HOMOCON REDUX :

We on the Gay Right Find Diplomacy Can Work Wonders : When mistaken for a man, I gently correct. (Norah Vincent, 6/20/02, LA Times)

I used to be bothered and embarrassed when strangers mistook me for a man, especially when it happened in public restrooms. I felt left out by what Foucaultians and other leftist intellectuals like to call "gender norms." I didn't fit, and to me the fault lay with--to borrow another radical's pet phrase--the heterosexist hegemony, the insidiousness of which had made me into a pariah among my own sex and a virtual Medusa in the eyes of the opposite sex. And all this because I had a boy's wardrobe, short hair, masculine features and a deep voice. Go figure. If the world couldn't see me through my disguise, I thought, it was the world, not I, who was going to have to change.

And that, in a nutshell, is what leftist gay politics is all about. Making the world change to suit the outcast. Not an ignoble cause on the face ofit. Everyone deserves respect, after all, as well as a certain degree of recognition. This is no less than the founding principle of our Bill of Rights. All libertarian-minded folk are in harmony with left liberals on this point--even gay conservatives, whom Village Voice Senior Editor RichardGoldstein has dubbed "homocons."

When Mr. Goldtsein last week announced that Norah Vincent was the new voice of Gay America and an inappropriate one because a conservative, some of us were concerned because we were as unaware that Ms Vincent was gay as we were that she was conservative. In the few things I'd read by her I guess her sexuality hadn't been at issue. But this column helps to clarify things by amply demonstrating that she is gay and that--as expected-- she's not conservative. One can not favor, as Ms Vincent says she does, making the world change to suit your own desires and still be a conservative. In the, as always, useful words of Russell Kirk :

Any informed conservative is reluctant to condense profound and intricate intellectual systems to a few portentous phrases; he prefers to leave that technique to the enthusiasm of radicals.  Conservatism is not a fixed and immutable body of dogma, and conservatives inherit from Burke a talent for re-expressing their convictions to fit the time.  As a working premise, nevertheless, one can observe here that the essence of social conservatism is preservation of the ancient moral traditions. Conservatives respect the wisdom of their ancestors...; they are dubious of wholesale alteration. They think society is a spiritual reality, possessing an eternal life but a delicate constitution: it cannot be scrapped and recast as if it were a machine.

It's damned hard to reconcile this with a belief that we should suddenly accept homosexuality as merely a lifestyle choice. Posted by Orrin Judd at June 24, 2002 4:20 PM