Sullivan's Drivels

Homo Superior has changed his format, but he's still linking to Andrew Sullivan, who's been complaining about the current state of the Right.

Once upon a time, the intellectual conservatives in this country cherished their dissidents, encouraged argument, embraced the quirky, valued the eccentric and mocked the lock-step ideological left. Now they are what they once mocked. And they have the ideological discipline of the old left.

Like HomoSup, I wonder which "intellectual conservatives" Sullivan has in mind, and when this Once Upon a Time golden age could have been. Homo Superior mentions William F. Buckley, who was as much of an intellectual second-rater as ... well, as Andrew Sullivan. Sullivan doesn't know his history very well, particularly of the American Right, but that's hardly news. What I find funny is that Sullivan himself started out as a hard-liner except for his homosexuality, and filled the pages of The New Republic with right-wing mediocrities like himself (remember Ruth Shalit?); he no doubt likes to think of himself as "quirky" if not "eccentric," but he has never been someone you could read for substance. When George W. Bush took the Presidency, Sullivan was exultant, jeering at the anti-corporate leftists who were going to rage impotently under the new dispensation; some years later Sullivan endorsed Barack Obama, which was not really that much of a change.

Not that I have anything against hard-liners; I suppose I'm one myself, though I'm not sure which line I'm hard about. Homo Superior goes on to say:

Having said that, I have had more valuable conversations, ones without judgment or ire, with people like Buckley than I have had with those on the lock-step ideological left, and that includes many, many on the Queer Left.

Like anyone with extreme viewpoints, their definition of dissident is someone who agrees with them.

I realized I didn’t belong in the left and sometimes call myself a lapsed lefty. I now embrace the descriptor, contrarian.

(The video clip above comes from Noam Chomsky's 1969 appearance on Buckley's PBS program Firing Line. Buckley's offer to "smash you in the goddam face" is a reference to his then-recent offer, made in earnest, to do the same to Gore Vidal. Here it's supposed to be a joke, though I've never gotten its point. It's the sort of thing that should be borne in mind, though, when Buckley is eulogized. So should Buckley's vacuous debating style.)

Maybe I should embrace "contrarian" myself, but the word has been dirtied more than a little since Christopher Hitchens began touting himself as one. I don't see my own positions are particularly contrary, if I understand the word correctly, which to me implies simply staking an opposing position; I find myself over yonder somewhere. And what happens when two contrarians clash? Do they cancel each other out like matter and anti-matter?

I don't know if I "belong in the left" either, but I do know that most of the thinkers and writers I've learned the most from have been associated with the left, and that left writers and media are those I can reliably look to for accurate information about politics and culture. The few right-wingers with whom I find some common ground are those who are least lock-step themselves, like William Buckley calling for the legalization of drugs (probably the only issue on which I agree with him). On the other hand, I'm not wedded to the word "left", anymore than I am to the words "gay" or "queer."

I'm particularly amused by the notion that the left is lock-step, considering how often people on the left complain about the deep divisions, the sectarian squabbling, that divide our portion of the political spectrum. And while I'm being amused, the use of the word "extreme" as a cussword is always good for a giggle. (I'm reminded of an old joke where a man accusingly asks an uppity woman, "Are you a lesbian?" and she counters, "Are you the alternative?")

I know very well about homophobia on the left, which is detestable and gives me opportunities to express my own hard-line extremism. Harry Hay founded Mattachine after he was expelled from the Communist Party of the USA for being a queer; Black Mountain College, a lefty-liberal experimental college of the 1930s through the 1950s, fired some queer faculty, notably the anarchist writer Paul Goodman, who wrote in a famous essay called "Memoirs of an Ancient Activist",

Frankly, my experience of radical community is that it does not tolerate my freedom. Nevertheless, I am all for community because it is a human thing, only I seem doomed to be left out.

On the other hand, my homosexual acts and the overt claim to the right to commit them have never disadvantaged me much, as far as I know, in more square institutions. I have taught at half a dozen state universities. I am continually invited, often as chief speaker, to conferences of junior high school superintendents, boards of regents, guidance counsellors, task forces on delinquency, etc., etc. I say what I think right, I make passes if there is occasion -- I have even made out, which is more than I can say for conferences of SDS or Resistance. [Len Richmond and Gary Noguera, eds.,The Gay Liberation Book (Ramparts Press, 1973, p. 24]

I especially like that bit about favoring community but always being left out of it, but then I've generally found myself not wanting in to the available communities. I've generally been content to deal with communities through their writings. If I'm marginalized, well, it's a dirty job but someone has to do it, and more often than not it's because I've sidled over to the margins rather than stay close to the people who are at the center or core or mainstream -- whatever you want to call it. ("I wouldn't belong to a club that would have me for a member" -- but there's not a club made up of those of us who identify with that line, either.) I've been a little disappointed to find that I don't necessarily get along with other misfits because being a misfit is not in itself enough to have in common; but that too has been a useful lesson. And despite all this, I've never been a total isolate either. I have something resembling community, and it serves to keep me going.

What to do about American politics, though, I don't know. As an intellectual I have little to say to the Teabaggers, but then anti-intellectualism is endemic to American society, including many intellectuals. Debate is hard, disagreement is generally painful, and most people prefer not to deal with either. Andrew Sullivan has done little to improve things; I've done even less. We're probably doomed.

Sullivan's Drivels

Homo Superior has changed his format, but he's still linking to Andrew Sullivan, who's been complaining about the current state of the Right.

Once upon a time, the intellectual conservatives in this country cherished their dissidents, encouraged argument, embraced the quirky, valued the eccentric and mocked the lock-step ideological left. Now they are what they once mocked. And they have the ideological discipline of the old left.

Like HomoSup, I wonder which "intellectual conservatives" Sullivan has in mind, and when this Once Upon a Time golden age could have been. Homo Superior mentions William F. Buckley, who was as much of an intellectual second-rater as ... well, as Andrew Sullivan. Sullivan doesn't know his history very well, particularly of the American Right, but that's hardly news. What I find funny is that Sullivan himself started out as a hard-liner except for his homosexuality, and filled the pages of The New Republic with right-wing mediocrities like himself (remember Ruth Shalit?); he no doubt likes to think of himself as "quirky" if not "eccentric," but he has never been someone you could read for substance. When George W. Bush took the Presidency, Sullivan was exultant, jeering at the anti-corporate leftists who were going to rage impotently under the new dispensation; some years later Sullivan endorsed Barack Obama, which was not really that much of a change.

Not that I have anything against hard-liners; I suppose I'm one myself, though I'm not sure which line I'm hard about. Homo Superior goes on to say:

Having said that, I have had more valuable conversations, ones without judgment or ire, with people like Buckley than I have had with those on the lock-step ideological left, and that includes many, many on the Queer Left.

Like anyone with extreme viewpoints, their definition of dissident is someone who agrees with them.

I realized I didn’t belong in the left and sometimes call myself a lapsed lefty. I now embrace the descriptor, contrarian.

(The video clip above comes from Noam Chomsky's 1969 appearance on Buckley's PBS program Firing Line. Buckley's offer to "smash you in the goddam face" is a reference to his then-recent offer, made in earnest, to do the same to Gore Vidal. Here it's supposed to be a joke, though I've never gotten its point. It's the sort of thing that should be borne in mind, though, when Buckley is eulogized. So should Buckley's vacuous debating style.)

Maybe I should embrace "contrarian" myself, but the word has been dirtied more than a little since Christopher Hitchens began touting himself as one. I don't see my own positions are particularly contrary, if I understand the word correctly, which to me implies simply staking an opposing position; I find myself over yonder somewhere. And what happens when two contrarians clash? Do they cancel each other out like matter and anti-matter?

I don't know if I "belong in the left" either, but I do know that most of the thinkers and writers I've learned the most from have been associated with the left, and that left writers and media are those I can reliably look to for accurate information about politics and culture. The few right-wingers with whom I find some common ground are those who are least lock-step themselves, like William Buckley calling for the legalization of drugs (probably the only issue on which I agree with him). On the other hand, I'm not wedded to the word "left", anymore than I am to the words "gay" or "queer."

I'm particularly amused by the notion that the left is lock-step, considering how often people on the left complain about the deep divisions, the sectarian squabbling, that divide our portion of the political spectrum. And while I'm being amused, the use of the word "extreme" as a cussword is always good for a giggle. (I'm reminded of an old joke where a man accusingly asks an uppity woman, "Are you a lesbian?" and she counters, "Are you the alternative?")

I know very well about homophobia on the left, which is detestable and gives me opportunities to express my own hard-line extremism. Harry Hay founded Mattachine after he was expelled from the Communist Party of the USA for being a queer; Black Mountain College, a lefty-liberal experimental college of the 1930s through the 1950s, fired some queer faculty, notably the anarchist writer Paul Goodman, who wrote in a famous essay called "Memoirs of an Ancient Activist",

Frankly, my experience of radical community is that it does not tolerate my freedom. Nevertheless, I am all for community because it is a human thing, only I seem doomed to be left out.

On the other hand, my homosexual acts and the overt claim to the right to commit them have never disadvantaged me much, as far as I know, in more square institutions. I have taught at half a dozen state universities. I am continually invited, often as chief speaker, to conferences of junior high school superintendents, boards of regents, guidance counsellors, task forces on delinquency, etc., etc. I say what I think right, I make passes if there is occasion -- I have even made out, which is more than I can say for conferences of SDS or Resistance. [Len Richmond and Gary Noguera, eds.,The Gay Liberation Book (Ramparts Press, 1973, p. 24]

I especially like that bit about favoring community but always being left out of it, but then I've generally found myself not wanting in to the available communities. I've generally been content to deal with communities through their writings. If I'm marginalized, well, it's a dirty job but someone has to do it, and more often than not it's because I've sidled over to the margins rather than stay close to the people who are at the center or core or mainstream -- whatever you want to call it. ("I wouldn't belong to a club that would have me for a member" -- but there's not a club made up of those of us who identify with that line, either.) I've been a little disappointed to find that I don't necessarily get along with other misfits because being a misfit is not in itself enough to have in common; but that too has been a useful lesson. And despite all this, I've never been a total isolate either. I have something resembling community, and it serves to keep me going.

What to do about American politics, though, I don't know. As an intellectual I have little to say to the Teabaggers, but then anti-intellectualism is endemic to American society, including many intellectuals. Debate is hard, disagreement is generally painful, and most people prefer not to deal with either. Andrew Sullivan has done little to improve things; I've done even less. We're probably doomed.

What Is "Community"?

I just got out of an interesting gay chat room discussion, which is something of an event in itself. The availability of cheap Internet access that doesn’t tie up your phone line makes it possible for many gay men to log in to a chat site, then leave the program running in the background while they work on other things, hoping that Ryan Philippe or Hugh Jackman will send them a private message. In chat rooms where, a few years ago, something like actual conversation sometimes could be found, there is now mainly the drone of log-in announcements:

hotstudt6969 has entered.
hotstud6969 has exited.
stuffmewithUrbig1 has entered: masc/musc only, stay away creeps!
hotstud6969 has entered.

And so on. As a relative newcomer to these things, compared to men who used IRC and America Online in the 1980s, I can only describe changes I’ve observed since 1998 or so. But it does seem to me that there’s been a decline in main-room conversation, as opposed to “private” conversations primarily consisting of sex talk or arranging personal encounters. There has always been a certain amount of social pressure against main-room chat, which for various reasons won out over time. Which doesn’t mean that main-room conversation doesn’t still sometimes happen, and I’m pleased when I find it.

Tonight’s discussion, which was already in progress when I logged in to my local room, was about a popular topic: “community,” and specifically whether there is a gay “community” in our mid-sized college town. My first question was how the others were using the word “community.” Many people think of “community” as requiring a high degree of homogeneity and lockstep consensus, with little internal conflict – a definition that would rule out the existence of communities of any kind.

One of the chatters, a graduate student, insisted on “physical community,” ruling out “virtual” communities. He saw the Internet as having damaged, if not destroyed, “physical” gay communities, by which he apparently mainly meant bars. It is true that two local gay bars have closed in the past year, but we still have two remaining. Both the graduate student and another participant, both of them in their mid-30s, seemed to think that there had been gay communities before, but now that guys could interact online, they had no interest in meeting real people face to face.

This was funny to someone like me, who remembers the Gay Liberation movement's hostility to bar culture; gay bars have been under attack by various gay community members ever since, for various reasons, but bars remain important “community” institutions for better or worse. I welcomed chat rooms for the opportunity they sometimes gave, to have conversations that weren’t drowned out by loud dance music, without cigarette smoke that clung to clothing the next day, and no need to buy drinks (alcoholic or otherwise). For many men, I realize, those were positive factors: the loud music meant that they didn’t have to converse beyond “Do you come here often?” and “Do you have a place to go?” The alcohol made it easier to pretend that they weren’t in a room full of homosexuals, and that if they did go home with someone to commit deviant acts, it was the booze that did it, not them.

The graduate student insisted that if you didn’t have more than two people present, there was no “physical community.” (Would an orgy count, I wonder?) He was careful to make it clear that he didn’t blame the Internet (apparently because it’s not a person), but he didn’t like my suggestion that the Internet had supplied what many gay men had always wanted – the ability to find sexual partners without having to be in a physical space with other gay men. Such facilities have always been with us: adult bookstores, tearooms, highway rest stops, and the like. The Internet is probably preferable to such sites, being free from physical harassment – even verbal harassment by homophobes has been rare in the chat site I’ve used, though apparently it does happen.

One person claimed that the Internet made it possible for men to delay their self-identification as gay. I’m not so sure of that either, and I don’t know how anyone could tell, let alone whether a shorter delay is necessarily desirable. I suggested, in fact, that maybe public spaces like bars were better off if men who didn’t want community stayed away. The graduate student claimed that the Internet somehow distorted public gay space; as someone who’s spent a lot of time in such spaces, I have always felt that they were distorted by the closeted. The other thirtysomething declared that public gay spaces shouldn’t cater to the wishes of the closeted, but though I’m sympathetic to that idea, I don’t see how you’d make it work. Commercial sites like bars, reasonably enough by their standards, consider the money of a closet case to be as good as that of an openly gay person. Non-commercial sites like discussion groups or student associations have a commitment, also quite reasonable, to try to make people feel welcome. Most gay people (including those of us who later become openly gay) feel frightened on their first visit to a gay space, and so gay organizations try to make themselves as non-threatening as they can. Uncloseted gay people are a minority within a minority, needed to keep public gay sites in operation, but also seen by the closeted as dangerous – we might “out” them, simply by the fact that we exist. And admittedly, we are often impatient with the fears of the closeted, much as we try to draw them into our institutions. This ambivalence creates a tension that has always been with us, and which isn’t going to go away in the foreseeable future.

But back to “community.” Despite the graduate student’s dislike of “virtual” communities, all communities are virtual to some extent. In all but the smallest towns, members of communities don’t know everyone else, or want to. The “physical” nature of their communities lies in the accident of living in an extended physical space, not in face-to-face contact for extended periods of time, let alone in the absence of conflict over values and goals. Much of their “community” comes from reading a local newspaper, listening to a radio station; when they vote for local politicians, they are not all in the polling places at the same time, and most debate over issues does not happen face-to-face. This is even more true in larger cities, let alone at the state or national level.

The graduate student asked me accusingly if I thought face-to-face interaction was unimportant. Of course I think it is important, but not because you can’t have “community” without it. And in fact, much of tonight’s complaint about the Internet glossed over the fact that in practice it’s a stepping stone (or gateway, if you want a different metaphor) to face-to-face interaction, if only the sexual. The graduate student’s insistence on the presence of more than two people was meant to address this, but he never quite clarified it. In our city, there are plenty of gay friendship circles, cliques, and the like. Some of them use the local chat room to touch base with each other on weekend mornings, comparing notes on the bars or parties where they saw each other the night before. I’ve also seen invitations to parties and other gatherings issued in the main room.

So I’m not sure that the Internet’s effects, even in the “aggregate” (a word the graduate student used frequently) are at odds with face-to-face interaction and contact. The problem I see is that many if not most gay men don’t really want “community,” even virtual, with each other. And who knows? Maybe they’re right. Another contradiction we’ve never begun to resolve is that on one hand, we want to find others “like us”, so we can feel at home and safe, without being judged; on the other, we want to be accepted by straight people, and to fit into our families and larger communities as ourselves, not seen as fundamentally and essentially “different.” (Even though we knew we were “different” from a very early age.) Until we sort out questions like this, we aren’t going to be able to figure out what role gay communities should play, whether they are “virtual” or “physical.”

What Is "Community"?

I just got out of an interesting gay chat room discussion, which is something of an event in itself. The availability of cheap Internet access that doesn’t tie up your phone line makes it possible for many gay men to log in to a chat site, then leave the program running in the background while they work on other things, hoping that Ryan Philippe or Hugh Jackman will send them a private message. In chat rooms where, a few years ago, something like actual conversation sometimes could be found, there is now mainly the drone of log-in announcements:

hotstudt6969 has entered.
hotstud6969 has exited.
stuffmewithUrbig1 has entered: masc/musc only, stay away creeps!
hotstud6969 has entered.

And so on. As a relative newcomer to these things, compared to men who used IRC and America Online in the 1980s, I can only describe changes I’ve observed since 1998 or so. But it does seem to me that there’s been a decline in main-room conversation, as opposed to “private” conversations primarily consisting of sex talk or arranging personal encounters. There has always been a certain amount of social pressure against main-room chat, which for various reasons won out over time. Which doesn’t mean that main-room conversation doesn’t still sometimes happen, and I’m pleased when I find it.

Tonight’s discussion, which was already in progress when I logged in to my local room, was about a popular topic: “community,” and specifically whether there is a gay “community” in our mid-sized college town. My first question was how the others were using the word “community.” Many people think of “community” as requiring a high degree of homogeneity and lockstep consensus, with little internal conflict – a definition that would rule out the existence of communities of any kind.

One of the chatters, a graduate student, insisted on “physical community,” ruling out “virtual” communities. He saw the Internet as having damaged, if not destroyed, “physical” gay communities, by which he apparently mainly meant bars. It is true that two local gay bars have closed in the past year, but we still have two remaining. Both the graduate student and another participant, both of them in their mid-30s, seemed to think that there had been gay communities before, but now that guys could interact online, they had no interest in meeting real people face to face.

This was funny to someone like me, who remembers the Gay Liberation movement's hostility to bar culture; gay bars have been under attack by various gay community members ever since, for various reasons, but bars remain important “community” institutions for better or worse. I welcomed chat rooms for the opportunity they sometimes gave, to have conversations that weren’t drowned out by loud dance music, without cigarette smoke that clung to clothing the next day, and no need to buy drinks (alcoholic or otherwise). For many men, I realize, those were positive factors: the loud music meant that they didn’t have to converse beyond “Do you come here often?” and “Do you have a place to go?” The alcohol made it easier to pretend that they weren’t in a room full of homosexuals, and that if they did go home with someone to commit deviant acts, it was the booze that did it, not them.

The graduate student insisted that if you didn’t have more than two people present, there was no “physical community.” (Would an orgy count, I wonder?) He was careful to make it clear that he didn’t blame the Internet (apparently because it’s not a person), but he didn’t like my suggestion that the Internet had supplied what many gay men had always wanted – the ability to find sexual partners without having to be in a physical space with other gay men. Such facilities have always been with us: adult bookstores, tearooms, highway rest stops, and the like. The Internet is probably preferable to such sites, being free from physical harassment – even verbal harassment by homophobes has been rare in the chat site I’ve used, though apparently it does happen.

One person claimed that the Internet made it possible for men to delay their self-identification as gay. I’m not so sure of that either, and I don’t know how anyone could tell, let alone whether a shorter delay is necessarily desirable. I suggested, in fact, that maybe public spaces like bars were better off if men who didn’t want community stayed away. The graduate student claimed that the Internet somehow distorted public gay space; as someone who’s spent a lot of time in such spaces, I have always felt that they were distorted by the closeted. The other thirtysomething declared that public gay spaces shouldn’t cater to the wishes of the closeted, but though I’m sympathetic to that idea, I don’t see how you’d make it work. Commercial sites like bars, reasonably enough by their standards, consider the money of a closet case to be as good as that of an openly gay person. Non-commercial sites like discussion groups or student associations have a commitment, also quite reasonable, to try to make people feel welcome. Most gay people (including those of us who later become openly gay) feel frightened on their first visit to a gay space, and so gay organizations try to make themselves as non-threatening as they can. Uncloseted gay people are a minority within a minority, needed to keep public gay sites in operation, but also seen by the closeted as dangerous – we might “out” them, simply by the fact that we exist. And admittedly, we are often impatient with the fears of the closeted, much as we try to draw them into our institutions. This ambivalence creates a tension that has always been with us, and which isn’t going to go away in the foreseeable future.

But back to “community.” Despite the graduate student’s dislike of “virtual” communities, all communities are virtual to some extent. In all but the smallest towns, members of communities don’t know everyone else, or want to. The “physical” nature of their communities lies in the accident of living in an extended physical space, not in face-to-face contact for extended periods of time, let alone in the absence of conflict over values and goals. Much of their “community” comes from reading a local newspaper, listening to a radio station; when they vote for local politicians, they are not all in the polling places at the same time, and most debate over issues does not happen face-to-face. This is even more true in larger cities, let alone at the state or national level.

The graduate student asked me accusingly if I thought face-to-face interaction was unimportant. Of course I think it is important, but not because you can’t have “community” without it. And in fact, much of tonight’s complaint about the Internet glossed over the fact that in practice it’s a stepping stone (or gateway, if you want a different metaphor) to face-to-face interaction, if only the sexual. The graduate student’s insistence on the presence of more than two people was meant to address this, but he never quite clarified it. In our city, there are plenty of gay friendship circles, cliques, and the like. Some of them use the local chat room to touch base with each other on weekend mornings, comparing notes on the bars or parties where they saw each other the night before. I’ve also seen invitations to parties and other gatherings issued in the main room.

So I’m not sure that the Internet’s effects, even in the “aggregate” (a word the graduate student used frequently) are at odds with face-to-face interaction and contact. The problem I see is that many if not most gay men don’t really want “community,” even virtual, with each other. And who knows? Maybe they’re right. Another contradiction we’ve never begun to resolve is that on one hand, we want to find others “like us”, so we can feel at home and safe, without being judged; on the other, we want to be accepted by straight people, and to fit into our families and larger communities as ourselves, not seen as fundamentally and essentially “different.” (Even though we knew we were “different” from a very early age.) Until we sort out questions like this, we aren’t going to be able to figure out what role gay communities should play, whether they are “virtual” or “physical.”