Book Review

Beyond being 'Virtually Normal'

By Nik Trendowski
Staff Writer

Andrew Sullivan is a very nice gay man. Why, he's even the editor of the "New Republic," not exactly a radical publication. Sullivan, it seems, also doesn't really like it much when people put those two things together to describe him. That's the perfect expression of what Sullivan tries to get across in "Virtually Normal" -- gay people may be a little different in whom they love, but when it comes right down to it, they're (pardon the use of a newly-coined clich) virtually normal.
In his book, Sullivan makes a very nice argument about why homosexuality is okay, and along the way, why four categories of arguments against it are not. So he's a nice gay man who argues quite well, and with no small amount of historical background on his side. And he might just be the greatest contradiction of the great flamboyant gay stereotype.
That's why "Virtually Normal" is neither a gay liberation text nor a variation on Bruce Bawer's controversial, integrationist "A Place at the Table." Sullivan agrees with none of the four categories of contemporary schools of thought about homosexuality as he sees them (the "prohibitionists," the "liberationists," the "conservatives" and the "liberals," terms which are pretty self-evident).
At first, any reader who has any background in scholarship about sexuality issues will find him or herself nodding and saying, "Yeah, and...?" to passages bringing out those old chestnuts, like the notion of the berdache and references to the "Symposium." The argument gets kind of boring for a while, until Sullivan pulls out revelations like this: in pre-World War II America, most men thought of themselves less as gay or straight than as passive or active (this might be the reason the Kinsey studies showed such a seemingly high incidence of male-male sexual contact). That is, the act of male-male sex wasn't particularly stigmatized as long as you were the active partner, in a sort of male-male mimicry of the male-female relationship. This, however, is a good place to note that Sullivan, though he explains why in his introduction, basically examines homosexuality through a male lens. It makes sense, since lesbians have been more often ignored, but it could be construed as a sort of sexist fault of the book.
In the same breath, Sullivan denounces the "liberationists" for perhaps being the single greatest force in allowing homosexuality to be stigmatized -- in effect, they've created the identifiable minority the "prohibitionists" always wanted. He takes each group's argument to its logical, or in some cases illogical, end, using, for the most part, the European mode of argument -- thesis, antithesis, synthesis.
The only problem is that it's often boring; like some articles in the "New Republic," there's a sort of knowing veneer of college-thesis language, much of which seems to be padding in a book that's already pretty short. Sullivan often gets bogged down in arguing, for instance, against the "prohibitionist" view. He takes biblical teachings and Thomas Aquinas' writings and refutes the notion that homosexuality is uniquely condemned -- in fact, eating shellfish and rabbit, for instance, are subject to the same derision in the Bible, and if some texts are to be believed, bestiality and homosexuality, among other things, are both subject to punishment by death. So if everyone isn't really following the edicts they say they are, they're probably following a conscious or unconscious thought that homosexuality must be just plain wrong. Aha. Most readers can do little but nod their heads and agree once Sullivan finally and laboriously gets to the point. But he posits from the beginning that he's arguing only argument -- there's really no way to argue emotion with those who, for instance, accept religious doctrine as inarguable, since it, uh, can't be argued with, according to those who believe in it.
So if the prohibitionists are wrong, since a natural phenomenon can't be eradicated or moralized out of existence, the liberationists are wrong because making a distinct minority of homosexuals merely fans the flames, the conservatives are wrong because public disdain and private tolerance eventually collapses on itself, and liberals are wrong because you can't legislate tolerance, then what's the answer to the "homosexual question," if there is such a thing? Well, his argument for a "politics of homosexuality" boils down to letting people be people --letting gays be married, be in the military, et al, because, after all, as he has just argued, homosexuals are "virtually normal." And if sexuality is a normal condition, whether it be homosexual or heterosexual, why not just let the normal course of life prevail for homosexuals as for heterosexuals?
It's all a rather persuasive argument in the end. Sullivan is the kind of guy you'd hope to have on your side in a debate. "Virtually Normal" is, despite its flaws, probably the best long essay (that's basically what it is) on homosexuality to date. There's just one problem: those who hold the viewpoints he argues against so well may never pick up the book.


"Virtually Normal"
By Andrew Sullivan
Knopf
Hardcover, 209 pages, $22