"You find them," he says, "not only in gay magazines such as OUT and The Advocate, but in the mainstream press as well: The New Republic, The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Magazine, The Weekly Standard, New York and even The Nation."

In the covering of same-sex issues, Professor Warner argues in the July 14 issue of The Nation, mostly neoconservatives predominate. They have put up a stone wall to keep gay issues boxed into their narrow ideology which, according to the professor, protects a retrogressive right-wing agenda they represent.

"It's no surprise," he writes, "that conservative voices might have emerged from the gay movement, as they have in American politics generally."

The "acceptable" gay neoconservative voices given especial freedom to disseminate their views, are all males. They include authors Andrew Sullivan, Larry Kramer, Michelangelo Signorile, Gabriel Rotello, Bruce Bawer, and Daniel Mendelson, all of whom, he says, are kindred spirits with similar backward-tilting agendas.

Professor Warner calls attention to what he believes is the intellectual poverty of Andrew Sullivan's book, Virtually Normal (see GayToday Archives, Reviews) as arguing that gay politics consists of only two issues: marriage and military service. Everything else is mere private difference, according to Sullivan. Taking his new book, Same-Sex Marriage, Pro and Con on the road, Sullivan implies that as soon as the marriage and military issues have been resolved, the gay movement will be essentially over. Professor Warner believes that this is a "we'll disappear for you" message straight neoconservatives want to hear.

Gabriel Rotello and Michelangelo Signorile, waxing critical of particular urban cruising grounds, favor, says Warner, state regulation of sexual behavior.

These few authors--with anti-sexual neoconservative support-- are overused by media, and have, Warner points out, accomplished "a bloodless revolution that few even noticed." They rail against the sexual element in the present-day gay subculture.

Critics accuse them of wanting to take the word "sex" out of homosexuality.

While mainstream America, gay and straight, moves rightward by neocapitalist design, author Gore Vidal deadpans that there is only one political party in the United States and that it has two right wings. Professor Warner seems to be saying as much about gay spokespersons, that they have two heads, both tilted rightward.

Based on a study of gay neoconservative ideas, the professor charges the aforementioned "neocon" authors with trying to hijack or kidnap the rich variety and individualism that has heretofore permeated gay communities and their cultures. They would return such individualism to the closet. He says:

"These writers repudiate the legacies of the gay movement--its democratic conception of activism, its goal of political mobilization, its resistance to the regulation of sex and its aspiration to a queerer world."

The gay neoconservatives are painting gay 'liberationists' with the same foul brush the neocons use to smear 'liberals', inducing the same kind of social amnesia, argues the professor. It might be said the neoconservatives exhibit a disdain for sexuality that could assure their support in Roman Catholic ecclesiastical circles.

For the past five years, however, universities have been alive with provocative explosions of what Professor Warner proudly calls "queer theory." This is particularly true in academic circles. Here, practical focus lies in discussing what must be done to meet inevitable change head- on, rather than trying, as Warner claims the gay neoconservatives do, to roll back the clock.

The neoconservative legislative dream, to promote state-sanctioned relationships and state regulation of sexual behaviors, would place gay men and lesbians under the Pentagon's roof, as well as assuring government a heavy hand in the regulating of same-sex relationships. Professor Warner believes gay men and lesbians see more in their liberation movement than this.

Innovative opposition writers in academia, according to the professor, include Judith Butler, Lauren Berlant, Leo Bersani, Douglas Crimp, Lee Eddleman, Jonathan Goldberg, David Halperin, Cindy Patton, and Eve Sedgewick.

Neoconservative author, Bruce Bawer, is critiqued by Professor Warner on the basis of Bawer's book Beyond Queer: Challenging Gay Left Orthodoxy. (See GayToday Reviews in Archives). Bawer had said: "Until we start imposing honesty, fidelity, and emotion on our lives--in other words until we are able to talk about moral standards--we will make very little progress in social acceptance."

Warner responds: "As if fidelity could only mean monogamy. As if honesty and moral standards had not been the theme of gay liberation. As if who's accepting whom were not at issue."