>As is Sullivan (not that I'm that sorry for him as an individual for the
>reasons you note). The folks exposing Sullivan don't object to his
>personal life but are
signorile and sullivan are both part of the neocon "gay movement' joe was trying to ask questions about this little falling out b/t the two of them. last week already. do you think you can catch an errant klew?
"The Trouble With Normal" by Michael Warner Reviewed By Peter Kurth (11.1999)
Cast your mind back a couple of years and you might remember Sex Panic, the "pro-queer, pro-feminist, anti-racist direct action group" founded in New York in 1997 "to defend public sexual culture" in the age of AIDS. The year was something of a watershed in the American gay-rights movement, exposing the rift between a vocal band of conservative gay publicists who were calling for same-sex marriage rights and an end to "anonymous promiscuity" in the gay community and the movement's traditional activist wing, which remained anchored in the politics of Stonewall, with its ethos of confrontation, defiance and public celebration of sexual differences.
"A whole lot of things were happening and there wasn't any resistance," according to Sex Panic's Michael Warner, a journalist, editor and professor of English who teaches American literature and queer studies at Rutgers. "Bars and sex clubs were being closed, and increasing numbers of gay men being arrested on the streets of New York under public lewdness charges -- very old-fashioned kinds of intimidation. And there was no community protest. One of the reasons that there's no protest is that the only prominent gay spokesmen are a handful of media celebrity journalists who are, in fact, encouraging this kind of crackdown."
Warner didn't need to name names. Of the "celebrities" in question, Larry Kramer, Andrew Sullivan, Gabriel Rotello and Michelangelo Signorile were and are the best-known -- especially Sullivan, whose 1995 "Virtually Normal" urged the complete abandonment of gay identity politics and argued that marriage is "the highest form of human happiness," "a profoundly humanizing, traditionalizing step" and "ultimately the only reform that truly matters" for gay men and lesbians. It was time for gays to grow up, Sullivan wrote, to become "mature" and "responsible," to throw off the mantle of victimhood and join the ranks of the respectably coupled. Let civil rights and hate crimes take care of themselves -- only marriage, with its state stamp of legitimacy and regulatory power, could guarantee "the basic bonds of human affection and commitment that make life worth living."
After the public revelation of his HIV diagnosis, Sullivan turned his philosophical guns increasingly against the gay community itself, denouncing the cult of hedonism, "circuit parties" and casual sex among gay men as "a desperate and failed search for some kind of intimacy, a pale imitation of a deeper longing that most of us inwardly aspire to and deserve." Those who don't desire it, by implication, don't "deserve" it, either.
What began as a demand for inclusion, however sentimental, quickly turned into a morality crusade. In 1997, both the movement for gay marriage and Sullivan's politics of "normal" got a boost from developments in the AIDS epidemic and what was said to be a dramatic rise in "barebacking" and public sex following the advent of protease inhibitors and combination therapy for HIV. When they first appeared, the new drugs seemed set to turn AIDS from an automatic death sentence into "a chronic manageable disease," thus increasing the risk of unsafe sex among a gay population liberated from terror and gloom for the first time in nearly two decades. Just when the future had begun to look bright, the doomsayers cried, gay men had reverted to their bad old ways, boinking like rabbits in a perilous retreat to "multipartnerism."
In "Sexual Ecology: AIDS and the Destiny of Gay Men," Gabriel Rotello argued that existing HIV prevention efforts were inadequate and that the epidemic would never disappear so long as a "core group" of male homosexuals continued to practice unsafe sex. Rotello called for a community rather than a personal response to the problem, with an emphasis on monogamy and the peril of multiple partners. "Marriage," he wrote, more honestly than most, "would provide status to those who married and implicitly penalize those who did not." What would happen to the losers after that Rotello did not say. Sex Panic was founded in direct response to his supposedly mathematical analysis of AIDS epidemiology. Its inaugural flyers set the tone of the counter-attack: "DANGER! ASSAULT! TURDZ!" The "turdz" were Sullivan, Rotello et al.
With its puerile performance tactics and roots in "queer" politics and theory, Sex Panic proved a sitting target for conservative ridicule. In Salon, David Horowitz described its members as "a group of left-wing academics" who had made it their goal, "first, to oppose any attempts by health authorities to curtail or restrict public anonymous sex and the institutions that support it; and second, to destroy the reputations of the handful of courageous gay activists ... who were fed up with the homicidal sex strategies of the gay left and had the guts to publicly say so." That these courageous activists were all affluent white men with well-established media connections it might be "leftist" to observe. Urban, sophisticated and well-heeled, they were never representative of most gay lives.
Horowitz singled out Warner as an example "of how the universities routinely provide a political platform for extremists, especially sexual extremists," offering Warner's notorious pronouncement on the joys of anonymous sex as evidence of his moral lassitude and Foucaultian perfidy. "The phenomenology of a sex club encounter is an experience of world making," Warner had said. "It's an experience of being connected not just to this person but to potentially limitless numbers of people, and that is why it's important that it be with a stranger. Sex with a stranger is like a metonym." Thus did crack-brained theory justify what Horowitz called "the real source of the problem: the re-emergence of a bathhouse-sex club culture that fosters large cohorts of promiscuous strangers spreading the infection in urban gay centers."
http://www.salon.com/books/feature/1999/12/08/warner/print.html