The Case for Fusion
A Place at the Table: The Gay Individual in American Society.
by Bruce Bawer.
Poseidon. 268 pp. $21.00.
A third of the way through A Place at the Table, Bruce Bawer recalls “a cocktail party for young conservative writers held at the New York headquarters of a right-wing think tank. . . . I looked around the room and thought to myself: this is the gayest crowd I’ve ever seen outside of a gay bar.”
I was at that cocktail party, and there were indeed a number of gay conservatives there. Was their presence anomalous? Is their existence? Bawer, a poet, literary critic, contributor to the Wall Street Journal and the New Criterion, and a homosexual, would say that the answer these days is yes, if you credit the rhetoric and the behavior of most vocal gays and conservatives. But he hopes to change this state of affairs.
Between homosexuality and at least one strand of conservatism, the libertarian, there is no conflict, since modern libertarianism is a philosophy of process, incurious about origins or ends, and homosexuals of a more traditional disposition have over the years fit their sexuality and their world view together in a variety of ad-hoc ways. But recently, a few individuals have proposed something more radical: a fusion, in which homosexuals would behave conservatively (especially by entering into monogamous unions), and conservatives would accept homosexuality (including gay marriage) without reservations. Andrew Sullivan, editor of the New Republic, who is invariably identified in that magazine’s advertisements for itself as a conservative gay Catholic, was the pioneer. Now comes A Place at the Table.
Bawer’s proposed resolution reflects his experience, and he has stitched patches of memoir into this book in order to help explain himself. He grew up in Middle Village, Queens—the very neighborhood that last year revolted successfully against the sexual agenda of New York’s Rainbow Curriculum. When he was nine, he was taken to a rally for the mayoral campaign of William F. Buckley, Jr.; when he was twelve, he passed out pamphlets for Nixon. For the next few years, prompted by medical books, he awaited the end of latency, but it never seemed to come. He crossed the bridge to homosexuality one day in college, and that night neglected to say his prayers for the first time since childhood. He resumed them upon joining the Episcopal Church, under the sponsorship of the man who has now been his lover for six years.
Bawer addresses most of the book to two disparate target audiences—“subculture” gays and “homophobes”—and he flays them both. He finds the gay subculture stifling, as if homosexuals had left their closets for the basement. When, in a review, Bawer panned Allen Ginsberg’s Collected Poems, Ginsberg asked, “Is Bruce homophobic?”—as if that could be the only reason for quarreling with Ginsberg’s metrics or his persona. Subculture promiscuity also strikes Bawer as compulsive and immoral, while subculture activism of the ACT-UP variety—“ecstatic, irrational, existential, orgasmic”—strikes him as displaced promiscuity.
On the other hand, Bawer charges conservatives with ignorance about homosexuality and how it arises, and he accuses a host of conservative public figures, from the religious Right to George Bush, of demonizing gays (often cynically) for political gain. Indeed, they have done worse—for, in Bawer’s view, mainstream ignorance and prejudice are what created the subculture in the first place. “The aspects of [gay life] that come in for criticism,” he writes, “are not intrinsic aspects of homosexuality but . . . manifestations of institutionalized prejudice.”
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The overall effect of both these sections of the book is scattershot, as of a sheaf of op-ed pieces Bawer forgot to put in the mail, and his shoddy handling of some conservative figures accomplishes the strange feat of making me wonder if he is being fair to Allen Ginsberg. But the fundamental case he puts to conservatives is a simple one.
Homosexuality, Bawer argues, is natural. We become homosexual or heterosexual in the womb, or very early in life, and no one veers from his nature except through self-deception or compulsion. Those who, like E.L. Pattullo in COMMENTARY (“Straight Talk About Gays,” December 1992), worry about possible “waverers” who might go either way, do not know what they are talking about: “Take my word for what I feel,” Bawer explains. The proper stance toward homosexuality is acceptance; to disapprove of it—even while tolerating it—is like disapproving of left-handedness.
Given all this, according to Bawer, the “sensible” and “conservative” course for an accepting society is to ensure “that homosexuals can grow into well-integrated and productive members of it as easily as their heterosexual counterparts.” To that end, “the cornerstone issue of the gay-rights movement should be the legal recognition of gay unions . . . [c]all them what you will, marriages and domestic partnerships or whatever.”
This is as clear a statement of the fusion case as we are likely to get. It is an argument from nature, and the goal is marriage. Once that goal is reached, hatred, self-hatred, and the gay subculture will wither.
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A number of obstacles stand in the way of Bawer’s vision, one accidental, others intrinsic to the case. His blunt premise, amounting almost to a form of Calvinism, that sexual identity is locked in concrete, tries to prove too much. For the truth is that people do slide across the sexual spectrum in both directions, and would probably slide more were it not for the accumulation of commitments, as well as that process which in some is maturity, in others loss of energy. Bawer treats all such shifts as uncoverings of one’s true nature. In a poet and a student of literature, such iron determinism about the variousness and unpredictability of life is surprising.
Still, the fact of indeterminacy begs the question of what society should do about adults who are settled in homosexuality. This is where the intrinsic barriers to Bawer’s program arise. The first is religion. Every time he says his prayers, Bawer has access to a higher Authority than book reviewers. To deal with the mass of Christian tradition that is contrary to his position, Bawer lets the gay historian John Boswell walk the reader through half-a-dozen problematic biblical texts, making the difficulties vanish.
But even if Boswell’s readings were correct—and one of them, even in Bawer’s summary, suggests the workings of what might be called the Warren Court school of biblical exegesis—this is an argument that would convince only fundamentalists. Other Christians give weight to moral reasoning, or dogmatic pronouncements on the subject. Even the liberal churches of the Protestant mainline have balked at blessing homosexual marriage. Homosexual Christians who insist on it will have to content themselves with subculture churches—the present Metropolitan Church, or post-schism portions of mainline churches.
The second obstacle is children. Children appear at Bawer’s table only in discussions of the coming-of-age struggles of homosexual boys, or in lamentations over the havoc wrought when a male homosexual comes out after first trying to be a husband and a father. “Marriage is recognized by the state,” says Bawer at one point, “because it reinforces civilized values by enhancing the reliability of workers and the stability of homes.” Not quite. Marriage is instituted primarily to produce and protect children. If the stork brought babies, and social workers raised them, we would not need marriage. Hence the bias toward heterosexual unions in all places and times.
Of course, humans being ingenious, these unions take many forms. Indeed, the form Americans have long considered ideal—a distillate of Christianity, capitalism, and a limited egalitarianism—has been so worn away by bastardy in the lower class and divorce in the middle that it is doubtful whether a bare majority still subscribe to it. If homosexual unions are legalized, it will be as a skirmish in the victory of slow-motion polygamy—as a result of a loosening of ties, not the strengthening of them that Bawer desires.
A third obstacle to the fulfillment of Bawer’s wishes is their Arcadian quality. Bawer imagines a world purged of guilt or conflict. In one characteristic sentence, he tries to describe what would happen “if gay children were educated to be as comfortable with their sexuality as straight children.” But even if Bawer’s social program were enacted in its entirety, so long as the overwhelming majority of gay children are raised by mothers and fathers, the gay life will be fraught with strangeness. Some homosexual women try to square the circle by resorting to artificial insemination or adoption, and movies from La Cage aux Folles to The Wedding Banquet have expressed the having-it-all fantasy of gay fatherhood. But it remains a fantasy. To walk the way of homosexuality is to foreclose the way that made you.
And how “comfortable” does Bawer think heterosexuals are with their sexuality? In a notably acrid passage, he surveys all the troubled marriages he knows, in the course of boasting about his own felicity. Sensing the vaunting tone, he pulls back to assure the reader that he is not more virtuous than these straight sad sacks, only luckier. But Bawer need not apologize. Marriage is hard, because life is.
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These are reasons for denying Bawer what he wants, or rather explanations of why he will not get it. But this leaves the question of what the conservatively inclined homosexual can expect from straight conservatives. The answer is, nothing. Nothing, but a state that honors contracts, strangers who mind their own business, families who do their duty, and friends who love their neighbors. In a totally different context, Bawer advises homosexuals who are still in thrall to the subculture that “being gay is an inconvenience; so are a lot of things; get on with it. . . .” He would certainly reject the application of this advice to the fusion case he presents. But it is the best advice that conservative homosexuals can take.
