To the Editor:

I cannot address the unreason in Norman Podhoretz’s polemic against lesbian and gay equality [“How the Gay-Rights Movement Won,” November 1996], but may I make two personal points? The first is Mr. Podhoretz’s misrepresentation of my book, Virtually Normal. Nowhere in the book do I argue, as he claims, that extramarital outlets “should be recognized by both parties in a same-sex marriage.” The sentence to which he refers is discussing the state of affairs in gay male relationships before same-sex marriage has been legalized. Part of the point of same-sex marriage, I argue in the central chapter of the book, is to provide an incentive for monogamy to be achieved. I have now publicly clarified this several times, most prominently in the Washington Post this summer. In the afterword to the paperback edition of the book, I explicitly wrote, in response to the deliberate distortion of this sentence: “[I]t is my view that, in same-sex marriage, adultery should be as anathema as it is in heterosexual marriage.” Is Mr. Podhoretz unaware of these statements? Or does he merely want to be unaware? It is one thing to disagree with an intellectual opponent. It is another thing consciously and systematically to misrepresent him.

It is also another thing to impugn his character. Mr. Podhoretz, in one of the ugliest of many ugly detours in his piece, says the following:

[M]any homosexuals (including Andrew Sullivan himself, as we learned when he announced upon resigning from the editorship of the New Republic that he had contracted the AIDS virus) are willing to court death rather than give up being promiscuous.

This is simply vile. Is Mr. Podhoretz aware that merely one encounter with HIV is sufficient to contract the disease? Or is his general loathing of lesbians and gay men so arbitrary that he feels able to impugn any one of us with his generalized prejudice? I had hoped we could conduct a civilized debate about this topic without this kind of personal invective. Mr. Podhoretz proves me wrong.

This isn’t the first time this tactic has been used. Mark Steyn, in what Mr. Podhoretz calls a “brilliant little piece” in the American Spectator, put a quote in my mouth boasting of alleged promiscuity some two years ago. I have no memory of such a remark, and Steyn has no independent evidence for it. But it is printed just the same, part of the neo-McCarthyism now prevalent on both sides of the political spectrum: if you can’t win the argument, smear, discredit, or misrepresent your opponents.

That COMMENTARY would stoop to these kinds of tactics is deeply depressing. And it is surely the real reason the “Gay-Rights Movement Won.” We have arguments. Mr. Podhoretz has merely bile.

Andrew Sullivan
New Republic
Washington, D.C.

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To the Editor:

Having been so often denounced by other gay writers and journalists as a “right-winger” and “neocon” because of my writings against gay-identity politics, the gay politicization of the academy, and the narcissistic culture of “queer” protest, I cannot tell you what a relief it is to be criticized, however obliquely, in the pages of COMMENTARY. Still, in paraphrasing my recent New York magazine cover story about the “heterosexualization of gay culture,” Norman Podhoretz oversimplifies a complex argument.

Mr. Podhoretz declares that I “complain” about this assimilationist trend, “lament[ing],” for instance, the fact that there is less “avid sexuality” than family values in today’s gay books and plays; reading this, one would get the impression that I am one of those “lust-driven” young men he is so agitated about. But my observations about, e.g., the shift in focus from sex to family in the most recent gay literature were part of a larger, essentially aesthetic argument: that whatever its drawbacks, the seething, ghettoized gay culture of an earlier, pre-assimilationist era produced a more distinctive and culturally interesting art, theater, and literature. But to observe that this is so is hardly to argue in favor of the ghetto itself—much less to advocate all the attitudes and behaviors that flourished within it. I can (and do) also lament the passing of the vibrant Yiddish literature and theater of my grandfather’s day, without wanting to move back to his shtetl, or for that matter to East Fourth Street.

At the very beginning of my New York article, and indeed in numerous articles on this subject—including the one that appears in Bruce Bawer’s collection Beyond Queer (which, had he actually read it, Mr. Podhoretz would have recognized as a polemic against “queer” thinking, instead of merely citing it, rather bizarrely, as an example of “queer” books)—I acknowledge the benefits of “mainstreaming,” and disdain social and especially intellectual ghettos. Yet as Jews know better than most, assimilation has its costs; and I thought it worthwhile, in the New York piece, to explore those costs a little—to catalogue the uneasy, sometimes grotesque, products of a once-distinct sub-culture’s attempt to mimic the ideology and rhetoric of an often still-hostile mainstream.

But, of course, the phenomenon is one with which Mr. Podhoretz’s COMMENTARY audience is already well acquainted.

Daniel Mendelsohn
New York City

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To the Editor:

Gay people essentially, sometime preening notwithstanding, live to themselves. Few are the places in majoritarian culture where we are welcome—truly welcome—without being perceived as posing a threat. True, in New York literary circles straight people beautifully invite gay friends to their parties. Many of us living outside New York would barely know; for once we came out, few of our old straight friends ever invited us back. (There was, for example, the embarrassed and gratuitous explanation of one prominent Washingtonian: “We wanted to invite you and your, ah, friend, you know, but, we already had a Jewish couple coming. . . .”)

So when one of America’s literary lions says we have won, it is sobering to think what it might have been like to lose. But after reading Norman Podhoretz’s brilliant discourse on our victory, I still pondered, what is our threat, that he could conclude that, even if all the Supreme Court supported us, he would withhold his weighty consent to our supposedly irresistible advance. That Mr. Podhoretz rests his argument on the usual prurient and breathless (yes, and shameful) mockery of us to which we are accustomed (“. . . promiscuous anal intercourse and other joys of gay sex. . . .”) might tempt us not to take him seriously. Not on your life.

A specter is haunting marriage—that of the weariness and dissonance pressing upon union far longer and more equal, more shaken by possibilities previously undreamed, by hopes that other ages had relentlessly to put aside. And homosexuals, so “animated,” so “butterfly free of choice,” are the chattering skulls at the age-long feast which seeks to bind human sexuality to loyalty and nurture. Let no one doubt, however, that the tasks and opportunities of love possess the hearts of homosexuals no less than those of the sisters and brethren of the larger world. But it is surely hard to be blamed for promiscuity by those who deny us marriage. We will win through to fulfillment and new vision side by side with heterosexuals or not at all; for this is one of the great quests of common humanity.

So one understands why conservative analysts fear for the family and look for scapegoats, demonizing a sexual minority. “Men using one another as women constitutes a perversion,” thunders Mr. Podhoretz and not Mr. Podhoretz alone. Much terrible history is on his side, but not much humanity and not much understanding. From what moral base does he so speak ex cathedra? This is not an argument. As a gay man I have never deemed that I do use another man as a woman, but what on earth difference does it make and how does it become his business what we do in bed? We don’t want to know what he and Midge Decter do in the bedroom, but—aha!—in the majoritarian culture all manner of dicta, including prurient ones, are allowed.

Mr. Podhoretz ultimately hinges his argument on the choice of identity that at least some “wavering” gay-disposed young men may make: which would

force them to “settle down” in exchange for the comforts and pleasures of a stable home and the delights and the troubles, the challenges and the anxieties, that together constitute the rich fascination of fathering and raising children.

I was married for fifteen years to a woman, and am the close father of three extraordinary children. Early this year there was a scandal at Stanford involving a football player inviting football applicants to send unclothed pictures. There turned out to be felonies involved. Nowhere was the word “gay” mentioned in the reportage until the Stanford Daily‘s Nick Thompson, its well-known liberal columnist and a varsity athlete, wrote that the issue was the nurturance—or lack thereof—that Stanford offered gay people, whatever the guilt of the football player involved. And then he gave his credentials to speak, noting that his father was gay and when his father came out, it was as painful to him as for his gay friends when they themselves came out. Nick made a moral choice in speaking out, arguing that people had a right to be what they were and that society should not be in the business of suppressing it.

The conservative Stanford Review replied that for once they agreed with him. Had Stanford offered a nurturing atmosphere a generation ago—when Nick’s father went there—they “wouldn’t [now] have to deal with Nick.” It was funny and tacky, but an emblem of conceded victory, perhaps. I had never been prouder.

Without question a person like myself today would have a greater likelihood of choosing the gay world at the start, bringing his heart into line with his senses. True, in my case I would have missed fathering the three most important people in my life. But 30 years ago it was a narrower, meaner, less honest choice. For me there was no option of being gay. Moreover, gay men can father children today; a Hawaiian court has ruled decisively on the question of whether gay parenting endangers children. But no one today need feel compelled by society into marriage when the odds against it are so dismal for anybody—and overwhelming if one is gay.

So Mr. Podhoretz’s “comforts and pleasures” are not what they used to be. Women’s autonomy in the world of work ever opening upward and charged with new choices in life overall has filled many men with fear. It is now women who initiate most divorce suits. And the notion of a world where men may have sex and enjoy it, without women, is, indeed, threatening.

Mr. Podhoretz’s essay makes a sad template for the diatribe of any “unreconstructed mind,” to use his own self-description: for the racist up through the 1960’s, for the tame “intellectual” of the Third Reich on Jews, for the Hutu speaking today of Tutsis. . . .

In making explicit its fear, blinding anger, and hatred, this short essay has done more good for a cause its author so detests than one could have imagined. Honesty imparts a clarity to attitudes which shame and cowardice might otherwise obscure. For that honesty at least, we may thank Mr. Podhoretz.

W. Scott Thompson
Fletcher School of Law
and Diplomacy
Washington, D.C.

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To the Editor:

Poor Norman Podhoretz! He doesn’t have a clue as to the forces and motivations behind the gay-rights movement. Like his radical-religious cohorts who cannot extricate themselves from a conceptual morass of “sin” and “immorality” on the question of homosexuality to engage in rational discussion and consideration of gay rights, Mr. Podhoretz cannot get beyond “perversion” and promiscuity. He indicates not the slightest awareness or comprehension of the factually well-founded burning sense of injustice which has driven the gay-rights movement from its inception and continues to drive it. . . . Nowhere does he even acknowledge the reality (or even the existence) of the pervasive anti-gay discrimination which provides the primary animation of the movement.

I write as a longtime gay activist who founded the gay movement here in Washington, D.C. in 1961 and with it gay militancy and activism nationally. In 1968, I coined the slogan, “Gay Is Good,” which expresses a moral absolute. As a scientist by training and background, I was one of those who, about 1963, initiated the effort to reverse the characterization by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) of homosexuality as an illness; though this was accomplished through political action, it was soundly based scientifically, Mr. Podhoretz to the contrary notwithstanding.

My involvement with the movement was triggered when my incipient career as a scientist was nipped in the bud in 1957 when I was fired, for no reason other than that I was gay, by a federal government which then had a policy of exclusion of gay people per se that was as rigorously administered and as ferociously enforced as the current ban on gays in the military. This policy set the tone and served as an example for all private employment in this country that is still widely followed, creating a real need for the Employment Nondiscrimination Act. . . .

As a homosexual American citizen, I put my life in jeopardy fighting for this country in front-line combat in Europe in World War II. Therefore, for me and for my fellow gays, explicitly as gays, this is our country, our society, and our culture fully as much as it is that of Mr. Podhoretz and his fellow non-gays. Everything it provides, including employment, housing, self-respect, and happiness are our birthright and our heritage. We are not about to allow all this to be stolen from us by a gaggle of two-bit little homophobic bigots such as Mr. Podhoretz and his ideological henchpeople. . . .

Mr. Podhoretz’s entire antipathy seems to rest upon an assertion that homosexuality is a “perversion.” The term “sexual perversion” is devoid of objective meaning, . . . expressive of visceral disapproval but of nothing rational. . . . Cogent arguments can easily be made for characterizing as sexual perversions (1) voluntary sexual abstinence, celibacy, or retention of virginity past puberty; and (2) long-term monogamy (more than about four years), especially by males.

Much more important: what is wrong with, or objectionable about, engaging in, a good, enjoyable sexual perversion (by any definition) as long as it is consensual for all persons involved? Obviously nothing! Such enjoyment is clearly subsumed under the guaranteed, inalienable right to the pursuit of happiness given to us by our nation’s birth certificate, the Declaration of Independence, and which is the basic, bedrock, unifying American ethical and moral principle which defines America and provides the very raison d’être for this country. That clearly includes homosexuality, however characterized.

Let us have more and better enjoyment of more and better sexual perversions (consensually engaged in) by more and more people. Individually, collectively, societally, culturally, and nationally, we will all be better off. So much for Mr. Podhoretz’s inane objections to homosexuality and the gay-rights movement. . . .

Franklin E. Kameny
Washington, D.C.

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To the Editor:

Norman Podhoretz suggests it is politics and not science that keeps homosexuality off the American Psychiatric Association’s list of mental disorders. As a psychiatrist-psychoanalyst who has been involved in the area of psychopathology and homosexuality for more than 25 years, I disagree. . . .

There is no question that in the early 1970’s, the gay-activist movement included an arm that attempted to apply political pressure to organized psychiatry to delete homosexuality from the diagnostic nomenclature.

Simultaneously, however, organized psychiatry was in the throes of an even larger intellectual upheaval about the diagnosis of mental disorders than one limited to sexual orientation. Until the 1970’s, the basic model for conceptualizing psychological functioning in psychiatry was psychoanalytic. Unconscious conflicts were thought to lead to most behavioral symptoms and syndromes. Homosexuality was believed to result from such conflicts. At about that time, however, the beginnings of a knowledge explosion in the neural sciences and descriptive psychiatry occurred. This was associated with radical revision of the way that mental-health professionals conceptualized the mind, and particularly psychological functioning in health and illness. Great emphasis was placed on the necessity for demonstrating with validity and reliability that people who suffered from mental disorders were impaired in their capacity to function, and/or experienced intense distress.

The formal description of mental disorders that is accepted by American psychiatry as a whole is published in a volume called the Diagnostic and Statistical Nomenclature, or DSM for short. The DSM-II published in the late 1960’s was basically psychoanalytic in its approach. The DSM-III published in 1980 was descriptive and not psychoanalytic. In the DSM-III and in today’s version, the DSM-IV, lists of specific symptoms are provided for each mental disorder. . . .

When subjected to modern standards for assessing psychopathology generally, homosexuality does not in itself qualify as being a mental disorder. People who are predominantly or exclusively homosexual are not more likely than people who are predominantly or exclusively heterosexual to experience disability or even distress (except for the distress resulting from being victims of social prejudice). Moreover, the theory that homosexuality results primarily from pathological unconscious conflicts has not been adequately supported by empirical data, and has been abandoned by most modern mental-health professionals, including psychoanalysts.

Accompanying the dramatic and highly visible struggles about homosexuality that occurred and continue to take place throughout American society were conflicts about the validity of psychoanalytic psychology as a model of the mind. Some psychoanalytic authorities who had published case studies and speculative theories about sexual orientation in the 1960’s and 70’s continued to assert their authority, mostly in nonprofessional publications and interviews. Even today, some of these hold to their beliefs that homosexuality is in fact a mental disorder. Although once speaking for the profession as a whole, they no longer represent the majority view. The major national organizations, not only of psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers but of psychoanalysts as well, no longer accept the view that homosexuals, simply by virtue of being homosexual, are mentally ill. . . .

Richard C. Friedman, M.D.
Clinical Professor of Psychiatry
Cornell University Medical
College
New York City

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To the Editor:

. . . As an ordained Orthodox rabbi I make a poor defender of the gay-liberationist faith, but Mr. Podhoretz’s article requires, in my view, a response from within the tribe. I do not doubt the sincerity of his moral outrage. I just cannot imagine how a Jew in this century manages to play the game of anti-Semites. His tone and arguments are chillingly reminiscent of writers in prewar Germany who shared much of his outrage at the lost hegemony of a certain kind, the right kind, of man.

If Mr. Podhoretz wonders how an Orthodox rabbi can sidestep the Levitical description of homosexual intercourse as an “abomination,” let me remind him that the Hebrew word to’eva does not mean perversion. In Genesis 43:32 Joseph’s brothers return and are seated separately from the Egyptians because it is a to’eva (abomination) for the Egyptians to break bread with Hebrews. Eating pork is an “abomination” in Deuteronomy 14. As far as I can tell, eating pork is a rather ordinary affair for most people. The fact that the Torah prohibits homosexual intercourse is another matter. Why and under what conditions is a contemporary dilemma that cannot be solved by Mr. Podhoretz’s feelings of disgust.

What bothers Mr. Podhoretz is the growing legitimation of what he calls perversion, by which I assume he means the perversion of nature. Homosexuality for him is a violation or corruption of the natural, a disease, treatable or not, which, while tragic for individuals, ought not to be normalized. But nature can never unambiguously ground an epistemology. There is no unmediated appeal to Nature. Nature is a text that can say almost anything we want it to say, while appearing to have said nothing but what is evident. . . .

European anti-Semites of the last century thought Jews to be a violation of nature. The friendly non-Jewish advocates of the emancipation of Jews in England and France claimed that what appeared to be the “natural” diseases of the Jews were induced by the social degradations to which they were subject. Others insisted that these corruptions were innate and that no emancipation would correct them. This is a mirror image of the debate which Mr. Podhoretz cites regarding homosexuals.

The parallel between gay liberation and the emancipation of the Jews at the end of the 18th and into the 19th centuries is truly salient. . . . One must remember that there was a certain loss in the Christian world when Jews were emancipated: . . . Christians lost the sweet myth of wholeness, the feeling of being the primordial Adam, the natural paragon of humanity. This is the loss that white males are facing now, and the loss that heterosexuals will be facing in the years to come. It is this loss that Mr. Podhoretz can already envision and wishes to mourn. . . .

Mr. Podhoretz and other conservatives like him make use of a strange ideology that employs a crass depiction of masculinity and male sexuality in order to keep male heterosexual privilege in place. . . . The uncontrollable wildness of male sexual desire becomes a rhetorical device, justifying certain attitudes toward women and gay men. . . . If only wild men tamed by women are real men, then gay men are either doubly untamed (the dangerous hypermale) or innately tame and not real men (the hateful “faggot”). It is a strange and eerie fact that Jewish men were depicted in Nazi propaganda as sometimes a dangerous sexual threat and sometimes not men at all. It is no accident that both homosexuals and Jews required a “Final Solution.” . . .

As a traditionalist, I tend to feel that lives dedicated to prowling for the next liaison are debilitating and that many gay men do get stuck in adolescent sexual habits that leave them unfulfilled, longing for something more authentic, something deeper. But how can a self-understanding of perversity and disease lead to any other set of choices? What Mr. Podhoretz and others miss is that gay liberation is, for the present, the only way to work against these problems. . . .

We all need to learn how better to love. Gays are not the problem, nor is gay liberation. In times of great change and upheaval, Mr. Podhoretz should remember how volatile this kind of scapegoating can be.

[Rabbi] Yaakov Levado
Jerusalem, Israel

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To the Editor:

. . . Norman Podhoretz believes that “men using one another as women constitutes a perversion. . . .” Why? Because it is prohibited in the Book of Leviticus? Then one should support the stoning of adulteresses, which is mandated in both the Bible and the Quran—and practiced in Saudi Arabia. . . . On Yom Kippur, Jews pray for forgiveness for their sins, including the sin of causeless hatred. Mr. Podhoretz’s disapproval of homosexuals may not be hatred, but it certainly is causeless.

George Jochnowitz
College of Staten Island
Staten Island, New York

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To the Editor:

. . . On the issue of homosexuality, it seems, conservatives may have strong passions but very little intellectual common ground and almost no political consensus. . . . What makes cases involving conservatives so interesting are the tendencies to oppose what they often admit is a personal issue in political terms and to deny the parallels between anti-gay prejudice and other sometimes violent forms of intolerance.

Take Norman Podhoretz’s lamentation. From the abundance of notes and allusions, the writer . . . deserves credit at least for bothering to read what gay people have to say about the complicated state of our movement for dignity and equal rights. He also acknowledges that in his own experience homosexuals “. . . tended to be amusing companions.” Well might he say so after conversations with such typical right-wing wits as Lou Sheldon, Paul Cameron, and James Dobson.

The good will that Mr. Podhoretz appears to feel for some gays on a personal level (as do many of his peers) makes his political stance on homosexuality seem all the more callous. In deploring the progress gays have made toward acceptance and full citizenship, he bemoans that “. . . not even the knowledge of its connection with AIDS can tarnish or compromise its [homosexuality’s] new reputation as a normal and healthy ‘orientation.’ ”

Mr. Podhoretz, still, like many conservatives trying to find a grounding for anti-gay politics, extrapolates from a twisted conception of gay men, . . . casting them as disease-spreading creatures for whom the “danger of infection” obscures almost every other reality and hope. He mentions AIDS 21 times in the article. As a kind of self-evident dismissal, he raises the specter of the doom the disease poses to the lives of three individuals whose work he cites.

Of gay men, he opines flatly that “. . . the life they live is not as good as the life available to men who make their beds with women.” And, in what may strike some readers as simply a matter of perspective and others as an unwitting condemnation of sexism, he asserts that “. . . men using one another as women constitutes a perversion.”. . .

Yet the rhetoric of Mr. Podhoretz’s own article reminded me of appeals to anti-Semitism rooted in the idea that there was something unhealthy and menacing about Jews. Like Mr. Podhoretz, those promoting such scare tactics—derived from centuries-old undercurrents that emerged as the hideous overtones in the 1930’s and 40’s—seemed to take for granted that the prevailing standard for Jewish identity should be shame. It is with seeming nostalgia that he recalls how, just a few decades ago, homosexuals “. . . mostly seemed to share in the almost universally held assumption that there was something wrong with homosexuality.” . . .

While those on different parts of the political spectrum have their own hangups with homosexuality, conservatives hasten to put their anxieties in political terms. Those terms are becoming increasingly full of fractures. Gay-rights supporters, rather than simply writing off all anti-gay conservatives as “extremists,” would do well to refute their assertions when possible and probe those splits at every opportunity. For as divisions widen, anti-gay politics loses not only credibility but its very core.

Marvin Liebman
Washington, D.C.

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To the Editor:

Norman Podhoretz omits an important reason for the success of the gay-rights movement. Those fields in which homosexuals seem to excel, such as the arts, entertainment, and design, are becoming more important in the economy. So gays, like the Jews in the early years after World War II, are gaining power and acceptance because of their economic clout. Homosexuals now have the money with which to help finance congressional campaigns and are assuming more positions of power and authority throughout many industries.

But an alarming point raised by Mr. Podhoretz is that, with homosexuality gaining greater acceptance, more boys and young men may tilt toward homosexuality rather than going straight.

Although nobody really knows what causes male homosexuality, I think it is probably a social disability—an inability to have the kind of intimate relationship that women quite reasonably expect and demand. At the deepest emotional level, homosexuals are loners. The gay man is probably drawn to males, not primarily because of their bodies, but because of their far less demanding emotional requirements. Therefore, those young boys and men who do not have this social disability may “experiment” with homosexuality but are unlikely to cross over. There is pervasive homosexual behavior in English public schools and American prisons. Yet young men get out of both places and immediately return to a straight life.

A recent study of sex in America notes that there are many more unmarried males in their twenties through their forties who are virgins than who are homosexuals. Perhaps now some of these men will turn from deep loneliness to homosexuality. Is it not better for a man to have sex with a man than with nobody? Especially since it can be done safely. And is it not better for a man to fall in love with another man, no matter how flawed the experience, than to fall in love not at all?

So the increasing acceptance of homosexuality is all to the good. It, of course, makes homosexuals themselves more comfortable and happier—no inconsiderable accomplishment—and may ease the loneliness of some hitherto chaste males.

Robert W. Wilson
New York City

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To the Editor:

It is odd to see the victory of gay rights announced in the same week by the New York Times magazine (Andrew Sullivan) and by COMMENTARY (Norman Podhoretz). The latter admission is of course the more significant, and Mr. Podhoretz displays a remarkable realism and candor. But he cannot explain what happened. He attributes this to “the culture.” Yet he knows the culture has for years grown steadily more conservative, and at the same time steadily more favorable to gays, and he sees nothing in this but an insoluble contradiction. I suggest a simple explanation: the gays had the better of the argument.

The most relevant Scriptural passage here is not Genesis 19 (Sodom and Gomorrah) but 1 Samuel 17 (David and Goliath). The marginalized, uncertain, amateurish gay movement always had a set of clear and cogent arguments. Its well-funded and arrogant opposition, backed by all the powers of church and state, used arguments philosophically flawed to the core, in ways fairly obvious to most secular intellectuals, including many conservatives like myself, and their attempts to provide utilitarian, “scientific” support for what was essentially a religious taboo had the air of elaborate quackery associated with creation science.

Even Mr. Podhoretz’s defense, which is far more lucid than most I have seen, is really a strange argument. It is an argument against promiscuity (a solid one), but not about homosexuality per se. He is certainly correct that there is an intrinsic element of promiscuity in male homosexuality simply because men are by nature more promiscuous than women. That seems to imply, perhaps inadvertently, an endorsement of lesbianism. It ought to imply that society should give some support to those gay men who succeed at monogamy in spite of nature. Mr. Podhoretz recognizes their existence but inexplicably will not give them an inch.

The argument has no obvious implications for the small minority of men who are in some way or another congenitally homosexual (under 2.6 percent, Mr. Podhoretz thinks) because they hardly have real marriages anyway. It seems to apply to nobody except the hypothetical category of “waverers” who might be lured away from marriage by homosexual promiscuity. One has read impassioned pleas for these people before in COMMENTARY. The problem is that there is no evidence they exist outside its pages. This is an argument for the severe punishment of large numbers of the real in order to “save” for the “comforts and pleasures” of domesticity some few of the probably fictive.

After listening to these tortured arguments for 30 years, the culture, outside of the religious Right, generally decided the gay-rights movement is after all closer to “the fundamental realities of life.”

Doyne Dawson
Greensboro, North Carolina

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To the Editor:

It seems like wasted breath even to attempt a response to Norman Podhoretz’s wearying expression of Archie Bunker bigotry. Mr. Podhoretz’s anti-homosexual ruminations hardly pretend to the status of arguments. After reading his article to the end—difficult enough—this much is clear: all the windy paragraphs of mock social science serve just to embellish Mr. Podhoretz’s guttural assertion that “men using one another as women constitutes a perversion.” To the mind of the bigot such declarations are always “obvious,” “self-evident,” and based on “fundamental realities.” That, of course, is true perversion; my homosexual brain is taxed even to answer it.

Mr. Podhoretz’s main historical thesis—that homosexuality has gradually been accepted by what he calls “the culture” despite the resistance of “the polity”—is based on an astoundingly lax use of terms. What, exactly, constitutes “the polity”? Anti-homosexual Republican Congressmen, presumably; but not members of the judiciary, polluted by the creeping liberalities of “the culture.” What, then, is “the culture”? Something conspiratorial, morally degenerative, irresistibly powerful. Whatever it is, when he sees it, Norman Podhoretz reaches for his gun.

Compared to Mr. Podhoretz’s overt peddling of personal fears and hatreds, even Charles Murray’s racemongery begins to look rational. Either way, when you dress up the logic of prejudice in the rhetoric of “science,” all you get is a Neanderthal in drag. Is there anyone at COMMENTARY who can instruct Mr. Podhoretz in the difference between an argument and a cross-burning?

Matthew Rubenstein
Brooklyn, New York

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To the Editor:

. . . Norman Podhoretz’s brief discussion of the ways that homosexuals once lived their lives should have caused him to be a little skeptical about his conclusions. Back then, he writes, homosexuals might “decide to get married and have children, but their true sexual desires would remain focused on men, and it was with men that they would commit adultery if (or more likely when) they did.”

Paying “their debt to society,” these homosexuals would place themselves in a position that guaranteed deception—how lovely. This, however, is the natural outcome in an environment that preaches to its homosexual members that their homosexual nature is a perversion. . . . The point is not that homosexuality should be accepted because adultery is worse, but that the only alternative offered by opponents of gay rights is a tradition that was morally decadent. . . .

Mr. Podhoretz writes about the “pleasures” and “fascinations” heterosexual men attain when a woman forces them to settle down and have children and thus concludes that “with no women to restrain” them, homosexuals are doomed to “anonymous and loveless encounters” (by which I take it he means a generally miserable life). Of course, because his intention is to condemn by averting understanding, he does not consider that “pleasures” and “fascinations,” along with “challenges” and “anxieties” and an an altogether happy and productive life, might be reached differently by homosexual men.

Heterosexual promiscuity is wrong because it hurts others: the man lying to the woman to get her into bed, the man deceiving his wife into believing that she is the only one for him, and (most important) the children being born to homes not suited to care for them. So men, heterosexual men, must be “domesticated,” as Mr. Podhoretz writes.

But beyond being “domesticated,” marriage to women has a civilizing effect on heterosexual men. It makes them more considerate of the needs of someone quite different from them. It turns them (let us say) from rowdy, drunken, football-watching, law-breaking, raping beasts into more genteel creatures. It gives them, come to think of it, the qualities that homosexual men have all along possessed. This is where the discussion should begin.

Arturo Fernandez
Panorama City, California

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To the Editor:

Norman Podhoretz’s angst over recent gains by gays and lesbians in their struggle against intolerance and discrimination reminded me of the way that, not so very long ago, both the Catholic Church and evangelical Protestants defended maintaining social opprobrium and government persecution against Jews.

In Mr. Podhoretz’s polemic were echoes of the old argument that failure to accept Jesus as savior means living in a sinful state. Moreover, those who fail to recognize Jesus can never be truly happy, the way Christians are. Ergo, it is in the interest of those trapped in Judaism that they not be given equal treatment, which could be misinterpreted as a sign that their wayward practice is morally equivalent to being a Christian in the eyes of state and society. Worse, unless Jews are continually stigmatized under the law, confused Christians might not realize just how sinful and repugnant the Jewish faith is and might be tempted into that misguided “lifestyle,” for which eternal damnation is the only possible outcome. After all, the Bible (New Testament version) tells us so.

Stephen H. Miller
Washington, D.C.

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To the Editor:

. . . While our culture is becoming more accepting of homosexuality, I would hardly call it “approving.” At best, less disapproving, perhaps. As we have become more enlightened, thoughtful persons opposed to homosexuality have been left with no rational arguments for denying homosexuals legal equality in our constitutionally based society. . . .

While the Bible may extol heterosexual marriage as the ideal, I do not recall it commenting on tax credits, rights of inheritance, health insurance, or custody rights—some of the legal issues pertinent here. Extending such rights and benefits to same-sex couples will make our society more equitable while not depriving anyone else of rights they already have. . . .

As to where we should go, it seems that Mr. Podhoretz thinks the appropriate direction is backward, to the days when homosexuals were invisible, guilt ridden, and self-hating—in short, perfect targets for persecution and blackmail. . . .

Given the relative infancy of the gay-liberation movement, why be surprised that some gays react to a history of oppression by asserting the superiority of homosexuality? The surprise is that there are still persons who feel the earlier model was more healthy and acceptable.

I look forward to a time when homosexual behavior between consenting adults is viewed simply as a fact of life. It has been present throughout history, and should elicit neither pride nor shame on the personal level, nor legal condemnation in the public arena.

Walter Naegle
New York City

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To the Editor:

I have grown so used over the years to being educated by the lucid mind of Norman Podhoretz on issues related to Communism, the Middle East, and cultural and political trends here at home that it comes as a shock to read his illogical analysis of the growing success of gay Americans in achieving equality in this land which stands for nothing less. . . .

Those like me, a straight, conservative gay-rights activist, are often at a loss to understand how so many conservatives are so quick to abandon our ethos, to say nothing of our most revered constitutional guarantees of the most elemental aspects of individuality, when it comes to private sexual expression or preference. . . .

Though reasoning derived from prejudice cannot be argued against on a rational basis, it must not be allowed to stand unanswered: Mr. Podhoretz finds hypocritical IBM’s granting of health coverage to domestic partners of its homosexual employees and not to its heterosexual ones. The perfectly logical answer, given by IBM, is that heterosexuals have the option of marriage.

In the body of the article, Mr. Podhoretz avers, without evidence that would be acceptable in any intellectually sound forum, that gay men are more promiscuous and more “catty” than straight men, and adds that men are more promiscuous than women. . . . He egregiously links pedophilia and homosexuality, and quotes one source, without documentation, avowing that the declining trend of AIDS among gay men over the last few years is reversing, whereas almost all contemporary studies and agencies working in the field report the opposite to be true.

So open is Mr. Podhoretz about the emotional basis of his views that one wants to give him credit, and thanks, for pointing out the positive role corporations are playing in bringing equal treatment to gay Americans as well as the largely ignored fact that we have as many gay people in public life on the conservative side of the ledger as on the liberal side.

Frederic Wile
New York City

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To the Editor:

I do not dispute what Norman Podhoretz writes about our societal acceptance of homosexuality. What I do not understand is why he cares.

Arguments about male promiscuity and sexually transmitted diseases such as AIDS are beside the point; if they were relevant, there would still be no reason to object to lesbianism. And while Mr. Podhoretz writes about the concept of “perversion,” he cannot bring himself to rely on the concept of “sin.” What seems to be operating is a preference for monoculturalism over multiculturalism. Mr. Podhoretz’s objection is not so much to homosexuality per se as to its being allowed a presence in mainstream culture.

I have pretty much reached the conclusion that the degree to which one is willing to accept multiculturalism is the key factor today in determining whether one is on the political Left or the political Right and that all else, including economic views, follows from that perspective. . . .

William A. Baker
Bloomfield, New Jersey

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To the Editor:

Norman Podhoretz’s contributions to the pages of COMMENTARY are always welcome, but his last two pieces have left me confused. In his October 1996 essay, “Liberalism and the Culture: A Turning of the Tide?,” cultural liberalism was depicted as a waning force, “no longer quite so powerful as it was even a few short years ago.” By November, however, Mr. Podhoretz’s analysis of “How the Gay-Rights Movement Won” summoned up the image of a beleaguered Churchillian figure, resolving to fight on the landing grounds and on the beaches and in the streets, in a losing, indeed lost, battle against the leading edge of cultural liberalism.

While I would be honored to shoulder arms beside Mr. Podhoretz in that struggle, however doomed, I confess to being unaware of anything that happened between October and November to turn incipient victory into headlong rout. What did I miss?

Henry D. Fetter
Los Angeles, California

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To the Editor:

Except for the eloquent personal statement at the conclusion of his essay, Norman Podhoretz offers an otherwise objective analysis of the not-so-gradual change in American attitudes and approaches toward homosexuality. I am disappointed, however, that he makes no reference (even for the purpose of rejection) to the argument that a validation of homosexuality was almost inevitable given the more general changes in sexual practice and opinion among Americans over the past three or four decades.

Most Americans today, even many conservatives and conservative Christian Americans, by their easy acceptance of a contraceptive mentality, . . . have separated sex from procreation. Or, to be more accurate, they have removed procreation from its place of primacy. If, then, pleasure, or affection, or intimacy, or companionship, or “love” can in our culture replace cooperation with God in the creation of new life (that is, babies) as the principal purpose of human sex, how is homosexual sex that much different from the heterosexual contraceptive sex now routinely accepted by Americans?. . .

Thomas B. Swanzey
Mahwah, New Jersey

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To the Editor:

I appreciate your publishing “How the Gay-Rights Movement Won.” I have only one qualification. I think Norman Podhoretz understates the perversion issue, . . . but he is on firmer ground in emphasizing, the promiscuity inherent in male homosexuality.

I live near a city as tolerant of the gay “life-style” as it is possible for a city to be. Such tolerance and openness, however, have not dampened the promiscuity nor pushed the perverse elements to the margins. Rather the opposite. Neither tolerance nor disease nor death avails in this regard, as Mr. Podhoretz aptly notes at the end of his essay. The unnatural drives out the natural, protestations to the contrary notwithstanding.

William E. Johnston, Jr.
Point Richmond, California

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To the Editor:

Norman Podhoretz raises the issue of a biological source of homosexuality and even states: “Nor do I doubt that a biological or genetic factor is at work here.”

I respectfully refer Mr. Podhoretz to “Gay Genes, Revisited,” Scientific American, November 1995, which examines two studies from the early 90’s that purported to show that male homosexuality has biological underpinnings.

The author of one of the studies, Scientific American reports, “has been charged with research improprieties and is now under investigation by the Federal Office of Research Integrity.” As for the other study, no one has been able to duplicate the researcher’s findings.

The Scientific American article concludes:

[A] neurobiologist at the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego notes that the search for the biological underpinnings of complex human traits has a sorry history of late. In recent years, researchers and the media have proclaimed the “discovery” of genes linked to alcoholism and mental illness as well as to homosexuality. None of the claims, [he] points out, have been confirmed.

At the time, those reports received headlines worldwide, yet I do not recall any headlines reporting this more recent information. . . .

David H. Fax
Canton, Massachusetts

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To the Editor:

I would like to express my appreciation for Norman Podhoretz’s courageous essay. I am a retired clinical (psychiatric) social worker and psychotherapist, a conservative, a long-time subscriber to COMMENTARY, and one of those holdouts in my benighted profession who insist that homosexuality is a psychological disorder. I would emphasize homosexuals’ narcissistic personality traits, in tandem with neurotic symptoms.

Of particular importance is Mr. Podhoretz’s analysis of the gay-rights pitch that homosexuality is biologically inborn, an involuntary condition that is “beyond the reach of moral judgment.” He notes that “. . . the same logic would confer moral legitimation on pedophiles, who also could and did claim that they were made that way and were therefore unable to help themselves.”

This aspect of the controversy is not peripheral. The virtual silence about male (homosexual) pedophilia and pederasty maintained by mental-health and social-work practitioners for, lo, these many years, is scandalous. . . .

If I might be forgiven the self-indulgence of extensively quoting myself, the following are excerpts from my five-year-old essay on “The Politics of Child Abuse” (Society, September/October 1991):

There has been considerable equivocation throughout the mental-health professions [including clinical social work] on . . . male (homosexual) pedophilia and pederasty. . . . After the initial massive denial from establishment figures, the Covenant House/Father Bruce Ritter scandal compelled serious attention. . . . In July 1990, a Covenant House internal investigation confirmed that Father Ritter had been involved in sexual misconduct with teenage boys at his shelter for over twenty years. It also revealed that senior staff members were aware of this, and that Father Ritter’s superiors at the Franciscan Order received reports from them on these affairs. . . .

In my article I also expanded on how this case graphically illustrated the political and ideological influences on mental-health and social services in this country:

To a significant extent, a cover was provided for Father Ritter and his accomplices by widespread liberal tolerance of and rationalization for homosexual pedophilia and pederasty. “Homophobia” has incessantly and unfavorably been contrasted with tolerance of “alternative life-styles.” . . . Interestingly, this deference is not extended to . . . heterosexual pedophilia, or other heterosexual manifestations of the exploitation of children. . . .

I also noted that among gay-rights militants, ideological rationalizations for child sexual exploitation often take rather bizarre forms:

Many gay men acknowledge that they have initiated encounters [with young boys]. They argue that these types of relationships offer young boys the only real possibility for healthy acculturation into homosexuality. . . . [T]hese attitudes, so pronounced and accepted in [gay] culture, . . . allowed a Covenant House/Father Bruce Ritter case to develop and operate for twenty years.

[This] benign presentation of male (homosexual) pedophilia is not supported by any clinical or research evidence. Outsiders usually do not learn of specifics about caressing and fondling of young boys by gay pedophiles. The subject of homosexual fellatio with children is rarely [if ever] discussed. Pederasts and their anal dispositions are also not discussed, despite the AIDS epidemic. (It is acceptable for Robert Mapplethorpe to present photographs of nude children in suggestive poses, along with adult males engaged in sadomasochistic practices. Such a display has been adopted as a civil-liberties [and cultural] cause célèbre.). . .

I despair of a liberal culture in which such pathological behavior, such physical and psychological traumas can be inflicted on children and adolescents, and rationalized in the name of gay rights. If my sense of moral, ethical, and professional repugnance is branded “homophobic” by the mob (and “diagnosed” as such by witch-hunting psychiatrists and other lemmings), then, now that I am retired, I can wear that badge proudly.

Congratulations to Norman Podhoretz on an inspiriting piece of work. He should keep in mind that there are mental-health and social-work professionals receptive to his analysis, perhaps more than he thinks. . . . But they are quiescent by necessity, not having the security of being able to change jobs—or retire. I know. I was there.

Paul Waller
New York City

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To the Editor:

. . . In 1935, Sigmund Freud wrote these words to a distraught American mother:

I gather from your letter that your son is a homosexual. I am impressed by the fact that you do not mention this term in your information about him. May I question you, why you avoid it? Homosexuality is assuredly no advantage but it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation, it cannot be classified as an illness; we consider it to be a variation of the sexual function produced by a certain arrest of development. . . .

Today, . . . homosexual candidates in American psychoanalytic institutes are affronted by phrases like the ones Freud used, which they consider pathologizing. . . . They would undoubtedly choke on Freud’s notion that homosexuality, though nothing to be ashamed of, is also no advantage. . . .

At meetings of the American Psychoanalytic Association, psychoanalysts now bustle to form committees and create workshops to investigate alleged bias and discrimination against homosexual candidates. The fact is that fully a third of America’s psychoanalytic institutes have “at least one openly gay or lesbian candidate,” . . . but the feeling among certain vociferous members of the Psychoanalytic Association is that statistics would dictate a much larger number, even though the most recent estimate of homosexuality in the general population is 1 percent. . . .

The word homosexual has now become the “h” word, too dangerous even for psychoanalysts. Homophobia has joined racist and sexist as a label with such power that before it we must all give way, no matter the intellectual and scientific cost. It seems that it is no longer important whether something is true, only whether it appears fair to the designated minority. . . .

If psychoanalysts believe in the concepts they have written so much about—pathological narcissism, developmental arrest, normal heterosexual development—why are they so ready to turn their backs on those ideas? The analysts who are willing to consider trashing the tenets of their science cannot really be the intellectual descendants of the same Dr. Freud quoted above. . . .

Let us be as bold as Freud was over 60 years ago. Science has shown that the homosexual population is rife with promiscuity, rife with AIDS. This does not call for a witch-hunt, but it does raise certain questions about the intrinsic health of a practice that wants to perceive itself as normal. Normal? In the absence of high-tech manipulation, homosexuality is an evolutionary dead end. One might conclude, then, that homosexuality, if it is indeed a genetic rather than a psychological phenomenon, is an evolutionary error. It is not . . . an alternative but equally valid foundation for family life. Individual homosexuals may contribute much to art, music, literature, engineering, medicine, politics, but homosexuality is, at best, biologically maladaptive. . . .

Jo Anne M. Randall
Shaker Heights, Ohio

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To the Editor:

Congratulations and thanks to Norman Podhoretz for publishing a superb analysis of the social and political pressures that have led to the widespread acceptance of the beliefs and claims of gay-activist propaganda. He has summarized with remarkable precision most of the crucial factors. Particularly anguishing to the more mature and sober clinicians who would entirely agree with his closing comments is his accurate judgment that the major psychiatric and psychological associations have simply capitulated to the gay-rights movement. . . .

As Mr. Podhoretz briefly notes, and as careful researchers have shown, the claims of a genetic basis for homosexuality—though trumpeted with great noise—are flimsy and feeble. They are based on very small samples, the results are contradictory, and in at least one well-known case, the lead researcher on the study has been accused of fraud.

The idea that homosexuality is irreversible has also been shown to be a flagrant untruth; there are a considerable number of studies and reports demonstrating unequivocal success in helping previously identified homosexuals become comfortably heterosexual. . . .

In regard to “health,” no responsible researcher disputes the annihilation caused by AIDS, or its very high correlation in North America with male homosexual practice. Neither is the high correlation with a number of other unpleasant diseases disputed. But what is most devastating is the very much reduced life expectancy for both male and female homosexuals who do not have AIDS. . . .

I would also like to discuss the Jewish aspect of the problem. Jewish tradition is quite unequivocal in rejecting the practice of homosexuality, while being open to and accepting of the person (as it is of any Jew). There have been many attempts in recent years to distort this position, but they have zero foundation. . . . In the latest (fourth) volume of . . . the Encyclopedia of Jewish Medical Ethics (in Hebrew), there is a very knowledgeable, fair, up-to-date review of homosexuality which concludes that whatever its etiology may eventually prove to be—genetic, chemical, hormonal, or psychological—Jewish tradition requires self-control in abstaining from its practice. . . .

Joseph Berger, M.D.
Downsview, Ontario
Canada

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To the Editor:

Norman Podhoretz is to be congratulated for courage in writing his wise and compassionate article on the gay-rights movement.

The extraordinary change in attitudes to homosexual behavior over the last two decades is not fully explained by the activities of the gay-rights movement, and the politics of the psychiatric profession. Another important factor is surely the marked decline in influence of the churches that began after World War II and accelerated in the last decades. Now that the Bible is no longer taught in schools, and the churches influence few outside their own committed members, . . . society at large feels no loyalty to the biblical condemnation of homosexual behavior. . . .

For most of the last two millennia, the ethics of the Torah have been, partly at least, mediated to the Western world by the church. This is no longer the case. We must learn to see this change as a massive cultural shift, of which the question of homosexuality is only a part. . . . Traditional Jews and Christians will have to . . . recognize that they now constitute a distinct group within a society with which full integration may no longer be possible or even desirable. . . .

Mr. Podhoretz is generous in his concession to homosexual apologists on biological factors, perhaps too generous, since there is still no conclusive scientific evidence for genetic or biological factors predetermining a homosexual orientation. Indeed, there are a-priori reasons to doubt it on evolutionary grounds, since such a gene could have no survival value.

There is, however, a considerable body of evidence from the psychoanalytic and post-psychoanalytic branches of psychiatry to support the view that this orientation is conditioned by emotional factors and sometimes physical abuse in early childhood, and that it is in principle and often in practice reversible. But psychiatrists who hold these views are being virtually silenced by the intense hostility to their position that prevails among gays and their supporters in the profession. Unfortunately, in the present cultural scene their ideas also receive little notice among the educated public at large, and the case for genetic or biological causation is going by default, as even Mr. Podhoretz’s article indicates. . . .

William Nicholls
University of British
Columbia
Vancouver, Canada

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To the Editor:

Norman Podhoretz’s elegiac article is both a brilliant summation of recent cultural history and an admirable exercise in intellectual independence and moral courage. The well-nigh total victory, within the universities and among the chattering classes, of the gay movement combines with the sympathy all must feel for gay friends to make it extraordinarily difficult to speak what many heterosexuals (and some gays) still believe to be the truth: that the man who is sexually attracted only to those of his own sex suffers from an unfortunate, though far from devastating, condition for which he deserves pity.

Whatever genetic, hormonal, or other biological factors may contribute to this developmental failure, it remains likely that the social environment also plays a crucial role in many, if not all, cases. That gays today, full of hubris at the success Mr. Podhoretz describes, can spare no sympathy for “wavering” children is understandable. Having persuaded themselves that gay and straight are co-equal, it would be quite inconsistent to deplore the fact that some young people will move into the gay life when they might happily live straight. It is astonishing, however, that heterosexuals—few of whom actually believe one orientation is as good as another—contentedly accept changes in society that are likely to have that result.

We remain extraordinarily ignorant about the genesis of sexual orientation. Those who pretend to know that free will plays little or no role in the matter are fooling themselves and trying, perhaps innocently, to fool the rest of us. In circumstances where there is even a suspicion that something might harm children (e.g., while the effects of smoking remained uncertain) loving parents act to protect them. Yet on this issue that is central to a person’s life, we allow ourselves to be persuaded, in the total absence of hard evidence, simply by a masterful, unremitting propaganda campaign. We do so through a wish to temper the suffering of gay friends. A saving grace, perhaps (though not for the youth who is misled), is that the lack of a base line from which to measure may spare us even knowing how many are condemned, through our generosity, to living gay when they might have lived straight.

E. L. Pattullo
Center for the Behavioral
Sciences
Harvard University
Cambridge, Massachusetts

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To the Editor:

I want to commend COMMENTARY for its courage in publishing Norman Podhoretz’s brave and honest article. What he has to say, especially in his closing paragraphs, needs to be said—and needs to be heard: that even if the AIDS plague were to abate and homosexual marriage were legalized in the 50 states and ratified by all nine Justices of the Supreme Court, it would not matter because gay sex itself would still be a perversion. Whether we call it truth or natural law or “the obvious,” as does George Orwell, or “the fundamental realities of life,” as does Mr. Podhoretz, makes little difference.

It requires a brave and probing unreconstructed mind, a mind undistorted by the wish-fulfillment of ideological propaganda, to remind reasonable men and women of the nature of homosexual activity and to make clear what are still, and will always be, the grave dangers and risks of claiming otherwise. Take the recent issue of Newsweek on the cover of which appears two women and the caption, “We’re Having a Baby.” To say anything but “Oh no, you’re not!” is to perpetuate the worst kind of mendacity and illusion, itself couched in the worst sentimentality about the nature and responsibilities of love and sexuality. But such relativist egalitarian sentimentality is all too often shared by the middle classes and advocates for the sexual revolution: love (even more than death) is the Great Leveler.

Having said this much, I would like to challenge one statement in the article, that “no homosexual today would be caught dead agreeing that homosexuality is a perversion, or even an illness.” I am such a homosexual who would unhesitatingly agree with Mr. Podhoretz’s judgment of homosexuality, and I hope I am very much alive. Nor am I alone among homosexuals in understanding and accepting homosexuality to be a deviance, although I know that I go against many fellow conservatives who increasingly claim their desire and their behavior to be normal, natural, or God-given. As much as I might otherwise admire political positions taken by Andrew Sullivan or the literary criticism of Bruce Bawer, I can only think them wrong in their views on homosexuality, and can only see their arguments as disingenuous, clever, and ultimately self-deceiving.

My own view is, of course, ridiculed as an instance of regressive self-loathing or dismissed as merely homophobic, but having observed the wildly irresponsible sexual attitudes and behavior of many gays over the years as well as the gay movement’s moral and political hypocrisies since the late 1960’s, I cannot believe I have a monopoly in these psychological debilities. . . .

There is but one instance I am aware of when homosexuality approaches the normal and natural: that is when the experience of Eros is God-given and the person so affected responds morally, that is, chastely. Such a conception, I am fully aware, may sound strange to most people, to gays as much as to straights, but it is an ancient one first and best elucidated by Plato in his Symposium and Phaedrus. With the utmost self-control, with the cultivating of virtue and the love of wisdom, it is possible for two men, as the Greek philosopher explains, to become pregnant and conceive truly spiritual children.

The personal result of such an intense and chastely intimate passion is friendship between the two men involved—whether it be called ideal, heroic, romantic, perfect, or spiritual friendship—as well as friendship with God. But the historical result of such erotic experience is equally dramatic (though seldom recognized for what it is) and, being more evident, has brought lasting benefit and inspiration to many generations, starting with Plato’s own dialogues and including the Epic of Gilgamesh, the covenant between David and Jonathan, St. Aelred of Rievaulx’s treatise on Spiritual Friendship, and Tennyson’s In Memoriam. . . .

These are only a few of the many contributions that could be pointed to, including realms other than the literary or philosophical, but they serve to indicate the powerful and enduring influence of works that originate from a transcendent source—which, rightly reverenced, and the forces it unleashes being virtuously disciplined—yields other, more lasting fruit than we have become used to since the gay revolution made its first devastating inroads into our cultural and political life. . . . Moral and cultural conservatives especially should be able to claim Plato’s philosophical contribution to this debate as much as they do the religious contributions of Judaism and Christianity.

I would also agree with what Mr. Podhoretz states earlier in his article, that no matter whether science irrefutably proves the existence of a gay gene, it does not argue for normalcy, nor does it absolve the carrier of ethical responsibility. And I would like to add to his closing words that no matter how many people come to change their minds about the nature of homosexuality and deem it to be natural, its sexual expression will still be unnatural by every design and purpose of nature.

Only by transcending nature and transforming physical desire into something moral and spiritual can homosexuality participate in God’s design and purpose. If our society were not so comfortable and geared toward immediate self-gratification, that “only” would be a challenge and incitement to greater self-knowledge.

Paul Edward Guay
Allston, Massachusetts

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To the Editor:

Norman Podhoretz’s article on the triumph of the gay-rights movement is right on the mark. In recent years the media have adopted the movement’s line that any criticism of homosexuality or of the gay-rights agenda is a sign of homophobia. As he points out, the tables have been turned: being a homosexual is now simply an “orientation,” whereas criticizing any aspect of homosexual culture is a symptom of a deep neurosis.

The signs of the movement’s triumph are everywhere. In the Washington Post I read recently that the president of the Old Town Civic Association in Alexandria, Virginia, thinks that supporting gay marriage could help Alexandria’s image in the business community and draw more high-technology companies and trade associations to the city. I also read that soon there will be a compact disc of gay classical-music composers that includes self-acknowledged homosexuals as well as “maybes” like Schubert, Chopin, and Handel. The gay-rights movement is intent on expanding the number of gay composers, writers, and artists because it continually implies that gays are not only “normal,” they are also more likely to be artistic than straight people.

It is too soon to say what effect the normalization of gay culture will have on American culture in general, but one thing is clear: because the business world has discovered that gays have a great deal of disposable income, there will be a growing number of products pitched to the gay community and a growing reluctance to question the gay-rights agenda. As it stands now, it is taken for granted in the major media that anyone who questions this agenda is a mean-spirited, unenlightened gay basher.

Stephen Miller
Reston, Virginia

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To the Editor:

Norman Podhoretz’s brilliant and courageous “How the Gay-Rights Movement Won” reminded me of Albert Schweitzer’s words to a friend: “I feel like someone who, in a perverted generation, remains loyal to the truth.”

His narrative of the gay-rights campaign, which has completely overwhelmed our culture, intimidating virtually everyone with the “homophobia” billy-club, . . . omitted an important phrase. Doesn’t Mr. Podhoretz recall those years when the movement had integrity and its members considered themselves free human beings who were responsible for their behavior? The term they were using in the early days after Stonewall (1969) was “homosexual preference,” remember? (This was later replaced by “homosexual orientation.”) They then decided to renounce freedom and responsibility, as a shrewd political tactic for gaining public sympathy. So they embraced biological fatalism. “We can’t help ourselves. We’re born this way.” . . .

Harold Kulungian
Amherst, Massachusetts

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To the Editor:

Even God would agree with Norman Podhoretz, for did He not say, “It is not good for man to be alone”? And when He finally created a suitable mate for man, was it not a “she”? . . . The question arises, why is it not good for man to be alone? I reached the same conclusion Mr. Podhoretz did through my best and wisest friend, the Bible. The solution to the problem of man being alone was to create a helper to face him. And that is what man needs in order to be elevated from the animal kingdom. Man needs a woman to face him, to set limits on him, to challenge him, and to remind him where he came from and why he is here. . . .

What is happening with the gay community is absolutely outrageous. I would have expected by now that someone from the gay community would have come out with a statement to the effect that . . . it is time to assume responsibility for the AIDS epidemic and put an end to it. No such statement. The gay community is holding us hostage and we are holding ourselves hostage in the name of understanding, progressive thinking, and the like. . . .

Rachel Neuman
Miami Beach, Florida

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To the Editor:

Norman Podhoretz’s “How the Gay-Rights Movement Won” resonates with clarity; he defines crucial terms, selects specific issues, and, supported by cogent examples, tells us where he stands. . . .

Douglas H. Schewe
Madison, Wisconsin

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To the Editor:

Bravo to Norman Podhoretz. I shudder to think of the vilification that will come his way. But for him, or anyone, to write as he did on this subject displays a species of guts that I had supposed was long gone from American intellectual life.

Herb Greer
Manchester, England

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To the Editor:

Norman Podhoretz has written a brave and important article. Brave because Mr. Podhoretz has written with (typical) brio, clarity, and insight on a topic which modern liberal sensibilities have demanded that we treat otherwise. Important because Mr. Podhoretz makes the argument that opponents of the gay-rights agenda are sometimes reluctant to make; namely, stating that their opposition is based not simply on utilitarian reasons but on intrinsic ones, such as (in Mr. Podhoretz’s words) “the fundamental realities of life,” the nature of men and women, the sacredness of the sexual act, and religious and moral considerations.

Let us be clear: the human carnage which has visited the homosexual community is an awful one. And the personal struggles that many homosexuals endure are often poignant. Christians (of whom I am one) have an obligation to treat people with basic dignity and decency. But we also have an obligation to speak out on behalf of moral standards and right conduct. And in response to the advancing gay-rights agenda (same-sex marriage and all that), I think the response must be: it is wrong, and so it ought to be resisted.

This is not an easy thing to say these days. But say it we must. And say it Norman Podhoretz has. For that he deserves our thanks.

Peter H. Wehner
McLean, Virginia

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Norman Podhoretz writes:

Andrew Sullivan finds me “vile,” “ugly,” and full of “bile.” To my old friend W. Scott Thompson, I am driven by “fear, blinding anger, and hatred.” To Franklin E. Kameny, I am a “two-bit little homophobic bigot.” To Matthew Rubenstein, I am a “Neanderthal in drag” who cannot tell “the difference between an argument and a cross-burning.” To Yaakov Levado, I “play the game of anti-Semites,” while George Jochnowitz reminds me that Jews repent on Yom Kippur of “the sin of causeless hatred.” Then, having put on this little demonstration of what lies in wait for anyone who opposes the gay-rights movement, its proponents go on to claim that it won because it has better arguments.

Now to a few specifics:

I humbly beg Andrew Sullivan’s pardon for not following every twist and turn in his thinking. Like many other readers of his book Virtually Normal, I interpreted the sentence in question as applying to gay marriage, and I fear that I missed his subsequent clarifications. Such are the dangers of not being a regular reader of the Washington Post and the disadvantages of lacking the variorum edition of Virtually Normal that will no doubt be available to scholars in the Utopian future it will have helped to bring into being. Nevertheless, my point remains valid. For the very fact that even in the age of AIDS Mr. Sullivan approves of “extramarital outlets” in premarital gay male relationships confirms the truth of the remark by Mark Steyn I quoted in my article: “a grisly plague has not furthered the cause of homosexual monogamy, so why should a permit from the town clerk?” Nor is it clear why Mr. Sullivan, or any other homosexual who believes in fidelity, should not be able to practice it without a marriage license. Moreover, given Mr. Sullivan’s own endorsement of “extramarital outlets,” I fail to see why it was “vile” of me to assume that he had contracted the AIDS virus as a result of promiscuity. And even though he became HIV-positive as a result of “merely one encounter,” he, like many other homosexuals, was indeed “willing to court death” (in this case by playing sexual Russian roulette) rather than remain monogamous.

Daniel Mendelsohn does not exactly accuse me of misrepresenting him, but I accuse him of misrepresenting me. If he had actually read my article, he would have noticed that in mentioning Bruce Bawer’s anthology, Beyond Queer, I said its “purpose [was] to challenge the ‘Gay Left Orthodoxy’ represented by the term queer.”

Mr. Mendelsohn, like Rabbi Levado, Marvin Liebman, and Stephen H. Miller (not to be confused with Stephen Miller, who is on the other side), also compares homosexuals to Jews. This comparison, which is in general much favored not only by Jewish homosexuals but also by propagandists appealing for Jewish support, always reminds me of the analogy Sholem Aleichem draws between a man and a shoemaker: “Wherein does a man resemble a shoemaker? A shoemaker lives and lives until he dies, and so does a man.” It is true that Jews and homosexuals are both members of minority groups who have suffered persecution and discrimination, and that similar arguments have sometimes been invoked to justify such treatment. But all this is also true of pedophiles. Would Rabbi Levado, Marvin Liebman, and Mr. Miller place them under the same protective Jewish umbrella they now hold over homosexuals?

W. Scott Thompson’s letter is so incoherent that even after reading it three times I still cannot figure out what the sad story it tells is supposed to convey. But to the question of whether what Mr. Thompson does in bed is any of my business, I can only reply that the gay-rights movement has made the sexual practices of its constituents everyone’s business. Indeed, thanks to the more evangelical members of that movement, even elementary-school children have been forced to learn about anal intercourse and other “joys of gay sex” (the phrase, I would remind Mr. Thompson, is not mine but is taken from the title of a manual by Edmund White, and in the age of AIDS unavoidably lends itself to mockery). It is also everyone’s business to decide what is normal and what is perverse; and as an intellectual, I consider it my special business to confront the kind of radical challenge that the gay-rights movement has mounted to my own intransigently traditional sense of the nature of human reality.

Unlike Mr. Thompson and others, Franklin E. Kameny agrees that homosexuality is a perversion, but so far as he is concerned, that is an argument in its favor. “Let us,” he cheerfully proposes, “have more and better enjoyment of more and better sexual perversions (consensually engaged in) by more and more people.” I do not share his view that we would “all be the better off for it,” and somehow I doubt that Thomas Jefferson had sodomy in mind when he wrote the Declaration of Independence. But I appreciate Mr. Kameny’s willingness to call a spade a spade, which is precisely the main thing I was trying to do in my article. It may also surprise him to hear that I oppose discrimination against homosexuals in the workplace (except for the military, which is a special case). But even if fighting job discrimination was the driving force behind the gay-rights movement at the beginning, today its animating purpose is to interdict the idea of homosexuality as a perversion and to establish it as no less normal and healthy an “orientation” than heterosexuality.

It is to this idea that I refuse my assent in spite of the fact that psychiatrists like Richard C. Friedman have given it an allegedly scientific imprimatur. Dr. Friedman admits that political pressure was brought to bear on the American Psychiatric Association to remove homosexuality from its list of mental disorders, but he assures us that the change was made on the basis of scientific considerations. The empirical data, he contends, reveal that homosexuals experience no special disability, while the only special distress they feel results from their “being victims of social prejudice.” Really? To quote again from the New York Times report I cited in my article, thanks to the return of promiscuity among homosexuals, “more than half of the nation’s twenty-year-old gay men will contract HIV during their lifetime” if present trends continue. Do Dr. Friedman and his colleagues seriously believe that suicidal behavior on this scale is normal, or that it can be attributed to social prejudice rather than to a mental disorder?

Having already registered my low opinion of the parallel Rabbi Levado draws between Jews and homosexuals, here I need only ask why, if gay liberation is the “way to work against perversity and disease,” these problems have grown rather than diminished with the increasing legitimation of homosexuality. I also want to express my astonishment at seeing an Orthodox rabbi declare, in brazen contravention of what the Torah teaches, that “Nature is a text that can say almost anything we want it to say.” But then again, Rabbi Levado (whose name if taken as a Hebrew word means “by himself alone,” which I sincerely hope he is within the Orthodox rabbinate) seems to specialize in brazen contraventions of the teachings of the Torah.

George Jochnowitz does my own fidelity to the teachings of the Torah too much credit in assuming that I rely on the authority of Leviticus for my belief that it is a perversion for men to use one another as women. To repeat: the reason I believe this is that it seems to me, as not so long ago it did to almost everyone, including most homosexuals, self-evident—a kind of axiom of natural law. But I thank Mr. Jochnowitz for absolving me of the sin of hatred. I do not hate homosexuals; what I hate (as William A. Baker perceives) is the idea that homosexuality is as normal and healthy as heterosexuality.

As a well-known conservative activist who came out of the closet some years ago, Marvin Liebman is understandably more concerned with the strictly political aspects of the debate over homosexuality than are many other conservatives (including myself). For me, to repeat it yet again, the main issue has to do not with electoral strategies but our “sense of the fundamental realities of life,” and “the terrible distortions that have been introduced into the general understanding of those realities by the gay-rights movement and its supporters.” Although it is true that—for reasons which are surely too obvious to need spelling out—I refer very often to AIDS in my article, I also declare explicitly “that even if gay sex no longer entailed the danger of infection,” it would still constitute a perversion.

I agree with Robert W. Wilson about the economic clout of homosexuals (though even on a point like this, I would apply the Sholem Aleichem rule to the comparison with Jews). I also think that he is probably right in speculating that homosexuality is rooted in “an inability to have the kind of intimate relationship that women quite reasonably expect and demand.” I myself have long suspected that homosexuality derives less from a positive attraction to men than from a fear of women—and especially of the messy entanglements that inevitably follow from getting mixed up with them. But I doubt that in the age of AIDS it is “better for a man to have sex with a man than with nobody” (Mr. Wilson is a little too confident that “it can be done safely”).

Doyne Dawson is right about my concern for “waverers,” but he is dead wrong in suggesting that they do not exist outside the pages of COMMENTARY. I have known a number of them myself, and there is plenty of testimony available from men who regret having been lured or seduced into homosexuality when they were young and still uncertain about their sexual proclivities.

If Matthew Rubenstein wants to know what I mean by the “polity” and the “culture,” he can easily find out by reading my article.

Contrary to what Arturo Fernandez imagines, I was not recommending a return to the time when homosexuals married women and then committed adultery with men; I was merely describing how things once were. But Mr. Fernandez is entirely correct about my bleak view of the life men lead without women to domesticate them. As for his (dare I call it campy?) claim that men who are civilized by women end up with “the qualities that homosexual men have all along possessed,” I will concede that it at least has the merit of originality.

Walter Naegle would like homosexuality to be “viewed simply as a fact of life.” Well, it certainly is a fact of life, but precisely because it raises questions about the fundamental realities of human existence, I doubt that it will ever be seen “simply” as that, least of all by homosexuals themselves.

I regret having disappointed Frederic Wile, who has always been very kind about my work, but I am bewildered by his denial that men are more promiscuous than women and that homosexual men are the most promiscuous of all. I am equally puzzled by his refusal to accept the evidence I cited of the return of promiscuity among homosexuals (and about which William E. Johnston, Jr., reporting from the San Francisco front lines, provides additional testimony).

I can (I hope) resolve the contradiction Henry D. Fetter finds between “Liberalism and the Culture: A Turning of the Tide?” and “How the Gay-Rights Movement Won” by pointing out that the two articles were looking at two different parts of the forest.

Thomas B. Swanzey makes an interesting observation about the way in which the legitimation of homosexuality has been helped along by the general separation of sex from procreation. But can he seriously mean it when he jumps to the conclusion that homosexual sex is not “that much different from the heterosexual contraceptive sex now routinely accepted by Americans”?

David H. Fax reads more into the sentence he quotes about the biological basis of homosexuality than I intended to put there. I was referring to the small percentage of homosexuals “who are so driven by lust for other men, and so erotically repelled by women, that for all practical purposes the only choice they have is between homosexuality and chastity.” (On such men, the extraordinary letter from Paul Edgar Guay casts a most unusual light.) But on the question of a gay gene, I am inclined to side with Mr. Fax (and with William Nicholls).

Paul Waller raises a difficult and delicate issue that I confess I deliberately avoided, largely because the silence of which he speaks has deprived us of any solid evidence concerning the extent of pedophilia among homosexuals. We are often told that most pedophiles are heterosexual, which must certainly be true in terms of absolute numbers, since heterosexuals make up about 97 percent of the population. But is it also true in terms of relative percentages? I agree with Mr. Waller that we will never find out so long as homosexual pedophilia remains the beneficiary of a tolerance that is not (at least not yet!) extended as widely or as readily to the molestation of girls by men.

In the meantime I commend Mr. Waller’s letter, as well as Jo Anne M. Randall’s and Joseph Berger’s, to Dr. Friedman. I also want to thank them—along with E.L. Pattullo, Stephen Miller, Harold Kulungian, Rachel Neuman, Douglas H. Schewe, Herb Greer, and Peter H. Wehner—for their generous words and their many illuminating comments.

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