Books by Andrew Sullivan

A L S O+.T O D A Y

Marriage as a revolutionary act
By Carol Lloyd
Andrew Sullivan on the love that dares to speak its name

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Let Nothing You Dismay
Reviewed by Daniel Reitz
From the self-appointed court jester of gay literature, a novel about one unemployed Manhattanite's marathon holiday party-going

T A B L E+T A L K

What books will you be giving as gifts this year? Discuss your list in the Books area of Table Talk

B O O K C A S E

A new service
for book lovers

R E C E N T L Y

From he-man to holy man
By Elaine Showalter
(11/12/98)

Ted Hughes, R.I.P.
(10/30/98)

Making book on the Booker
By Sylvia Brownrigg
(10/29/98)

Across the great divide
By Gary Kamiya
(10/19/98)

The king of death
By Andrew O'Hehir
(09/24/98)

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Browse the
Books feature archive

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

T H E+G A R N E R
R E P O R T

A highly subjective, monthly roundup of upcoming book titles
By Dwight Garner

S A L O N
E M P O R I U M
FREE! 12-ounce bag of Salon Blend with a purchase of $30 or more. While supplies last.

Uncle Andrew's cabin
HOW DID A MORALIZING, SELF-CENTERED
TORY NAMED ANDREW SULLIVAN BECOME
THE SPOKESMAN FOR GAY AMERICA?

BY PETER KURTH | When the history of gay life in the 20th century is finally written, a small chapter might be devoted to explaining how an overgrown schoolboy and Tory moralist named Andrew Sullivan managed to emerge as the most prominent voice of the gay rights movement in America; how, in fact, the whole issue of gay liberation was hijacked in the wake of the AIDS epidemic by a band of reactionary, middle-class gay commentators in a dither over "gay promiscuity," urging marriage and monogamy on their wayward brothers and decrying "the cult of masculinity" as the source of all evil in homosexual life.

If it sounds schizophrenic, it is. The famously conservative, famously English, famously Catholic Sullivan first made a name for himself in 1991 as the openly gay editor of the New Republic, at a time when British editors were thought by American magazines to be essential to the production of "buzz." In a tenure that reflected nothing so much as a lack of coherent vision, Sullivan won plaudits from the chic and trendy for "pushing the envelope" at TNR, and round condemnation from almost everyone else for his role in wrecking what had once been a respected American institution. When he resigned his position in 1996, at the same time disclosing that he was HIV-positive and on treatment with protease inhibitors, Sullivan announced that he was "not stepping down because I'm sick and going away and dying." Far from it. Responding well to combination therapy, with a sudden reprieve from almost certain death, he embarked on what he plainly sees as a holy mission, arguing for the complete assimilation of gays and lesbians into American life while chastising male homosexuals for their hedonism, their immaturity and their persistence in regarding themselves as "different" from everyone else.

"The one thing I insist upon," Sullivan declared, "is that [homosexuality] should not be determinative ... This is the argument of my life, and I have to win it." Already at the New Republic and in his first book, "Virtually Normal: An Argument About Homosexuality" (1995), Sullivan was blaring the assimilationist horn, outraging gay activists with his purportedly "post-ideological" insistence that "being gay isn't about sex as such" and his sophistic efforts to reconcile his Catholic faith with the unconquerable demands of his libido. Like many Catholics, Sullivan is an expert at putting his thoughts into separate boxes, embracing the central mystery and seductive trappings of his faith -- "the crisply starched vestments that I prepared for the priest in the sacristy, the grimy dark wood we gripped in the pews" -- while banishing Catholicism's odious position on homosexuality to the realm of informed debate.

"It matters to me what the Vatican thinks," Sullivan has said, "even if I disagree with it. I don't like stylizing institutions into enemies." He is noteworthy also for his insistence that homophobia in the mass of humanity is "natural" rather than bigoted, and that government should take no action whatsoever on gay issues apart from ending its own discrimination against gays and lesbians by granting them open access to the military and full marriage rights, thus paving the way, through some miraculous trickle-down effect, for complete acceptance of gays by society at large. No further legislation, Sullivan thinks, would be needed.

For Sullivan, marriage -- legal, state-sanctioned, church-blessed marriage -- is "the deepest means for the liberation of homosexuals, providing them with the only avenue for sexual and emotional development that can integrate them as equal human beings and remove from them the hideous historic option of choosing between their joy and their dignity." Or, as he says in reference to himself, between "a life of suffering or a life of meaningless promiscuity followed by eternal damnation." So sold is Sullivan on the most repressive of all social institutions that he actually delights in the prospect of becoming "banal," arguing that "what we need is a Christian ethic for how to live one's life as a homosexual," and that "what is valuable is not sexual gratification but informing sexual desire with love and commitment."

What's changed in Sullivan's work since he left the New Republic is not his belief that marriage will save the fallen, but the rock on which he has built his vision of a new gay identity -- "the end of AIDS," as he boldly declared it in a 1996 cover story for the New York Times Magazine. Sullivan's notorious tract, in which he visited a gay "circuit" party at the Roseland Ballroom in New York and barely survived the assault on his sensibilities, raised a storm of protest in the gay community and among AIDS professionals and activists, with its insistence that "AIDS is over" and its horrified commentary on what Sullivan calls the "libidinal pathology" of gay life.

"Some of them glided past, intent on some imminent conquest," Sullivan wrote of the men at Roseland, "others stumbled toward me, eyes glazed, bodies stooped in a kind of morbid stupor, staring at the floor or into space; others still stood in corners, chatting, socializing, their arms draped around each other, a banal familiarity belying the truly bizarre scene around them ... Beyond, a mass of men danced the early morning through, strobe lights occasionally glinting off the assorted deltoids, traps, lats, and other muscle groups."

From this "conflicting puzzle of impulses" Sullivan emerged with a theory, arguing that the apparent resurgence of promiscuity, drug abuse, quick affairs and shattered lives in the gay community is a symptom of mass denial, "the need to find some solidarity among the loss," as Sullivan sees it, "to assert some crazed physicality against the threat of sickness, to release some of the toxins built up over a decade [sic] of constant stress. Beyond everything" -- and this is Sullivan's central point -- "the desire to banish the memories that will not be banished, to shuck off -- if only till the morning -- the maturity that plague had brutally imposed." Where AIDS once equaled death, Sullivan says, it now demands "responsibility," clean living, and an end to empty, meaningless sex.

N E X T+P A G E+| Promiscuity is always pathological

ILLUSTRATION BY JEFF CROSBY

Become a Salon member. Click here.