Homocons (292 lines)

Jul 19 05:46 UTC 2002

FEATURE STORY | July 1, 2002 

Fighting the Gay Right
by RICHARD GOLDSTEIN 


The precipitous rise and fall of Pim Fortuyn, the Dutch politician who was
assassinated in May, sent a shock wave through the European left in
several respects. Not only did it signal the emergence of yet another
popular right-wing figure, in the world's most liberal democracy, no less;
it also presented the novel image of a gay man running on an
anti-immigrant platform. It's always been assumed that any homosexual who
hoped to rise on the right would have to be closeted. But Fortuyn was not
just out; he made his sexuality a positive issue, flaunting his taste for
Maggie Thatcher's purses. In Fortuyn's hands, queerness became an emblem
of Dutch values, and he used it to stoke xenophobic passions. He was able
to combine a libertarian embrace of personal freedom with a classically
conservative law-and-order program that included slashing the public
sector and, most infamously, closing the Netherlands to immigration. The
idea of a gay man embracing such an odd combination of values baffled most
observers, but it makes sense in the context of the gay right. Like
Professor Pim, they make it seem rad to be trad. 

If the very concept of an out-and-proud conservative seems like an
oxymoron, you haven't been following the gay right's march across the
American media. In a recent Kaiser Family Foundation survey, 66 percent of
lesbians and gay men called themselves liberal and only 7 percent said
they were conservative. Yet the loudest queer voices belong to homocons.
Andrew Sullivan, Camille Paglia and Norah Vincent are the hot gay pundits,
and they owe their success to liberal publications. Though Sullivan now
claims he has been barred from writing for The New York Times Magazine
(allegedly because he makes the new executive editor, Howell Raines,
"uncomfortable"), for the past four years he has been the signature of
that paper's interest in the gay community. Paglia regularly makes the
rounds of hip publications, from Interview to Salon. Vincent is a creature
of the alternative press; she leapfrogged from the Village Voice to the
Los Angeles Times. Though the gay left survives in progressive journals,
and though some liberals (such as Detroit News columnist Deb Price) can be
heard in the heartland, radical queers can't compete with homocons when it
comes to major media. As a result, gay and lesbian commentary in America
is skewed sharply to the right. It's as if the press had designated a foe
of affirmative action like Ward Connerly to be the spokesman for his race. 

But the gay right is not just a media sensation. The current power
struggle between two conservative gay groups--the Log Cabin Republicans
(allied with John McCain) and the Republican Unity Coalition (a pro-Bush
contingent)--shows the buzz homocons have generated in the GOP. The
Christian right makes it necessary to keep this flirtation on the down
low, but Republican strategists are aware of the gay community's political
charms. Homosexuals are concentrated in key electoral states, and they
give heavily to campaigns. In 2000, the Democrats raised some $18 million
from the gay community. No wonder both parties are wooing this
constituency. By presenting itself as a matchmaker with credentials among
the most desirable homosexuals--affluent white males--the gay right has
garnered influence beyond its meager numbers. But its real strength, like
Fortuyn's, is its positive image in liberal society. 

Of course, liberal society is not a monolith. Some of its members remain
open to self-examination and social change, but others have retreated from
this critical edge, and a powerful backlash culture reinforces their
flight. Homocons appeal to retreating liberals in a way that radical
queers do not. For one thing, they don't seem all that conservative. The
fact that they are out and proud can make their most reactionary ravings
seem vaguely progressive, and they maintain the illusion by the enemies
they keep. The gay right is as fiercely opposed to religious
fundamentalism as it is to queer theory, and this dual repudiation allows
homocons to position themselves as independents whose only agenda is
speaking "common sense." They pose as free thinkers fighting the
orthodoxies of both the left and right. In fact, homocons are neither
independent nor individualistic. They are neoconservatives in every
respect--or would be were it not for the issue of homosexuality. 

If only he were straight, Sullivan would fit snugly into the right-wing
Weekly Standard. Like its editors, he is fiercely nationalistic, dedicated
to the free market, antichoice and hostile to civil rights. Most homocons
actually oppose laws that prohibit discrimination against gay people
(Sullivan has called the issue of discrimination "a red herring"). And
when it comes to sex, the gay right stands for a lifestyle that comes as
close to the straight norm as it's possible for homos to get. Marriage,
Sullivan has written, is the only alternative to "a life of meaningless
promiscuity followed by eternal damnation." Recent revelations about his
adventures on the Internet punctured his pose of respectability, and
Sullivan has morphed into a champion of cruising. Still, his standard for
proper behavior is the closest thing the gay right has to a motto:
"virtually normal." 

This term conjures up an image of gay men and lesbians throwing off
stereotypes, and in that sense it seems progressive. But the neat,
discreet look that homocons favor is part of a larger crusade against the
things that make gay people distinct. To be virtually normal is to present
your gender in the customary way. The many variations that don't fit this
mold--bull dykes, sissies, trannies and fairies, to name just a few queer
types--are an embarrassment to the gay right. And so are queers, proudly
known as "sluts," who don't conform to the monogamous model. The gay right
is not just an ideology; it's an attitude toward difference. Homocons may
pose as nonconformists, but they push a single, morally correct way to be
gay. 

And it's not enough to butch up or femme down. The gay right is ready to
lead a charge on behalf of what it calls "gender patriotism." At heart,
this is a mission to restore male power--and it's a link between homocons
and the rest of the right. Masculinism is the tie that binds
fundamentalists, free-market libertarians and even Camille Paglia. She may
be a lesbian and a registered Democrat, but she swears an oath to macho,
which is why it's fair to call her a homocon. For Paglia, masculinity is
the source of creative energy, while femininity is a "chthonian swamp"
from which real men (and the women who adore them) struggle to escape. By
undermining this Promethean process, feminism has produced frustration for
both sexes, Paglia maintains. Her solution to this crisis: "Men, get it
up! Women, deal with it." Her seemingly therapeutic program is also a
prescription for politics: Men, reclaim your power; women, recover your
allure. 

Homocons are as vicious as any chauvinist when it comes to bashing gender
traitors, including the usual suspects: faggots. Paglia has no problem
calling Barney Frank "a physically repellent...specimen of alleged
manhood...with his puny infant's mouth still squalling for mama's bottle."
Sullivan is equally harsh toward "hirsute fellow[s] dressed from head to
toe in flamingo motifs," or drag queens "at war with their nature." This
eagerness to attack gay people who veer from the straight and narrow is
the major reason homocons have gotten so far in the mainstream media. They
say things about queers many straight people wish they could, expressing
the anxiety that still surrounds homosexuality, even in liberal society.
It may not come up at the office or the dinner table, but in the hot zone
where entertainment and sexual politics meet, bitch-slapping and
fag-bashing are major motifs. Just as retreating liberals are a major
audience for this backlash culture, they are drawn to attack queers who
make their fear and loathing seem rational. Reading Paglia, Sullivan and
Vincent is like peering into the liberal id. 

Backlash liberals are as fearful of homosexuality as conservatives are,
but they see gay people in a different light. While these liberals are
willing to welcome gays as they have other minorities, the price of
admission is giving up the qualities that make this out-group distinct.
The most threatening thing about gay people--as it is with all pariah
groups--is their claim to a separate culture and their demand that its
values be accepted by the mainstream. The bargain that these liberals set
requires minorities to deny their difference, thereby affirming a bedrock
principle of liberalism: that all people are the same. 

But there are differences between straights and gays, as connoted by the
word most homosexuals use to identify themselves. Before it was an
honorific, gay stood for sexual looseness (which is why it was originally
applied to prostitutes) and deviation from the gender norms. It still
does. Most gay people are neither butch nor femme in the traditional
sense. They are gay. And that distinct identity is the product of a
culture more than a century in the making. This queer sensibility--with
its own rituals, affects, codes and concepts of freedom--threatens the
liberal solution to difference in a way that individual homosexuals do
not. And the repository of this difference is the queer community. 

What is the queer community? It is a manifestation of the idea that people
who share the same experience--especially the experience of stigma--are a
people. Though this concept seems obvious now, in 1948 it was the unique
perception of leftists like Harry Hay. He was the first to call
homosexuals an oppressed minority, and among the first to conceive of a
movement to represent them. Hay and his gay comrades called themselves the
Mattachine Society, borrowing the name from a sect of medieval jesters who
specialized in skewering orthodoxies, including the reigning ideas about
gender. The Mattachines were organized as semisecret cells, a model Hay
was familiar with since he was a member of the Communist Party USA. 

By the early 1950s, the Mattachines had expelled Hay in a McCarthyite
purge of radicals, but the gay movement would retain its ties to the left.
This affinity is not just a matter of temperament. It's a tradition that
goes back long before Stonewall. The queer community is the spawn of a
marriage between socialism and bohemianism more than a century ago. This
heady union, which begat gay liberation, has been all but ignored by the
culture. We hear little about Edward Carpenter, the nineteenth-century
British socialist who touted the revolutionary potential of "homogenic
love," and what we hear about Oscar Wilde has more to do with his
aesthetic genius than with his political program, which included sexual
liberation. The key role German socialists played in fostering queer
culture in the Weimar Republic was left out of Cabaret, and Spike Lee has
yet to make a film that mentions the alliance between the Black Panthers
and the Gay Liberation Front. Since the radical roots of gay liberation
have been suppressed, young people coming out have only a glancing sense
of where their community comes from. They aren't aware that queer culture
is the waking incarnation of a socialist dream. 

Queer culture still reflects this visionary tradition, though its roots
may not show. Gaze through the scrim of camp and you can see a far more
central gay aesthetic. This sensibility, with its knowledge of the
relationship between sexual repression and the social order, and its faith
in the liberating potential of desire, is queer humanism. You can find it
in generation after generation of gay artists: in Walt Whitman and Tony
Kushner, Allen Ginsberg and Audre Lorde, Carson McCullers and Tennessee
Williams, Rufus Wainright and RuPaul. But queer humanism is founded on a
common experience of stigma--and that's what has changed. 

Until recently, there was no way for homosexuals to be out and successful.
They might be closeted and famous or openly gay and under siege. But in
the wake of the gay movement's success, there's now a place at the liberal
table for a certain kind of homosexual. These recently rehabilitated
outcasts should look and act like the other guests, except for a telltale
tone of voice or a certain sparkle in the eyes. In other words, they must
come as close as possible to expressing the heterosexual norm while
identifying themselves as homosexual. This is where being out comes in. It
maintains the boundary between straight and gay, allowing the pariah to
enter society on terms that affirm the order. 

All pariah groups that seek to rise must enact a kind of kabuki in which
the difference they embody is simultaneously denoted and denied. It's a
painful, warping performance, but the reward is "progress." And for the
large contingent of gay people who were middle class before they were
queer, acceptance even on these stilted terms is a seductive offer. The
gay right is a broker of this deal. It provides a training manual in
assimilation, complete with lessons on how to make straight people
comfortable, how to present your gender properly and how to distinguish
yourself from others of your kind by attacking their failure to conform. 

The queer community is an impediment to this agenda, because it nurtures
the difference that liberal society can't abide, and passes along this
difference as culture. What's more, the community insists that a wide
variety of queer identities be honored. Retreating liberals aren't ready
for that. They're looking for a few good gays, not a tribe. Homocons abet
this recruitment drive by urging gay people to qualify for membership in
an assimilated elite, and that means leaving the tribe behind. By pitting
personal ambition against communal values, they hope to wean gay people
from the institution that has played a major part in their rise. The queer
community still ties its members to the left, which is why it has been
targeted by homocons. 

Though the largest gay political organization, the Human Rights Campaign,
has been known to endorse Republicans (most notoriously Al D'Amato), the
movement as a whole is bound to the Democratic Party, and so are the
majority of gay voters, about 70 percent of whom chose Al Gore in 2000.
The reason for this allegiance--regardless of class interests--is queer
humanism. As long as this tradition and the community that embodies it
remain intact, homocons will have a hard time claiming the mainstream. The
gay right exists, just as Jews for Jesus do, but it stands apart from the
ethos that marks gays as a people. You can't really be a queer humanist
and a homocon. 

But traditions must be constantly renewed if they are to stay alive. The
brave new world of assimilation has produced a very different situation
from the one homosexuals have always known. It's a contradictory
existence, somewhere between freedom and oppression. In liberal enclaves
of America, it's OK to be gay, but beyond these sanctuaries, to be out is
to risk losing custody of children, having a lover's will overturned or
worse. In Texas last year, a male couple (interracial, naturally) was
tried and convicted for having sex in their home. The ambiguous status of
gay people requires a strong community that can protect and promote all
its members. Preserving this ethic of inclusion, when it's under attack in
the name of upward mobility, means convincing gays who dress for success
to see their affinity with those who don't. That's job number one for the
left. After all, there's nothing eternal about the queer community. Like
everything constructed, it can change beyond recognition. That may well
happen if strivers buy the program of the gay right. 

To grasp the true impact of the homocon agenda, consider this statement by
Sullivan: "Once we have won the right to marry, I think we should have a
party and close down the gay movement for good." In the meantime, he urges
gay men to form a movement of their own, since the one that exists is run
by...girls. A schism along gender lines would be devastating, since gay
men as a whole are more prosperous than lesbians. It would impoverish gay
groups that work on issues affecting women, people of color and
unregenerate queers. Abandoning the fight for laws against discrimination
would leave gay people who need civil rights protections most to fend for
themselves. We would know the meaning of Billie Holiday's wry refrain:
"God bless the child that's got his own." 

This is why it's crucial to fight the gay right, not just for lavender
leftists but for all progressives. That means creating a much closer
interface between the queer community and the rest of the left. It means
rejecting the idea that the gay and feminist movements are distractions
from the real struggle. It means teaching gay history and its ties to
radical politics, funding queer publications that can counter the mass
media's bias and reaching out to lesbians and gay men on the rise. The
left has a lot to say about the ordeal of assimilation, and most strivers
would welcome the clarity. They understand the difference between
tolerance and true acceptance, and they are willing to hold out for the
real thing even as they take what they can get. 

Why should progressives care about the queer community? Not just because
it has long been part of the left, but because it may not always be. As
homophobia becomes a less formative force--at least for the most fortunate
gay people--all the old ways of thinking are up for grabs. The flexibility
that marks gay culture is bound to express itself in politics, and a time
is coming when the most dynamic gay voices will find a much broader
audience. The Netherlands may be a special place, but Pim Fortuyn's
success prefigures an era when the creative energies of gay people can
take them very far. The message they send could help renew the left--or
strengthen its enemies. 

Consider how the Fortuyn assassination played out. The ultimate winner was
an echt conservative who wants to rein in abortions and stiffen drug laws.
Such are the unintended consequences of Professor Pim's "syncretic"
politics: They open the door to the real thing. The homocons' flirtation
with the American right could produce a similar result. We should consider
that and act accordingly. The advice of E.M. Forster--a quintessential
queer humanist--couldn't be more relevant to this mission: Only connect.