, while radically inventing the social future, however, they invite just those retributions that have historically attended the systematic violation of natural order...

...As Shilts explains, the enteric diseasesamoebiasis, Gay Bowel Syndrome, giardiasis, and shigellosis¡ªwere followed by an epidemic of hepatitis B, "a disease that had transformed itself, via the popularity of anal intercourse, from a blood-borne scourge into a venereal disease...

...Because democracies, like America's, are founded in conservative views of human nature, they embrace their opponents...

...In his authoritative history of the AIDS epidemic, author Randy Shilts describes the atmosphere on the eve of its outbreak: Gay men were being washed by tide after tide of increasingly serious infections...

...But the most determined and successful claimants were radical women...

...but as variable, provisional, and most of all constructed...

...Even college stu dents¡ªamong the most privileged of America's social ranks¡ªexperienced no difficulty in nursing their grievances into a revolutionary apotheosis, captured in the title of a sixties tract called Student as Nigger...

...Developing what came to be called a "politics of identity" (in contrast to the old politics of class), the feminists turned to the Marxist patriarchs as an intellectual source...

...It is usually prescribed because it has been previously tried and proven successful...

...From the poisoned well of the Communist past, they drew not only the specific terms but the general forms of their social analyses, creating a parodistic version of what had long been a bankrupt creed...

...But the effort to produce a super race created instead an unprecedented monstrosity, whose horror was nonetheless predictable...

...The first clusters of AIDS victims were formed not by monogamous civil reformers who had come out of the closet to demand tolerance and respect, but by sexual revolutionaries who pushed their bodies' immune envelopes to advance the new order...

...The reason was the revolution itself: So successful was the campaign of the radical activists that it made traditional public health practices politically impossible, particularly when officials attempted to close sexual bathhouses regarded as "symbols of gay liberation...

...For behind the revolutionary pursuit of an impossible ideal lurks a deep hatred for the human norm and an unquenchable desire for its annihilation...

...For Marxists, the key to this power was the proletariat, a majority class...

...But every effort to take normal precautionary measures was thwarted in turn by the political juggernaut the gay liberation movement had managed to create...

...And, consequently, of bourgeois standards of public hygiene...

...Similar campaigns against testing and contact tracing¡ªstandard procedures in campaigns against other sexually transmitted diseases¡ªinsured the metastasis of AIDS into the black and Hispanic communities, which now account for more than 50 percent of the known cases...

...El...

...In its queer formulation, the radical project appears to reach its outer limit, realizing what the young Marx might have called its species essence...

...The San Francisco Coordinating Committee of Gay and Lesbian Services, chaired by Pat Norman, a city official, issued a policy paper asserting that donor screening was "remi niscent of miscegenation blood laws that divided black blood from white" and "similar in con cept to the World War II round ing up of Japanese-Americans in the western half of the country to minimize the possibility of espionage...

...specter is haunting the American cademy, the last refuge of the political left...

...This, in capsule, is the totalitarian story, and the animating theme of all radical theory...

...It was defined instead as a defiant promiscuity, the overthrow of bourgeois morals and sexual restraints...

...Catherine MacKinnon turned this into academese: "If feminism is the epistemology...

...No reflexive embar rassment seemed to restrain them as they rushed forward to compare their own dis comforts with the historic sufferings of American blacks...

...Women, "Latinos," homosexuals, and Native Americans vied for possession of the victim's mantle...

...Queer revolution is thus the ultimate subversive project: it proclaims the death not only of Society's God, but also of Nature's Law¡ªthe very idea of a reality beyond human will...

...Thus when officials tried to institute screening procedures for the nation's blood banks and asked the gay community not to make donations while the epidemic persisted, gay political leaders opposed the procedures as infringing the "right" of homosexuals to give blood...

...Michael Callen, a gay youth present at the meeting, had already had 3,000 sexual partners and was shortly to come down with AIDS...

...Like black radicals before them, gay activists rejected the idea of integration into a civil order...

...Self-hatred is the root of the Communist ideal, a lesson too easily ignored...

...Most riveting is a computer-enhanced David Horowitz is co-editor of Heterodoxy, published by the Center for the Study of Popular Culture in Studio City, California...

...As Don Francis, the Center for Disease Control official in charge of fighting the hepatitis B epidemic, told a reporter: "We didn't intervene because we felt that it would be interfering with an alternative lifestyle...

...Not only were measures to prevent the geographical spread of AIDS thwarted by radical politics, but measures to prevent its spread into other communities were obstructed as well...

...Unwittingly, and with the best of revolutionary intentions, a small subset of gay men managed to create disease settings equivalent to those of poor third-world nations in one of the richest nations on earth...

...The implementation of real public health methods is nowhere in sight...

...The result of these revolutionary attitudes was to spread AIDS among hemophiliacs and some heterosexuals...

...The nihilism that rejects nature and the idea of the normal is as blindly destructive as its consequences are predictable...

...In the radical view, society reflects neither nature nor history, and individual human beings have no complicity in their historical fates...

...But description in this sense does not necessarily lead to proscriptive conclusions...

...The same constructivist fallacy creates the revolutionary potential of all those categories valorized and simultaneously depreciated by radical theory, i.e., stripped of their free will and reduced to the status of historical objects...

...In the radical view, existing sexual norms reflected nothing about humanity'shistoric experience, but were merely a social construction to preserve the privileges of a dominant group...

...To the post-modern left, the institutional forms of capitalist democracies are not at all triumphs of an evolutionary process, nor reflections of the reality of who we are...

...The fulcrum of this revival has been the development of post-Marxist theories that substitute other "oppressed" groups¡ªblacks, women, and homosexuals¡ªfor the missing revolutionary term...

...It springs from Rousseau's fantasy that social institutions are the root of all evil, which is the fountainhead of radical theory...

...Their agenda is to make a racist, sexist, homophobic humanity into a liberated entity in their own image...

...For them, tolerance itself is repressive because it denies their most cherished illusion: that they are the authentic voice of humanity, and theirs the universal political solution...

...It is by trial that we arrive at methods, procedures, institutions, laws, that bring our efforts into conformity or coherence with the orders of our nature...

...Before the collapse of the Communist empire, the quest for a "new man" and "new woman" consumed the lives of entire nations...

...Once in power¡ªas the entire history of our bloody century attests¡ªthe radical impulse embraces radical evil in the futile attempt to enforce its rule, and to realize its impossible ideal...

...As work is to marxism, sexuality [is] to feminism," she wrote in her pretentious opus, Towards a Feminist Theory of the State...

...The new political goal¡ª"black liberation"¡ªwas defined as liberation from the American dream...

...Such conclusions must be a matter of individual principles and communal preferences...

...Queer" posited a uni versal sex to replace the absent universal class...

...Heterosexual sex," complained a lesbian theorist (and former Trotskyite) "is a site for male dominance that Marx ignored...

...Instead of a classless society as the redemptive future, queer theorists envisage a gender-free world...

...A "normal procedure" in medicine or in public health is a procedure that is usually prescribed...

...But it is the normal "civil rights" solution to the problem of minority status, integration into America's civic foundation, that homosexual radicals reject...

...Why should anyone have expected anything different...

...The century behind us is littered with the corpses of millions who died on the cross of such new worlds...

...It is their destiny to be reshaped and redefined by the radical vanguard...

...The future will give birth to a new revolutionary people, no longer male and female, but queer...

...The inhumanity of the Communist ambition was what made its epoch so evil...

...The task (in the words of the previously cited manifesto) is "to confront .. . modern culture with its worst nightmare, a queer planet...

...In so doing, they have created their own social Frankenstein, even without achieving state power, in the contemporary epidemic of AIDS...

...Its goal is "to challenge the pervasive and often invisible heteronormativity of modern societies...

...At the same time, natural forces asserted themselves with ever more devastating results...

...In a world threatened by racial tensions and overpopulation, the survival instinct could summon a new human, one who has no single race and who, by being . . . androgynous, is less subject to the procreative urge...

...In this radical conception of human freedom, the revolutionary goal is a queer state where norms no longer exist...

...The conservative conclusion will be that homosexuality is normal in that it is rooted in nature, but that socially it is abnormal in that the vast majority of people are not and will never be homosexually inclined...

...A San Francisco Chronicle reviewer describing Michael Jackson's international video Black and White, which was seen by half a billion youngsters across the globe, waxes messianic: The refrain in the Black and White video is "It doesn't matter if you're black or white...

...Although they affect an intellectual superiority to their Communist forbears, the new campus puritans seek an identical result: the redemption of humanity through political power...

...When playwright Larry Kramer issued a similar warning, he was accused in the New York Native of "gay homophobia and antieroticism...

...Like their predecessors, the Doctor Frankensteins of the newest left are intoxicated with the prospect of brave new worlds...

...The problem with this new paradigm was that it lacked the basic coherence of its Marxist predecessor and, except as a rationale for destructive agendas, made little political sense...

...Jews can live with this attitude in a society that protects their rights and invokes tolerance of difference as its central virtue: E pluribus unum...

...Easy treatment had imbued them with such a cavalier attitude toward venereal diseases that many gay men saved their waiting-line numbers, like little tokens of desirability, and the clinic was considered an easy place to pick up both a shot and a date...

...If the agenda is to erase the human past in order to remake the human soul, then totalitarian terror is the necessary means...

...Public officials licensed sexual gymnasia called "bathhouses" and turned a blind eye toward homosexual activity in bookstore back rooms, bars, and "glory hole" establishments, until a $100 million industry flourished by decade's end...

...But in this malevolent confrontation with democratic societies, radicals are confronted with a serious dilemma...