MIDGE DECTER AND THE BOYS ON THE BEACH
Coser, Lewis
Midge Decter has become Commentary's specialist in baiting minorities. Some years ago she wrote a book studded with venomous attacks against liberated women. More recently she wrote about a race...
...Some of them, having "made it," are now ready to join the majority pack...
...A community of men who must always live on edge—subject as they are to assault, blackmail, police brutality, and entrapment—will find it harder than others to live ordinary lives...
...Commentary has become their mouthpiece...
...Yet Decter is apparently unaware of this nostalgie de la boue...
...They are viewed as potential child molesters, depraved, neurotic, irresponsible wretches...
...She thinks it is "undeniable" that there is an "increasing longing among homosexuals to do away with themselves—if not in an actual physical sense then at least spiritually—a longing whose chief emblem, among others, is the leather bar...
...One is reminded of Macauley's observation that Puritans did not object to bear-bating because it gave pain to the bears but because it gave pleasure to the spectators...
...And now she has followed this up with a vicious attack on homosexuals ("The Boys on the Beach," Commentary, September 1980...
...Decter's Fire Island gays are spendthrifts who can indulge in lavish displays because they are not burdened with family responsibilities...
...Midge Decter gives no evidence of having any familiarity with the vast literature on the subject of homosexuality...
...And there is Midge Decter, leading the pack...
...Decter shows no interest in such matters...
...She "was engaged to the fullest" by the gays, she admits, indeed "by little else...
...This part of the essay displays a kind of unconscious mixture of sniggering denigration with barely repressed attraction...
...She sees herself as a moral physician intent upon curing the diseases of modernity, but her writings are symptoms of a widespread retreat from the generous moral commitment to the cause of minorities that infused the'60s...
...Would Commentary run an essay on Jews based on casual observations of the weekend going-ons at Grossinger, supplemented by a travelogue on Jewish communities and a Philip Roth novel...
...These are not grown men, she asserts...
...To be sure, there are S-M bars frequented by homosexuals, but most are frequented by heterosexuals...
...Gays, Decter avers, are not men who can experience authentic love and authentic desire...
...But even if one were able to show that the proportion of drug-takers, alcoholics, and compulsive and brutalizing sexual adventurers were higher among homosexuals than heterosexuals, this would prove very little...
...218...
...They are contemptible because they are less than men...
...Decter's description of Fire Island gays is mild compared to the picture she paints of gay life in the '70s...
...they can only be defined negatively as men who reject normal existential burdens...
...The second part is largely based on one journalistic account of homosexual communities in the '70s, on the "evidence" of a TV documentary, and on one encounter she had with an angry group of gays who protested the running of a prejudiced article in Harper's magazine...
...Homosexuals are denounced from pulpits, treated with contempt by the square community, ridiculed and disdained by much of the political and medical establishment...
...The girlish life styles she observed with such fascinated attention in the '60s have gone forever, she states...
...Gays seem to have a good deal of fun, and they do not deserve it...
...Such expeditions seem to have been similar to an earlier generation's slumming trips to Harlem bars...
...how then can one expect them not to display their scars and to show a certain amount of pathology...
...More recently she wrote about a race riot in New York City and the attendant looting in terms of the animalistic behavior of the black rioters...
...Such soured disdain for the life of minorities has recently surfaced in many corners of the American cultural landscape...
...Decter thinks that she has struck through their masks and that she has revealed that without masks they are empty men...
...Throughout the summers she spent on Fire Island, her attention seems to have been riveted on gay activities...
...She and her friends felt the need frequently to visit a rough gay bar in the neighborhood to observe the goings-on with fascination...
...While the Fire Island gays of the '60s refused to grow up and develop a mature and responsible self, the homosexuals of today loathe themselves as well as their sexual partners...
...That Decter has no sense of empathy and charity we already know, but in this essay her assault on the victims of societal persecution and discrimination passes all previous bounds...
...Yet she chooses not to mention all of this and cites only the authors' finding that homosexuals have had more sex with different people than heterosexuals...
...An open season on gay-baiting seems likely in the times to come...
...The first part of Decter's essay is mainly voyeuristic...
...was the main underlying desire that sent those Fire Island homosexuals into the arms of other men...
...Instead of attending to the victimizers who are largely responsible for whatever pathologies may be found among gays, she attacks the victims...
...Some homosexuals indulge in alcohol, drugs, and compulsive sex—so do many heterosexuals...
...The authors present a careful typology of a sample of San Francisco homosexuals, arguing that it is misleading to assume that all homosexuals have the same sexual and life styles...
...Gays cheat, it seems, because they escape the usual burdens of family obligations: "The desire to escape from the sexual reminder of birth and 217 death, with its threat of paternity...
...In the leather bar both the brutalized and the brutalizer announce a common and mutual loathing of the flesh and especially of the self, the spirit, that moves it...
...In the major part of her essay she relies entirely on observation and casual encounters with a group of affluent homosexuals during Fire Island vacations in the '60s...
...That Decter is a Jewish woman writing in a Jewish magazine edited by her husband, Norman Podhoretz, is also significant...
...Midge Decter does not stand alone...
...The great majority of gays live stressful lives and such stress, it stands to reason, can lead to pathology...
...She cites only one scientific study of homosexuals, that by Alan R. Bell and Martin Weinberg, Homosexualities (1978), and this she distorts...
...This, I submit, is not only irresponsible, it is dishonest...
...Presentday gays are brutal, suicidal, self-pitying bullies...
...They are defined not in terms of what they are but in terms of what they are not, and so their identity is stripped from them...
...they are immature, girlish, vain, pouting, forever displaying their bodies, and their penises in particular, catty, competitive, unable to form secure attachments, alcoholics who are so given to getting stewed that she finds it doubtful that they can fuck in a satisfying manner...
...Jews traditionally have been on the side of other minorities whom they correctly perceived as fellow sufferers from majority prejudice and discrimination...
...Her private obsessions have become public issues...
...They show that homosexual men may live in "close-coupled," in "open-coupled," in "functional," or in "dysfunctional" sexual arrangements...
...IN THE FACE of such hostility one almost wearies to point out that Decter's portrait is almost entirely fanciful...
...Their smooth and elegant exteriors, unmussed by traffic with the detritus of modern family existence, constituted a kind of sniggering reproach to their striving and harried straight brothers...
...Only the last type presents the pathological characteristics Decter attributes to all gays...
...But where middle-class voyeurs in Harlem used to indulge in a kind of romantic glorification of its denizens, Decter now looks with utter contempt at the gays she once observed with such fascination...
...Decter omits any account of the causes of such pathologies...
...According to her, the homosexual community is now mired in drugs, violence, compulsive sexuality, and sadomasochism...
...It surely provided some of the fuel for the passionate assault of the self-styled moral majority during the recent electoral campaign...
Vol. 28 • April 1981 • No. 2
