I heard Andrew Sullivan speak at a fund-raiser for a gay rights group just a few months after his 1993 essay “The Politics of Homosexuality” appeared in the New Republic. In that essay Sullivan argued that the liberal pursuit of antidiscrimination legislation relegates gays to a “permanent supplicant status,” and that such a political agenda is “more than a mistake. It is a historic error.” As I sat in the grand ballroom of a downtown hotel with hundreds of other gay men and women–many of whom, it was not difficult to imagine, would slip on fake wedding bands before returning to the office Monday morning–I eagerly awaited the hubbub that would erupt when Sullivan lambasted the crowd for playing victim politics and then disappearing into privileged middle-class lives. But during his ten minutes at the podium he co-opted every cliche that has trickled down from the civil rights movement and applied it to “our struggle.” I was surprised he didn’t ask us to link hands and join him in a solemn chorus of “We Shall Overcome.”
In the past, Sullivan’s writing put his readers in the thick of things. “The Politics of Homosexuality” led the reader through a web of contradictory political rhetoric about homosexuality. The introduction of such rarefied topics as Aquinas, Nietzsche, or the Universal Catechism only served to bring the real world more clearly into focus. But in Virtually Normal Sullivan appears convinced that political ideology–rather than political expediency–drives the process of government. The level of abstraction is clear as he prepares to discuss his four “essential” political worldviews: “The terms are imperfect, and the classifications artificial. They’re not meant to identify any actual group of people, any political parties, factions, religious organizations, or intellectual or activist salons.” It’s easy to find yourself in the middle of a chapter wondering what or who on earth he’s talking about.
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Virtually Normal is full of superfluous intellectual rigmarole. Rather than telling fundamentalists to shut up and go back to snake handling, Sullivan spends ten pages meticulously picking apart the antihomosexual writings of the apostle Paul, Leviticus, and Aquinas, hoping to convince, well, God knows who, that Christians who abominate gays are inconsistent. And after all that posturing he finally insists that “when the Bible is used…in a secular political order, the use is immediately irrelevant to politics as understood.”
Instead of trying to legislate tolerance among individuals, which he sees as the true aim of antidiscrimination legislation, Sullivan’s politics “affirms a simple and limited principle: that all public (as opposed to private) discrimination against homosexuals be ended and that every right and responsibility that heterosexuals enjoy as public citizens be extended to those who grow up and find themselves emotionally different. And that is all.” In practice such a principle would mean an end to sodomy laws, equal ages of consent for gays and straights, acceptance of gays in the military, and inclusion of information about homosexuality in the curricula of government-funded schools. These goals certainly seem laudable–setting aside, of course, any discussion of the amoral horror of the military-industrial complex–but to Sullivan all of them pale beside equal access to civil marriage. “It is ultimately the only reform that truly matters,” he intones. Many in the gay community agree. With the possibility of legalized gay marriages pending in Hawaii’s Baehr v. Lewin, the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, one of the most prominent gay-rights groups in the nation, has made the legalization of gay marriage one of its top priorities.
Let’s face it: the institution of marriage has little to offer gays and lesbians that solid domestic partnership legislation wouldn’t provide. Such legislation would have the added benefit of recognizing the great diversity of gay relationships, rather than legitimizing one heterosexually defined version above all others. As Homer concludes, “Heterosexuals have shown us what marriage is worth and how long it lasts….Rather than accept the narrowness under which heterosexuals themselves chafe, why not invite them to share in what we know about the multiple ways in which relationships can form? If we come to heterosexuals and their institutions, we valorize the mechanism of our oppression.” They should come to us.
The choice defense paints gays as helpless Quasimodos saddled with emotional humps; we are gay through no fault of our own, and we’ve gone through such an ordeal that America can’t turn its back on us now. It’s no surprise that Sullivan, like so many gay male authors arguing for gay equality, spends about a dozen pages detailing the exquisite agony of his repressed adolescence, writhing with self-contempt as he ogles his friends in the boys’ locker room, swallowing his shame when a classmate asks him if he might really be a girl. If Sullivan is truly intent on fashioning a workable gay politics, his troubled upbringing is about as relevant to the task as his driving record. Furthermore, Sullivan assumes that his experience is the gay experience. “This isolation will always hold,” he writes. “It is definitional of homosexual development.” Thus homosexual development becomes a recovery from an injury, that injury being, of course, homosexuality itself. It’s a burden thrust upon us, making us indistinguishable from survivors of child abuse.
