Sexual Politics: The Gay Person in America Today
by Shannon Gilreath
University of Akron Press. 176 pages, $42.95
IN HIS SOLID ANALYSIS of the contradictory status of “the gay person” in the United States at this moment, and the strategies that might advance the cause of social and legal equality, Shannon Gilreath shows himself to be well-armed with both knowledge and political passion, and with a gift for finding the right word.
Not yet thirty, Gilreath has already risen to the rank of assistant director of a law program at Wake Forest University in North Carolina. He’s also a Catholic convert (raised Baptist) who defends his faith to the skeptical GLBT reader while exposing the dubiously “Christian” roots of the homophobia that’s currently espoused by both the Vatican and Protestant fundamentalists. He argues that the sexual intrusiveness of the present-day American government, originally founded on Enlightenment principles, is moving it closer to the Islamic theocracies that it is currently fighting than the true liberalism of the European democracies.
Gilreath analyzes “the politics of the closet” and debunks the underlying fallacy that “private life” can be separated from public status and civil rights in the broadest sense. He distinguishes between “integrationists” like himself (and the analogy with racial status is intentional) and “assimilationists” who argue that there’s no important difference between gay people and straight, a view he regards as a surrender to the dominance of the majority. Citing one of his heroes, James Baldwin, he argues that “a minority politics that panders to the same predominating majoritarian values that have held the minority in bondage can never realistically expect to achieve equality, let alone dignity, for the members of that minority.” It seems odd that a thinker who can approach the oppression of GLBT people with so much logic and passion seems to find the word “gay” unproblematical in an era when the “GLBT” community is widely perceived as having at least four distinct streams. Nowhere does Gilreath suggest that the interests of monogamously-inclined gay white men might not be identical to those of lesbians, who still share certain goals with heterosexual feminists, or the increasingly visible ranks of the transgendered, who challenge traditional notions of gender in ways that even the most sensitive and non-athletic of gay men (as Gilreath describes himself) do not. Gilreath upholds the theory that homosexuality is caused by biological factors and implies that if everyone accepted this theory, moral condemnation of homosexuals would fade away. He quotes Vita Sackville-West, a writer and lover of Virginia Woolf, as saying in 1920 that “the feminine and the masculine elements alternately preponderate” in those like herself. For the alternative view, Gilreath turns to the words of a lesbian activist who appeared on a daytime talk show: “[Donna] Minkowitz brashly told [Montel] Williams and his audience that she was fed up with the idea that the movement wouldn’t increase the number of gays and lesbians in America. … She then proudly proclaimed that she had chosen to be gay and that because of the gay movement more straight people would choose to be gay as well.” Gilreath sees greater wisdom in Sackville-West than in Minkowitz (whose ideas are largely paraphrased, not quoted), but does not place either woman in her cultural context or interrogate how this might affect her notion of same-sex relationships. Gilreath could easily have sidestepped the nature-versus-choice controversy as a red herring that’s not strictly relevant to “gay rights.” Legal history is clearly his area of expertise, and he neatly deploys the combined progress of gay rights in the legal arena since 1969 and the improved popular image of GLBT people to encourage the reader to practice “transformative politics” as a means of advancing the noble principles of the Declaration of Independence in the real world. It seems both brave and reckless of him to step off the solid ground of his central argument into the quicksand of biological determinism. On balance, Gilreath’s analysis of the current and historic status of American “gays” looks both narrow and deep. His book is worthy of debate, and in the end the value of what he says overcomes the deficit of what he leaves out. Jean Roberta is a widely published writer based in Regina, Saskatchewan.
