AUGUST 30, 1996 GAY PEOPle's ChroNICLE
25
BOOKS
Leftist ideology will always put gays outside of society
Beyond Queer
Challenging Gay Left Orthodoxy by Bruce Bawer
Simon and Schuster, $25.00 hardcover
Reviewed by Daniel R. Mullen
To Bruce Bawer, queerness is a gay left ideology more than a gay identity. It is to be subversive, marginal, "intrinsically at odds with the political and cultural establishment." "Ultimately selfish and immature," it can't get gays to where they say they want to be: immersed in a society that treats them as equals.
In Beyond Queer, Bawer says there is a way beyond both the closet and the "queerthink" of the gay left leaders. This way has no die-hard political party affiliations. It asks us to be honest with ourselves: Are we really victims? Do we stunt our own growth? It rejects a monolithic gay identity while confining that identity to same-sex love and nothing more. Finally it says if we truly want what we seek, we must quit trashing religion and communicate our family values-because we do have them.
Bruce Bawer is the author of A Place at the Table: The Gay Individual in American Society. His new book is a collection of conservative arguments about gay and lesbian identity and equal rights today. Bawer calls himself a “monogamous, churchgoing Christian," a member of the "silent majority" of gays who are becoming more vocal every day.
Bawer presents forty essays; nine written by himself, and eight written by Paul Varnell for his "Observer's Notebook" column in the Windy City Times, Chicago's gay weekly. Carolyn Lochhead of the San Francisco Chronicle, and Norah Vincent, assistant editor of the Free Press division of Simon and Schuster, contributed the only two articles by women. Most were previously published; primarily in the New Republic, a weekly opinion journal edited by Andrew Sullivan, and the Advocate, a gay and lesbian news magazine.
being "participants in an educational program of which the expressly political work is only a part." Bawer argues that the fringe of yesterday is mistakenly incorporated in the gay left today. "Am I attacking radicalism? No. I'm saying that the word radical must be defined anew by each generation."
-Beyond Queer challenges, criticizes, and lambastes the gay left, often informing it on its own strategies. It's an eye-opener for gays in the movement, and a serious threat to anyone who opposes equal rights.
The essays dissect and discard such popular trends in gay rights as domestic partnership benefits, hate crimes laws, outing, and shading bisexuals and transgenders under the gay lib tent.
Sound shocking? What's worse, this camp of conservative radicals can't be ignored.
Defending himself and other "openly gay moderates" against being labeled "a bunch of bigoted, reactionary, self-serving upperclass reformists," Bawer says his group wants "a politics that recognizes the real world possibilities and human limitations of politics... that stands a chance of effecting a genuine improvement in the lives of gay Americans, rather than a self-indulgent millenarianism full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
Bawer opens his compilation with "Notes on Stonewall," calling the 1969 riots in Greenwich Village a social upheaval justified in its radicalism: Gays on the fringe were tired of being pushed around.
Varnell proposes that the gay rights movement may not be responsible for the gains we have seen or for the more liberal society we now enjoy. Essays on domestic partnerships see it at best as a bad substitution for marriage and at worst, in the words of John W. Berresford, "legislation that makes us an officially sanctioned class of oddities and freaks."
"First-generation post-Stonewall gay activists saw themselves as street combatants in a political war. But the second generation activists must embrace a new radicalism by
Andrew Sullivan contends: "The concept of domestic partnership chips away at the prestige of traditional relationships and undermines the priority we give them. [P]roviding some civil recognition for gay relationships is a noble cause... but the way to go about it is not to undermine straight marriage; it is to legalize old-style marriage for gays."
Jonathan Rauch says "in practice [hatecrimes laws] come dangerously close to criminalizing prejudice,” that violence, not opinion, is the problem in America. He reasons that if you stab someone for their sneakers, rather than because of their sexuality, you get a lesser charge for being a danger to more kinds of people-those who wear sneak-
ers
that show homophobes to be uninformed hypocrites.
Norah Vincent found that anything from individuality, to youth and beauty, to defining herself "beyond lesbian” was discouraged by butch/femme or radical feminist veterans. "Only the simplicity of what the word lesbian means (a primary sexual and emotional attraction to women), can make being a lesbian a neutral fact of life to which all other traits, lifestyles, professions, proclivities are incidental and beside the point."
Varnell's "What Homophobes Think” fits several anti-gay propagandists, like Utah Senator Orrin Hatch and Reverend Jerry Falwell, with dunce caps for having "no unified conservative position about” what homosexuality really is. One leader is against "public homosexuality," whatever that is, says Varnell. Varnell also believes the Catholic Church should be actively recruiting openly gay and celibate priests "because presumably celibacy is the only issue the church has with homosexuality."
What of the gay lib bandwagon? Varnell argues that because most transvestites and transsexuals are straight, their issues are not ours. Even including bisexuals is problematic, writes Bawer. He fears that the trendhappy gay establishment will confuse straights by portraying all gays as essentially bisexual, and thus indecisive and unable to actualize their heterosexual sides.
Projecting and practicing family values, respecting marriage, and carefully educating others are the things that will give gays equality, according to these writers. One couldn't say the gay left is opposed to these goals. And there is a sense that the gay left is sometimes confused with gay left extremists.
While Bawer sometimes preaches from the soap box, the contributors provide honest analyses of themselves, the movement and the radical right's positions. Beyond Queer is rich with reasoning that dissolves the unconvincing and poorly-thought-out arguments
BEYOND
QUEER
A Roster sites by
CHALLENGING BRUCE
GAY LEFT
ORTHODOXY BAWER
Still, when former National Gay and Lesbian Task Force director Urvashi Vaid says we risk losing ourselves by joining the mainstream, Bawer says she is out of touch for not seeing how many new gay voices already exist in that mainstream. David Link, a writer whose essays have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, argues persuasively that outing closeted hypocrites in the style of Michelangelo Signorile doesn't work. He says that one must declare oneself gay before the label can truly stick. Rumors aren't enough. Remember Pete Williams, the former Defense Department spokesman who Signorile outed because he was working in the country's most anti-gay institution? If not, it may be because Williams brushed off the accusation as irrelevant to his job as a public figure.
Author of & Place at the Table
Beyond Queer hopes to be the new politics, steeped in research and honest inquiry into who we are today and who we want to be in relation to the mainstream. Admittedly, Beyond Queer's contributors don't always agree on a single course of action. But they prove themselves justified in tipping the scales in order to balance the question of gay liberation.
The criticisms of the current direction of the equal rights movement and the call for a "new radicalism" that Bawer puts forth are as provocative as sexuality itself, and, like it, can't be ignored.
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