Susan Sontag did speak about the politics of sexuality, often in a way that is useful for queer activists, though I don't think that she ever personalized it.
The longest section in her essay "What's Happening in America" (1966) is devoted to discussion of youth culture. It's a reply to Leslie Fiedler's essay on the same topic "The New Mutants," in which he deplores the "post-humanist era" of a "radical metamorphosis of the Western male," a "revolt against masculinity," and "a rejection of conventional male potency." In contrast to Fiedler and others who thought like him, she argued that "[t]he depolarizing of the sexes . . . is the natural, and desirable, next stage of the sexual revolution (its dissolution, perhaps) which has moved beyond the idea of sex as a damaged but discrete zone of human activity, beyond the discovery that "society" represses the free expression of sexuality (by fomenting guilt), to the discovery that the way we live and the ordinarily available options of character repress almost entirely the deep experience of pleasure, and the possibility of self-knowledge. 'Sexual freedom' is a shallow, outmoded slogan. What, who is being liberated?" (_Styles of Radical Will_, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966, p. 200).
Sontag's discussion of illness as metaphor (_Illness as Metaphor_, 1977) -- some diseases get romanticized, some are regarded as punishments for bad personalities of patients or their mothers, others become metaphors of absolute evil, modern political discourses across the ideological spectrum tend to designate their targets as cancer and incite violence against them, such metaphoric uses of illness make it difficult to treat illnesses as they are -- was politically useful for queer activists even before she authored her own book on AIDS and its metaphors.
Sontag was also one of the first major writers who addressed the AIDS crisis in a story published in a mainstream magazine: "The Way We Live Now" (1986).
>While I admired some of Sontag's writing over the years and learned
>from it, what I will remember most is her sponsorship of the
>criminal war on Yugoslavia, a dress rehearsal as it were for the
>present invasion of Iraq.
>
>Carrol
To her credit, Sontag did criticize common American reactions to the 9/11 terrorist attack, which many liberals embraced. Most liberals don't object to an American war unless it gets as bad as the invasion of Iraq. To this day, little rethinking on Yugoslavia has taken place in liberal circles, and it's not clear why they think it is OK to do "regime change" in Yugoslavia but not in Iraq. -- Yoshie
* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/> * Greens for Nader: <http://greensfornader.net/> * Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * OSU-GESO: <http://www.osu-geso.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>