Culture Vultures: Wedding Bell Blues

...gay helplines patiently explain which existing extrastrength condom works best with which oil-based or water-based lubricant...

...I don't know what this says about gay sex...

...I can't say I blame the judge: by the end of the show, I was wishing they could adopt me, too...

...Gay advocates' contempt for fidelity is their Achilles heel, both literally and intellectually...

...They were so sweet, so sober, so dignified, so responsible...

...It falls to Sullivan, who says his generation will be the first to survive AIDS, to prove that a long life and a fruitful life are not, as they presently seem in our great cities, mutually exclusive...

...You can see Sullivan's point: a grisly plague has not furthered the cause of homosexual monogamy, so why should a permit from the town clerk...

...Look at Disney's "Gay Day...

...of his departure, Sullivan's huge accumulation of unique selling points seemed to have dwindled away to one: he was the first Catholic, the first Briton, the first Tory to edit the New Republic...

...If you're a classicist, "homophobia" does n't mean "anti-gay" but a fear (phobia) of the same (homo...

...Whatever happens, Sullivan has brought his camp followers to the brink of a great victory: the legalization of gay marriage...

...But those that aren't seem to be the least interested in gay marriage...

...Homosexual marriage, he says, would be better served by the "openness of the contract," which would be sympathetic of gay men's need for "extramarital outlets...

...These mainstream entertainments are smugly self-congratulatory about their progressiveness...

...And maybe it already has...

...It jus' don't seem right...

...Gay promiscuity is far more trivial and demeaning of themselves than any shaft from Pat Buchanan, for it suggests that gayness itself is irredeemably immature...

...It makes them look, well, a bit silly...

...They had a whip-round in the office and collected enough for a parting shot from literary editor Leon Wieseltier, who wished Andrew "a long and fruitful life"-which sly phrasing was subsequently revealed to be not a careless ad-lib but something closer to a calculated sneer...

...TV known a few gay marrieds-for example, a production manager on a TV special I did, who found a minister in Holland to pronounce him and his lover man and husband...

...Certainly, when Edmund White hymns the beauty of anonymous sex, you feel he's confused anal intercourse with banal intercourse...

...A few hours later, when the show was broadcast, the sex line had mysteriously disappeared, so I asked my producer what had happened to it...

...Sullivan resents Pat Buchanan's "demeaning reduction of `what homosexuals do' to a sexual act"-and he may have a point: the chief characteristic of modem homosexuality is not any particular sexual act but the number of partners required to perform them...

...They gave up trying to apply a workable definition to gay men when it became clear that those who'd had less than six in a year were almost statistically irrelevant...

...Even as it embraces gays, Hollywood de-sexes them: these homosexuals are so untypical, they're insulting...

...both are now HIV positive...

...Sooner or later, it's bound to happen with a couple of American celebrities...

...In a literal sense, the most homophobic people of all are male homosexuals: they have an almost pathological fear of the same...

...They love the sinners, but they're terrified of showing us the sin...

...Gays are very keen on "redefining," and now it's the turn of matrimony: backed by a mainstream culture that gets a kick out of gay chic, we drift towards some sort of formalization of gay relationships...

...In The Birdcage, the stereotypical right-wing senator winds up getting lectured by the middle-aged drag queen, a Barbara Bush lookalike: "I meant what I said about family values and the need for a return to morality...

...In that case, why get married at all...

...In 1989 they divorced the gals, moved to Denmark, and tied the knot, becoming the first gay newlyweds in rock history...

...I prefer the straightforward honesty of gay authors like Edmund White, who writes elegant paeans to the "beauty" of anonymous sex, even the brief, nondescript, undistinguished encounter with the man who fatally infected him...

...After fifteen years of AIDS, promiscuity isn't the issue, but the need to practice promiscuity "safely": gay activists berate the government for not allocating funds to invent a concrete condom...

...C U L T U R E V U L T U R E S by Mark Steyn Wedding Bell Blues Is Andrew Sullivan the marrying kind...

...unlike skin color, contemporary gayness is behavioral...

...Hollywood has no interest in "family values" except in promoting "alternative" households as their true repository: the only nuptials on America's cutest sitcom, "Friends," have been between two lesbians...

...But most gay men-not the ones in "Picket Fences," but real gay men-have more sexual partners in a year than most heterosexuals have in a lifetime...

...foreign policy and Michael Huffington's Senate race and then someone mentioned the recent study which indicated that, contrary to received opinion, it wasn't swingin' singles who were getting tons of sex, but boring old married couples...

...The so-called Defenders of Marriage, on the other hand, stumble along unable to make a coherent case for an institution already enfeebled by divorce, adultery, trendy clerics, and a three-decade wallow in the right to instant self-gratification...

...Oh, and I once met Siggi and Bragi of the Sugarcubes, Iceland's biggest pop group (don't laugh...

...I found that survey very odd," said Andrew Sullivan...

...I remembered the remark a couple of months back when, disclosing he was HIV positive, Sullivan quit/was sacked from (delete according to factional loyalty) the editorship of the New Republic...

...After he'd been so good on Hillary and the congressional elections and Iraq, I thought it made him seem a bit silly...

...Whether or not Andrew Sullivan has more sex in a weekend than most folks have in a year, I cannot say...

...This is the new affirmative action...

...MARK STEYN is theater critic of the New Criterion and movie critic of the Spectator o f London...

...If they're honest, most people's (and probably Bob Dole's) objection to gay marriage runs along the lines of: "I dunno...

...It is, in that sense, quintessentially American: like NAAFA (the National Association for the Advancement of Fat Acceptance), gays want the rest of the country to make their self-indulgence respectable...

...Today, being gay demands nonstop round-the-clock commitment...

...Sullivan marshals a dazzling array of arguments, comparing the prohibition of gay marriage to the old laws on miscegenation, citing the Bible in his favor, and even flinging Pat Buchanan's childlessness back at him...

...In fact, albeit unintentionally, they adhere wholeheartedly to that fine Christian distinction between the sinner and the sin...

...there is no reason why the "varied and complicated lives" of gay men should be constrained by a "single, moralistic model...

...Tellingly, Bob Dole, who's never one to let stumbling incoherence stand in the way of delivering his thoughts on taxes, abortion, tobacco, whatever, shies away from this one-happy to pick a scrap with uni vernally reviled bogeymen like Katie Couric or C. Everett Koop, but not so foolish as to get tossed a no-win hot potato like heterosexual marriage...

...But, even in all its weaknesses and evasions, heterosexual society still aspires to the ideal of matrimony-the requirement to "forsake all others...

...It was such a shame...

...over 9o percent of his body...

...but, by the end, what he was mainly was gay...

...What's undeniable is that even HIV infection rates of 5o-6o percent among the gay populations of New York and San Francisco hasn't persuaded homosexuals of the virtues of reducing their number of partners to, say, those of an MCI "Friends & Family" calling plan...

...Possibly he's unnerved by the strange tendency of so many Republican icons-from Newt to Bob Hope-to acquire lesbian siblings and offspring...

...In the "Pride Week" special issue of One in Ten, a Boston publication, columnist Mubarak S. Dahir relates the story of Brian and his lover, both HIV-negative, who being in a monogamous relationship decided to dispense with condoms...

...they were very big -or anyway very medium-in Britain, too...

...Deploring their decision to abandon condoms, Dahir advises gay men to "redefine our test of love for each other...

...During that same BBC show, Sullivan himself observed that there was probably more male-on-male sex loo years ago before anyone had invented the concept of "gay" as a lifestyle or a fulltime occupation...

...Sir Hardy Amies, the Queen's couturier, had the same partner for over two decades, but says, "If someone rings you up and says, `Can you come to dinner?' the worst thing you can do is say, `Can I bring my friend?' It is just too common for two men to go around together...

...The only mention of AIDS is in reference to the two teenage heterosexuals...

...At one time, London AIDS clinics defined a woman as promiscuous if she'd had more than six sexual partners in her lifetime...

...Ah, happy days...

...Anyone who winds up defined by his sex life, weekend or otherwise, inevitably seems "a bit silly"-Bob Packwood, Charlie Sheen, the Kennedys, Bill Clintonbut it's a pitfall that the modern gay sensibility disdains...

...Even the passage of the hasty, poorly drawn Defense of Marriage Act is little more, from its very title down, than a dismal recognition that an institution central to Western society is on the defensive, if not yet on the ropes...

...I get more sex in a weekend than most of those people seem to get in a year...

...The film preaches tolerance and understanding, yet won't permit its gay couple so much as a peck on the cheek for fear of testing that tolerance...

...49 The American Spectator • September 1996...

...and so unlike go percent of the gays I know...

...the "issue" dramas prefer scenarios like that on "Picket Fences," where the crusty judge rules against the reactionary gran'ma and gives custody of her grandchild to the gay father and his lover...

...But nobody seems to question what it is in gay pathology that makes this awkward, non-erotic paraphernalia necessary...

...Pace Sullivan, it isn't the emancipation of the slaves, take two...

...Yet it's happy to allow Gay Day-when DisneyWorld is turned into a playground for gay couples-to promote itself with posters showing Mickey and Donald holding hands, and Minnie and 48 September r 9 9 6 . The American Spectator Daisy doing the same-like an Uncle Walt version of the Bloomsbury group...

...The fact that that's no longer enough is the best evidence of how the other side's winning...

...We'd discussed U.S...

...Siggi (short for Sigtryggur) was the drummer and Bragi (short for Bragi) was the bassist and they were brothers-in-law married to twin sisters...

...This is a company so protective of its franchises that it once sued a guy in Florida for "unauthorized use" of its copyrights because he'd tattooed Mickey, Goofy et al...

...But turn the question around: When was the last time you saw a negative role model...

...Quentin Crisp, the octogenarian "stately homo of England" now resident in New York, has suggested that the need for novelty is due to gay sex being somehow fundamentally unsatisfying...

...By the time...

...Sullivan, by contrast, wants (so to speak) to have it both ways: to have his union blessed, and to have his license blessed...

...Obviously, not all gays are promiscuous...

...Homosexuals have complained for years about the lack of positive role models in the media...

...loathe homophobia-the word, that is...

...I t was just before the November '94 elections and I was hosting a panel show on the BBC...

...Oh, I cut it," she said...

...It is on this ground that heterosexuals should stand and fight...

...When I mentioned this to my near neighbor-the head of the White Mountain Militia-he said cheerily: "My sister is a lesbian person...

...I prefer that ferocious scourge of what he called "beery heterosexuality," the late British film-maker Derek Jarman, who claimed to be in a long-term "monogamous" relationship in which he was nevertheless free to go trawling for rough trade in the bushes of Hampstead Heath every night, the ravages of AIDS notwithstanding...