Fluent in Fag

Sunday, November 12, 2006

Seriousness and Play, Sex and Death

[A] love that springs merely from sexual impulse cannot be love at all, but only appetite. Human love is good-will, affection, promoting the happiness of others and finding joy in their happiness. But it is clear that, when a person loves another purely from sexual desire, none of these factors enter into the love. Far from there being any concern for the happiness of the loved one, the love, in order to satisfy his desire and still his appetite, may even plunge the loved one into the depths of misery. Sexual love makes of the loved person an Object of appetite; as soon as that appetite has been stilled, the person is cast aside as one casts away a lemon which has been sucked dry. Sexual love can, of course, be combined with human love and so carry with it the characteristics of the latter, but taken by itseld and for itself, it is nothing for than appetite. Taken by itself it is a degradation of human nature; for as soon as a person becomes an object of appetite for another, all motives of moral relationship cease to function, because as an Object of appetite for another a person becomes a thing and can be treated and used as such by every one.

- Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Ethics, trans. Louis Infield

Just as there have been philosophers who are playful with the topic of death, there have been philosophers who were deadly serious about the topic of sex. Kant is chief among them. But this entry isn't about that, at least not precisely. Instead, I'd like to call into question the strict separation of seriousness and playfulness, of sex and death, love and alienation.

Play and Seriousness

I have a friend with whom I have sex. Or perhaps more accurately, I have a person with whom I have sex that I consider a friend. His mother recently passed away, and I have been thinking about the appropriate response (from both of us) to this event. I want to send a card (and I will), but other than that I'm also not sure how much care I should extend, how much I want to extend, how much he wants me to extend, and how much he expects me to extend. We had actually been having less sex and meeting less frequently because of the stress of his mother's ailing health. He would talk about it to some degree, but I think he is in general quite private about such things (though I could be wrong - he might just be private about those things with me). I do know that I do care, and I'm sad for him. I'm just not sure how much I should/can do. So far my plan is to send a card and just be available if he needs anything.

Sex and Death

In a time of death, in anticipation of death, one might want to have less sex or more. It's almost inconceivable that one would want to have the same amount of sex. Because of its oppositional quality (Eros vs. Thanatos - fight!), sex can either be an antidote to death's chilling promise or an inappropriate response to its somber demands. But of course, sex and death are inextricably linked in a chicken-egg, cause-effect way.

Evolutionarily speaking, in a way, as a species we have sex because we die (how could a queer person really get away with saying this, you ask? I'm not totally sure). To continue going, our genes had to get really good at making copies of themselves even though those frail vessels would one day decay. Reproduction turns out to be the solution to death's inevitable entropic mandate.

Practically, of course, most of us die because someone had sex. Life is a disease that only death can cure, and sex is the chief mode of transmission.

Love and Alienation

Half an American lifetime ago I attended a lecture by a visiting professor from France who argued that the traditional picture of romantic love entails alienation. Perhaps he was just playing around. Who knows? This was back when the French were charmingly rogueish, and not the cowardly America-haters that they apparently are today. So, to bring my interpretation up to date, for "playing around" read "refusing to commit to a real position, that flip-flopping cad."

To brutally summarize, the argument went something like this:

1) Love requires recognition of the will of another
2) Love requires making one's happiness dependent on fulfillment of that other's ends
3) In so doing, one subsume's one's own will into that of the other, and thus becomes profoundly alienated and unfree.

So there you have my hasty un-binarification of those things. I have more thoughts, but they aren't really coherent right now. I'm just going to skip to the questions.

1) Can anyone think of a good poem or poems about this stuff? So far I've got Thomas' The Force that Through the Green Fuse Drives The Flower.

2) Thoughts on the contrast between "play" and a "serious" relationship. Can play be serious? Can relationships be playful? And if you get it, won't you tell me how?

3) What should I do for/about/with my friend?

4) Sometimes you have to laugh to keep from crying. Other times you have to cry to keep from laughing. I read an interesting quote in an otherwise objectionable law review article today about how sometimes we are faced with a choice between tragic struggle and a pleasant trip to hell, and for the sake of our humanity, we have to pick tragedy (or something like that). How is this a question?

Sunday, November 05, 2006

Radical, Conservative, Married, Polyamorous

Let's call the whole thing off.

While searching for more Zak Szymanski articles, I found this National Review piece (or rather, two pieces) by Stanley Kurtz about the "confessions" of a "radical" agenda by many in the same-sex marriage movement after the publication of the Beyond Same-Sex Marriage statement. The only movement figures who stuck to their conservative gay guns, apparently, were Jonathan Rauch and perhaps Rob and Clay Calhoun (the Calhouns I had never heard of before reading this article, to be honest).

Couched in the tones of a clever analytical piece, the article is in fact a sensationalistic bit of red meat for the National Review's social "conservatives" and perhaps some of their "moderates" (and which conservative in These United States doesn't at least sometimes enjoy being thought of as a moderate?). In it, Kurtz "reveals" that the LGBT movement is at its core socially "radical," and that even the strongest proponents of the "conservative" goal of same-sex marriage turn out, after some prodding, to be of a kind with the polyamorous freaks that the Right has always assumed them to be (notably absent from Kurtz's list of closet sexual radicals is orgy-lovin' Justice Antonin Scalia).

If the language Kurtz (ab)uses sounds familiar, it's because the divisions come in part from Andrew Sullivan's seminal homocon tract, "The Politics of Homosexuality" in The New Republic in May 1993. Though the words have been switched around a bit, the categories remain the roughly the same. In part this is because Kurtz can't hold a candle to Sullivan's originality of thought (honestly, his talents are completely wasted in Time magazine's online blog). It's also because the political climate at the New Republic is very different from that of the National Review, where "conservative" means "you, dear reader." Finally, it's also a testament to the superficial inclusivity of neoconservatism that one can even talk about "gay conservatives" and not be referring to some closeted religious nutjob.

Instead of quoting Sullivan's piece, why don't I quote an enjoyable summing up of the relevant categories by Tony Kushner:

Andrew divides said politics into four, you should pardon the expression, camps - conservative, radical, moderate, and liberal - each of which lacks a workable "solution to the problem of gay-straight relations." Conservatives (by which he means reactionaries, I think, but he is very polite) and radicals both profess different brands of an absolutist politics of "impossibilism," which alienates them from "the mainstream." Moderates (by which he means conservatives) practice an ostrich-politics of delicate denial, increasingly superseded by the growing visibility of gay men and lesbians. And liberals (moderates) err mainly in trying to legislate, through antidiscrimination bills, against reactive, private sector bigotry.


By the way, also absent from Kurtz's article is any mention of Andrew Sullivan - a pretty glaring omission, akin to visiting Paris and somehow managing not to see the Eiffel Tower. Of course, this is completely in keeping with the "conservative" tradition of completely failing to credit one's intellectual and political ancestors. For a group of people whose faction has "conserve" as a root word, they have remarkably porous memories.

Bitchy aside over.

So in Kurtz's article you have the "radicals" (who have kept the same name since 1993) and then you have - or rather, you don't have - the gay "conservatives" (who Sullivan called "liberals"). What "radicals" want, in Kurtz's remarkably narrow reading of Beyond Same-Sex Marriage, is eventual state recognition of polyamorous relationships. "Conservatives," on the other hand, want same-sex marriage that looks exactly like old-school hetero-marriage, but with two suits or two bridal gowns.

How exactly did Kurtz come to such an "understanding" of what the LGBT movement really wants? His final paragraph offers some valuable clues about how Kurtz thinks of LGBT organizers:
For now, “conservative” proponents of same-sex marriage are out in front, supported by a vast array of considerably less conservative activists and lobby groups. Meanwhile, the radicals are marginalized and/or intentionally keeping a low profile. In a post-gay-marriage world, this situation will flip. The radicals will step out in front, supported by largely the same coalition of activists and lobby groups who currently support same-sex marriage. At that point, the conservatives, no longer needed to run interference for the larger movement, will be quietly put out to pasture. By then we shall be well beyond same-sex marriage. Listen carefully to the words of same-sex marriage supporters, and they confess as much themselves.


It's as though he thinks the whole movement is merely a kind of exciting strategy game for everyone in it, instead of a struggle for our lives and dignity. By using this "strategic" lens, of course, Kurtz manages to completely avoid any engagement with the underlying issues raised by the Beyond Same-Sex Marriage statement (Should marriage continue to be the "gold standard" of relationships? Should alternative forms of family be recognized? How should the state regulate human relationships generally?). Instead of treating various people's statements as part of a complex community conversation, he regards them as merely obfuscatory remarks meant to diffuse intra-community tension (admittedly, they also have that function). He then writes what is essentially a piece of schoolboyish self-congratulation at having "found out" the gay radicals by "listening carefully" to what they said.

But of course, I'm only scathing about Kurtz because he almost hits too close (see, if Sullivan had written this piece, it would have hit too close - Kurtz is dogmatically, intentionally oppositional to the LGBT movement, Sullivan thinks of himself as within it).

Earlier this year I had a conversation (just after Beyond Same-Sex Marriage) with my friend Rich about how marginalized I felt whenever same-sex marriage was the topic in political circles. He suggested a course of political judo. Perhaps, he said (I'm paraphrasing), same-sex marriage is the move in the wrong direction that can eventually lead to a move in the right direction. I was initially heartened by this thought, though eventually I was too uncomfortable with the idea of toying with what I saw could become a kind of political disingenuousness.

Some questions, then:

1) Could same-sex marriage "undermine" marriage? What would this mean?

2) If everyone decided to stop getting married (a la Brangelina), would we still need same-sex marriage? Would we still want it? Are hypotheticals like this completely counterproductive?

3) Why did Kurtz focus on the polyamory part of Beyond Same-Sex Marriage when this was merely one aspect of a call for recognition of a wide variety of already existing family structures? (okay okay, this is kind of a leading question)

Lies, Damned Lies, and Religion

Just when I thought my week was going badly.

Ted Haggard, the leader of a large evangelical church, the New Life Church, finally admits, after an initial denial, that he's had some kind of "lifelong" sexual problem. It all started with an out of work personal trainer saying that Haggard had paid him to have sex with him for three years. Haggard initially denied this, but then later admitted, vaguely, to being a "deceiver and a liar" and also admitted to having purchased, but not used, methamphetamines from the trainer.

He was fired from his position as leader of the church, but apparently this was done in a "loving" way. His congregants, at least, seem to still have some fondness for him:
"I probably cried all morning," [one congregant] said. "He knows he's hurt us and it hurts when your brother has done something, but like Pastor Ross said, he's in a good place -- he's better off this week than he was last week -- and he will receive the healing he needs and he did a good thing for our church so that we can heal."


A pretty gentle fall, all things considered. Donald Rumsfeld, take note.

My queer cents on this whole thing:

1) This was really skillful use of the media by Mike Jones, the trainer who outed Haggard. As Larry Gross noted back in 1993, in his book Contested Closets:
[t]he involuntary exposure of closeted homosexuals was long a favored tactic of social control threatened and employed by our enemies. The adoption of outing as a political tactic has challenged their ability to determine the meaning of gay identity and the consequences of its visibility.

Jones was not a trained spokesperson, but he recognized that he had the opportunity to expose hypocrisy where he found it (Haggard had come out in support of an anti-same-sex marriage measure in Colorado). Sex worker ethics aside, what he did was pretty savvy, and his statements to the media make him sound like your Gay-Man-On-The-Street. It's refreshing to see a religious figure backpedalling wildly while an out gay man is portrayed as the indignant voice of reason.

2) I feel rather sorry for Haggard, of course. The man is doing crystal meth, for goodness' sakes. This is not the kind of drug you do when you're loving life. You might say he had it coming (and he did), but I still can't help but feel sympathy for the man. Unfortunately, it looks like he's going to continue making himself miserable for some time to come, saying that his (homo, presumably) sexuality is something "so repulsive and dark that I've been warring against it all of my adult life." The tragically divided self is alive and well in evangelical America.

3) Who has Haggard wronged? In his own eyes, he has sinned against God. In the eyes of the non-evangelical public, he has harmed us with his hypocrisy (however indirectly), by shaking our faith in religious figures to practice what they preach. In the eyes of those jaded queers who still watch these events with interest, there is little surprise or injury in the hypocrisy (which we have come to expect). His real sin is homophobia. Public humiliation repays this debt that he owed us even before we discovered he himself had some desires for same-sex intimacy. Why do I speak of debts? Here's a passage from On The Genealogy of Morals (essay II section 4) that has informed my thoughts on this:
Throughout the greater part of human history, punishment was not imposed because one held the wrongdoer responsible for his deed, thus not on the presupposition that only the guilty one should be punished: rather, as parents still punish their children, from anger at some harm or injury, vented on the one who caused it - but this anger is held in check and modified by the idea that every injury has its equivalent and can actually be paid back, even if only through the pain of the culprit. And whence did this primeval, deeply rooted, perhaps by now ineradicable idea draw its power - this idea of an equivalence between injury and pain? I have already divulged it: in the contractual relationship between creditor and debtor, which is as old as the idea of "legal subjects" and in turn points back to the fundamental forms of buying, selling, barter, trade and traffic.


So you see, it all comes back to Contracts. One has to wonder what payback is going to be for Mike Jones (not to us, of course, he hasn't wronged us)

I'm reminded of this apropriately Christian joke about a lawyer, a surgeon and an engineer arguing about whose profession is the oldest. The surgeon says that his profession is the oldest because God created Eve from Adam's rib. The engineer says that in fact his profession is the oldest because even before that, God had to build the world out of the chaos. The lawyer smiles and asks, rhetorically, "Ah, but who do you think created the chaos?"

By the way, in case you hadn't already heard, Dougie Howser is also gay. As is this other baby-faced TV-doc.