Queer Wars: The New Gay Right and Its Critics (review)

The last fifteen years have witnessed the seeming contradiction of openly gay intellectuals publicly espousing conservative viewpoints on issues both of general interest and of particular concern to the gay community. Andrew Sullivan, the best known of these gay conservatives, illustrated this paradox in a talk he gave at Yale in the late 1980s. He began with an extended joke about the difficulties of coming out—as a conservative. This joke reflected the conventional wisdom that gays and lesbians naturally gravitated toward the left of the political spectrum. In part, that wisdom is based on the status of gays and lesbians as a long-oppressed minority in American society. Gays' resulting interest in civil rights laws in turn creates a natural alliance with other minority groups and, more generally, with liberal and leftist political groups. But gays' assumed leftward orientation rests even more deeply on the culturally transgressive potential of homosexuality, at least as homosexuality is understood by both some gays and many opponents of gay rights. It is this distinction—between gays simply as an oppressed minority seeking civil rights and gays as cultural dissidents—that largely (though not completely) marks the contested territory between gay conservatives and their more liberal and radical counterparts.

Queer Wars by Paul Robinson, a professor of humanities at Stanford, takes the reader on a tour of the personalities and thinking of both gay conservatives and, to a lesser extent, their critics. The book is organized into three chapters, each of which centers on the thinking and writing of a prominent gay conservative writer (or, in the case of chapter 3, two such writers). Chapter 1 discusses Bruce Bawer, whose 1993 book, A Place at the Table, is perhaps the purest expression of the view that homosexuality is nothing more than a morally neutral fact with no larger cultural consequences. Chapter 2—the longest and most interesting chapter—discusses Andrew Sullivan's work, especially but not exclusively his 1995 work, Virtually Normal, and the critics that took aim at his work. Finally, chapter 3 discusses Michaelangelo Signorile and Gabriel Rotello, whom Robinson labels "sexual conservatives" based on their arguments about gay male sexual behavior in light of the AIDS epidemic. Robinson ends the book with a brief epilogue that discusses the American version of the television miniseries Queer as Folk and its relevance for the arguments reviewed in the body of the book.¹

True to its organization around individual writers, Queer Wars focuses predominantly on the personalities and personal stories of these gay conservatives as well as, to a lesser degree, those of their liberal and radical critics. To that extent the book is not precisely a work of intellectual, political, or cultural studies: Queer Wars is fundamentally a book about gay conservatives, not gay conservatism. This is not an inappropriate focus, even if one wishes to study the ideology of gay conservatism. Indeed, much of Robinson's analysis assumes that a given writer's personal history and psychology strongly influence the political and cultural views he adopts. Thus, for example, Robinson's analysis of Bruce Bawer's critique of gay sexual promiscuity gives prominent place to Robinson's suspicion that Bawer possesses a weak libido. Similarly, Robinson detects middle-age envy in Michaelangelo Signorile's criticism of the sexualized culture of the gay urban ghetto and questions the criticism that Gabriel Rotello is motivated by sexual puritanism, based on Rotello's account of the losses AIDS has inflicted upon his life.

Still, Robinson's focus on persons and personalities sometimes distracts from the analysis of those writers' ideas. To be sure, Robinson does go beyond a focus on the life-story origins of those ideas to engage the ideas on their own terms. As noted below, much of his analysis—especially of Andrew Sullivan's work—is interesting, nuanced, and insightful. Nevertheless, by organizing his analysis by author rather than, say, topically (for example, attitudes about...