Virtually Over It

Reading this review of Andrew Sullivan's Virtually Normal over at OGMN, I was reminded of the first time I read that book. I read it in 1996, as a 15 year old closeted gay boy in Singapore. Its neatly argued call for gay marriage seemed revolutionary to me. Gay Marriage! Like all revolutionary ideas, of course, I saw it as completely unattainable, yet completely reasonable (yes, my political miseducation was well underway).

wtf, mate?*

*Sorry. I couldn't find a good creative commons licensed photo of Andrew Sullivan or his book, but in my search I did find a picture of a redheaded cutie reading Virtually Normal. It's still not creative commons, so I won't steal it, but you can see the photo here. Instead, I found a cute chipmunk really giving it to that rock. Courtesy of ReneS. EDIT: So it turns out that photo of the redhead is under a creative commons license. But the chipmunk is too cute to delete. Here is the redhead too, though. Courtesy of alaspoorwho.

Alaspoorwho says: Protect yourself from the sun with the power of virtual normalcy!

So, First, some words on the emotive power of marriage to the 15 year old Minger:

!!Embarrassing Revelation Alert!! At 15, I was very into marriage ceremony fantasies. I wanted it all - first, an elaborate Singapore/Malaysia-Chinese-style wedding: the tea ceremony, the ten course dinner followed by long exhortations to "Yaaaaaaaaaam Seng!", the bowing to parents, and then driving through the streets in a gaudily decorated white or silver Mercedes Benz.

One exactly like this! Yes, that is a Singaporean license plate, as well.
Photo taken by St@ce. Another one under the creative commons license. I heart creative commons.

I also wanted the whole white-dress and tuxedo Western church wedding - somewhat odd in retrospect, because in addition to being a flaming queenlet, I was also a raging atheist - with the hushed awe as I walked down the aisle (I wanted to be in the dress), the solemnity and explicitness of the vows, and the awesome drama queen moment where the priest asks if anyone has any reasons that these two should not be wed, and everybody looks down while priest and couple glare accusingly at the crowd. It all sent shivers down my spine. I wanted a honeymoon too.

Not my ideal wedding. Although being presided over by a pumpkin would be great. Photo by Eric van der Neut. Again, creative commons license.

But that's not all. I didn't stop at the marriage ceremony fantasies. My schoolgirlishness was quite advanced. I'd also constructed an exquisitely detailed picture of domestic bliss. Everything in the house that could be covered with white or natural undyed linen would be (having actually done my own laundry now, I shudder at this particular aspect of the fantasy), the sun would always be rising or setting, and we would always be spending long mornings in bed or long evenings on the balcony with breakfast/cold drinks. ... Actually that's all the details I'm willing to divulge right now. Take a 2 minute sigh-of-relief break and keep reading.

WHEW!

So, back to Sullivan's book


Photo of gay shame anti-wedding cake is from dannyman.

Oh how I have changed. I suspect that if I were to read the book today I would be:
1) annoyed/amused by Sullivan's naivete;
2) still delighted by his crisp "Yes chaps, I was educated in England" prose;
3) furious at his caricatures of what he now calls the "Gay Far Left" (I think at the time he had another term for this, I forget what; and
4) bitchily remembering the bareback sex scandal in 2001. (others also still remember) BTW: Bronski's piece behind the first link is quite good. You should go read it AFTER you finish reading my post.

In any case, I certainly wouldn't be the overawed little boy from (what was in in gay terms) a cultural isolation cell.

So what is Sullivan's appeal? And who is he appealing to besides 15 year old gay boys? (Ok that sounded wrong)

I think Sullivan's work finds an eager audience in the embarrassed conservative base* that doesn't really like/care about gay people all that much, despite their protestations of "fiscal conservative, social liberal". This group, however, is a little alarmed at the sheer vitriol/hatred being spouted by the Religious Right that passes for idealism in the Republican party (and disguises the fact that it is a vehicle for the rich to use state power against the poor).

*I'm sure some gay and lesbian people and some liberals who genuinely care about gay and lesbian rights read and agree with Sullivan too. Now, how should I overgeneralize about and belittle them? Deluded? Self-hating? Insert Third Bit Of Invective Here? This is left as an exercise for the reader.

After all, one may not want that homosexual hanging around one's children (which is why one sent them to private school, where it's alright to discriminate more or less openly against gays, and probably always will be), but one does want him around to do one's hair. Surely it's only cricket to let him have a crumb or two of civil rights. Oh yes, marriage, that's a perfectly respectable one. After all, one doesn't have sex in a marriage, does one, unless one intends to have children. And homosexuals don't do that. Do they? Now Canada's gone and sanctioned gay marriage. One can't have all the homosexuals fleeing across the border - whoever would decorate one's house? The U.S. simply must keep up with its neighbors. Just so long as they don't try anything funny, like advocating for economic, social and political justice, those homosexuals are okay.

Photo of "Separate the Church and Hate" sign from sushiesque. ----->

In fact, I think Sullivan is at his best when he is taking on the Religious Right on their own terms. He (euphemistically? kindly? strategically?) refers to them as "social conservatives". There's no denying the man is a master of rhetorical moves.

But seriously. I understand the appeal. No, really. I feel your pain. I was once like you, entertaining fantasies of assimilation and obsessed with sexual privacy and the sanctity of the marital home. And it's not just me and you. Even Supreme Court justices have these fantasies. Yes, underneath those solemn black robes beat nine romantic hearts secretly dying to pass a covert love note across the bench ("Clarence, what do you think about this Lawrence guy from Texas? Totally gross or what? - Tony. P.S.: Do you like Ruth? Yes/No"). In fact, we have that Court's (well, a previous Court's) fantasies of the marital home to thank for legal contraception in the U.S. Thank you, marital home!

Let me just ramble on about marriage a bit more

I get the impression that, in a libertarian-flavored way, Sullivan generally opposes cultural change coming from government legislation. But then why campaign for government to sanction certain relationships and not others? Why not remove the hand of government altogether from marriage, and let whoever wants to call themselves "married" do so with no formal change in their relationship to the government? The answer must be that somehow, there is an overriding interest: certain relationships need government protection.*

*I think that Sullivan also argues (sort of) is that marriage encourages social stability. Now, I say "sort of" because, if I recall correctly, he really makes this point not as something he personally endorses, but in the context of pointing out the inconsistency in social conservatives' idealization of (straight) marriage even as they oppose gay marriage.

The fact is that "marriage equality" is not merely the removal of a bias, it is the extension of a regulatory scheme. Not just any scheme, but one that is rank with normative implications for sexual behavior.

Marriage is a set of conditional benefits. Those benefits are given not based on need (unlike redistributive schemes). A person would be entitled (let's say) to their spouse's healthcare if that spouse were an employee of the government, whether they* really needed it or not, which leaves us with the inescapable implication - that these benefits are given to those who deserve it.

*Yes, I use the singular "they" where I feel like it. I will also, but more rarely, use "ze" and "hir".

The normative nature of marriage is inescapable. "You get these rights because you deserve them" it says to married couples. By implication, unmarried people do not deserve these rights. So what happens? Gay people start reinterpreting our community narratives to fit into marriage's narrow picture of "deserving" couples. Just take a look at Freedom to Marry's current publicity materials. Most of these couples have been together for a long time, and many have kids and apparently steady jobs. Through implication by omission (anyone who has been "semi-in-the-closet" you know what I mean), they are monogamous. Certainly none of the publicity materials say "on weekends, Kris and Eddie like to go to sex parties, where they enjoy having group sex with friends and strangers" or "Lisa and Tyra are active community organizers and advocate the decriminalization of prostitution and marijuana".

I'm not saying that Freedom to Marry's campaign is ineffective. I'm certainly not devaluing the couples' lives together, or impugning their love for each other. I'm also not saying that going to sex clubs is preferable to not going to sex clubs, or that monogamy is never the right decision. (Actually, you know what, fuck that, you all are intelligent enough to figure out what I am not saying)

So what ARE you saying?


Thanks to irina slutsky and emarquetti for these two images, that I modified to make the above graphic. (creative commons licenses r00l!).

What I'm saying is that the couples picked to represent the LGBT community are de-fanged, sanitized, and otherwise made "safe" (however they are in real life, this is how they are portrayed). They've got one issue, and they're sticking to it. We're going from predatory sex fiends in the shadows to Model Minority 2.0. It seems that in order to get marriage, many in the community are trading in one set of cultural stereotypes for another, and abandoning those with whom we used to have solidarity in the process.

This is a pet topic of mine, and I could harp on it all day. It's not just Sullivan's focus on marriage as a gay rights panacea that bothers me, however. And anyway, it's not just Sullivan, but apparently the whole mainstream liberal camp that is adopting the attitude of marriage-as-crowning-achievement to a materialistic, individualistic version of the gay and lesbian movement (Sing it! We've got Castro, we've got WeHo, we've got marriage, who could ask for anything more?).

Oh dear oh dear, this has turned into a post on marriage. I wanted to talk more about Sullivan's core beliefs and how mine have changed from a set something like his (libertarian-esque) to something subtly different. But I've been working on this damn post for 3 days now, and it's time to let it go.

Thoughts for future posts or further reading:

So we'll become the new model minority - is that so bad? Asian American community organizers and theorists have done plenty of thinking and writing on why the model minority myth is harmful to Asian Americans and other oppressed racial groups.

Should government play a role (and what role should it play) in cultural/social change? I mentioned that Sullivan, like many libertarians, is averse to government meddling in "private" social relationships. My own view is that it is far more complex than this (obviously, Sullivan's view is more complex as well). I don't think there is a sharp public/private divide, nor do I think that government should be singled out and fetishized as the Big Disrupter of social relationships (there are other forces that interfere with personal autonomy as much as or more than government).