 |
|
 |
| By Jack Nichols
Or, perhaps, she may simply have run at the mouth much too fast like she does on TV talk shows when she's welcomed by appreciative right-wingers. Why is she welcomed? Because she is, in fact, a lesbian-bashing lesbian—filled, in my opinion, with self-hate-- her own predilections in conflict with the R.C. brainwashings she suffered as a young woman. The neo-conservatives love her, though. She masquerades on the tube as a sex liberal, urinating splashing critiques over conventional sex. But then she dumps Bigtime on the more important issues that surround sexual freedom, the odor of her repressive turdishness meant to put sweet liberty to flight. This feisty Italian woman is, in one way, at least, an enigma. Mainstream media calls her "America's most controversial, most intimidating gay woman." Its tough to figure whether she's trying to make Freud look good (he's one of her heroes—and that old coke-head said, let it be remembered, that women suffer penis envy) or whether she's just a convert to some oddball fertility cult that places penises on alters. To hear Camille tell it, she's definitely into worship and adoration, not envy. Yes, fanatical, propagandizing worship, the one thing nobody should give to anything or anybody, human or divine. But Camille, don't forget, was a good Catholic girl until age 22. Long enough, really. Camille cozies up to the right-wing in a multitude of not-so surprising ways. She fools many gay male listeners by making outrageous-sounding sex statements—but lesbians are hardly ever fooled. They hear her real message, one that differs but little from that of Pat Robertson or the Pope. In fact, as was reported in GayToday (see Archives, July 1, 1998, Top Story) she recently took sides with the G.O.P.'s bigots and with the Southern Baptists. "Gays should stop bitching about Southern Baptists exercising their constitutional right to free speech about homosexuality, which is condemned by the Bible," she is quoted as saying in Salon magazine. Her attacks on male homosexuals have been escalating of late. Most recently (July 7) she writes in Salon:
This is precisely the kind of insidious 1950s psychoanalytical claptrap gay males fought off—starting in the 1960s when the Mattachine Society of Washington adopted its now-famous position paper, a statement that was eventually adopted by the entire gay movement and then by the organizations that represent the nation's mental health professionals. Camille's claptrap is insidious because there's scarcely a male alive—straight or gay-- who doesn't worry at some point about acceptance by other males. That she would assign such a concern to gay males alone shows how she'd try to twist matters to make us doubt ourselves. As for her words about "smothering female presences", please. Is this gal not a woman-hating lesbian? But media-savvy Camille doesn't care. She hugs her old-fashioned Freudian bibles with glee, knowing that if she speaks fast enough, she can throw her glib psychobabbling into public debates and few laymen will be any the wiser. Fran Liebowitz got it right answering a question about what she thought of "one of the most two intelligent women in the world" which is what Camille calls herself. "Thought is not a word I connect with her," said Fran, "She's very small-town. Doesn't she teach at the same college as Newt Gingrich?" When Playboy's David Sheff interviewed Camille he explained in his introduction that it is almost easier getting through to the President than to Paglia. Her answering machine—boasting a male's shielding voice— bellowed a host of instructions to U.S. and Canadian media, telling them to get in touch with her publisher. In Sheff's interview, Camille allowed how she's cheap speech date, mouthings ala Camille for only $2,000 a session. Whew! Beeeg Lecture Whore. She also indicates in the Playboy interview with her that she favors the development of effective fellatio skills—that they ought to be underwritten. Trust her to think of sex and cash simultaneously. But Sheff was not—nor, obviously, is this writer—a Camille-o-phile. Camille regroups with ease as she gropes about making "big bad lesbian" news. She dotes mightily on her own damned "cleverness", this ditz, spouting a trillion words a minute so folks can't keep track of her nonsense. She perpetually says things she doesn't mean to say and is forever being forced to backtrack. Like the current Pope, she calls AIDS nature's answer to promiscuity and insists that homosexual promiscuity isn't in nature's best interests. "Nature wants us to procreate," she pontificates, sounding just like the Roman Pontiff. Playboy's interviewer wisely countered: "That's a dangerous attitude, the same message we hear from fundamentalists who say that gay men are responsible for AIDS and that their sexual practices are immoral." Poor Camille. She's forced to backtrack: "It's not gay men who are ultimately responsible," she blithers, "It's all of us who set up a series of things for which gay men paid the price. Gay men put into effect the ideas created for heterosexuals." She blames, as does Newt Gingrich, the counterculture of the 60s. Hey, are the various factions of the sexual freedom crowd really listening to this Camille creature? Criticisms of her, I discovered, don't amuse Keith Griffith, Cruisemaster at cruisingforsex.com,, a website that glories in the glory hole world of renegade restroom sex. Responding to GayToday's July 1 news report, he e-mailed the following testament of support of Camille, blasting, along the way, Boston's Bay Window's editor, Jeff Epperly (who had previously blasted Griffith for being politically unhelpful and naive) and openly gay Congressman Barney Frank as well. "Jack," he wrote,: "I'll take Camille Paglia as an ally any day if the other option is Barney Frank or Jeff Epperly!!! And you can quote me on that. I often side with Paglia and always appreciate those like herself who make us stop and think.
"As for the charge of provincialism (made by Camille against gays), I couldn't agree more. The gay movement in the USA is very provincial when compared to the larger world out there. And the local communities are almost always the same. It is a very American thing -- not limited to gay people. "And about those Baptists (full disclosure: I'm a recovering member): they surely do have a right to hate us and we have a right to hate them back. This is the beauty of America. I should hope we will never come to the day where religious groups will be forced to accept views that go against their faith. "Finally, those Republicans (full disclosure: I'm a registered Republican): the current hate campaign is very calculated and isn't coming from out of nowhere. My columnist at cruisingforsex.com, John Fall, predicted this months ago, citing some letters coming into the party leadership from right wingers. The Republicans have no agenda. Nothing that Bill Clinton hasn't co-opted. And everything in the nation seems fine. What are they to do but attack vulnerable groups. We are only one segment they will go after in their desperate attempt to maintain control of the Hill and win the White House." Griffith's Cruising for Sex (mainly in restrooms) web site, had long used a home-page Camille-ian quotation about the power of odorous urine in restrooms to incite gay male hormonal surges. Wow, remind me to sniff deep next time. In all my years, this is something I've never picked up on. Well, as Griffith rightly says, questions of sexual response are indeed complicated. After all, we mustn't forget Camille's odd quote about the shape of Paula Jones' jawbone—an obvious (to Camille) enticement to blow-job bloodhounds such as she imagines the President to be. Here, of course, Camille covertly takes sides in the Republican-led sexual witch-hunt now souring the nation, one wherein Clinton's struggle against nosy prosecutor Kenneth Starr has become the topmost symbol. So why is it that Keith Griffith—who opposes sexual witch hunts—doesn't catch on to this aspect of her shenanigans? Because he's a registered Republican, perhaps? The trouble with Camille's admirers is that they hear what they like—her diatribes against Victim Feminists, her libertarian raps on drugs—but they ignore the dumber damaging dimensions in her "thoughts".
Walt Whitman who, Camille told me personally, was a truly great bard, disagreed vehemently with what her art theory says, as well as with similar nonsense from Oscar Wilde, whom he knew personally. (Perhaps Camille didn't know this.) "His (Whitman's) expansiveness and inclusiveness had never been merely a literary exercise," wrote David S. Reyonolds of Whitman. "I think of art," he declared, "as something to serve the people—the mass. When it fails to do that, it's false to its premises." Great American artists such as John Sloan and Robert Henri stood with Whitman against Camille's "art for art's sake" babbling. Sloan, quoted on the dust jacket of John Loughery's masterful book about him said that art "brings life to life." What is Camille's real life about? Who knows? She did tell me that it was partly about being without sex for an entire decade. And this in Philadelphia, where there are 100,000 lesbians per square inch, all of whom were unreachable by Camille Paglia. Fortunately, as was reported in Playboy, she finally met a young woman, giving an amazing example of those peculiar Paglian-style social graces. Advertising in the personals, she studied her best respondent like a worm under a microscope. "She sent me her resume," she explains. There was a "formal letter" and a picture too, of a woman in a very short skirt. Camille said: "I checked her resume. I don't want any psychopaths, thank you. She had a job. Still I was cautious. I called her voice mail and listened to how she sounded." Is this the woman who should critique gay lib activists and "radicals" as she's doing today? Is she the one to lead us to the truth about all things in life—especially sex-- that really count? Is her life an art form? Or is she only an awkward character dancing across the screen in a Woody Allen movie? You decide.
References:
http://gaytoday.badpuppy.com/garchive/interview/033197in.htm
|
Camille Paglia, self-proclaimed lesbian author of Sexual Personae and (more recently) Vamps and Tramps, blames the lesbians of Philadelphia because—for ten years, she says—she was unable to get laid. But were the lesbians of Philadelphia really to blame? Or could Camille's femme-famine been of her own making? Did, in fact, the lesbians of Philadelphia pick up on those weird patriarchal/Roman Catholic undercurrents running through all her work: A penis! My queendom for a penis!
"In gay men's early development, there is usually a painful wound from lack of acceptance by other males -- father, brothers, schoolmates -- and then a driving need to gain that attention and acceptance, eventually taking sexual form. There is also, most of the time, some smothering female presence, either too hot or too cold, from which the boy will escape to other men, where he can breathe free. Archetypally, the mawlike female genitalia threaten both claustrophobia and castration and can seem to men as fetid as mulch."
"She is right about gay men appearing to many people to be amoral. The irony of your article is that people like Epperly who you quote are the reason we come off that way. Epperly would rather make a sweeping statement to condemn men who don't have sex the way he prefers, than deal with the very complicated nature of our sexuality. Some men do appear to be amoral in their conduct. But most gay men having the kind of sex Epperly finds so offensive have a fairly well-developed moral code. At least when it comes to their sex lives. I can't speak for the rest of their lives.
Oscar Wilde © 1997-98 BEI