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Friday, Oct 10, 2008
Andrew Sullivan has been condemned as a reactionary by some fellow gay intellectuals for advocating marriage instead of promiscuity -- but his complex views on politics, religion and his own sex life defy easy labels.
Nov 30, 1998 | Since 1990, when Andrew Sullivan exploded into the American publishing world as the 28-year-old editor of the New Republic, the Oxford-educated Wunderkind has become a lightning rod for debates about the meaning of gay culture in national political life. With his first book, "Virtually Normal: An Argument About Homosexuality," he positioned himself betwixt and between the orthodoxies of the left and the right, calling for the gay community to move toward integration in a way that maddened many gay activists who had devoted themselves to building a separate gay culture. Arguing that equal access to marriage and military service should be the primary focus of gay civil rights activism, Sullivan seemed to be advocating conventionality as a healthy alternative to radicalism and promiscuity.
Or at least that's the message many gay opinion leaders and literati took from his work. Some of the more traditional (i.e. liberal) elements of the gay community are content to paint Sullivan as a token gay poster child for conservatives and a self-hating gay man who is grappling with his own demons in the pages of the nation's most influential magazines. But Sullivan's multiple personalities -- as a Catholic, gay politico, libertarian and freelance intellectual -- defy attempts to caricature him.
At times intensely confessional, Sullivan's writing delves into his own and his friends' psychological and physical struggles, and uses these stories as launching pads for his speculation about love, homosexuality and justice. Many of his ideas -- his feelings of shame, his abiding faith and his willingness to use a word like "pathological" to describe promiscuity -- fly in the face of the gay conventional wisdom. But he is also just as quick to "marvel at the exotic beauty of other men, at the literal unbelievable sense of having them." As a passionate Catholic, he's blasted what he sees as the church's implicit wish that he as a gay man "would not exist," even as he continues to turn to the Bible for spiritual sustenance. As a libertarian who promotes small government, he's often been dubbed a reactionary by gay activists, even as he's writing scathing critiques of the Christian right for their moral puritanism.
Sullivan's new book, "Love Undetectable: Notes on Friendship, Sex and Survival," was written after he was forced out of the editor's chair at the New Republic in 1996 by publisher Martin Peretz, who reportedly objected to Sullivan's swashbuckling editorial style and his focus on sexual and cultural themes. (Perhaps Sullivan was simply ahead of his time; the Beltway elite would later come to share his obsessions.) "When Plagues End," the first of three interrelated essays in the book, explores his own HIV-positive status and the psychological ramifications for the gay community of outliving the plague in the new era of viral inhibitors. "Virtually Abnormal" poses the now-taboo question -- is homosexuality normal? -- through a survey of Freud and current therapeutic literature aimed at "curing" gays. "If Love Were All" looks at friendship as the most neglected love of all, and the way the gay community has survived chiefly through this simple unsung relationship.
During a recent visit to Salon's San Francisco offices, Sullivan, clad in a red and white rumpled shirt and khaki pants, seemed to have the mild-mannered countenance of a man who has never known controversy. But when he opened his mouth, his Anglo-American accented speech strummed with a vulnerable, heated momentum as he warmed to his subjects: the attacks on him by Peter Kurth and other gay critics, his disillusionment with President Clinton, the importance of gay marriage and why he's not a moralist.
What do you think of Peter Kurth's critique of your work?
It doesn't merit the word "perspective." It is so mindlessly dumb. It's typical of a certain type of person whose arguments are challenged -- rather than engage in an argument, they demonize a human being in the most personal and offensive way. It's the mark of the decadent left that it cannot argue, it can only demonize.
Can you give an example?
Well, the very epithets "overgrown schoolboy" or "Tory moralist." These are just stupid insults. The idea that I am somehow morally judging or promoting a way of life for gay people is nonsense. Anybody who has read my books is completely aware that that is the opposite of what I do, it's not even in the same universe as what I'm doing. I'm talking honestly about myself, my own difficulties with sex, my own issues with love, my own attempt to frame a debate that is between either "you are a promiscuous slut" or "you are a good boy." It's precisely that dichotomy that "Love Undetectable" attacks, pointing out that almost all of us are somewhere in between.
The last thing I am is a moralist. I just wrote a piece for the New York Times Magazine attacking moralism as a political endeavor ("The New Scolds"). Any simple analysis of anything I have written about politics will betray the fact that I am someone who believes in small government, and does not attempt to impose morality upon any group at any time. I have never urged marriage or monogamy on wayward brothers and sisters. Never. I have argued for equal marriage rights. In fact, I got into trouble in Britain by saying that some gay relationships are not monogamous. In this book, I specifically do not wag my finger at anybody who is "promiscuous." I talk about my own sex life in a very candid way, and talk about moving beyond it.
And do I decry the cult of masculinity? No! The central part of my new book is about restoring people's sense of their own masculinity and reclaiming their own gender. There is almost no sentence in Kurth's essay that has even a scintilla of intelligence. He says of me: "[Sullivan] never writes a declarative sentence that isn't surrounded by acres of explanation." Well, doesn't any attempt to say something true and complicated require more than a simple declarative sentence?
He says I downplay the ongoing significance of the AIDS epidemic. He says, "It is a slap in the face to anyone living with HIV infection." Like I'm not? My book begins with someone who dies of AIDS. There is a specific story of someone who is not doing well on these [anti-viral] medications. So it's simply absurd. How does one respond to an utterly unreasoned personal attack? It is loopy.
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