Before we blame ourselves entirely for our own deterioration, we must remember that the loss of vision gay people have experienced since the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 is partially a reflection of the dumbing down of American culture across the board. Americans' ignorance of and alienation from the rest of the world was accompanied by the narrowing of discourse, the homogenization of our cities, the restrictions on public conversation, the stupidity of American entertainment, and the gathering of power into fewer and fewer hands. Gay people are just Americans after all, and it is hard to retain independent consciousness and awareness when being bombarded by reactionary culture. Yet, the decline of revolutionary thinking by gays and lesbians has its own special trajectory that is dynamic with American decline, but also specific to our own history.
I think it is obvious, though unexplored, that this terrible moment of lost vision is a consequence not only of America's lost vision but also of the unexplored impact of the AIDS crisis on the gay and lesbian self. Contextualize this with the homogenization of cities where gays and lesbians' political imaginations once thrived. And most importantly, with the relationship between these two events: the unexplored trauma of the AIDS crisis, and the loss of the radical culture of mixed urbanity. Set it all against the backdrop of the Reagan/Bush years, and we discover how we got here. To a place where homosexuality loses its own transformative potential and strives instead to be banal.
If you ask most people what the most pressing issue for queers is in America today, they will say “marriage.” Inherent in this is the assumption that everything else is great for gay people, and only marriage remains. Yet there is no nationwide antidiscrimination law, and marginalization in publicly-funded institutions like schools and the New York City Saint Patrick's Day parade is firmly in place. There is no integration of lesbians of all races or gay men of color's perspectives into mainstream arts or entertainment. Familial homophobia is the status quo. We are not integrated into education curriculum or services. Being out is professionally detrimental in most fields. Most heterosexuals still think of themselves as superior and most gay people submit to this out of necessity or lack of awareness. Basically, in relation to where we should be—we are nowhere.
But how did we get nowhere, when it looked like we were doing so well? This is a question I would like to begin to look at in this chapter, realizing that it is bigger than me. All I can do is start with my own perception that one of the key moments where we lost momentum of vision was when our leadership transitioned from organic to appointed. That is to say, when we shifted from leaders who rose naturally from within our communities to ones who were appointed by corporate media, and subsequently by corporate donations.
Donald Suggs once said to me, “The drag queens who started Stonewall are no better off today, but they made the world safe for gay Republicans. It's a bitter pill to swallow, but the people who make change are not the people who benefit from it.”
The AIDS crisis made gay people visible. For the first time we were on prime-time news programs, in newspapers, while dying and death made the closet more difficult to maintain. I've gone into this process in depth in my book Stagestruck: Theater, AIDS and the Marketing of Gay America, but in short, the visibility created by AIDS forced the dominant group to change their stance. They could no longer insist that homosexuality did not exist. What they could do is find representative homosexuals with whom they were comfortable, and integrate them into some realm of public conversation. If they didn't, the gay voice in America would be people with AIDS disrupting mass at Saint Patrick's Cathedral. It was crucial to the containment crisis that acceptable gay personalities be identified and positioned as “leaders,” even if they had no grassroots base. It's kind of like the CIA setting up a puppet government.
This is a classic gentrification event. Authentic gay community leaders, who have been out and negotiating/fighting/uniting/dividing with others for years, the people who have built the formations and institutions of survival, become overlooked by the powers that be. They are too unruly, too angry, too radical in their critique of heterosexism, too faggy, too sexual. The dominant culture would have to change in order to accommodate them. And most importantly they are telling the truth about heterosexual cruelty. The dominant culture needed gay people who would pathologize their own. Supremacy ideology could not tolerate the confrontation with the heterosexual self that is at the core of gay liberation. So instead of the representative radicals, there was an unconscious but effective search for palatable individuals with no credibility in the community, no accountability to anyone, with no history of bravery or negotiation with other queers, who were then appointed in their stead. This replacement process, facilitated by the straight media, really became visible in the late nineties. It was the first time that I noticed a crew of guys being interviewed on television as emblematic gay men whom I had never seen in a community capacity. It was the moment when the corporate media was creating its own gay personalities, who were entirely different from the people featured in the gay-owned press. And eventually, the grassroots voices were drowned out completely, as gentrification co-opted the gay media, and the gay liberation movement, dialogically, was demobilized.
In 1998, I interviewed two white males from opposite sides of the divide for the Advocate, which had long been the most conservative national gay news publication. Rooted in the California community and initially funded by sex ads, the Advocate had just recently volunteered to relegate all sexual advertising to a pull-out section in exchange for an ad campaign from Absolut Vodka, the first mainstream company to niche market its product to gay consumers. While the Advocate had steadfastly refused to cover women (I remember the editor, Jeff , asking me who Allison Bechdel was), they also refused to racially integrate, insisting that every time they put a nonwhite male on the cover, their sales dropped. This was always an indicator to me of who their readers were. Ironically, the Advocate was being outrun by Out magazine, the truly gentrified publication, who didn't put gay people on the cover at all. They were more nihilistic than conservative, as they were motivated entirely by marketing. Out did not cover gay politics with any depth, and instead focused on consumer products their readers could be niche-marketed to buy. It could probably be categorized as the first openly gay magazine for the blasé and their friends.
Yet in this weird transitional moment, 1998, I was invited (possibly because lesbians had come into editorial leadership after a long line of dead and ill male editors) to conduct interviews with Edmund White and Andrew Sullivan for the Advocate's pages. Although both men are white, of a certain age, HIV-positive, and identified with certain class-based pleasures, Edmund White and Andrew Sullivan came from opposite sides of the gay tracks.
Here I want to replicate some excerpts from these two conversations because their juxtaposition illuminates the difference between the two points of view, and hopefully will make clear why Sullivan ended up as the chosen corporate mass media spokesperson for the gay community and White did not.
HE OUTLIVED HIS DEATH: INTERVIEW WITH EDMUND WHITE
S: The title of your new novel Farewell Symphony and its cataloguing of your life and loves implies that you may have expected to die of AIDS before its publication. Now that you are hopefully outliving your own death, how do you feel about having thrown caution to the wind?
EW: I started it as my last book. I've always been a charming writer who depended upon charm both in life and in work. I didn't want to be quite so seductive and I didn't mind showing myself in an unattractive light.
S: Do you feel that the waning sense of crisis around gay men and AIDS has left a community that has miraculously “coped” or is there a fury, despair, and regret waiting to be unleashed?
EW: I think there will be people over thirty now who have survived and who will feel themselves becoming more and more marginalized by younger people who aren't as aware of the whole battle. That's going to be painful in a very different way. It's one thing to think that we all w
ent through this together and survived it and “here's my story of what I went through.” It's going to be another thing to have nobody want to read those stories.
S: Farewell Symphony was trashed by Larry Kramer in the Advocate for representing your promiscuity. Your novel Caracole was obstructed by Susan Sontag because she saw herself unflatteringly depicted. What do you feel when powerful people try to hurt you professionally?
EW: In both cases they were friends so I felt betrayed. I had sent Larry proofs of the book. In the manuscript I claimed that I was the one who invented the name Gay Men's Health Crisis [for the organization White cofounded]. Larry called up and said, “I think it was me and I've told all the historians it was me, could you please change that?” and I said “Fine.” Otherwise all he said to me was, “Ed, Ed you did not have all that sex.” And I said “But Larry, I did.” Then the next thing I know there's this explosion, choosing me as a focal point for his diatribe. “Sucking cock in the bushes, is that all we are? What about Tolstoy, Flaubert?” And so on. Forgetting that Tolstoy and Flaubert had enormous scandals on their hands. Flaubert had an obscenity trial. Why didn't Larry call me and talk it over? He misrepresented me and he misrepresented The Joys of Gay Sex, which came out in 1978, not on the “eve” of the health crisis. And even if it had, I'm not a crystal ball reader and nobody in 1980 would have known that in 1981 there was going to be the AIDS virus.
People said to me, “It's good. It's controversy. It's going to sell copies.” But I didn't feel that at all. I just feel angry and then kind of wounded. I respect Susan Sontag a lot more than I do Larry Kramer, as a mind and as a person. So, when I had my run-in with her, I really didn't expect that she would react that way to my book. First of all, if she had kept her own mouth shut no one would have ever recognized her. Only she would have recognized herself because it's not a roman à clef. It takes place in another century, another country. I based the character half on Madame de Staël. To the degree that every writer has to find some models for their characters, I did that too but it was anything but a direct attack on her. We were very close for a long time and I still have dreams that she and I will become friends again. But Larry, I just wash my hands of it.
S: Although you've maintained a WASP patrician image, you've always been open about your sexual history and desires. Hustlers, unsafe sex, masochism, phone sex, enemas, and endless tricking. Yet this stands in contrast to a number of white gay men who have been calling for marriage and monogamy. Is this the time for gay people to adapt heterosexual mores?
EW: No. First of all, about my image. I never quite know what that comes from. My parents were both Texans, my mother never wore shoes until she was sixteen. I went to the University of Michigan, not Harvard. I never got a single penny from anybody. The minute I graduated college I was completely on my own. I'm earning one hundred percent of my living from my pen. Being seen as a patrician has to do with the way I talk or act or look or something, but it has nothing to do with the social realities. I've always struggled to make a living.
In terms of monogamy, I think that's absurd. People who are ranting in that way are going to lose all credibility with younger people. To say to some twenty-year-old gay man, “you should become monogamous” is crazy since what they really want is a lot of sex. I have always seen gay life as an alternative to straight life. If gay life meant just reproducing straight life, I'd rather be a monk.
What makes White typical of community-based figures are some key elements revealed in his interview. He has always been out. He is self-aware. He has a history with activist organizing, while maintaining his individuality as an artist. He thinks in terms of the community, recognizes its trends and changes. He is available and accountable to the community, and as a consequence has had those kinds of difficult moments that accountable people experience, particularly in a longtime conflict with Larry Kramer over the very question of sexual freedom. The simple expectation that Larry Kramer should have called him up and talked over their differences shows that White values accountability and negotiation with other human beings. Most significantly, he believes in a gay male sexual culture that is not the same as heterosexual culture.
INTERVIEW WITH ANDREW SULLIVAN
The interview began with an extensive discussion of Sullivan's new book Love Undetectable, that is not reproduced here. Then the conversation turned to other questions. Here are some excerpts:
S: Do you believe that life begins at conception?
AS: Where in the book does this come up?
S: No, I'm asking you.
AS: It's like you have a set of PC questions.
S: It is relevant because you are a spokesperson for the gay and lesbian community, you are one of the few in the gay and lesbian community who have access to the mainstream media and a huge amount of visibility. There are a lot of people in this community who are very interested in things like abortion. You do put your Catholicism front and center, and I think it is a perfectly reasonable question.
AS: I do too. Every question is reasonable. It's just, you know…asking about how I fit into leftist orthodoxy.
S: Okay, so do you want to pass?
AS: No, I'll answer your question.
S: Are you in favor of a repeal of Roe v. Wade?
AS: Yes.
S: Do you endorse and vote for antiabortion candidates?
AS: I can't vote and I don't endorse candidates.
S: But you did endorse the Human Rights Campaign support for Alphonse D'Amato for U.S. Senate from New York.
AS: Absolutely. But I'm not in favor of making abortion illegal tomorrow. And I'm not in favor of a constitutional amendment to make it illegal. And I have taken a very strong stance against pro—alleged pro-life terrorism. And I do think, certainly within the first trimester there is such a deep division of moral belief. The people who disagree with me have such an integrity to their views that I would not make it illegal for someone to have an abortion in the first trimester ever. I may disagree with them about what is moral, but in a culture such as ours I would tolerate that. I still think it's wrong, and still could not myself be a party to it in any way. But I would defend the right of someone to go ahead, given how genuinely divided our culture is on this matter. That makes a kind of pro-choice pro-lifer. Which is where I think a lot of people are.
S: Are you involved in grassroots organizing on the marriage question?
AS: Well, it depends on what you mean by that. If you mean, have I, you know, gone to cities and talked about it and raised money and talked to anybody who wants to talk to me about it, yes.
S: But not just as Andrew Sullivan, spokesperson. I mean, your support for that issue is well known. But have you ever been involved in a community-based grassroots organization?
AS: I'm not a group person, I never have been.
S: You are the most visible gay person in the media of this country. You're on prime-time talk shows, you're in the New York Times. You're in the Times today. Are you surprised that you have become the token gay man who is represented in the media?
AS: I [laughs] don't, I'm not sure that's entirely true. There are many people out there talking about those things and I think it's flattering, what you said…. All I've ever done is write and defend my writing and if I'm asked to go on TV, I've gone on to defend whatever. I think you do that well or not well. Obviously they think that I can do it and so they've asked me back on. But you know, it's not really a question of access because it's really up to them.
S: Why do you think that they, meaning the media…
AS: Like the bookers, you know.
S: Why have they selected you?
AS: Well, they know that if I go on, I'm going to be reasonable and cogent.
S: But don't you see yourself as representing a minority opinion within the gay community?
AS: No, I don't think that at all. The vast majority agree with almost, with much of what I say. It is only a very small minority of people who really do feel threatened by certain a
rguments and ideas.
S: How do you assess that?
AS: Once upon a time, when the gay world was smaller, it was more easily controlled by a particular political faction. And it was monolithic. It has become more diverse. There are more variety of voices out here and the old elites are very threatened. So they attempt to demonize or stigmatize or marginalize people who they disagree with.
S: Okay, that's your scenario. Let me offer you mine and you tell me why I'm wrong. There are quite a few people who have come from the grassroots up and have built a community. They have a great deal of legitimacy within that community. But they have never been recognized by the dominant culture. They have never been offered a voice at the highest level. They are now watching people be selected whose views are most acceptable to the dominant group.
AS: You really think that arguing for same-sex marriage is most acceptable?
S: Well, what's the other argument?
AS: [laughs] I think it is the one argument that is most likely to provoke opposition, and the polls will tell you that.
S: Actually, my recollection is that before the AIDS crisis, gay marriage was considered preposterous. But once there was ACT UP doing things like going into Saint Patrick's Cathedral…
AS: You think that made same-sex marriage more palatable.
S: Yes, absolutely.
AS: [laughs] I think that's ludicrous. AIDS, undoubtedly, for a whole variety of reasons, brought gay and straight Americans into a whole conversation and dialogue, and because it reasserted the notion amongst many gay people of our equality and our dignity, as I say in the book—that marriage came to the fore naturally. Definitely, I'm not out there telling straight America what it wants to hear. It doesn't want to hear that we demand marriage rights. It doesn't want to hear that we deserve to be equally in the military.
The Gentrification of the Mind Page 11