Badpuppy Gay Today

Monday, 17 March, 1997

Normal? Virtually Normal? What brand of 90's title is this? In a C-Span interview the author seems a sweet-natured English immigrant who laughs a lot, unnecessarily and often nervously. No matter. It should be expected that along with an impressive Oxford (and later Harvard) education, he lugs with him certain cultural maladies, prissy quirks against which America revolted in 1776, but that have remained to loose putrid odors since, causing much of the havoc crippling discussions of sexuality. Raising indirection to a high art, English socialization has often provided us with the next best thing to lying, just as it gave us Maggie Thatcher, the next best thing to Reagan. Mr. Sullivan, a gay "success" story for having become a former Editor of The New Republic, says shamelessly he'd probably have voted for Reagan and for Bush. It figures.

Virtually Normal will be applauded by conventional people in backwoods regions where folks seldom stir the pot and where, in fact, as the soup heats up, we're able to hear little more than human-vegetable mixes sounding glub glub glub. It might have served Mr. Sullivan best if he'd held off writing this all-too-proper argument until living a bit more, taking time to become a truly revolutionary American, as opposed, say, to remaining an orthodox virtual citizen. Mr. Sullivan thinks, like the fundamentalists who have pushed the issue most, that legalized marriage must be at the center of the gay agenda, and that we should be clamoring ad nauseum for the right to approach church alters in same-sex pairs. Such reasoning befits a true-believer who, somehow, still calls himself a practicing Roman Catholic. Certainly we who are lesbians and gay men should have the same right to "get married" just as other people do--no matter our orientations. But many of us first want our daily fears of "exposure" as gays or lesbians and the consequences of job loss eliminated. N'est pas?

Mr. Sullivan has told, touchingly, how his English parents reacted to his now seven-year-old announcement that he's gay. His mother said, "Oh God, I better go make a cup of tea." That's merry old England for you. John Lennon and Elton John both moved away. Why? Let The Naked Civil Servant, expatriate Quentin Crisp, tell you. Its because folks adeptly dodge facts there, he says. A foremost great grandfather of gay liberation, Edward Carpenter, was English too, but he weaned himself on the exuberant philosophic attitudes of a great American poet, not as Mr. Sullivan does, on decaying Vatican doctrines. Carpenter wrote how the grotesque stuffiness of his own countrymen caused him to escape to the far north countryside so he wouldn't have to deal with it. Living in America, Mr. Sullivan knows now something about the repressiveness he left behind in the "old" country. Its much to his credit, no doubt, that he's escaped the cultural confines his birthplace, but he needs several more years of virtual exile before this escape allows him to dress without his papal straitjacket, one he wore as a youthful soul as he struggled to become self-respecting in evasive old England.