August

speakout

'The gay moment' ends conservative journal's fight

by Paul Varnell

It must have been a slow news week. The July 26 issue of the conservative National Review not only published a little article called "The Gay Moment,” but featured it as the cover story, which means they thought it would stimulate more newsstand sales than anything else in the issue.

The subhead read, "They're here. They're queer. We're used to it."

As Thomas Carlyle might have said, "Egad, it's about time!"

The cover illustration featured Jar Jar Binks, Tinky Winky, Abe Lincoln (with an attractive rainbow-colored bow tie), Ellen DeGeneres, and the irrepressible Oscar Wilde dancing in what appears to be a conga line. Ellen and Oscar are labeled by name for the culturally impaired.

The article, by senior editor Richard Brookhiser, turns out to be almost mindnumbingly shallow, leaning heavily on style and topical references rather than cogency to hold reader interest. The rare arguments are laughable.

But all this sends an important message: Brookhiser does not treat gays as a moral issue, as the magazine's very Catholic founder William F. Buckley regularly used to; nor as a sectarian political movement, as many conservatives still do; not even as a social issue generating ongoing controversy.

All that is over. Instead, gays, having our "moment," are described as just another cultural phenomenon, a new entertainment package, almost an aesthetic phenomenon.

Brookhiser implies that not much can be done to prevent or shorten or undo the "gay moment" so he is not even going to try. He is just going to observe us with detachment and wry amusement. What this signals is that the National Review is just not interested in fighting gays any more.

We won. They gave up.

Brookhiser's notion is that during this century there have been "moments" when different groups successfully drew attention to themselves: An Irish Catholic "moment" from 1900 to 1940, Jews from 1945 to maybe 1980 or 1990, and now currently "the gay moment."

"What are the common traits of groups in their moments?" Brookhiser asks. "Irish, Jews, and gays all have high verbal skills essential for attracting attention, stimulating, and entertaining the national audience."

But anyone who lives in a large city such as Boston, Chicago or Brookhiser's own New York City knows that the Irish "moment" has had considerable staying power in religion and politics if not on the television screen (Cardinal O'Connor, Chicago Mayor Daley). Its influence continues, less obtrusive but not much abated. The "moment" has been assimilated into the American scene.

The same is true of the Jewish "moment." It began most noticeably with the music of Tin Pan Alley, Borscht Belt humor and the eminent group of left-wing "New York intellectuals" in the 1930s. It continues largely unabated, now another part of America's cultural mix.

By the same token, the "gay moment"... began as early as 1977-1978 with the reaction to the sanctimonious bigot Anita Bryant, and became more conspicuous with the gay response to AIDS beginning in 1983-84. It continues now with heightened coverage of anti-gay crime, gays as a commercial market and gays in the media.

If Brookhiser's analysis is meant to reassure his readers that the "gay moment" will eventually pass and gays sink into oblivion, and I think it is, he is probably wrong: Our "moment" shows no sign of abating and may well intensify.

We're here. We're gay. We plan to stay. What Brookhiser is fumbling to describe is simply what happens with any group that can provide a fresh view, new perspective,

and a certain amount of surprise or controversy. The groups don't disappear, but people become comfortable with them and accept each as part of the ongoing national conversation. It is just the old, familiar process of assimilation.

We're here. We're gay. We're citizens. Brookhiser says, perhaps a bit hopefully, that he can think of two things that will undermine the “gay moment.” One is what he calls the "threat" of bisexuality. He cites a recent New York Observer article that found that some people said they are attracted to both sexes. He thinks this undermines some essential part of gay self-understanding.

If Brookhiser were better informed he would know that Alfred C. Kinsey publicized that same finding 50 years ago: Although most people are clustered at the ends of the spectrum, a few occupy shifting positions somewhere in the middle.

Why this should threaten or undermine gay self-understanding is not clear. The sources of a person's sexual attraction "value system" are many and varied and not always exclusionary-for gays and heterosexuals both. I think gays can live with that if heterosexuals can. Most gays and lesbians, after all, have already engaged in a good deal of selfexamination on this issue.

But I suspect the notion of occasional sexual fluidity is, as things now stand, more threatening to heterosexuals than to gays. Brookhiser is simply not paying attention to the implications of his own argument.

The only other reason he offers for the eventual decline of the "gay moment" is that gays will run out of things to say and that, for instance, "people will realize that Gore Vidal is a vain old chatterbox, not Henry Adams."

But it seems unlikely that gays will ever run out of things to say. Just because we may not talk specifically about gay issues does not mean we do not have useful things to say or do not bring an interesting perspective to general social and cultural topics: Minorities can often see things that are invisible to a majority.

Many of us can readily agree that Gore Vidal's "use by" date expired long ago, but Brookhiser's counter-example is woefully inapt. After all, as historian Douglass ShandTucci pointed out in his recent biography of Isabella Stewart Gardner, there is a good deal of evidence that Henry Adams too was gay.

Brookhiser seems to miss all this because of his all-too-provincial New York City point of view: He can only understand gays as a style, an aesthetic or entertainment phenomenon. He misses the substance of what gays are saying and therefore the substance of what is happening.

Despite his bemused smugness, or maybe because of it, he cannot understand why gays are having a "moment." If Brookhiser took gays more seriously, he might be able to understand his world a little better.

Paul Varnell edits the Independent Gay Forum web site, www.indegayforum.org. His e-mail address is PVarnell@aol.com.

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