QUEER WARS

Paul Robinson

University of Chicago Press

11.50

I bought this book (in Gay’s the Word), because it appeared to indicate a Gay intellectual life in the USA’something we don’t really have in GB ‘ though there probably is one in Ireland. It’s not GtW‘s fault that I was sorely disappointed. So disappointed that I had to work hard to read the whole text. Professor Robinson takes a part in these Queer Wars, in opposition to ‘conservatives’ like Bruce Bawer and Andrew Sullivan. He appears to be suggesting that the sexual (anarchy or incontinence) of the 1970s is still an option for most people. I don’t think it is, especially in the USA, which has no Health Service (National or otherwise) and in so far as it had a vestigial Health infrastructure Reagan, Bush, Clinton and Bush destroyed it.

It is indicative of the shortcomings of this book that the only thing I learned about Bruce Bawer (p24) is that he doesn’t like opera. And, admittedly, that he is living in ‘Europe‘ (a larger and ore varied place than Paul Robinson appears to realise). Sullivan is a (sexual) hypocrite praising the family out of one side of his mouth and asking for ‘bareback’ (unprotected) fucking on the internet. (I got the distinct impression that some of his enemies were as pleased that the tough talking Sullivan was asking to be fucked, as they were about his, apparent, hypocrisy.)

[I]nverted socialism

The economy of the US is a sort of inverted socialism. Working stiffs have a heavy tax burden, while the hyper-wealthy pay virtually nothing. America has ‘space-age’ health facilities. But everything (from plastic spoons to complex surgery) has a price tag. Some queer Americans can barely afford condoms, and may well earn what little they do by ‘donating’ blood. The commercialisation of aspects of the health system horrifies most Europeans. I am anything but anti-American, but in this complex of matters, we are right and America, or more precisely the USA‘s Establishment, are dead wrong. And Americans know it. I’ve met people who described themselves as Right wing Republicans, Reaganites, who unaffectedly envied the British and Scandinavian ‘Welfare States’.

Our world ” less pleasant ” than the 1960s

The above may seem an eccentric diversion from the main point, but the ‘conservatives’ and therefore the ‘liberationists’ discuss sexuality and sexual order at great length. ‘Liberationists’ because as Paul Robinson states in the first sentence of his Introduction; “The gay movement began on the left.” Meaning the Gay Liberation Front. This implies that those defending the behaviour of the first ‘liberated’ generation in the late 1960Seand ’70s are in (essentially) a nostalgic frame of mind. They are asking for our youth back. That is impossible outside the pages of works of fiction. Despite the collapse of the (allegedly) dour and gray USSR, our world is a great deal less pleasant than the world before us in the 1960s. Rampant Manchester Liberal Capitalism has ground whole nations down to misery and want ‘ a situation so dire that the PoleSeand Hungarians, of all peoples, have re-elected Communist Parties into government.

Stalin ” Tashnaq ” Russian ” peasant ”

The above may have to do with the fact that I, like many of the writers discussed here, am no longer young. But I am not so doddery that I can’t recall my youth in the 1960s. We in the UK had ‘never had it so good’. Western Europe was undergoing an economic miracle, as was the Republic of Ireland. Eastern Europe was in full recovery from the destruction of the Great Patriotic War (due to the efforts of Stalin and his “ists”). Khruschev et alia decided to get rid of the economic policies that brought about the revival of the USSR by the early ’50s. They held on to the repressive apparatus which had become unnecessary -and counterproductive- nobody in the Soviet Union in 1953 wanted the return of the Romanovs, or the Kings, PrinceSeand Emirs of the minority nations. Nationalists, even the Armenian Tashnaq, had engaged in ambiguous alliances. Armenia (a Soviet Socialist Republic) fought Fascism with a will in the course of the Great Patriotic War. 90+% of the population of the USSR were ‘Soviet patriots’, the various Five Year PlanSeand WW2 had proved that Armenians, or Jews, Kalmyks or Tatars, (or proletarian-, or peasant-background Russians) who had proved themselves, could get into the highest Soviet echelons.

‘Detente’ was in the air in 1960. The USA shot it down in the course of the ‘U2 incident’. The Soviets shot down a spy plane (code-name ‘‘) over Sverdlovsk during US / USSR talks in Vienna on scaling-down ‘conventional’ and nuclear arms. Commentators have claimed the Russkies blew this incident out of proportion. Sverdlovsk was the Soviet (and Russian) equivalent of Minneapolis, it’Seanything but a border town.

Instead of learning from this episode America has spent the past half-century attempting to impose itself on the stateSeand peoples of Asia. And more guardedly, on Africa and Europe. (Mostly using the UK as a proxy. It has reduced Africa to a shambles. Europe is becoming politically ineffective. But the US / UK may find it has been so sharp it’ll cut itself. Spain has proved itself independent-minded, and is reviving in terms of population and economy. It also has good relations with Latin America, no longer the collection of sleazy dictatorships Uncle Sam can boss at will, telling them, for example, when to declare war on European States they had no quarrel with. There is not so much a wind as a hurricane of change blowing through Latin America). If Germany ever decides to throw its weight about the US / UK will regret

America ” most powerful ” on the planet ”

The above must seem a greater diversion than the one on health systems. It would be ludicrous to pretend that America has been anything other than the most powerful State on the planet since 1945. It is the mightiest military power in history. And is now realising that perception is all. The British Empire dissolved in a decade. Its conquered peoples’ realised ‘ due mostly to Japan‘s victories ‘ that Europeans are not invincible.

In Kenya, (1950 to 1960), 70,000+ (possibly over 100,000) Africans were killed, as opposed to 16 European settlers, despite which the Union Jack was lowered and the UK brought its soldiers, settlers, and civil servants home.

Quickie marriageSeand Gay Pride

This book is about a discussion going on in what is still the heart of Gay Liberation. Few other Gay Liberation or Gay Rights movements would have been set up if it had not been for the explosion in America in the late 1960s. (Certainly Warsaw would not, under any other circumstances, have been chosen as the venue for 2008′s EuroPride festivities^1. It is doubtful if there would be such an event if it had not been for ‘Stonewall’). That is a debt we owe them. The debt they owe us is to take themselves seriously. Judging from this particular book the Gay movement in America is stuck in a perpetual intellectual adolescence. It is absurd for Bruce Bawer and Andrew Sullivan to praise the ‘selflessness’ of the partners in heterosexual marriage, in a culture where marriage is -by European standards- a joke. (Think of ‘quickie’ celebrity marriages in ghastly Las Vegas chapels). And divorce in some States is a matter of signing a bit of paper and handing over a few greenbacks. That is, admittedly, something of a caricature. But every State of the Union allows divorce, despite the alleged Puritan origins of American culture.

The sub-title of this book is The New Gay Right and its Critics, but one wonders how ‘Right’ some of these critics are. Especially as Michelangelo Singnorile and Gabriel Rotello, (political Leftists), are roped in on the conservative side of certain arguments. They take the attitude that the halcyon days of barSeand bath houses, of open-ended sexual behaviour is ended, because of AIDS. Professor Robinson seems to be claiming that with the drugs available today the restrictions of the 1980Seand ’90s have become surplus to requirements. This is where a ‘credibility gap’ opens up for me. Most Americans, including American Gays, can’t afford the cocktails of drugs required to control AIDSeand the opportunistic infections which come as a consequence of being HIV+.

The matter may seem down and dusted to wealthy academicSeand journalists. Though one assumes that people like Sullivan and Signorile would have rather little to fall back on financially if they acquired full-blown AIDS. Sullivan could possibly escape to back to the UK. Being seriously ill in the US can be a death sentence for even quite wealthy people.

” neo-Puritans ” ‘Gay Plague’ ” mutat[ion] ”

The notion that Signorile and similar writers are neo-Puritans seems to me to be simply wrong. Tens of thousands of American Gay men have died ‘of AIDS’. Many of them because of a smug notion that they would not ‘get it’. The smugness being encouraged by the people who owned the bars, bath houses, and magazines which made money out of the sexual anarchy of the ’70Seand early ’80s. The ‘Gay Plague’ was first recognised a quarter of a century ago -a reasonably long time- but well within the lifetime of, Sullivan, Signorile, Professor Robinson (unless he iSean Infant Phenomenon) and myself. Paul Robinson (Richard W. Lyman Professor in the Humanities at Stanford University) nowhere brings forward free-standing evidence to refute Signorile’s notion that the H I Virus may well mutate into something more lethal, than it is already.

[N]otes ” navel-gazing ” flamers ” effeminate[s]

I made a lot of notes on this text, and probably should apologise for not really using them. But it seemed to me that the arguments were futile, navel-gazing, or pointlessly ad hominem ‘ the sort of argument you get in Gay barSeany day of the week. Sullivan’s a (sexual) hypocrite; Signorile’s a (sexual) spoilsport – so what? There is navel-gazing about the health problems the Gay community faces (though women barely feature in this book) and about America. The USA is admittedly a big country, but it does not contain the solution to every problem in the world ‘ particularly not health-related problems. Nobody, including the England-born Sullivan, refers to the fact that European States’ provision of health services makes the US appear grotesquely backward. There is also an element of navel-gazing in restricting the discussion of some matters to those resident in the USA.

There is also what I consider to be a fudging of matters like effeminacy. Robinson puts ‘flamers’, drag queenSeand effeminate men on the same level. Implying that these phenomena are the same. They are, surely, not even similar. Gentle ‘effeminate’ men are rarely ‘flamers’, which one assumes, means ‘in your face’ queers. And drag, even queer male drag, has little to do with either phenomenon ‘ and it can easily topple over into misogyny ‘ when it is not misogynist in the first place.

On that ambiguous note I will end. The themes of this book are of very great moment to the Gay community, all of us, women, men, ambiguous, transsexual. We are at a very odd juncture in our history, we appear to have everything ‘ but I, for one, feel we have lost something.

 

 

I may write another review of this book.

If you would like to comment on the book, or on my feeble review of it, you will be very welcome.

 

Sean McGouran