Ayn Rand among Gay Youth
By <http://www.indegayforum.org/authors/varnell/index.html> Paul Varnell
Ayn Rand's work enjoys surprising popularity among gay youth. The author explores why.
A WELL-INFORMED FRIEND asked me recently why Ayn Rand is so popular among young gays and lesbians.
"Is she?" I asked.
He assured me that he keeps running into young gay Rand fans in social circumstances and on the Internet. Just recently a gay man visiting his home page told him he should read Ayn Rand.
I had not thought much about it before, but it seems reasonable that a writer who stresses individuality, trusting your own perceptions and confidence in your ability to achieve against the odds would be popular among young gays who might feel particularly assaulted by social pressures contrary to their own deepest feelings.
Some background here. Ayn Rand (1905-1982) was a novelist and philosopher best known for three remarkable, long novels: We the Living, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. She also wrote plays, short stories, and five or six books of popular essays on ethics, economics, education, aesthetics and the importance of philosophy.
Born Alice Rosenbaum in St. Petersburg, Rand saw the Communist revolution at close range. Disgusted with both collectivist theory and the reality of its practice, she realized she could not live in a society that instead of bringing a human liberation, sacrificed the individual, demanded conformity, stifled individual creativity and opposed personal excellence.
Much of her life's work would be devoted to developing a consistent philosophy that would defend the autonomy of the individual against government, religion, society and everything that would use him or her for purposes other than his or her own.
Determined to be a writer, Rand left the Soviet Union for America in 1926. She made her way to Los Angeles, where she worked in the film industry, first as an extra, then reading and eventually writing screenplays.
Her first major novel, We the Living (1936), was a popular failure. But her subsequent novels The Fountainhead (1943) and her magnum opus Atlas Shrugged (1957) were best sellers, each articulating in fictional form her ideas about the value of the individual, thinking for oneself, enlightened self-interest, personal integrity, the importance of creative and satisfying work, and the multitude of obstacles to all of these.
Today we seem to be in the midst of a Rand boomlet.
A documentary about Rand's life, Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life, described as "marvelously engrossing" by the Los Angeles gay publication Frontiers, was just nominated for an Academy Award.
A made-for-television movie, The Passion of Ayn Rand, based on episodes from a biography of Rand by Barbara Branden, is scheduled for broadcast on Showtime this fall [1998"ed.].
And the first full-length scholarly analysis of Rand's intellectual background and philosophical procedure, Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical was published just three years ago by Chris Sciabarra, a gay visiting scholar at New York University.
Rand's writings continue to be popular as well. According to a March 9 article in U. S. News & World Report, her books still sell upwards of 300,000 copies a year. An English professor at the University of California at Berkeley who regularly survey's his students reading habits found to his dismay that The Fountainhead was the single most popular book.
So I asked several friends who admire Rand, both gay and heterosexual, what they thought her particular appeal might be for gays. Some of the answers:
* "Most lesbians and gays want the world to judge them for the content of their own character"not as a stereotype defined by somebody else."
* "Anybody who growing up has some special 'marginality' problem with respect to society might well respond with enthusiasm to a philosophy and vision that upholds going one's own way as a very basic value, especially one as artistically powerful as Rand's. Gays of course are clubbed over the head with the fact of their marginality fairly early on, in the very important area of sexuality. So they may be a little more susceptible to Rand because of their special situation."
* "[It] seems to me that those who feel disenfranchised in a culture would find Rand's individualist stance psychologically, at least, very appealing. A kind of 'in your face,' 'I'll be whoever I want to be, so long as I respect others' rights to do the same' approach. This would be appealing to gays, especially, given that in all respects they could well be unassailable in character, etc., while being or having been assailed to no end for being gay."
* And novelist Robert Rodi (author of Closet Case, Drag Queen and other comedies of manners) replied, "The simplest and greatest appeal of Rand to me, as a gay youth, was that her world was a meritocracy. People there were judged my the quality of their minds and works, and by nothing else, which certainly appealed to me at that particular time, beleaguered as I was by religious and societal disapproval (and worse)."
There is another way of coming at this. The benefits Rand offers are not limited in their appeal. But considered separately, it is easy to see their particular relevance for young gays.
An immunization against a great deal of popular, even pervasive, nonsense in religion, morality, psychology and political thinking that is helpful to anyone who is trying to make sense of the world and beginning to question and test whatever views they have been brought up to believe.
* A distancing from the general culture, even a kind of healthy alienation from it, based on substantive values"as distinguished from any sort of nihilistic alienation.
* Skepticism about government and institutional do-gooders and "helping professions" (coercers, politicians, planners, organizers, experts, moralists), about their claims regarding duties, obligations, traditions, moral imperatives, collective goods, and so forth.
* An appreciation for individual creativity, enterprise and achievement as the source of personal meaning and fulfillment, the connection between those and human freedom, and the falsity of any distinctions between "personal" freedom, "artistic" freedom and "economic" freedom.
* A profound and largely accurate analysis of the character and motivations of the "bad guys": their deceptions, their motives, their self-deceptions, their cynicism, their envy, their willingness to distort language and use sophistic arguments to tear down what they oppose.
In short, Rand shows people a way to understand themselves and their differentness, to see the problem as "out there" in society, not inside themselves. In doing so, Rand shows that you can be a good (gay) person in a bad (homophobic) society. That is no inconsiderable achievement.