Beyond Queer: Challenging Gay Left Orthodoxy, edited by Bruce Bawer
Kirp, David
BEYOND QUEER: CHALLENGING GAY LEFT ORTHODOXY, Bruce Bawer, ed. The Free Press, 1996. 304 pp., $25. Gay rights parades, those annual celebrations of the 1969 Stonewall riot, are festivals of...
...It's a sacrilege and an obscenity, something to be resisted as ferociously as state-sanctioned abortion...
...Yet as other despised American minorities have learned to their sorrow, ignorance is not the whole of the problem...
...The public schools of Salt Lake City, Utah have been ordered to bar all student organizations, rather than permitting a club with the hopeful name of the Gay and Straight Alliance to meet on school premises...
...If even one state authorizes same-sex marriage—and Hawaii's Supreme Court seems poised to require this—gay rights lawyers are ready to insist that, as a matter of constitutional law, the other forty-nine states must recognize gay marriages...
...At those gay pride parades Bawer abhors, the crowds reserve their loudest cheers for a contingent that's as main street as America itself: PFLAG, Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays...
...To the religious right, gay marriage isn't just another misguided policy nostrum...
...Meanwhile, because the authors oppose penalizing private discrimination, employers and landlords would be free to indulge their prejudices against gays...
...FALL • 1996 • 137...
...As long as government recognizes committed heterosexual couples, there's no logical reason why same-sex couples shouldn't also receive the civil blessings and obligations of such recognition...
...to celebrate gay couples who have created their own havens in a heartless world...
...In the face of these repeated slaps in the face, though, the authors' persistent surprise comes off as naïve or disingenuous...
...Vitally, this means that gay marriages would be sanctioned by government...
...And someone usually parades wearing only a smile...
...But logic is the farthest thing from the minds of those Christian Coalition stalwarts who, in the midst of the recent primary season, gathered all the GOP candidates to pledge their undying opposition to the idea...
...What's of more immediate concern to thousands of gay men and lesbians is that their sexuality puts at risk their homes and their jobs...
...The central plank of the Beyond Queer platform calls for ending all discrimination by the state...
...I am not that different from most people in this country...
...Pride days do not show his gayness, and amid the continuing struggle for tolerance they offer a "bonanza for the [intolerant] religious right...
...The authors of the thirtyeight chapters, all but two of them men, include familiar names like Andrew Sullivan, former editor of the New Republic, and some fresh voices, among them an Orthodox rabbi who shows off some fancy Talmudic footwork...
...Employers and landowners don't constitute a law unto themselves...
...Beyond Queer is the follow-up, a collection of essays written by people who think more or less as Bawer does...
...One essay dissects "Morality and Homosexuality," a Wall Street Journal screed, penned by twenty-one scholars and ministers, that rails against homosexuals' "predatory behavior" aimed at the "seduction and solicitation" of the young...
...Similarly, Bruce Bawer believes that "building acceptance of homosexuals is like teaching a language," so that gay, just like German, stops being gobbledygook...
...A clarion call to the new gay intelligentsia," the dust jacket of Beyond Queer boasts, and at a moment when the tried strategies for promoting gay concerns no longer seem true, such a call is needed...
...This requires tirelessly communicating in plain English until the homo-ignorant get the message...
...To appear "normal," Link continues, provides the best chance "of starting a conversation . . . of changing a mind...
...That desire to belong, I suspect, resonates with even the most outwardly outrageous among us...
...But the note this volume sounds is badly off-key...
...Behind this insistence on normality resides a desire to belong to the larger community, to be an unhyphenated (not gay-) American...
...Bawer tells of his hurt feelings when his review of the film Longtime Companion is rejected by the American Spectator on the grounds that homosexual love must be inferior to the real (that is, straight) thing...
...As I write, Pat Buchanan is making a handsome living by pandering to homo- and other phobias...
...Sweet reason is what they have to offer by way of rejoinder, but learning about gayness isn't the least bit like learning German...
...I am not a queer because I do not have to be one," writes David Link, a Los Angeles writer and lawyer...
...Bruce Bawer despises those parades and the hypersexualized image of gayness that they convey...
...Why should sexual orientation be treated differently...
...Tough luck—this is just "private" discrimination, writes Andrew Sullivan, and so shouldn't be regulated by the state...
...He wrote that book to describe "normal" gay life to the confused adolescent who, standing at a newsstand, furtively slips a gay porn magazine between the pages of Rolling Stone...
...to be understood, accepted—loved—for who we are...
...Now it's time to move on: to stop hollering about rights and to cease raging, "like King Lear back from the heath," about the unfairnesses of AIDS, to stop equating gay concerns with other "left-wing" causes, as if "gay" were a synonym for "progressive...
...Perhaps that fight is worth waging—but is it worth waging right now...
...In the quarter-century since Stonewall, this critique runs, national gay organizations have accomplished nothing...
...to stop promoting promiscuity rather than commitment— in short, to stop being marginal and marginalized...
...Rules that safeguard racial minorities, women, and the handicapped against discrimination were adopted by a society that believed government could distinguish between genuine privacy concerns and the preservation of prejudice...
...My e-mail is packed daily with tales of verbal and physical assaults on homosexuals, collected by an electronic clipping service called Channel Q. Every once in a while, the authors of Beyond Queer remember these facts of life...
...and to nudge the gay silent majority, those who don't act up or act out, into making themselves known...
...In cities across the land, Dykes on Bikes, looking for all the world like Hell's Angels, roar by on souped-up Harleys...
...In A Place at the Table, published in 1994, Bawer spoke up for homosexuals whose sexual orientation, while more than a bedroom sport, amounts to less than a life...
...Their immodest intention is to draft the platform for a new gay politics, one that rejects the in-yourface tactics of radical "queers," and the identity politics of "the gay establishment" in favor of a quieter push for acceptance and assimilation...
...It's not inconceivable that this could turn into the Willie Horton issue of the 1996 campaign...
...They are also a public concern, which is why zoning laws and civil rights statutes are on the books...
...In the gay as well as the straight world, writes Jonathan Rauch, marriage would be regarded as the norm, the unmarried would be "pitied" (perhaps even "clucked over" by grandma), and divorce would be hard to obtain...
...All the tightly constructed arguments in the world aren't going to change the many minds unwilling to be confused by fact...
...Elaborate floats carry flocks of perfectly primped, besequined young men, queens for a day...
...Those hosannas signal a gay desire both 136 • DISSENT Books to be liberated and to be acknowledged...
...Gay rights parades, those annual celebrations of the 1969 Stonewall riot, are festivals of the shocking...
...Up from the Ghetto would have been an equally apt title for the book...
...Yet drawing so bright a line between the public and private realms makes little sense...
...Decisions about what buildings can be built or what job criteria can be fixed aren't just matters of private choice...
...Another describes a Policy Review symposium that condemned homosexuality as both cause and effect of much that ails the society, "a sign of civilizational decadence" that "produces a social evil...
Vol. 43 • September 1996 • No. 4
