June 14, 2002
MORONIC OXYMORON :
Fighting the Gay Right (RICHARD GOLDSTEIN, July 1, 2002, The Nation)In a recent Kaiser Family Foundation survey, 66 percent of lesbians and gay men called themselves liberal and only 7 percent said they were conservative. Yet the loudest queer voices belong to homocons. Andrew Sullivan, Camille Paglia and Norah Vincent are the hot gay pundits, and they owe their success to liberal publications. Though Sullivan now claims he has been barred from writing for The New York Times Magazine (allegedly because he makes the new executive editor, Howell Raines, "uncomfortable"), for the past four years he has been the signature of that paper's interest in the gay community. Paglia regularly makes the rounds of hip publications, from Interview to Salon. Vincent is a creature of the
alternative press; she leapfrogged from the Village Voice to the Los Angeles Times. Though the gay left survives in progressive journals, and though some liberals (such as Detroit News columnist Deb Price) can be heard in the heartland, radical queers can't compete with homocons when it comes to major media. As a result, gay and lesbian commentary in America is skewed sharply to the right. It's as if the press had designated a foe of affirmative action like Ward Connerly to be the spokesman for his race.
There's something breathtakingly moronic about the phrase : "gay and lesbian commentary in America is skewed sharply to the right". First of all, by any measure of prominence and audience reached, you'd have to say that the traditional gay and lesbian Left--Rosie O'Donnell; Ellen deGeneres; Melissa Etheridge; etc.--remain overwhelmingly the public voice of America's gay community. With no disrespect intended towards these authors, if you added up every single person who's ever read a word that Andrew Sullivan, Camille Paglia and Norah Vincent have written, you'd have only a fraction of Rosie's viewing audience. All of America knows when Ellen's latest show gets canceled or when Rosie decides to end her's. But go out on a street corner and ask the next thousand people who walk by what they thought of Norah Vincent leaving the Village Voice and if two of them have even heard of her I'll give you $10.
Secondly, since this seems to be my week to defend conservatism from its friends, while we on the Right can value the assistance of able commentators like Andrew Sullivan and Camille Paglia, and can easily share the Republican Party with them, it is simply absurd to refer to them as Conservatives. Morality is a vital component of Conservatism. In the words, once again, of Russell Kirk :
[T]he essence of social conservatism is preservation of the ancient moral traditions of humanity. 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. 'What is conservatism?' Abraham Lincoln inquired once. 'Is it not adherence to the old and tried, against the new and untried?'
Setting aside for the moment the question of whether the old Railsplitter was himself gay, it seems fair to say that you can not diverge so far from conservative ideology as homosexuality requires you to and still be a Conservative. If nothing else, it is monumentally hypocritical to say that you wish to preserve all of the moral traditions except for those that you have trouble measuring up to yourself, which should be disposed of post haste. It's worth mentioning that this article begins with a discussion of Pim Fortuyn, who was not merely gay but also an advocate of pedophilia. To refer to him as a conservative is objectionable in the extreme.
At any rate, I've addressed some of these issues more fully in a review of Mr. Sullivan's marvelous book, Virtually Normal. For now let us just assure Mr. Goldstein that the gay Left is still swinging the bigger microphones and he need not fear that the "homocons", as he so charmingly puts it, are taking over the public debate. We can only pray for the day when Andrew Sullivan's audience is the size of Rosie's, and vice
versa.