populist.com column on Sullivan and Judicial Nominations

Nathan Newman nathan at newman.org
Wed Jun 6 22:52:14 PDT 2001


----- Original Message ----- From: "j.f. noonan" <jfn1 at msc.com>
>One of the points that *some* 'sexual liberationists' (fucking
>godawful term) make is that no small part of the reason that
>moralistic arguments of the kind that Funboy Sullivan makes is
>that they are unreasonable -- that people won't actually live by
>them because many of these dicta are prima facie unreasonable.
>When Funboy goes ahead and illustrates this point for one, why
>not use him as an example?
>Randy Andy has made a point of preaching to others what their
>sex lives should look like. When he turns up doing just the
>opposite (after slandering tons of other people for doing the
>same or 'less'), it shows that even a True Beliver can't manage
>to fullfill the unnatural demands he makes on others.

Yet the point is nothing has even been proven that he was doing anything other than what he has preached. What bothers me most about this discussion is that almost no one has posted anything by Sullivan that is incompatible with looking for an HIV+ partner to have sex with. In fact, as he pointed out, he has written about having unprotected sex with other HIV+ partners in the past.

Where has Sullivan ever said HIV+ men should not have unprotected sex with other HIV+ men?

Can you or anyone else give a cite?


>Pure bullshit, and I think you know it. I often disagree with
>you, but I don't think you stupid. I, for one, am neither
>'pomo', not 'academic', nor all that enamored of "the personal
>is political" gig. I also agree with Kelly, your article seems
>like a post ripped out of here and dumped out in the 'public'
>out of context. What a 'media' thing to do.

Actually, in the end relatively little of what I posted to LBO about Sullivan ended up in the column. It happened that the column was inspired by the fact that as we were debating Sullivan, I've been engaged in work for the National Lawyers Guild on mobilizing against the judicial nominations. And the sick thing is that the thought was obvious that if our research team could find some sexual deviance about one of the nominees, we could wipe them out, but the fact that the nominee might want to rip the constitution to shreds was not sexy enough to get media attention.

And the use of the word pomo was just indicating that folks are parading gossip with a lot of high-faluting theory to justify it. But it's still gossip at its heart.

-- Nathan Newman



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list