Advocate, The: Sex and sensibility - criticism of gay culture

For the first time in years, LARRY KRAMER, America's angriest and most powerful critic of how the world responded to the greatest health catastrophe of the 20th century, takes on the, new AIDS crisis and shows us the only way out: ourselves

In his terribly important new book, Sexual Ecology: AIDS and the Destiny of Gay Men, Gabriel Rotello makes the definitive, airtight case that AIDS in the gay male population is not going to go away. We've changed, but we haven't changed enough, and because we haven't changed enough, the infection rate continues to be unrelentingly high. All our efforts at education, "safe sex," and behavior modification have been insufficient to keep the gay population from continuing to be destroyed.

Gabriel's book also makes the airtight case--still considered controversial, unfortunately, rather than undeniable--that we brought AIDS upon ourselves by a way of living that welcomed it. You cannot fuck indiscriminately with multiple partners, who are also doing the same, without spreading disease, a disease that has for many years also carried death. Nature always extracts a price for sexual promiscuity.

None of this is new or should be new.

Tragically, not enough of us have responded to this information maturely and responsibly. Too many of us have used almost every conceivable excuse not to face this plague squarely and honestly. We think we know what's safe and unsafe, know all about condoms, know all about these new drugs we've put our faith in so quickly, and we get very irate when the word promiscuity is used.

But nobody is out there saying loud and clear and nonstop: Stop acting like assholes. Start acting like adults. Even in the best of times, an adult does not play Russian roulette with cocks.

It's been particularly distressing to me as a writer, as someone who tries very hard to believe he's an artist, to see how almost every other gay writer--as well as journalists, essayists, poets, playwrights, painters, photographers, filmmakers, what have you--has, to my mind, ignored the primary job of being an artist: telling the truth.

What is this truth?

We must create a new culture that is not confined and centered so tragically on our obsession with our penises and what we do with them.

Instead our "artists" just continue to perpetuate what got us into all this trouble and death in the first place. If I am going to single out Edmund White, it is because he's considered our most distinguished gay writer.

In his forthcoming novel The Farewell Symphony, Edmund perplexes me even more than he has in the past. (To cowrite The Joy of Gay Sex, extolling the virtues of fist fucking on the eve of a plague, is bad timing enough.) Now he's given us an autobiographical diary, couched as a novel, in which, almost night by night and day by day, he parades before the reader what seems to be every trick he's ever sucked, fucked, rimmed, tied up, pissed on, or been sucked by, fucked by, rimmed by, tied up by--you get the idea. There are so many faceless, indistinguishable pieces of flesh that litter these 500 pages that reading them becomes, for any reasonably sentient human being, at first a heartless experience and finally a boring one. It is bizarre, to say the least, to read the publisher's description of this as "the great novel about the last 30 years of gay life."

Surely life was more than this, even for--especially for--Edmund White. He did not spend 30 years with a nonstop erection and an asshole busier than his toilet.

Is it not incumbent, particularly in the time of a plague that has been spread by our own callous indifference to ending it, that those of us who are read and listened to perceive of ourselves as fuller human beings and capable of writing about far more than just what sex we had night after night for 30 years? It is impossible for me to believe that this book embodies what AIDS really represents to Edmund or that this is the kind of tribute he wishes to leave to all his dead friends and lovers or, indeed, that this is all that becoming our most esteemed and respected writer has meant to him. I found this book an irresponsible piece of work indeed.

I am so sick of the literature of sex, of the soft porn of all our novels and short stories that traffic only or mostly in sex. Tricks, bushes, S/M, discos, drugs, bathhouses, Fire Island, phone sex, meat racks--is this all we are capable of writing about or our audience capable of reading? With regard to the recent spate of coming-out books, I was amazed that every single writer's definition of coming out was characterized solely around a first sexual encounter. Is this what coming out means? For everyone? Think about it. When did you first attain a feeling that you might be open to different forces controlling your destiny? How did these develop and mature and clarify and challenge? The first time you tasted cock or cunt? I sincerely doubt it. But that is what coming out, for gay writers and their anthologists, seems to have been absurdly reduced to.

Are not our lives more complicated and challenging and interesting than we are being told by our gay writers?

Look at the great works of literature. Do we see Anna Karenina being fucked by her husband or her lover once, twice, a hundred times? In her cunt, up her ass? Then being tied up and pissed upon? Does the word sex ever even appear in Dickens? Is Hamlet, whom Terrence McNally calls the greatest gay character in all literature, seen with his tongue up somebody's butt?

We are the only minority that never writes about our oppressors! People are murdering us right, left, and center on a daily basis and have been doing so since the beginning of time. Why aren't we writing about these people and our battles with them? Do we, as the black writers do, write about the goddamned straight white men who make us their slaves? Do such great writers of color as James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, August Wilson, Derek Walcott, Wole Soyinka, and Nelson Mandela write about sneaking around in the bushes sucking dick or tit?

We learn what it's like to be what we are from what we read! Black men learn from reading great black writers. What do gay readers learn from reading gay writers? We learn that our bodies must go to the gym every waking moment and that our cocks and our libidos are deficient, for surely they cannot do everything Ed White is telling us for 500 pages he is doing every waking moment.

Why don't we write about our oppressors and our friends and our businesses and our families and our greed and our hopes and our crimes and our politics--in other words, our real lives?

One thing our writers are not teaching us about is love. How to love another gay. How to love ourselves. Or respect. How to respect each other and ourselves.

Has no one read Tolstoy or Zola or Balzac or Chekhov or Dostoyevsky? Yes, I know they were writers who wrote in a different time. But they are great writers, and we must ask ourselves if anyone since has surpassed them in their greatness, and I would maintain that no one has and that if this is the case, is it not incumbent upon us to go back and pick up where they left off? Why are the goals of gay fiction so small? Look at the plot of any gay novel. It is so petite. Our world is gigantic! Why are our novels so unchallenging? So safe? Because, ironically, it is very safe--and easy--to write about sex. Sex is--at least, the way gay writers write about it--impersonal. I cannot see one face in White's new book. I cannot feel one touching moment. I did not learn one thing. It did not make me feel any emotion but disgust and disappointment.

Sadly, I feel myself more isolated than ever from my fellow gay writers. But then I always did. The things I believe are things few of my people want to hear, but then they never did. It is disheartening to hope so much for change and to see so little of it.

After all our history, after all these deaths, we still don't have an AIDS literature, and we don't have a gay literature. We don't have a gay culture, I don't believe. We have our sexuality, and we have made a culture out of our sexuality, and that culture has killed us.

I want to say this again: We have made sex the cornerstone of gay liberation and gay culture, and it has killed us.

We endlessly blame the government for its hideous response to AIDS. But we speak not one syllable about how we can repair the damage we have caused that brought about so much death in the first place. We do not even admit that we walked down the wrong path. We do not admit that we made a mistake. Only crybabies, petulant children, and immature adults never admit when they've made a mistake.

We certainly are not talking about how we can build a new culture that will enable us to go forward to a future.

We've all been partners in our destruction. AIDS has killed us, and while we certainly did not invite it in, we certainly did invite it in. We still invite it in. We certainly do not do everything we can to keep it out. We have been the cause of our own victimization. I know these are grotesquely politically incorrect things to say. So be it. We knew we were playing with fire, and we continued to play with fire, and the fire consumed monstrously large numbers of us and singed the rest of us, all of us, whether we notice our burn marks or not. And we still play with fire.

What kind of denial do we persist in? What kind of death wish? Don't writers in particular have the responsibility not to kowtow to the culture as it is, if this culture is murderous, but to create a new culture if a mistake with the old one has been made (and we certainly must begin to acknowledge that we made a mistake with the old one)? Surely the German writers who did not kiss Hitler's ass are the writers who have endured. You can't name me one good one who stayed home in Berlin and wrote Sieg Heil.

Surely gay culture is more than cocks. (And surely it is time for lesbians to start getting angry at gay men about all of this.)

Who are we? What does it mean to be gay? What is the gay sensibility? The poet Richard Howard and I once wanted to teach a course at New York's New School for Social Reform asking these questions, and not one person signed up. I guess no one wants to know, but that is what we must learn. What is it that joins Michelangelo and Elton John and Herman Melville? Abraham Lincoln and George Washington? (Wait for my new novel!) Cary Grant and Ian McKellen. Schubert and Boy George. Pasolini, Visconti, Cukor, and Schlesinger. Cole Porter and Auden. Francis Bacon and da Vinci. Not that they fucked in the bushes but that they created their own great works! Heterosexuals are not studied, dissected, adjudged, calibrated, compared by their sexual acts, by the peccadilloes of their genitalia.

We read, we study, we go to school to learn that somebody did something that made a difference. That we are here on earth. That we tried to make it better. That we tried to climb mountains. That is what civilization is all about. Schoolkids spend all their time studying what heterosexuals did to form our civilization.

What do kids learn in school about the contributions homosexuals have made to the world?

Recently I tried to leave my estate to Yale University. I was a pretty lonely young gay man when I went there, and it has always been my dream that I'd leave what I could to insure that gay kids at Yale today would have a better time than I did. I didn't think there would be any problem, giving them money and all.

I'd offered, in my will, several alternatives. One was to endow permanent professorships as part of an authorized and permanent lesbian and gay studies program. Another was to help set up a gay student center, an actual building where gay kids could hang out. In a rather cold letter from Yale's provost, both of these offers were shot down. If the reasons given to me for this were presented to black students, they'd rightly charge racism. Under antidiscrimination laws Yale could be sued. But gays are not so protected.

I will not go into all the details of my ensuing meetings, phone calls, lunches, and cries for help to fellow gay Yale alums. Many times I asked myself, Larry, why are you spending so much time trying to make someone accept a present they don't want to accept? Surely there are places other than Yale I can give my money that will benefit gays. (Tony Kushner asked me why I want to give anything to such an elitist institution.) Do I have to ram gay people down everybody's throat? And, of course, when put this way, I have to answer yes.

Gay teachers at Yale are afraid to come out of the closet, They have good reason to be afraid. They're denied tenure on too regular a basis. One of Yale's most popular teachers, voted so by all the students, the distinguished gay scholar Wayne Koestenbaum, was recently denied a permanent position. I brought this up with the provost and the dean, and of course I was pooh-poohed. There is no discrimination at Yale.

No discrimination? What about Dr. Koestenbaum? What about the too-long list of names I gave them of other gay faculty who'd had to leave? Why does Yale refuse to recognize lesbian and gay studies as a legitimate course of study? If there are women's studies programs and African-American studies programs and Jewish and Christian studies programs and Hispanic studies and Far Eastern studies, why is the line drawn in the sand at gays?,

Is any other college different? I understand from Martin Duberman that with the exception of an excellent program at San Francisco State, the answer is usually no.

Why do gay students accept such mediocrity? Black students, Hispanics, and women have been known to revolt, to picket, to sit in when denied studying their own. Why are we so passive everywhere? It's a question that never ceases to haunt me for my inability to ever come up with an answer I find acceptable.

"What would happen," I asked the provost, "if I came to Yale with $100 million to establish a lesbian and gay studies program and student center?" (After a I know David Geffen, and he taught at Yale.) She answered, "We would turn it down." (David, I would dearly like to put her to the test!)

The right to have rights. Listen to those five words.

Our right to have rights.

Does your gayness and your concern with the fate of your people stand at the very center of your being?

The great political philosopher (of, among other things, totalitarianism, anti-Semitism, and the Holocaust), Hannah Arendt, whose work has meant more to me than that of any other person who has ever lived, once posed this question: Are you responding to the unprecedented experiences and events of your time (because there are always events and experiences that are unprecedented) that call into question the morality of the majority, the categories and standards and rules and regulations and laws that are established for us by others and not by ourselves?

Arendt writes about Jews. But you have only to substitute gay every time she uses Jew to learn everything you must know about why we are where we are and what to do about it.

She says equality comes into possibility only when people organize themselves into a group. An organized group. The organization of gay people.

Marginalized. "We don't want our students marginalized." I heard this over and over from Yale's provost and dean every time I tried to propose legitimized lesbian and gay studies programs, endowed professorships of gay subjects, a gay student center.

Talk like this scares me. Its aim, it seems to me, is not to join us to the majority but to lose us in the majority. But in no way are we a part of the majority because the majority denies us just about every legal avenue that could lead us to being just like them. Their aim, it seems to me, is really to destroy the civil rights of our whole gay population so that gays can continue to be treated as if we don't exist, as if what happens to us as gays is of no interest, that the gay part of us, so far as the majority is concerned, might as well be dead, which for many of us has certainly historically been the case.

Indeed, because "majority" acts against us are based on the shame of our difference--certainly their discomfort with our difference--terror is engendered in us, and, as Arendt says over and over again, "terror enforces oblivion."

And in our terror we become their slaves. We do what they rule we must. Day after day they pass laws against us, and we become even more their slaves. The destruction of a person's rights is a prerequisite for dominating that person and that community entirely. That is what masters do to slaves.

Why can't we see that we are being kept in a state of slavery? We are not allowed to learn about our-, selves in school. We are not allowed to have teachers teach our culture. We are not allowed student centers to be with our own. We are not allowed to educate about safe sex. We are rarely allowed joint benefits. We are not allowed to inherit tax-free. We are not allowed to marry! We are not allowed... We are not allowed... We are not allowed...

One thousand forty-nine. That is the number of federal statutes that provide benefits, rights, and privileges to individuals who have the legal right to marry. I am at the end of my patience with gays who say they're not interested in obtaining the right to legally marry. Those 1,049 benefits, rights, and privileges, which amount to respect, don't interest them. Dumb, stupid, blind gays opposed to gay marriage obviously have not had to watch helplessly as a lover who has no citizenship or a green card is deported from America like a common criminal.

Demanding legalized gay marriage is a pragmatic decision! It is not about "copying" them. It is about money and rights. Straights don't want us to marry? Then give us all those 1,049 rights, and we'll make up our own form of marriage. No 1,049 rights? Then we demand legalized same-sex marriage!

Democracy is not democracy if it does not include us. And it does not include us. Jews faced exclusion for centuries. They were great hiders too. Until a plague came along and almost destroyed them. Until they realized, as Arendt has said over and, over, that the only proper response to anti-Semitism, the only way in which Jews could get power and assume their political responsibility, was to fight for their rights as Jews.

The most fundamental right of human beings is the right to have rights. To be stripped of legal and political rights is to be stripped of a necessary condition for leading a human life. At the National Institutes of Health, the fact that the government controls all scientific research guarantees that it won't be done on anyone whom straight white gentile males regard as impure. At Yale and everywhere else, our educational system is set up so that straight teachers have the power to see that gay teachers won't come out and that kids won't be taught about anything gay. We are all to be alike. We are all to be taught as one. Marginalization is the dirty word they don't want to do to us at the same time that is exactly what they do to us.

Isn't thinking like this not much different from the Nazi racial hygiene program? Those who look after us are no different from the Nazi doctors who wanted to purify their race.

A straight Yale professor writes a book about the most famous doctors in history and denies when they are obviously gay. A straight Harvard professor writes a biography of Abraham Lincoln and warns his readers not to read anything into Abe's sleeping side by side in a double bed with another man every night for four years. The founders of psychoanalysis in America refused to acknowledge that one of their most famous leaders was gay, lest it interfere with their continued classification of us as sick.

Why do we allow all this shit to be dumped on us century after century? When are we finally going to rise up in fury and protest? We are a body of people, a nation of gays, a huge political group capable of exercising power!

Don't you see how the hate continues, how the hate of centuries still confines us, still prevents our freedom, still makes us less than whole? As Arendt tells minorities over and over who refuse to fight, in so doing you become the majority's slaves. We are the straight white man's slaves.

So if our very own gay writers do not write about our real lives and our very own universities do not teach about our real history and we do not demand better from both, how can we create a new culture so we can begin to escape this plague that continues to kill off our children one by one?

The only response, the only way gays can assume our political responsibility and obtain our democratic due, is to fight for our rights as gays. To be taught about, to be studied, to be written about, not as cocks and cunts, but as gays.

And if we don't know what this means yet, we better find out fast.