Denial is still there: denial of death, of the racial and viral barriers that exist among gay men, of the costs of cathartic political activity. And with this, an avoidance of the intimacy the crisis demands. At this point, perhaps, it is only fair to say that going backward is an understatement. There is no light beneath us in this hole. The hopeful idea that a community is being forged in the face of death is untrue, not because it is beyond the capacity of gay people, but because there is nothing as isolating as one’s own extinction. There is, ultimately, no community of the dying. There are only the dying.
If there is an occasional sense that the railway carriage is actually going forward, it is perhaps in the strengthening of gay identity that has begun to be felt, the knowledge that a new, less ravaged generation of gay men will replace the one that is soon going to be missing, and that it will surely gain something from knowledge of the current horror. There is also the awareness that we have gained subtle, private strength from meeting death in this way. And there is the consolation that at least one myth about gay life, held by gays and straights alike, has finally been put to rest. It is an irony of the isolating nature of death that it is also curiously universalizing. Gay men die like straight men die. Loneliness, it turns out, is not the condition of being homosexual. It is the condition of being human.
Taken Unseriously
May 6, 1991 | THE NEW REPUBLIC
The death of Michael Oakeshott was greeted in America the same way it was greeted in the English village in which he lived for the last three decades of his life. Almost no one noticed. Those among the villagers who read the obituaries in the London papers were surprised to learn that their neighbor, the sprightly, reclusive octogenarian, who drove a blue MG sports car and lived in a rustic cottage on the edge of a quarry, had been regarded as one of the most original political philosophers of the century. Josiah Lee Auspitz, in a forthcoming article in The American Scholar, tells how the pastor at the sparse Anglican funeral even got Oakeshott’s first name wrong, as the coffin tipped into the earth. The villagers knew who he was, of course. The shopkeepers recognized his face; others knew that his wife was a painter; his neighbors had seen a variety of odd characters troop in and out of the old man’s cottage over the years. They just didn’t know what he did. And they had no idea what he meant.
Michael Oakeshott wrote only two books in his life. The first, published in 1933, was an ambitious, intense attempt to describe all of experience—no less—in the philosophical idiom of Hegel and F. H. Bradley. He called it Experience and Its Modes, finding in experience different “modes” of seeing the world: science, history, practical life, and, in a later afterthought, poetry. All of experience, he argued, could be found somewhere in these worlds, if you looked hard and carefully enough. His second book, On Human Conduct, published in 1975, was an account of one mode: practical life, the world in which most of us spend most of our days. In it, he fleshed out a philosophy of law and of politics. Between these two tomes, Oakeshott taught—he ran the politics department at the London School of Economics for many years—and wrote a batch of essays and reviews. His only other work, A Guide to the Classics, was not a disquisition on Romans and Greeks, but a guide to horse racing. Of his intellectual achievements, the most unchallenged is his theory of history, which ranks perhaps with Vico’s in its originality and scope.
Sounds dry enough, and some of it, frankly, is dry. To me, however, Oakeshott meant something a little different. I first came across him in an essay I found while doing some reading on Hobbes. It’s not one of his most accessible, and, to tell the truth, I didn’t understand a good deal of it. But there was something in the assurance of its prose that stuck somewhere in my mind. The essay was in a collection of his, Rationalism in Politics. A couple of months later I came across it again in a secondhand bookstore and took it home. I started reading. Within four years of that discovery, I’d tracked down and read everything Oakeshott had published, and spent a year doing little else but trying to puzzle him out. It was about as painless a way of writing a doctorate as I could have imagined.
Toward the end of my labors, I got to meet the man himself. I wrote to ask him whether he would be willing to discuss his work (mine was only the third dissertation ever written on him), and he wrote back, in his elegant calligraphy, that he’d be glad to. I found my way to his village, Langton Matravers, by train from London, and arrived in midmorning, in the cloying November mist of southern England. He was waiting at the garden gate, with a mischievous grin on his face, and hustled me inside. The cottage was made entirely of slate and had no central heating. I discovered only three rooms: a cramped kitchen to one side, a poky guest room, and a living room, turned into a makeshift duplex, with a ladder leading to the second story, which this eighty-nine-year-old clambered up each day to get to bed. The walls were lined with books, in various languages, from Victorian potboiler novels to Hegel’s Phenomenology. He made me coffee, and a meticulous four-course lunch, and, in front of a coal fire, we talked.
My trouble with Oakeshott had always been with his restraint. He started his intellectual life with a grand attempt to perceive the truth about the world, and over the decades had slowly shifted into an elegant digression about the world’s texture. His last essay was actually a work of allegorical fiction, as if the struggle to perceive the truth had proved too demanding to continue, even pointless. I raised the issue: Did he share the philosophical lassitude of so many of his contemporaries? He replied by saying that giving up the search for “the truth” was not equivalent to believing that it did not exist. His restraint came from modesty, not nihilism. Everything is true, he averred, so long as it is not taken for anything more than it is. The nuances were everything, perhaps more thoroughly within our reach, perhaps the only way ultimately to understand the whole.
As in philosophy, religion. Oakeshott’s first essays concerned religious truth, but since the 1930s there had been an utter silence. Faith, one could glean from between the lines of his writing, was too acute, even too crushing, an obligation to sustain; or too important, too mysterious, to write about. He seemed even to enjoy the ambiguity of half belief, seeing sin as the occasion of a fascinating conversation with oneself and with God, rather than as an oppressive encumbrance to happiness. “After all,” he quipped, half seriously, “who would want to be saved?” God might even prefer us as we are: we’re more interesting flawed, and, without flaws, no real love is possible anyway, either between us, or between us and God. Love, Oakeshott explained, has its origins in mutual amusement, and ends in “total acceptance” of the other person. Or as he put it in one of his essays, “Friends are not concerned with what can be made of one another, but only with the enjoyment of one another; and the condition of enjoyment is a ready acceptance of what is and the absence of any desire to change or improve.”
This radical acceptance of what is he put at the heart of his idea of the conservative temperament, and it is why many modern conservatives find him so awkward a figure. This disposition is alien to them: it is fickle, aloof, humane, where they are consistent, engaged, and rationalist. Oakeshott couldn’t care less about politics as such, who wins and loses, what is now vulgarly called the battle of ideas. He cared about understanding the relations between human beings, and he saw the vagaries of human beings as occasions for celebration, rather than correction. His paradigm was dramatic, not programmatic. His life was poetic, not prosaic. His conservative politics were not a means to repress man’s exuberance, but a way to allow it to flourish when politics ends. In this, he was out of his time, but also curiously at home in it: a wildflower planted among our wheat.
Quilt
November 9, 1992 | THE NEW REPUBLIC
I first saw the AIDS quilt three years ago, on its last trip to Washington, when it was only a few thousand panels in size and fit comfortably in the Ellipse in front of the White House. Last weekend, at twenty-six thousand panels (one-sixth of the number of deaths in the United States so far), it fil
led most of the vast space between the Washington Monument and the Reflecting Pool. Neither experience was forgettable, and neither still even faintly morbid. Like the Vietnam Memorial, a few minutes’ walk away, the quilt has to be entered in order to be understood, a piece of interactive architecture of both public and private space.
But unlike the Vietnam Memorial, the quilt is a buoyantly colorful, even witty, monument. It doesn’t immortalize its commemorated in regimented calligraphy; its geography is not the remarkable, black snowdrift of casualties, but a kind of chaotic living room, in which the unkempt detritus of human beings—their jeans, photographs, glasses, sneakers, letters—is strewn on the ground, as if expecting the people to whom they belonged to return. People walk over this cluttered landscape, looking like tourists, caught between grief and curiosity, saying little, peering intently down at the ground. As you approach the quilt from the rest of the Mall, toward a place where tens of thousands of people are congregated, noise actually subsides.
The panels themselves are tacky and vital, and therefore more chilling: you are invited to grieve over faded Streisand albums, college pennants, grubby bathrobes, cheesy Hallmark verses, and an endless battery of silk-screen seventies kitsch. Unlike the formulas of official memorials, each panel manages to speak its own language in its own idiom; you have to stop at each one and rethink.
Camus suggested in La Peste that the most effective way to conceive of large numbers of deaths was to think in terms of movie theaters, but the quilt dispenses with such mind games by simply reproducing shards of the lives of the fallen, like overheard, private conversations.
Some panels are made by lovers, others by parents, friends, even children of the dead; and some are made by those whose names appear on them and speak with uncanny candor. “Life’s A Bitch And Then You Die,” quips one. Even the names themselves rebel against any attempt to regiment them. In the program, some people are identified with full names, others with first names, others with nicknames. There are sixteen Keiths; and one Uncle Keith; twenty-eight Eds; one Ed & Robert; eighty-two Davids; one David Who Loved The Minnesota Prairie; one mysterious David—Library of Congress; and one David—Happy Birthday. Some go only by two initials—T.J.; others spell it out in full—Dr. Robert P. Smith, Arthur James Stark Jr., HM1 James T. Carter, USN; others are reduced to symbols—five stars (unnamed) “commemorating five theater people who have died”; still others are summoned up by nothing but a baseball cap and an epitaph. Celebrities, of course, creep in—I counted four Sylvesters and twenty-nine Ryan Whites—but they are scattered randomly among their peers. The most piercing: Roy Cohn’s. A simple inscription: “Bully. Coward. Victim.”
The democracy of the plague is enhanced by the unending recital of names over the loudspeaker, as friends and relatives and strangers read out the death roll. The names resonate with metronomic specificity, adding an aural dimension to the visual litany. “Patrick J. Grace, Dan Hartland, Ron Lopez, Edwina Murphy, Mark Jon Starr, Billy, Kim John Orofino, Frank, Bob Flowers, Sergeant Rick Fenstermaker, US Marine Corps…” Many of the two-minute recitations end in “and my brother and best friend” or “my sweet little sister” or some such personal touch. From time to time, a mother’s voice cracks over “my precious son and best friend,” and the visitors to the quilt visibly stiffen at once, their throats caught in another, numb moment of unexpected empathy. I bumped into an acquaintance. “What’s going on?” I asked, lamely. “Oh, just looking for friends.”
Just when you’re ready to sink into moroseness, however, the panels turn on you. Since this act of remembrance is one our public authorities have not sanctioned (neither President Reagan nor Bush walked the couple of hundred yards to visit the quilt), it is mercifully free of decorum. Drag-queen creations—taffeta, pumps, and pearls embroidered across silk—jostle next to the overalls of manual workers and the teddy bears of show-tune queens. There’s plenty of bawdiness, even eroticism, and a particularly humanizing touch you don’t find in cemeteries: a lot of the spelling is wrong. Many of the epitaphs have a lightly ironic edge to them, coming close to a kind of death camp: “The Fabulous Scott Tobin”; “Dennis. We Didn’t Get To Know Each Other Very Well, And Now We Never Will.” My favorite panel ornament was a Lemon Pledge–scent furniture polish can.
Others simply shock you into reality: “Hopefully the family now understands” inscribed beneath a pair of someone’s jeans; “For the friend who still cannot be named—and for all of us who live in a world where secrets must be kept.” And another: “You still owe me two years, but I forgive you and will always love you. I never located your parents. Maybe someone will see this and tell them.”
The point of it all, of course, is not merely to release grief, but to affirm the dignity of those who have died so young and in the face of unique public disdain. For many of the families who came to D.C. last weekend, the event was the end of an extraordinary journey to grapple not simply with their loved ones’ deaths, but with their lives. A few short years ago virtually everyone I saw at the quilt was gay. This time the presence of families—predominantly heterosexual—was overwhelming. These were ordinary people who through their loved ones’ deaths were asserting, beyond their own sorrow, the overcoming of their own shame. Being there was a catharsis not simply of the horrors of the disease, but of the bigotry that stalked so many of those on the ground and, by association, those who reared them.
This is one way in which AIDS has surely changed America. With the collapse of the closet, a collapse accelerated by HIV, attacks on gay people are now attacks on our families and friends as well. They will no longer go unanswered. “I have done nothing wrong. I am not worthless. I do mean something,” as one panel put it. “This is my beloved son,” echoed another, “in whom I am well pleased.”
The Politics of Homosexuality
A Case for a New Beginning
May 10, 1993 | THE NEW REPUBLIC
Over the last four years I have been sent letters from strangers caught in doomed, desperate marriages because of repressed homosexuality and witnessed several thousand virtually naked, muscle-bound men dance for hours in the middle of New York City, in the middle of the day. I have lain down on top of a dying friend to restrain his hundred-pound body as it violently shook with the death throes of AIDS and listened to soldiers equate the existence of homosexuals in the military with the dissolution of the meaning of the United States. I have openly discussed my sexuality on a TV talk show and sat on the porch of an apartment building in downtown D.C. with an arm around a male friend and watched as a dozen cars in a half hour slowed to hurl abuse. I have seen mass advertising explicitly cater to an openly gay audience and watched my own father break down and weep at the declaration of his son’s sexuality.
These different experiences of homosexuality are not new, of course. But that they can now be experienced within one life (and that you are now reading about them) is new. The cultural categories and social departments into which we once successfully consigned sexuality—departments that helped us avoid the anger and honesty with which we are now confronted—have begun to collapse. Where once there were patterns of discreet and discrete behavior to follow, there is now only an unnerving confusion of roles and identities. Where once there was only the unmentionable, there are now only the unavoidable: gays, “queers,” homosexuals, closet cases, bisexuals, the “out” and the “in,” paraded for every heterosexual to see. As the straight world has been confronted with this, it has found itself reaching for a response: embarrassment, tolerance, fear, violence, oversensitivity, recognition. When Sam Nunn conducts hearings, he knows there is no common discourse in which he can now speak, that even the words he uses will betray worlds of conflicting experience and anxieties. Yet speak he must. In place of the silence that once encased the lives of homosexuals, there is now a loud argument. And there is no easy going back.
This fracturing of discourse is more than a cultural problem; it is a political problem. Without at least some common ground, no
effective compromise to the homosexual question will be possible. Matters may be resolved, as they have been in the case of abortion, by a standoff in the forces of cultural war. But unless we begin to discuss this subject with a degree of restraint and reason, the visceral unpleasantness that exploded earlier this year will dog the question of homosexuality for a long time to come, intensifying the anxieties that politics is supposed to relieve.
There are as many politics of homosexuality as there are words for it, and not all of them contain reason. And it is harder perhaps in this passionate area than in any other to separate a wish from an argument, a desire from a denial. Nevertheless, without such an effort, no true politics of sexuality can emerge. And besides, there are some discernible patterns, some sketches of political theory that have begun to emerge with clarity. I will discuss here only four, but four that encompass a reasonable span of possible arguments. Each has a separate analysis of sexuality and a distinct solution to the problem of gay-straight relations. Perhaps no person belongs in any single category; and they are by no means exclusive of one another. What follows is a brief description of each: why each is riven by internal and external conflict; and why none, finally, works.
I
The first I’ll call, for the sake of argument, the conservative politics of sexuality. Its view of homosexuality is as dark as it is popular as it is unfashionable. It informs much of the opposition to allowing openly gay men and women to serve in the military and can be heard in living rooms, churches, bars, and computer bulletin boards across America. It is found in most of the families in which homosexuals grow up and critically frames many homosexuals’ view of their own identity. Its fundamental assertion is that homosexuality as such does not properly exist. Homosexual behavior is aberrant activity, either on the part of heterosexuals intent on subverting traditional society or by people who are prey to psychological, emotional, or sexual dysfunction.
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