by RICHARD KIM
...So there is a certain satisfaction, I suppose, in catching Sullivan, the moralist, in a moment of deep hypocrisy, in finding out that he never had any intention of adhering to the standards by which he has so often judged others.
But we queers and leftists should pause before we nail Sullivan to his own cross.
For one thing, if we delight in discovering that Sullivan the moralist doesn't follow his own prescriptions, we need to ask whether excoriating him for his hypocrisy risks reaffirming those very moral standards. In finding him a sinner, do we end up concurring with Sullivan's original understanding of sin--if only to turn the tables on him? In doing so, we don't challenge the moralizing, normalizing values that Sullivan espouses. We just relocate ourselves, temporarily, on the other end of the finger....
<http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=special&s=kim20010605> *****
I agree with Kim on the risk of reaffirming objectionable moral standards by way of the rhetoric of excoriating hypocrites. I've said the same here before.
***** As Ellen Willis argued regarding the Clinton-Lewinsky affair, invoking privacy in order to defend secrecy is a classic gesture of male sexual privilege. Genuine sexual privacy involves a respect for sexual diversity and militates against the policing of other people's sex lives, "and when privacy is respected, secrecy is unnecessary." But since Sullivan has been instrumental in creating a political climate in which sexual privacy doesn't exist for others, his claim to privacy must be read as a last-ditch effort to maintain sexual secrecy. He wants to enjoy a right that he would readily deny others, and therein lies his real irresponsibility--his absolute failure to articulate a sexual politics that extends beyond his own interests. ****
Kim's & Ellen Willis's differentiation between privacy and secrecy works very well, too.
***** As with so many other sex scandals, we're left with a lot of what ifs. What if at any moment either Signorile or Sullivan had advocated an expansive view of sexual politics? What if they had attempted to build a gay movement that takes to heart feminism's historical insistence on talking about both sexual freedom and responsibility? What if they had understood the AIDS epidemic as a moment that reveals the deep-seated inequalities in our society, that presents an opportunity for queers to forge alliances with other minorities? What if they had given due respect to the AIDS activists who pioneered the languages of safe sex and AIDS militancy, rather than disparaging them in the most condescending ways? In short, what if they had been that much more generous in their polemics? We might find ourselves in a radically different place. Instead of a defense of sexual secrecy masquerading as a claim to sexual privacy, we might be talking about valuing a wide range of sex publics, such that no one need hide their sexual practices from public view. Instead of a politics of sexual fear and revulsion, we might be building sexual communities, working within them to promote safe sex while respecting sexual freedom. *****
Here, I beg to differ from Kim. Instead of thinking about what ifs, we have to come to terms with the fact of class polarization & increasingly diverging political interests among women; GLBT people; black people & other peoples of color; immigrants; & any other categories of individuals created by oppressions. To the extent that civil rights politics succeed in gaining formal equality & changing the standards of social intercourse, political categories held together by oppressions break down, & class interests assert themselves more clearly than before. Rich gay men don't have the same political interests as even those of poor gay men in the USA, much less those of poor HIV-positive Africans in Africa. In other words, if they are often conservative like Signorile & Sullivan, there is a material cause for their conservatism. The politics of sexual liberation now needs a political foundation other than an imaginary cross-class sexual community.
Yoshie