Vice Versa

Thoughts and reflections on literature, film, television, politics, philosophy, and (bi)sexuality--not necessarily in that order.

Sunday, October 19, 2003

Such a long time
I've been away from blogging for far too long, but I suppose I've never really gotten into the habit. That may be changing now, though, as I keep having issues and ideas pull at me, and I would like to write more about them.

Yesterday I went on a long hike (or at least long for me) in the mountains with a group of people I had just met. I had a great time and things were going really well until, sitting by an alpine lake, two members of my group started discussing politics. It turned out they were both pretty far left, which would not necessarily be a bad thing if they were able to engage in rational discussions about their views. But I had my doubts. One of them was saying that she had just read Michael Moore's latest book and she started repeating its questionable claims as though they were the truth. I was dismayed by this development, because I regard Michael Moore as a third-rate demagogue and propagandist. Moore might have received an Oscar for his so-called documentary, Bowling for Columbine, but if such a mishmash of untruths, distortions, faulty logic and propaganda can be considered a documentary--much less an award-winning one--then we really are in trouble.

For the most part, you'll find that I distrust extreme partisanship on either the right or the left, but these days I see it more frequently among those on the left than the right. In the current climate, the tone and extent of liberal puritanism is almost overwhelming. By "puritan" here, I mean that kind of self-righteous ideologue who can tolerate no dissent, and who regards dissenters as necessarily evil, venal creatures that must be overcome. That definition probably needs some work, and yet it seems to apply to extremists of almost any stripe.

Becoming A Man
And that leads me indirectly to my main cultural commentary for today. For some time now I have wanted to write about Paul Monette's award-winning 1992 autobiography, Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story. Although I read it several months ago, it has been on my mind again lately, since I met someone who reminded me ever-so-slightly of the persona Monette presents in the book.

While I could certainly see parallels and echoes between moments in his life and moments in mine, I can also see huge, glaring differences. There's all his promiscuity for one thing, from an early age onward, even during his supposedly "celebate" years. There's also his conviction, from a relatively early age, that he is gay--or at least that is how he tells the story. For me, the answer has never been clear in the least bit, which is one reason why I find some peace in the category of bisexuality. For him, bisexuality was a phase, a part of coming out as gay, a license to experiment in the wild years of the 1970s. For me, bisexuality serves to explain the reality of how I have fallen in love with women in the past, but also how I have always been attracted to men, even though I did everything I could do deny the reality of those feelings in adolesence.

As helpful or insightful as I found parts of the book to be, I was suspicious or distrustful of the kneejerk partisanship, the gay essentialism, and even the strong anti-Catholic bias. To his credit, he does seem wary about being too much of a gay essentialist--he equivocates or backs away from statements that seem too absolutely proscriptive--and yet, his story hinges on the realization that running from being out as a gay man was the source of most of his problems. Ending as it does when he meets his long-term partner Roger, the book seems rather like a big fairy tale (pardon the unintended pun) in which coming out is the magic device that enables him to meet Prince Charming and live happily ever after.

Pardon me, I want to say, but I doubt it's ever that simple for anyone. Although the book foreshadows his parents' possible difficulties in accepting this reality, he conveniently ends the book before he has to tell us how he integrated his new vision of his life with his life as it had existed previously. Many gay and bisexual people remain closeted because if they come out they might face not only familial rejection but economic consequences or social ostracism. Nor does it help when the most active or vocal people one encounters in the gay community are quite often pushing a political agenda which has little to do with gay rights or interests. As Andrew Sullivan would be among the first to argue, being gay or bisexual doesn't mean that one needs to support an inefficient welfare state, nor does it mean one should necessarily oppose current administration policy with respect to Iraq or Israel. Monette does not seem willing to accept that truths can be more complex than the story he tells suggests.

While some (including apparently, Monette) see bisexuality as a transitional phase or as an excuse to be promiscuous, for me is useful as a category for understanding the variety of my feelings. I refuse to cast them all into the category of self-delusion. And that's why I have so little patience with gay essentialism, or at least with what I've taken to calling gay essentialism: a theory that you're either gay or straight and that there is no in-between, and there is nothing you can do abut it. To my mind, that theory seems as ridiculous as the belief in the old south that people of mixed race were always black, no matter how small a fraction their black ancestry might represent. And just as the southern racial theories insisted on a (fictionalized) relationship between race and character, so gay essentialism seeks to perpetuate unhelpful stereotypes about sexuality and character (think Queer Eye for the Straight Guy). Although for some gay might define a sensibility or a cultural style as much as a sexual preference or an orientation, for others it is not necessarily any of those things, and to insist that it is or must be strikes me as wrongheaded. In that respect, of course, it is rather like the "diversity" debate: seeing people as "representatives" of a group means expecting them to represent the views or characteristics of the group, rather than expecting them to be individuals. But groups rarely interest me as much as individuals do.