Get Out or Be Dragged Out : QUEER IN AMERICA: Sex, the Media and the Closets of Power, <i> By Michelangelo Signorile (Random House: $23; 368 pp.)</i>

Reviewing this book requires a metal helmet with a Perspex visor such as welders wear. Wherever you open it, the sparks fly; your skin tingles, your eyes smart and, when finally you put it down, you find that the tips of your fingers are blackened.

“Queer in America” is a long book, and rage of this intensity ultimately tends to become monotonous if expressed without satire or irony. Reading it is like holding a conversation with somebody who never stops shouting. To heighten this impression, the most vituperative passages are printed in capitals. On Page 68, men who do not reveal their homosexuality are called “YOU SLIMY, SELF-LOATHING HYPOCRITICAL MONSTERS” and, later on, “SELFISH BASTARDS.” Really, the entire text could be in uppercase letters: It is almost all denunciatory.

I believe that I once met the author, Michelangelo Signorile, on a television program ruled by Ronald Reagan’s son, and it may have been he who accused Ron Two of being a closeted homosexual. Apart from the embarrassment, the trouble with this attitude is that it divides the world’s population into “them” and “us” whereas, in fact, there is no such clear-cut division. A lot of heterosexual men are not entirely straight and many homosexuals are not completely gay.

Signorile was once the gossip columnist for a now-extinct magazine called “Outweek,” which strove to reveal the homosexuality of various public figures. In “Queer,” he discusses what he considers the legitimate limits of this practice and outlines its morality. He thinks that what has come to be called “outing” is admissible--nay, laudable--in the cases of men who are in the public eye and have used their influence adversely to affect the fate of homosexuals in general.

The book is divided into three main parts. The first deals with the press and the “outing” of Malcolm Forbes with whom, to Signorile’s annoyance, the papers archly insinuated Elizabeth Taylor was pursuing an illicit liaison. When the scandal was aired, the multimillionaire was already dead, so it is hard to imagine what good such a revelation could do.

The second section concerns the government and “outs” Pete Williams, the Pentagon’s chief spokesman during the Gulf War, who was not in favor of homosexuals being allowed into the armed forces. Signorile’s research into “the Washington closet” has spurred much debate about government hypocrisy. After Signorile’s story on Williams first ran in the Advocate, for instance, the New Republic’s openly gay editor Andrew Sullivan wrote, “Whatever the differences among gay men and lesbians, there was always a sense that everyone was essentially on the same side. Now I’m not so sure.”

The third part of the book focuses on how the movie and television industries portray homosexuals in a bad light. The attitude here sometimes parallels the one that straitjacketed black men during the reign of Sidney Poitier, when it seemed that we would never again be allowed to watch a film about a black man who was evil. That era is now past, and we can see pictures in which black people of all kinds appear just as they do in real life.

Signorile is not prepared to countenance the same treatment of gay characters. He condemns “The Boys in the Band,” not for its nauseating sentimentality, but because its main figure is pimply and effeminate (as though we have not all met such men). He also protests the depiction of a killer transvestite in “The Silence of the Lambs,” but we all know there have been spectacular gay murderers from Gilles de Rais in the Middle Ages, who killed 150 choirboys in his lifetime, to the more recent Jeffrey Dahmer. Signorile apparently does not notice the number of heterosexual murderers who appear on the screen.

The Hollywood section is largely devoted to the outing of David Geffen, who is addressed here as “YOU PIG.” (It is distressing to note that when homosexuals wish to discredit one another they employ exactly the same phraseology as straight people.) On placards protesting his issue of a record cut by Guns ‘N Roses, he is called “Miss Geffen.”

The quieter passages of the book come at the beginning when the author describes his childhood as a member of a traditional Italian family on Staten Island. It is a sad tale well known to anyone who has ever been called a sissy, a pansy or a fairy by boys of his own age. This treatment so distressed Signorile that he claims that he was denied a real adolescence, even a real childhood in which he could grow and learn. In fact, though, he was learning the hard way what his adult life would be like.

Occasionally the author evinces sympathy for victims other than himself, and then in the oddest instances. He is marginally kind to Anita Hill in her accusations against Clarence Thomas. I thought her arrival on that scene distinctly fortuitous but I must admit that I judged the situation from a British point of view. English judges do not have penises and, if one of them did and anyone were so tactless as to mention it, his response would be the same as that offered by an Englishman if you ask him if he has a television set: a grudging, “Well yes, I do have one--but I never look at it.”

Hill’s case is mentioned while Signorile is castigating a legislator for trying to involve one of his aides in a homosexual liaison. The younger man, called Keith to protect the guilty, says his employer invited him to his house, plied him with drink and started to tamper with him. The victim does not respond but, nevertheless, the aggressor then leads him into the bedroom, takes down his trousers and lays him on the bed. It seems incredible that, in all that time, there was no moment in which Keith could say that, while he greatly valued his boss’s friendship and totally supported his policies, he found this situation embarrassing. In the days before women decided to be people, a girl could reply to unwelcome advances with the phrase, “I don’t want to ruin a beautiful friendship.” Is there no modern translation of these words?

I am not sure that Signorile understands why straight men object to homosexuality. It is a fact of human nature that, if our attention is drawn toward some unusual behavior, we judge it by imagining what it would be like to be compelled to take part in it. Most men know or can guess the nature of the sex acts in which homosexual males indulge, and they would hate to have to try them. To heterosexual people there is little difference between sodomy, incest, sadism or bestiality. This is a viewpoint that cannot be altered and the more the gay community claims to have rights, the more indignant the rest of the world becomes.

In spite of my disagreement with so much of what “Queer in America” says, I found it impossible to stop reading it. I was swept forward on the tide of the author’s rage as though I were shooting the rapids and, though I found Signorile’s abrasiveness difficult to digest, I know he is absolutely sincere and I would like to wish his book well. But the sad truth is that, the more people read it, the wider will become the rift between the straight and the gay worlds. Protest leads to counter-protest and anger begets anger. This is an unalterable law.

A Queer Manifesto

Michelangelo Signorile’s “Queer in America” concludes with “A Queer Manifesto.” Here are some excerpts.

To All Queers

There is no “right” to the closet.

If you are in it, it is not by your choice. You were forced into it as a child, and you are being held captive by a hypocritical, homophobic society.

Now is the time to plan your escape. The power to do so is inside of you, and only you can unleash it.

Stop sitting around blaming your parents, your school, the government, the media.

Stop wishing yourself dead.

If you are already out of the closet, it is your obligation to help all those who are still being held prisoner.

If you are not yet out of the closet--if you are a teenager dependent on your parents, if you are trapped in a homophobic town or a tough city neighborhood where they beat up queers, if you are in any way in danger--hold on and plan for the day when you are older, when you have saved some money, when you can leave that place, when you can stand up on your own two feet and take charge of your life. No one can keep you where you are--except yourself. But you must come out wisely.

*

To the Closeted in Power

Get yourself some professional help.

The walls are caving in around you, and there’s nothing you can do.

Unless you come out, you’ll eventually be revealed as just another cowering, sad, self-loathing homosexual.

Now is the time for those who occupy the closets of power to come out and be counted.

*

To the Sympathetic Straights

From now on, discount the opinions of the closeted gays around you. Everything they have to say is colored by the closet, tinged by the repressed and fearful existence they lead.

Admit it: All of you have some discomfort with homosexuality. Your minds have been as polluted as ours by the homophobic society in which we life. You must now be part of changing that society, beginning in your own home.

*

To the Religious Right

You say we’re coming for your children, and you’re right.

We’re coming for your queer children. We are your queer children.

God--your God, our God--made us that way. And there’s nothing you can do about it.

*

To All Queer Activists

We must not focus on that which divides us--our genders, races, classes, ages, political ideologies--but on the one powerful enemy that we all have in common: the closet.

Our diversity is in fact our greatest weapon.

Our brainpower, resources, talent, and experiences will break down the closets of power forever.