But that is not the prime reason for standing up for the conservatism of doubt in a time of religious certainty. Imagine if the Rove formula is actually a successful one. Imagine a dominant political party devoted to expanding government as a means of moral revival, using national security to achieve a tiny democratic majority. The long connection between Republicanism and the expansion of individual freedom could be severely compromised. The attractiveness of a conservatism of doubt rests ultimately not on its ability to corral majorities. It rests on its central insight: that politics is not religion; that the US guarantee of freedom is for all, not merely the majority; that political freedom must mean economic freedom, and that freedom is imperiled by fiscal recklessness; that there are worse things than doing nothing, especially if that “something” is the imposition of a divisive moral agenda.
There may come a reckoning for this political moment—and it may soon peak or deflate or be undone by its own hubris. Or it may not. What has to endure is not merely a reformed liberalism that can one day take government away from its current masters, but rather a conservatism that does not assent to its own corruption at the hands of zealots. This doesn’t mean hostility to religion. It means keeping religion in its safest place—away from the trappings of power. And it means keeping politics in its safest place—as the proper arrangement of our common obligations, and not as a means to save or transform our lives and souls. If we are fighting such a conservatism of faith abroad—and that is the core of the war on Islamist terrorism—then why should it be so hard to confront it in much milder forms at home? This was, once upon a time, the central conservative calling. Why not again?
Still Here, So Sorry
June 21, 2005 | THE ADVOCATE
People are in such denial about how serious HIV is. Unfortunately, the best prevention is seeing people die.
—Michael Weinstein, president of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation
I’m sorry. It has taken me a long time to say this, but it’s time: I’m sorry. It’s been almost twelve years since I became infected with HIV, and I haven’t died yet. I haven’t even had the decency to get sick. I am a walking, talking advertisement for why HIV seems not such a big deal to the younger generation—and indeed, many in my own age bracket. I know this is a terrible thing, and I promise in the future to do better. As gay activist Michelangelo Signorile recently told The New York Times, “If everyone in your group is beautiful, taking steroids, barebacking, and HIV-positive, having the virus doesn’t seem like such a bad thing.”
I’m sorry. At the tender age of forty-one—a year longer than I once thought I would live—I have never felt better. HIV transformed my life, made me a better and braver writer, prompted me to write the first big book pushing marriage rights, got me to take better care of my health, improved my sex life, and deepened my spirituality. I’m sorry. I’ll try to do better. Yes, I take testosterone and human growth hormone, and I now weigh 190 pounds. I discovered a couple of abs in my midsection the other day. I’ll try to disguise them. Do they sell burkas online? I’ve even enjoyed sex more since I became positive—more depth, more intimacy, more appreciation of life itself. Sorry.
I look physically and mentally healthier than ever. Sorry again. I know that by just going daily to the gym, walking on the beach, or dancing at the occasional circuit party I am the cause of more people getting infected with HIV. I have helped persuade them by my very existence that HIV isn’t such a curse, that it can be survived, that it can be treated effectively, that you can live well and long with HIV if you look after yourself and stay alert and informed. I’m sorry. I’m almost as bad as those damn drug ads showing people with HIV triumphing over adversity. In the future I’ll try to look sicker. Or I’ll stay home more. Promise. I’ll try to get depressed. I won’t work out. I’ll stay off television. I will never tell anyone that treatments are far less onerous than they used to be (and I went through medication hell for several years in the 1990s). I’ll even repeat the lie that HIV transmission rates are exploding because of people like me, even though the latest solid data show HIV rates to be stabilizing or even declining in many cities. (A decline in infection rates in New York City last year! Sorry again. I shouldn’t have told you that. It will make you less scared.) If all else fails, I’ll tell people I may have got “super-AIDS,” an old, extremely rare, now-debunked viral strain that is being successfully treated in one gay man in New York City. Promise.
I’d even be prepared to stop taking my meds if that would help. The trouble is, like many other people with HIV, I did that three years ago. My CD4 count remained virtually unchanged, and only recently have I had to go back on meds. Five pills once a day. No side effects to speak of. I know that others go through far worse, and I don’t mean to minimize their trials. But the bottom line is that HIV is fast becoming another diabetes.
You can see the symptoms. Far fewer gay men are dying of AIDS anymore. Sometimes local gay papers have no AIDS obits for weeks on end. C’mon, pozzies. You can do better than that! Do you have no sense of social responsibility? Young negative men need to see more of us keeling over in the streets, or they won’t be scared enough to avoid a disease that may, in the very distant future, kill them off. You know, like any number of other diseases might. They may even stop believing that this is a huge, escalating crisis, threatening to wipe out homosexual life on this planet.
What are those happy HIV-positive men thinking of? Die, damn it.
Of course, we could always be thrilled that so many people are living longer and better lives with HIV. We could celebrate our reclaiming of sexuality after years of terror. We could even try new strategies for risk reduction among gay men—strategies that emphasize positive ways to care for our health rather than negative ways to scare the bejeezus out of everyone. But then we’d have no more people to scapegoat and blame, would we?
The End of Gay Culture
Assimilation and Its Meaning
October 24, 2005 | THE NEW REPUBLIC
For the better part of two decades, I have spent much of every summer in the small resort of Provincetown, at the tip of Cape Cod. It has long attracted artists, writers, the offbeat, and the bohemian; and, for many years now, it has been to gay America what Oak Bluffs in Martha’s Vineyard is to black America: a place where a separate identity essentially defines a separate place. No one bats an eye if two men walk down the street holding hands, or if a lesbian couple peck each other on the cheek, or if a drag queen dressed as Cher careens down the main strip on a motor scooter. It’s a place, in that respect, that is sui generis. Except that it isn’t anymore. As gay America has changed, so, too, has Provincetown. In a microcosm of what is happening across this country, its culture is changing.
Some of these changes are obvious. A real-estate boom has made Provincetown far more expensive than it ever was, slowly excluding poorer and younger visitors and residents. Where, once, gayness trumped class, now the reverse is true. Beautiful, renovated houses are slowly outnumbering beach shacks, once crammed with twentysomething, hand-to-mouth misfits or artists. The role of lesbians in the town’s civic and cultural life has grown dramatically, as it has in the broader gay world. The faces of people dying from or struggling with AIDS have dwindled to an unlucky few. The number of children of gay couples has soared, and, some weeks, strollers clog the sidewalks. Bar life is not nearly as central to socializing as it once was. Men and women gather on the beach, drink coffee on the front porch of a store, or meet at the film festival or Spiritus Pizza.
And, of course, week after week this summer, couple after couple got married—well over a thousand in the year and a half since gay marriage has been legal in Massachusetts. Outside my window on a patch of beach that somehow became impromptu hallowed ground, I watched dozens get hitched—under a chuppah or with a priest, in formalwear or beach clothes, some with New Age drums and horns, even one associated with a full-bore Mass. Two friends lighted the town monument in purple to celebrate; a tuxedoed male couple sl
ipping onto the beach was suddenly greeted with a huge cheer from the crowd; an elderly lesbian couple attached cans to the back of their Volkswagen and honked their horn as they drove up the high street. The heterosexuals in the crowd knew exactly what to do. They waved and cheered and smiled. Then, suddenly, as if learning the habits of a new era, gay bystanders joined in. In an instant, the difference between gay and straight receded again a little.
But here’s the strange thing: these changes did not feel like a revolution. They felt merely like small, if critical, steps in an inexorable evolution toward the end of a distinctive gay culture. For what has happened to Provincetown this past decade, as with gay America as a whole, has been less like a political revolution from above than a social transformation from below. There is no single gay identity anymore, let alone a single look or style or culture. Memorial Day sees the younger generation of lesbians, looking like lost members of a boy band, with their baseball caps, preppy shirts, short hair, and earrings. Independence Day brings the partiers: the “circuit boys,” with perfect torsos, a thirst for nightlife, designer drugs, and countless bottles of water. For a week in mid-July, the town is dominated by “bears”—chubby, hairy, unkempt men with an affinity for beer and pizza. Family Week heralds an influx of children and harried gay parents. Film Festival Week brings in the artsy crowd. Women’s Week brings the more familiar images of older lesbians: a landlocked flotilla of windbreakers and sensible shoes. East Village bohemians drift in throughout the summer; quiet male couples spend more time browsing gourmet groceries and Realtors than cruising night spots; the predictable population of artists and writers—Michael Cunningham and John Waters are fixtures—mix with openly gay lawyers and cops and teachers and shrinks.
Slowly but unmistakably, gay culture is ending. You see it beyond the poignant transformation of Ptown: on the streets of the big cities, on university campuses, in the suburbs where gay couples have settled, and in the entrails of the internet. In fact, it is beginning to dawn on many that the very concept of gay culture may one day disappear altogether. By that, I do not mean that homosexual men and lesbians will not exist—or that they won’t create a community of sorts and a culture that sets them in some ways apart. I mean simply that what encompasses gay culture itself will expand into such a diverse set of subcultures that “gayness” alone will cease to tell you very much about any individual. The distinction between gay and straight culture will become so blurred, so fractured, and so intermingled that it may become more helpful not to examine them separately at all.
For many in the gay world, this is both a triumph and a threat. It is a triumph because it is what we always dreamed of: a world in which being gay is a nonissue among our families, friends, and neighbors. But it is a threat in the way that all loss is a threat. For many of us who grew up fighting a world of now-inconceivable silence and shame, distinctive gayness became an integral part of who we are. It helped define us not only to the world but also to ourselves. Letting that go is as hard as it is liberating, as saddening as it is invigorating. And, while social advance allows many of us to contemplate this gift of a problem, we are also aware that in other parts of the country and the world the reverse may be happening. With the growth of fundamentalism across the religious world—from Pope Benedict XVI’s Vatican to Islamic fatwas and American evangelicalism—gayness is under attack in many places, even as it wrests free from repression in others. In fact, the two phenomena are related. The new antigay fervor is a response to the growing probability that the world will one day treat gay and straight as interchangeable humans and citizens rather than as estranged others. It is the end of gay culture—not its endurance—that threatens the old order. It is a simple fact that, across the state of Massachusetts, “gay marriage” has just been abolished. The marriage licenses gay couples receive are indistinguishable from those given to straight couples. On paper, the difference is now history. In the real world, the consequences of that are still unfolding.
Quite how this has happened (and why) are questions that historians will fight over someday, but certain influences seem clear even now—chief among them the HIV epidemic. Before AIDS hit, a fragile but nascent gay world had formed in a handful of major US cities. The gay culture that exploded from it in the 1970s had the force of something long suppressed, and it coincided with a more general relaxation of social norms. This was the era of the post-Stonewall New Left, of the Castro and the West Village, an era where sexuality forged a new meaning for gayness: of sexual adventure, political radicalism, and cultural revolution.
The fact that openly gay communities were still relatively small and geographically concentrated in a handful of urban areas created a distinctive gay culture. The central institutions for gay men were baths and bars, places where men met each other in highly sexualized contexts and where sex provided the commonality. Gay resorts had their heyday—from Provincetown to Key West. The gay press grew quickly and was centered around classified personal ads or bar and bath advertising. Popular culture was suffused with stunning displays of homosexual burlesque: the music of Queen, the costumes of the Village People, the flamboyance of Elton John’s debut; the advertising of Calvin Klein; and the intoxication of disco itself, a gay creation that became emblematic of an entire heterosexual era. When this cultural explosion was acknowledged, when it explicitly penetrated the mainstream, the results, however, were highly unstable: Harvey Milk was assassinated in San Francisco and Anita Bryant led an antigay crusade. But the emergence of an openly gay culture, however vulnerable, was still real.
And then, of course, catastrophe. The history of gay America as an openly gay culture is not only extremely short—a mere thirty years or so—but also engulfed and defined by a plague that struck almost poignantly at the headiest moment of liberation. The entire structure of emergent gay culture—sexual, radical, subversive—met a virus that killed almost everyone it touched. Virtually the entire generation that pioneered gay culture was wiped out—quickly. Even now, it is hard to find a solid phalanx of gay men in their fifties, sixties, or seventies—men who fought from Stonewall or before for public recognition and cultural change. And those who survived the nightmare of the 1980s to mid-’90s were often overwhelmed merely with coping with plague, or fearing it themselves, or fighting for research or awareness or more effective prevention.
This astonishing story might not be believed in fiction. And, in fiction, it might have led to the collapse of such a new, fragile subculture. AIDS could have been widely perceived as a salutary retribution for the gay revolution; it could have led to quarantining or the collapse of nascent gay institutions. Instead, it had the opposite effect. The tens of thousands of deaths of men from every part of the country established homosexuality as a legitimate topic more swiftly than any political manifesto could possibly have done. The images of gay male lives were recorded on quilts and in countless obituaries; men whose homosexuality might have been euphemized into nonexistence were immediately identifiable and gone. And those gay men and lesbians who witnessed this entire event became altered forever, not only emotionally, but also politically—whether through the theatrical activism of ACT UP or the furious organization of political gays among the Democrats and some Republicans. More crucially, gay men and lesbians built civil institutions to counter the disease; they forged new ties to scientists and politicians; they found themselves forced into more intense relations with their own natural families and the families of loved ones. Where bathhouses once brought gay men together, now it was memorial services. The emotional and psychic bonding became the core of a new identity. The plague provided a unifying social and cultural focus.
But it also presaged a new direction. That direction was unmistakably outward and integrative. To borrow a useful distinction deployed by the writer Bruce Bawer, integration did not necessarily mean assimilation. It was not a wholesale rejection of the gay past, as some feared and others hoped. Gay men wanted to be fully part of the world, but not at the expense of their own
sexual freedom (and safer sex became a means not to renounce that freedom but to save it). What the epidemic revealed was how gay men—and, by inference, lesbians—could not seal themselves off from the rest of society. They needed scientific research, civic support, and political lobbying to survive, in this case literally. The lesson was not that sexual liberation was mistaken, but rather that it wasn’t enough. Unless the gay population was tied into the broader society, unless it had roots in the wider world, unless it brought into its fold the heterosexual families and friends of gay men and women, the gay population would remain at the mercy of others and of misfortune. A ghetto was no longer an option.
When the plague receded in the face of far more effective HIV treatments in the mid-nineties and gay men and women were able to catch their breath and reflect, the question of what a more integrated gay culture might actually mean reemerged. For a while, it arrived in a vacuum. Most of the older male generation was dead or exhausted, and so it was only natural, perhaps, that the next generation of leaders tended to be lesbian—running the major gay political groups and magazines. Lesbians also pioneered a new baby boom, with more lesbian couples adopting or having children. HIV-positive gay men developed different strategies for living suddenly posthumous lives. Some retreated into quiet relationships; others quit jobs or changed their careers completely; others chose the escapism of what became known as “the circuit,” a series of rave parties around the country and the world where fears could be lost on the drug-enhanced dance floor; others still became lost in a suicidal vortex of crystal meth, internet hookups, and sex addiction. HIV-negative men, many of whom had lost husbands and friends, were not so different. In some ways, the toll was greater. They had survived disaster with their health intact. But, unlike their HIV-positive friends, the threat of contracting the disease still existed while they battled survivors’ guilt. The plague was over but not over; and, as they saw men with HIV celebrate survival, some even felt shut out of a new sub-subculture, suspended between fear and triumph but unable to experience either fully.
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