More on Michael Warner, Signorele, Bersani, "Sex Panic," etc. in this Lingua Franca story. http://www.linguafranca.com/9710/crain.html Pleasure Principles Queer Theorists And Gay Journalists Wrestle Over The Politics Of Sex By Caleb Crain
NEARLY TWO HUNDRED men and women have come to sit in the sweaty ground-floor assembly hall of New York City's Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center. They've tucked their gym bags under their folding chairs, and, despite the thick late-June heat, they're fully alert. Dozens more men and women cram the edges of the room, leaning against manila-colored card tables littered with Xeroxes or perching on the center's grade-school-style water fountain, a row of three faucets in a knee-high porcelain trough. A video camera focuses on the podium, where activist Gregg Gonsalves and Columbia University law professor Kendall Thomas welcome the audience to a teach-in sponsored by the new organization Sex Panic.
It might have been the Sex Panic flyer reading DANGER! ASSAULT! TURDZ! that drew this crowd. Handed out in New York City's gay bars and coffee shops, the flyer identified continuing HIV transmission as the danger. It pointed to the recent closing of gay and transgender bars and an increase in arrests for public lewdness as the assault. And it named gay writers Andrew Sullivan, Michelangelo Signorile, Larry Kramer, and Gabriel Rotello as the Turdz.
The flyer, however, is not how I first found out about the Sex Panic meeting. A fellow graduate student recommended it to me as a venue for academic networking. "It's a Who's Who of queer theory," he told me. "You should go." Indeed, speaking at the teach-in are the independent historian Allan Bérubé, 1996 winner of a MacArthur "genius" grant and author of Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War II; NYU professors Phillip Brian Harper and Lisa Duggan; and Rutgers's Michael Warner, one of the deans of queer theory. In the audience are the well-known academics Douglas Crimp, Jeff Nunokawa, Ann Pellegrini, and Carole Vance, as well as nearly every lesbian and gay graduate student I've ever met.
DURING THE TEACH-IN Bérubé will sketch a history of American "sex panics"; Maura Bairley of the New York City Gay and Lesbian Anti-Violence Project (AVP) will report that earlier this year sixty-seven men were arrested over two days in a single World Trade Center restroom; attorney Bill Dobbs will explain the new city zoning law due to close an estimated 85 percent of New York's 175 adult businesses; and a mustachioed drag king named Murray Hill will campaign for mayor. But it is hard for me to shake the feeling that these performances are beside the point. This crowd is angry. In his introductory remarks, Kendall Thomas refuses to identify the people he calls "the bac klash boys--gay positive but sex negative." But the speakers who follow him are not so reticent, and the crowd rewards anyone who mentions Rotello, Signorile, Kramer, or Sullivan with hisses, boos, and laughs. The men and women here tonight feel sure of their enemies, and as the evening advances, these enemies condense into one creature, a hyphenated neoconservative bogeyman named Rotello-Signorile-Kramer-Sullivan...
Michael Pugliese