The Victims' Revolution

by Bruce Bawer

  As Halperin puts it, S&M involves “the strategic use of power differentials to produce effects of pleasure instead of effects of domination,” and thus “some of Foucault’s clearest indications of what might count as queer praxis occur in the context of his discussions of S/M.” Indeed, the more you look at it, the more Foucault’s entire philosophical project looks like a road map to S&M—a justification for Foucault’s own sexual practices, and more than that: an implicit argument that his own sexual practices are the proper sexual practices for homosexuals. “More powerfully than any other thinker I know,” writes Halperin, “Foucault politicizes both truth and the body” because he “reconceptualize[s] sexuality as a strategic device” and “thereby converts sex into the basis for a radical critique of, and political struggle against, innumerable aspects of modern disciplinary culture.” In short, Foucault was—and Halperin is—out to sign up recruits for a revolution against human freedom, individual identity, Cartesian reason, and Enlightenment values.

  Imagine believing that it’s your obligation as a “queer” to view your every sexual encounter as an act of political resistance! Foucault goes on endlessly about oppression, but he doesn’t come off as someone who has been oppressed (nor does Halperin)—he comes off as an overgrown brat who wants to have his cake and eat it, too, and who has worked up elaborate, sophisticated-sounding reasons for why he should not only be allowed to do anything he feels like but be idolized for it. Even as he celebrated himself for his exploits, he flatly refused to acknowledge the damage these activities can, and did, cause both medically and psychologically. Social constructionism, after all, became a force in Lesbian and Gay Studies at a time when some gays in certain cities were forming what Halperin describes as “a subculture that . . . has been pioneering new forms of life.” To refuse, as Halperin does, to draw any conclusions about Foucault’s philosophy from the consequences of the “new forms of life” that he advocated is, by any objective standard, morally irresponsible. (Then again, to a pure social constructionist even the AIDS that killed Foucault was nothing but a social construct.)

  Yet in Halperin’s view, any criticism of Foucault’s totalitarianism is beyond the pale. More than once, Halperin refers to Foucault’s critics as “gay-baiting detractors.” How dare anyone not worship at Foucault’s altar? Halperin devotes a good deal of Saint Foucault to a savaging of James Miller’s book The Passion of Michel Foucault—which, although it is in fact a hagiography, is nonetheless insufficiently worshipful for Halperin, who complains that Miller “reverses [Foucault’s] entire political program.” Yes, he does—by uncovering the ugly personal impulses that informed Foucault’s philosophy. Similarly, Halperin accuses “Foucault’s gay detractors” of being “just as crude as any professional, right-wing homophobe: Bruce Bawer, for example, is not ashamed to write, ‘The greatest single influence on Gay Studies today is the late French theorist Michel Foucault, an enthusiast of sadomasochism who analyzed sexual relations almost entirely in terms of power’ (not a bad place to begin such an analysis, now that you mention it!).” In other words, I was entirely correct to describe Foucault in this way—my offense was not in misrepresenting him but in disagreeing with him. By the end of Saint Foucault, it is clear that Halperin shares Foucault’s brutal preoccupation with power: Foucault saw himself as being at war with tyrants and terrorists, and felt justified in being as brutal as he thought they were; and the same is true of Halperin. “[W]henever those of us who feel ourselves to be in Foucault’s embattled position, or who share his political vision, hear those who aren’t, or who don’t, invoke the notion of ‘truth,’” writes Halperin in the last sentence of his book, “we reach for our revolvers.” This is, of course, a line from Goering.

  For a representative picture of Gay Studies under social constructionism, we can turn to The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader (1993). Edited by Henry Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale, and Halperin, it contains forty-two articles, two-thirds of which are by women (even though the actual proportion of gay men to lesbians in the general population is approximately the other way around). The editors describe their discipline as follows: “Lesbian/gay studies is not limited to the study of lesbians, bisexuals, and gay men. Nor does it refer simply to studies undertaken by, or in the name of, lesbians, bisexuals, and gay men. Not all research into the lives of lesbians, bisexuals, and gay men necessarily qualifies as lesbian/gay studies.” To “help to clarify this point,” the editors introduce an “analogy with women’s studies”:

  [W]omen’s history seeks to establish the centrality of gender as a fundamental category of historical analysis and understanding. . . . Thus, women’s studies is not limited to the study of women’s life and contributions: it includes any research that treats gender (whether female or male) as a central category of analysis and that operates within the broad horizons of that diverse political and intellectual movement known as feminism.

  Lesbian/gay studies does for sex and sexuality approximately what women’s studies does for gender.

  In other words, just as Women’s Studies is not about women but about gender (which explains why many Women’s Studies departments or programs have added words like “Gender” and “Sexuality” to their names), Lesbian and Gay Studies is not about lesbians and gays but about sex. The editors note that there is a “degree of overlap” between the two fields. They also point out that like Women’s Studies, Lesbian and Gay Studies has “an oppositional design” and “straddles scholarship and politics.” At many institutions, in fact, Gay Studies is treated, in some way or another, as a subdivision of Women’s Studies. Stanford’s Feminist Studies Department, for example, offers an undergraduate minor in Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Studies. At many universities, such as the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, departments of, or programs in, Gender and Women’s Studies offer courses or minors in Queer or Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies. Some institutions offer Lesbian Studies under the aegis of Women’ Studies (at South Puget Sound Community College, for example, you can earn a graduate certificate in Lesbian Studies from the Women’s Studies Program). But none of these departments or programs offers degrees in Gay Male Studies. (Barry D. Adam, after examining a representative sampling of books in the field, notes that while half of them “address lesbian studies, and half gay and lesbian or queer studies . . . none offers an exclusively gay male focus.”)

  Indeed, The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader reads in large part like a Women’s Studies primer. For example, the contribution by Marilyn Frye, then a professor at Michigan State, addresses such subjects as the “parasitism of males on females” and the supposed preoccupation of many literary works by men with “the theme of men getting high off beating, raping, or killing women.” Among Frye’s assertions are that “[m]any awakening women [that is, women whose consciousness has been raised by people like Frye] become celibate or lesbian,” that “[m]ale parasitism means that males must have access to women; it is the Patriarchal Imperative,” and that “[t]he woman-only meeting is a fundamental challenge to the structure of power,” for “[t]he slave who decides to exclude the master from her hut is declaring herself not a slave.” Rather than seek to understand sexual categories, the late University of Arizona professor Monique Wittig declares in her essay, “One Is Not Born a Woman,” the need to “destroy . . . the categories of sex” and maintains that a woman can escape servitude only “by refusing to become or to stay heterosexual. We are escapees from our class in the same way as the American runaway slaves were when escaping slavery and becoming free.”

  A gay man reading The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader discovers soon enough that he is expected to acknowledge (and admit his complicity in) the oppression of women by men through the centuries; to recognize that women’s revolution against patriarchal domination is central to the contemporary study of sexuality and sexual orientation; and to accept the appropriateness of discussing all sexuality, including his own, within a radical feminist framework. He i
s expected, in short, to embrace the view that gay male sexuality can be properly studied only in light of the alleged plight of women, and to understand, therefore, why Gay Studies is often a subsidiary of Women’s Studies. Even to suggest that it might be worthwhile to examine gay male identity, history, and experience as a topic unto itself, without constant reference to the alleged evils of patriarchy and the oppression of women, is to identify oneself as sexist.

  Indeed, The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader is testimony to the fact that the gay male, or at least the gay white male, is welcomed into the precincts of Lesbian and Gay Studies only, as it were, on a tentative, probational basis—for as a white man he is by nature simply too implicated in the patriarchy for the comfort of his more multiply-oppressed fellow homosexuals. A lesbian, after all, cannot disguise her gender, and a black man cannot hide his color, but a gay white man can keep his sexual orientation a secret and thereby function smoothly as a member of the oppressor class. In The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, the essays that do deal with gay men are disproportionately concerned with such subgroups as gay African males, gay African American males, gay Mexican males, and gay Indian males (not to mention pre-Columbian Native American berdaches and medieval Chinese transsexuals), suggesting that it’s far more legitimate in the eyes of Lesbian and Gay Studies professionals to belong to any one of these categories than to be a gay white male. The anthology, to be sure, includes several essays on AIDS, which suggest that gay white men who are visibly infected with HIV are at least somewhat redeemed in the eyes of the Lesbian and Gay Studies community, plus not one but two articles about photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, the criticism of whose often quasi-pornographic work by conservatives made him a left-wing hero and thus, for the gatekeepers of Lesbian and Gay Studies, that rare thing—a gay white male worthy of admiration.

  Indeed, the hostility that rises up from the pages of The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader—and there’s quite a lot of it—is directed far less toward heterosexuals than toward men of whatever orientation. Take the book’s most famous contributor, the poet Adrienne Rich, who in her essay wonders why gay men and straight women exist, since women should obviously be the primary objects of affection for both men and women. Isn’t female heterosexuality, she asks, an aberration? Employing a popular radical feminist trope, Rich all but equates heterosexual sex with rape, speaks of the “terrorism of women by men,” and approvingly cites a description of “adult male sexual behavior” as “a condition of arrested sexual development.” And she insists: “To equate lesbian existence with male homosexuality because each is stigmatized is to erase female reality once again.” Women who think they are heterosexual, she writes, are suffering from “false consciousness.” She praises as “revolutionary” the “refusal of some women to produce children,” hails “[w]oman identification” as “a source of energy” and “a potential springhead of female power, curtailed and contained under the institution of heterosexuality,” and acclaims “[l]esbian experience” as “an electric and empowering charge between women.”

  This kind of rhetoric was ubiquitous in gay newspapers and magazines in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and I wasn’t the only gay man who found such fanatical man-hatred less than congenial. In 1993, the year The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader came out, I published a book, too. In part, it was a response to the disinformation spread by public figures like Pat Buchanan, who in his now-notorious “culture war” speech at the 1992 Republican convention essentially declared war on gay people; in part, it was a reply to the radical nonsense of people like Adrienne Rich and groups like Queer Nation (founded in 1990 and known for the slogan “I hate straights”) and the Lesbian Avengers (established in 1992). What was striking was that the two sides presented the world with almost identical views of gay people: we were depicted as philosophically lockstep subversives who despised America, religion, and capitalism; whose lives revolved around sex far more than straight people’s did; and whose proper place was not in mainstream society but at its margins. On one issue after another, both camps were in total agreement—for example, both fiercely opposed gay marriage and the right of gays to serve openly in the military. For gay-left activists, marriage and the military, along with corporations and organized religion, were the enemy; a gay person who wanted to have anything to do with any of these things was, in their view, a pathetic creature begging for admission into straight institutions, rather than a soldier in the heroic struggle to establish specifically gay and lesbian institutions. Instead of wishing to be welcomed into mainstream American society, lectured the gay left, gays should be seeking to transform it radically from top to bottom.

  A Place at the Table: The Gay Individual in American Society (1993) was my attempt to effect a change. I wanted to illuminate for straight readers a subject that made them uneasy; to persuade gay readers who’d unthinkingly embraced the gay left’s narrow line to open their minds; and, especially, to help young gay people to understand that they needn’t accept anybody else’s prescriptions for their lives. There was no single “right” way to be gay. The public debate about homosexuality had been controlled by people at the ideological poles; I wanted to move the discussion to the center, the mainstream—where most individuals, gay and straight, actually lived.

  A Place at the Table was followed, in 1996, by Andrew Sullivan’s Virtually Normal, which systematically decimated the arguments of both the antigay right and queer left, and by the anthology Beyond Queer, in which several writers, most of them gay, took on gay-left orthodoxies. These books were part of a sea change for gay Americans, and the response from ordinary gay readers was enthusiastic. But both the antigay right and the gay left attacked us mercilessly. The former, of course, viewed us as apologists for something they found abominable; the latter saw us as traitors to the Queer Nation. “We don’t want a place at the table,” lesbian activist Donna Minkowitz railed at me on the Charlie Rose Show. “We want to turn the table over!” In a 1994 article, “Who Stole the Gay Movement?,” Stephen H. Miller provided a snapshot of that moment in gay history: “The lesbian and gay left,” he wrote, “has declared war against the growing numbers of moderates, libertarians, and out-and-proud conservatives (along with other ideological deviants) within the gay movement.” What the gay left was actually irked by, suggested Miller, was “the gay community’s failure to embrace what [Tony] Kushner and others conceive of as a grand alliance of the radical left.” Miller quoted Richard Goldstein of the Village Voice, who had complained that “gay conservatives” ignored “the vital bond between queers and feminists,” and Urvashi Vaid, former executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, who in Virtual Equality: The Mainstreaming of Gay and Lesbian Liberation (1995) condemned that “mainstreaming” as the work of “a racist, sexist gay and lesbian Right” and called for “a full-scale frontal assault” on its members. “This,” observed Miller quite rightly, “is pure Stalinism—silencing anyone who opposes the hard left’s dominance of the gay movement by labeling us racist and sexist.”

  The “gay conservative” movement made a difference. It helped innumerable gay Americans to realize that they weren’t alone—that there were other gays who, like them, didn’t identify with the ideas and images promulgated by the gay left. Thanks in part to that movement, millions of gays came out during the 1990s—and the more gays came out, the clearer it became that the “gay conservatives” were right: the great majority of gay people weren’t the political extremists or sexual subversives that both the antigay right and gay left said we were; in most ways, we were ordinary people, who could be found not only in Greenwich Village, the Castro, and West Hollywood, but also in Queens, Oakland, and Burbank—not to mention in cities, towns, and rural areas across America. We worked at every imaginable kind of job and ranged across the social, political, and cultural spectrum. In short, aside from our sexual orientation, we were very much like our heterosexual siblings. The rise of the Internet during this period also played an immensely imp
ortant role: suddenly, young gay people whose counterparts a decade or two earlier had felt utterly isolated could go online and discover kindred spirits.

  The result of these changes has been a society that, for gay people, is light-years away from the one in which I wrote A Place at the Table. For more and more gay youth today, the closet is a historical curiosity; thanks to the presence in their lives of openly gay adults (and the increasing number of openly gay celebrities and TV characters), they’re able to recognize their own homosexuality at amazingly young ages and, rather than being plunged into the intense confusion, anxiety, and sense of isolation that plagued earlier generations of young gay people, can matter-of-factly come out to their families and friends and be met with matter-of-fact acceptance. They don’t see themselves as different in any significant way from their straight friends; they don’t view themselves as members of a subculture or feel that their homosexuality obliges them to become political radicals or sexual libertines or to live in gay ghettos. To show young gay people today a gay newspaper or magazine from 1990 or earlier is to introduce them to a world that is completely alien to them. The issues over which gays argued back then seem, to them, quaint and baffling; they take for granted that gays should be allowed to marry and serve openly in the armed forces.