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EVENINGS OUT

Not straight, but still narrow

Continued from page 11

possible. Sullivan implies that all promiscuity is unprotected, that it is all risky, that it is homicidal and that it is always incompatible with intimacy and love.

Sullivan prides himself on clarity, consistency and rigor of argument. But these are not, in fact, his strong points. The book is riddled with unexamined terms-such as normal-logical leaps and glaring contradictions. Sometimes the argument is simply

culture. But this could be seen as a portrait of intimacies that are an alternative to marriage. Sullivan thinks that "sex between friends is something to be avoided at all costs," that love and friendship are wholly distinct. But for many gay men, tricks become friends, friends cross into sex and back again, both tricks and friends can become lovers, exlovers can be friends or even tricks, and friends who don't have sex can bond over their common sexual lives. Some of us have relations simultaneously that run the gamut from long-term lover to fuckbuddy, surround-

sexual culture.

Sullivan thinks his opponents ing us with a web of intimacies that is also a call him a "gay conservative" simply because "it is easier to idealization of marriage as the only valid label than to listen.'

irresponsible. He writes as though AIDS were over, even though he takes pains to acknowledge that AIDS is still going on, that gay men continue to get infected, that the vast majority of people with HIV have no access to the expensive drugs, that many of those lucky enough to get them are seeing the virus rebound.

"When Plagues End" is, in fact, the title of the book's first essay, a different version of which ran in the New York Times Magazine. After Sullivan's piece appeared there, contributions to AIDS organizations dropped precipitously. Gay Men's Health Crisis now faces a $2 million shortfall for this year, and has laid off scores of people in desperation. Why? Because the organization's donors many of them just the sort of well-heeled gay men who, like Sullivan, reap the full benefits of the new treatments have come to the same conclusion: The plague is over. For them.

In the last chapter, Sullivan rightly emphasizes the importance of friendship in gay

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All of this is utterly falsified by Sullivan's

context for intimacy, love and sex. And as usual when Sullivan talks about marriage, he treats the relation and the legal regulations as one and the same. The implication is that passage of some new laws will make it easier for gay men to find boyfriends.

In the end, as this tortured and unselfknowing book veers from confession to sermon, it leaves its most human insights behind. Sullivan has a large following, mostly of men who share his sense of isolation and of a lifelong war between shame and yearning. But Sullivan's solution to these problems is a versión of morality that remains too restricted and too willful to be much more than moralism. It perpetuates the cycle of shame and yearning, and this tension is audible in the frustrated piety and simmering resentment of Sullivan's prose. For those who are not already among the converted, the book's flaws are hardly undetectable.

Michael Warner is a professor of English at Rutgers University in New York City. He is the editor of Fear of a Queer Planet, and author of several books on American literature.......

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