Richard Goldstein's The Attack Queers

...But it's hard to see this relationship as of any political or public value...

...It is difficult to share his surprise and horror over the fact that, now that many of the goals of the gay liberation movement have been achieved, gays feel less and less tied to a strictly gay, strictly left politics...

...most of her ideas sit well with our more ingrained and conservative understandings of gender...

...or, for that matter, any respect for the privacy and sanctity of an individual's personal beliefs, no matter how conservative...

...Goldstein specializes in a kind of pugilistic and peremptory journalism...

...What seems to worry Goldstein most is what he perceives to be a dissolution of a political and community-based gay identity, worn away by the appeal and success of gay "strivers" and talking heads such as Andrew Sullivan and Camille Paglia, and replaced by an individualistic and consumerist ethos of every homo for him- or herself...

...Although he doesn't often play the scold to gay hedonism—at least not to the extent that Goldstein suggests—he does periodiDISSENT / Spring 2003 n IOI BOOKS cally inquire into the possible psychological and emotional origins of such behavior...

...his claim is that liberal society's increased tolerance is conditional, part of a bargain, and that the gaybaiting theatrics of a Sullivan or Paglia are the ultimate fulfillment of this Faustian pact...

...This is most apparent in his dissection—and conflation—of the work of Paglia and Sullivan...

...mostly, though, it attests to a healthier relationship to the non-gay world than Goldstein's...

...The "attack queers" are popular because their loyalty is to their predominantly heterosexual audience and not to some conception of a gay community...

...By glossing over this distinction, Goldstein breaks faith with his readers...

...I'm saying stop being a lesbian.'" Compare this analysis with its apparent source, a lecture Paglia gave at M.I.T., published in Sex, Art, and American Culture: Once I thought that militant lesbianism was an answer...

...The Attack Queers argues that we are on the verge of a widespread cultural backlash against the gains in gay visibility and tolerance achieved over the past thirty years, the most glaring evidence of which is the prominence and popularity of gay conservatives in the mainstream media...

...According to Goldstein, "homocons" can say things liberal heterosexuals are too uncomfortable and afraid to say, can voice opinions that from the mouth of a straight person would be considered unforgivably homophobic...

...It is exactly this kind of passive, liberal response that Goldstein rails against in The Attack Queers...

...Further evidence of a kind of heterophobic paranoia can be gleaned from Goldstein's comments at a panel discussion held at the New School last June: "It's about how all of us are regarded, beyond the handshake and beyond the smile...

...This allows Sullivan and Paglia to claim the benefits and rewards of social and cultural progress as their own, while denying the validity of progressive or radical goals beyond those that have already been achieved at a given moment...

...Gay conservatives...

...He could have risked a real debate on the legal and constitutional particulars of gay civil rights...

...he's too busy sliding from slyly decontextualized quotations to their imagined cultural or social significance to bother...

...In my book BOOKS I mention an old joke about Jews, which is: What is the definition of a kike...

...He seems less preoccupied with how this shift will affect politics than with the disappearance of some nebulously defined left-gay essence and the potential social and sexual transformations such a spirit could have, one day, brought about...

...Emphasis added.] By manipulating her words, Goldstein suggests that Paglia had commanded lesbians to "open that thing" toward men—that is, to spread their legs and to receive the power and beauty of the phallus, a misreading no doubt calculated to anger lesbian feminists...

...Gay contrarians such as Paglia and Sullivan, I would argue, offer a valuable public service...

...There is room for adversarial politics, but to view every heterosexual as a candidate for deprogramming and reeducation, to assert the necessity of their "[examining] their anxieties," is to invite an oddly legitimate kind of backlash...

...They would never make this kind of implied demand on their heterosexual readership...

...BOB BERENS is a New York-based writer...

...I think we are all subject to that joke...

...Reading The Attack Queers, one begins to wonder if Goldstein isn't perhaps more outraged by the homocons' success than he is by their ideas...

...Goldstein's approach—conjectural, subjective, psychoanalytic—is such that his most illuminating ideas are inseparable from his most politically suspect...

...Goldstein could have launched his attack squarely at Sullivan's politics without utterly distorting his books, which are relatively sensitive and nuanced...

...Catching Paglia on television or reading Sullivan on Salon can function as a safe, vicarious act of politically incorrect titillation...

...If Paglia and Sullivan do exert a disproportionate media influence, I think part of the reason can be traced to statements like this...

...Just a little digging, however, shows a surprising disregard for accuracy...

...And I'm not saying stop sleeping with women, I'm not saying stop being a lesbian...

...W W HAT LITTLE controversy The Attack Queers has managed to stir up has centered on Sullivan's charges that Goldstein deliberately misquotes and misrepresents his work...

...One could argue that this reluctance illustrates their fundamental allegiance to the status quo...

...He has written that the gay rights movement should call it quits as soon as legally recognized gay marriage is achieved...

...The war Goldstein is attempting to wage is primarily focused on the gay con servative members of the pundit class...

...His "main aim is to reach those who aren't aware of the rich connections between radical thought and queer sensibility...

...The other, presumably less desirable audience for the book is composed of "heterosexuals willing to acknowledge their anxieties about homosexuality...

...Their public disloyalty to the gay community and their acceptance of the social and sexual staDISSENT / Spring 2003 n 103 BOOKS tus quo is, he argues, the same thing demanded of all homosexuals, writ large...

...As a gay man in an ostensibly tolerant age . . . every encounter with a heterosexual involves expectations that arise from my sexuality...

...his style isn't particularly balanced or scholarly...

...If my identity becomes known to the straight man with whom I'm conversing, his words will carry a certain formality beneath which I can read anxiety...

...I now feel that part of a woman's power is her power over men, her sexual power...

...Aside from Sullivan's desire to protect his reputation—a couple of the misquotations are pretty egregious—most of the quibbling is probably moot...

...And because he never quotes his targets at length and doesn't offer up a bibliography, it is almost impossible to put his citations in context...

...Ultimately, Goldstein's insistence on a vital link between homosexuality and progressive politics fails to convince...

...There is, however, a certain reluctance to profess one's bewilderment...

...It is along this line of thought that Goldstein's contention that even a registered Democrat such as Paglia is worthy of "homocon" status is somewhat persuasive...

...His entire discussion of Paglia's work is structured around an extended analogy to pornography— which is treated, predictably enough, as a patriarchal, violent, and hetero-normative cultural force—but it is clear here that Goldstein is the one spinning Paglia's eros into porn...

...I I N HIS INTRODUCTION to the book, Gold stein describes his intended audience as "Straight people who know little about the queer community, and gay people who know even less about the progressive tradition...

...I think that when we leave the room the homosexual gentleman becomes a faggot in the mind of our friend and . . . there is a lack of self-examination and that that examination that people, that heterosexual people must do is absolutely crucial to the future of gay liberation...

...Sullivan isn't exactly fair with his ideological opponents, either...

...Paglia is a registered Democrat who supported Ralph Nader in the last presidential campaign, a fact Goldstein acknowledges and then proceeds to ignore...

...The Darwinian world of sexual power dynamics, with men as sexual aggressors and women as cunning vamps is Paglia's utopia...

...The success of conservatism in this country over the past twenty years has been achieved largely by the steady co-optation and absorption of yesterday's liberal victories...

...THE ATTACK QUEERS: LIBERAL SOCIETY AND THE GAY RIGHT by Richard Goldstein Verso, 2002 108pp $22 ALTHouGH NOT as catchy or as politically incorrect as its African American equivalent, the lexicon of gay slang now has its own version of the term "Uncle Tom...

...Although Sullivan and Norah Vincent, another conservative columnist from Salon and a disciple of Sullivan's, might agree with Paglia about, say, the inadequacies of the media-watchdog approach to gay liberation, their politics are hardly identical to hers...

...He tells us that "Paglia's advice to any baby butch headed in that direction is to recover her full nature—by which Paglia means 'opening that thing to men.' As she once told an audience of college students: 'I'm not saying stop sleeping with women...

...the assumption of gay and lesbian political liberalism has, until recently, been a pretty safe bet...

...I have not seen the results that I would have liked...

...According to Voter News Service exit polls, an estimated one million gays and lesbians voted for George W. Bush in the 2000 election...

...But 102 n DISSENT / Spring 2003 it never occurs to Goldstein that there is a deeper social problem at work if heterosexual liberals are craving outlets for sublimated homophobia, whether those outlets take the form of an Eminem, a Dr...

...Indeed, Goldstein is so confident that the pundits he targets inaccurately reflect majority gay opinion that he devotes very little time to exploring the rise of a gay right in America, as constituted by actual citizens...

...And it is here that Goldstein exposes, inadvertently, what is so inviting about the worldview that Sullivan and Paglia offer to a younger generation of gays and lesbians, one that has developed beyond a reflexive assumption of heterosexual fear and disgust...

...The word is "homocon," short for homosexual conservative, and we have Richard Goldstein and his recent book, The Attack Queers: Liberal Society and the Gay Right, to thank for introducing it...

...Paglia celebrates mythic conceptions of gender roles, and her gender essentialism, although balanced by an equal emphasis on cultural construction, cuts against the grain of most contemporary theorizing about gender...

...I'm saying that a lot of gay women have closed down half of their brain and half of their sensorium, and that when you open that thing toward men, then the sex with your girlfriend will be hotter...

...Goldstein is a gifted polemicist, and his explanation of the allure of Paglia's and Sullivan's work is intermittently brilliant...

...Goldstein doesn't engage Sullivan's or Paglia's work on its own terms...

...Couldn't that account for some of the "certain formality" Goldstein speaks of...

...And although Goldstein never explicitly states this, throughout the book he keeps insinuating that their ultimate loyalty is to their careers and the fulfillment of their own ambitions...

...With this book, he attempts to reassert the historical continuity of leftist political activism and the relatively young gay liberation movement, and to win back gays and lesbians who have drifted rightward over the past decade...

...Again, we have a righteous injunction to all heterosexuals to 'fess up to their homophobia and to get to work and fix it, divorced from any realistic awareness of how much time heterosexuals will ever be willing to devote to such a project...

...Without the "attack queers" Goldstein speaks of, the media discourse on homosexuality would be a tiresome litany of scolding and sermonizing, rather than an open and honest— and yes, occasionally offensive—debate...

...This approach yields insights about these writers' popular appeal, but it isn't rigorous or fair-minded enough to serve as the scorched-earth indictment of their work he seems to intend...

...It could be argued that Sullivan sees pathology where other, more radical, gay writers see freedom and sexual diversity...

...Yea" to increased gay visibility and public tolerance, "nay" to hate-crimes legislation and anti-discrimination laws...

...as the years have gone on, I have begun to feel it is not...

...Again, a rhetorically convenient denial of the kind of politically correct fear liberal heterosexuals have of offending the delicate sensibilities of potentially oversensitive homosexuals...

...One can theorize endlessly about the connection between the development of a person's sexuality and political beliefs...

...This is a surprising figure...

...their tithe is paid out by routinely "attacking" their homosexual peers...

...The Hebrew gentleman who's just left the room...

...104 n DISSENT / Spring 2003...

...Goldstein renders himself powerless to respond to such criticism, and for what...

...We are faced here with a rather cynical assumption of pervasive homophobia, even on the part of his "friend...

...Goldstein is writing about the limitations assimilation puts on gay identity...

...Vincent and Sullivan are dyed-in-the-wool, laissez-faire economic neoconservatives...

...For the privilege and pleasure of labeling other gay journalists heretics...

...Sullivan espouses a conventional, assimilationist sexual ethic, one of monogamy, commitment, and marriage...

...it is a personal and an aesthetic understanding of self, better suited to a navelgazing memoir than a radical polemic...

...The fact that the two are themselves gay, coupled with their welltailored, media-savvy images and their relatively liberal positions on a variety of social issues, makes it that much easier to enjoy some arguably retrograde thought...

...Characterizing the "homocons" as gay—and therefore publicly acceptable—mouthpieces of politically incorrect thought is fair enough...

...Goldstein should maybe consider getting some new ones...

...Laura, or an Andrew Sullivan...

...Better to bite one's tongue and silently muse: Black Republicans...

...But in order to do so, he would have had to ditch his glib phraseology and narrowed the scope of his critique, because on most gay issues Sullivan is liberal, and on most political and economic issues Paglia is not a conservative...