Queer Wars: The New Gay Rights and its Critics
by Paul Robinson
University of Chicago Press. 192 pages, $25.
PAUL ROBINSON states at the beginning of Queer Wars that “the emergence of gay conservatism as a political and intellectual force is arguably the most important new development in the gay world.” It’s an ambitious claim, and one that would be hard to sustain with reference to today’s political organizations. Indeed it’s seriously debatable whether gay conservatism constitutes a political force at all. The largest gay conservative group, the Log Cabin Republicans, could scarcely be described as a political force in its own party.
Robinson is more interested in gay conservatism as an intellectual force. Queer Wars is a languid rumination on the careers and writings of Bruce Bawer, Andrew Sullivan, Gabriel Rotello, and Michelangelo Signorile. He freely acknowledges that they’re a motley crew, not easy to fit into the procrustean category of “conservatism”—a label, as he points out, that both Rotello and Signorile disavow. Women don’t show up on Robinson’s radar: he brushes aside journalist “Nora [sic]Vincent” and excludes Camille Paglia because “her thinking is too idiosyncratic and her politics too leftist”—criteria that, if consistently applied, would seem to rule out Sullivan (too idiosyncratic) and both Rotello and Signorile (too far left). It’s hard to see much of a coherent intellectual force here.But Robinson is determined to find a conservative core in his subjects, and he constructs it along three “axes”: “[G]ay conservatives repudiate the gay movement’s affiliation with the left. … [They] seek to rescue homosexuality from its association with gender deviance. … And, finally, gay conservatives reject what they consider the sexual license of the Gay Liberation movement and urge gays to restrain their erotic behavior.” He’s on shaky ground here, too, since Signorile and Rotello can really be mapped onto the third axis only. More to the point, gender conformity and disaffiliation from the left were hallmarks of the homophile movement in the 1950’s and 60’s. The pinko sissy Harry Hay gets a mention as “the Urvater of the idea of [gay]community,” but Robinson neglects to note that Hay was expelled from the Mattachine Society that he helped to found, as he’d earlier been expelled from the Communist Party. A major problem with Robinson’s picture of gay politics is that it begins in 1969, so it ignores the conservatism that had frustrated many homophile activists for years before Stonewall.
The most noteworthy thing about the gay Right today is how far left it is. The loony radical ideas of thirty years ago have been adopted by gay conservatives—coming out as a personal responsibility, demanding positive role models in the media, critiquing (however ambivalently) the commercialization of the gay male scene, pursuing alliances with other minorities—except that instead of trying to join forces with the United Farm Workers or the Black Panthers, someone like Andrew Sullivan looks to the Republican National Committee and the Roman Catholic Church (though even he is now disenchanted with both). Instead of shocking decent mainstream Americans with backless chaps and trash drag, these so-called conservatives do it by demanding legal marriage and the right to serve openly in the military.
True, the Gay Liberation Front was wary of both same-sex marriage and gay military service, but the GLF never subsumed the whole gay Left. The first groups to present themselves as more sober alternatives to leftist extremism, the Gay Activists Alliance and the National Gay Task Force (as it was first called), took a different view. Jack Baker, the gay Minnesotan who wanted to marry his male lover, and Leonard Matlovich, the right-wing Vietnam veteran who first fought to stay in the military, were important figures of the militant 70’s. NGTF and GAA may have looked like assimilationist reactionaries to GLF, but to straight American society they were leftist wackos, zapping straight liberals and giving migraines to respectable closet cases.
For all its oversimplifications, Queer Wars provides a pleasant enough reading experience, and Robinson is a better writer than many of his subjects. From time to time he abruptly swoops down to lay bare some flaws in his subjects’ arguments. He comes down hardest on Bruce Bawer, while he’s a bit too indulgent of Sullivan for my money. The book ends with a discussion of Queer as Folk, a show I’ve never been able to watch for more than about five minutes. Robinson sees its essence as a “dialectic of sex and romance, of lust and love,” but even here he tends to sidestep the issues in his world-weary way rather than engage them in depth.
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Duncan Mitchel is a writer living in Bloomington, Indiana.
