To Assimilate or Not to Assimilate?

There’s a funny little dialogue tossed about by scholars of gay history that goes something like this:

Question: Is there such a thing as a gay subculture, and has it had any effect?

Answer: No, there is no such thing as a gay subculture and, yes, it has had an enormous effect.

In other words, gay culture is a chimera, impossible to pin down. Which, of course, never stops people from arguing about it.

In the eye of the latest verbal storm are two ambitious new books, “Sexual Ecology: AIDS and the Destiny of Gay Men” (Dutton), by Gabriel Rotello, and “The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture” (Hyperion), by Daniel Harris, which explore the role of sexuality in gay culture and how it influences assimilation. The books, on most gay bestseller lists, have prompted a frenzied outpouring of anger in the gay and alternative press and even the formation of an activist group to counter the books’ claims.

Although both men see assimilation as inevitable, they come from opposite ends of this rocky terrain.

Rotello is a science-minded, prophet-rationalist with utopia in his sights who warns of a new upsurge in the AIDS epidemic, even though death rates are falling, and urges gay men in the name of AIDS prevention to replace promiscuity with sexual restraint and monogamy. Just a little change of behavior, he pleads, a bit like a fearful parent, and not only will gays get rid of the plague, but be welcomed into the mainstream, maybe even get marriage rights as a kind of social prophylactic against the further spread of AIDS. Using the language of ecology, he talks of a “new gay culture” of balance and moderation that will lead to “a new equilibrium with nature.”

Harris is a hybrid of gleeful anthropologist, delving into some of the quirkier aspects of gay male subculture--drag, underwear, leather fetishism, personal ads--and a wistful ironist recording the death (by homogenizing heterosexual influence) of unique gay mores born of oppression and secrecy. It’s a death exacerbated, he says, by the acceptance of gay men and lesbians into the corporate commercial fold and the subsequent promotion of the kind of cozy domestic coupledom featured in IKEA ads.

That means, he says, no more worship of witty old movie stars who were once role models for lonely gay men; no more hilarious “camp” language whose verbal aggression helped boost flagging self-esteem. “The proverbial tasteful gay man basic to the subculture” will become . . . a stockbroker. Already, he says, sexual adventurers are ostracized; elegant drag queens, masculinized; tough-guy leather men, feminized--all to seem more palatable to the middle-of-the road society into which gay culture will soon be entirely subsumed.

Both writers have received accolades--Harris from literary essayists like himself (he writes regularly for Harper’s magazine) who applaud his lack of sentimentality, his incisive prose and a “wicked wit.” Novelist Dale Peck in the Village Voice admiringly called Harris’ book “the bitchy rant of a bar queen with a lot on her mind.”

Rotello has been praised by epidemiologists and historians for the depth of his research into the genesis and spread of AIDS and the danger of a so-called second wave of infection; they tout his book as the most important work about AIDS and society since Randy Shilts’ “And the Band Played On” (St. Martin’s Press, 1987).

But coming on the heels of other books by such largely assimilation-minded writers as Andrew Sullivan, Bruce Bawer and Michelangelo Signorile, these works have inspired not merely argument but outrage in that segment of the gay community that has traditionally equated sexual freedom with political rights.

The angry epithet hurled at all these writers, without regard for their differing perspectives, has been “neoconservative,” or “Neo Con.” (Rotello, in fact, had something of an agitator status eight years ago as the founding editor of the now-defunct Outweek, at which he helped start the trend toward “outing” public figures. Harris isn’t really interested in political dogma at all.)

Many in the gay community see Rotello’s work in particular as part of a broader attack on gay sexuality and a harking back to an earlier, more repressive era, on a par with recent government crackdowns on bathhouses, sex clubs and gay bars in a number of cities. And although Rotello nowhere in his book moralizes about promiscuity, many critics have pointed out that he helped found a group in New York--Gay and Lesbian HIV Prevention Activists--which successfully lobbied the mayor’s office to close down a number of sex clubs and bathhouses, a fact he does not mention in his book.

Letters in the Nation, the veteran liberal weekly, responding to an excerpt of Rotello’s book, railed against the piece as “outrageous,” “strait-laced” and “slavish worship at the altar of family.” In a follow-up article, Michael Warner, a professor of English at Rutgers, asked why gays should seek out marriage when it didn’t seem to work for straight people. Meanwhile, Richard Goldstein in Out magazine made fun of Rotello’s you’re-all-going-to-die approach, calling it “a new literary genre: The Gay Jeremiad.”

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To counter Rotello and other so-called Neo Cons, several activists and academics have formed a New York-based group called Sex Panic (the name comes from feminist theories about public hysteria over sexual behavior), which attracted 300 people to its first meeting, says Warner, one of the founders. Meanwhile, the annual gay and lesbian national political conference known as Creating Change, to be held in San Diego in November, will devote a good portion of its workshop time to “attacks on queer sexuality,” says organizer Tony Valenzuela.

One complaint is that neither author offers a really positive slant on the culture. “I don’t know if you put both of them up against a wall with a knife held to their necks if they could tell you what the value of gay culture is,” says Michael Bronski, a cultural critic.

Both authors have also been charged with portraying only a particular segment of urban gay male life. Harris purports to be describing “gay culture” but, critics ask, where are the lesbians and people of color? Rotello’s brief mention of lesbians--as inherently serially monogamous, and from whom, therefore, gay men can learn--was found by some to be patronizing.

Others say that to simply pit monogamy against promiscuity is to ignore broader questions about sexuality. “Is sexual fidelity the ideal that best suits human and needs and promotes human happiness?” asks Martin Duberman, distinguished professor of history at City University of New York and founder of the graduate school’s Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies. He notes that the so-called queer theorists are now charting “sexual fluidity. They’re saying that all sexual categories have got to go. . . . ‘Gay men’ and ‘lesbians’ are sleeping with each other. There’s a lot of wild radical stuff going on.”

In his generally favorable review of “Sexual Ecology” in the Nation, Duberman thought that Rotello lacked a larger societal vision. After all, “much of what is deplorably shallow or indulgent about a segment of gay male culture” is “in fact characteristic of American culture in general--even if heterosexual consumption is less centered on the sexual.”

Meanwhile, Harris’ death-of-gays-in-the-arts thesis is decried as hyperbolic--while his vision of oppression ending is seen as naive. “What world does he live in?” asks John De Cecco, editor of the Journal of Homosexuality and a professor of psychology at San Francisco State.

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Both writers find themselves bemused and misunderstood.

“The automatic assumption that I’m coming from a moralistic place goes to the root of the difficulty--that many people seem incapable of distinguishing a biological and survivalist message coming from a gay man, who wants all gay men to survive as openly gay and openly sexual, from a moralistic message coming from right-wing moralists who want gay men to stop being gay and stop being sexual,” says Rotello, a former New York Newsday columnist who, at 44, is still “in a kind of mourning” for the death of his longtime partner, Hap Hatton, in 1988 from AIDS complications.

He wants people to see sexual behavior and disease in an “ecological” framework (not a moral one), where promiscuity may be defined as a kind of conduit for toxins (AIDS) in the social environment. Why should battling promiscuity be any different from anti-smoking campaigns or efforts to ban the use of fluorocarbons? he asks.

Nevertheless, Rotello understands why his pragmatism may seem threatening and concedes that monogamy isn’t for everyone. Nor is he advocating “some grotesque penalty for people who don’t behave that way.” It’s more, he says, that sexuality should be integrated into “the larger fabric of people’s lives.”

Harris is less welcoming of assimilation. A 39-year-old escapee from a blue-collar childhood in Asheville, N.C., who sees himself as the end product of a “long line of campy writers” from Lytton Strachey to Gore Vidal, he regrets the passing of aestheticism. His book, he says, is “an unwilling swan song” to earlier times.

Still, he’s certainly not yearning for “the days of paddy wagons and raids on bars.” And, unlike the “queer theorists” who find something special or different in the “gay sensibility,” he sees only a sentimental clinging to identity. “You see this with Jews,” he adds, noting that his father is a “born-again Jew.” (His mother is a Southern Baptist.) “You sentimentalize your minority status only when it’s stopped oppressing you”--a sure sign of assimilation, he adds.

If Rotello’s book was a plea for common sense, Harris’ is a defense of intellectual life. “What I wanted to do was a very coldblooded dissection of contemporary gay culture without any propaganda,” he explains. “And one of the ways I can tell I’ve succeeded is that people are very disturbed by the absence of the kinds of uplifting bromides they expect from gay literature. So many people see books as mood-enhancers. I set out to write a book that was a depressant--though I hope the humor leavens it quite a bit.”

People were most upset about his chapter on the kitschification of AIDS, he says, because of his witty analysis of the AIDS quilt. “One very good friend of mine said he’s going to leave a note in his will to force me to make his panel for the quilt. If he does, I probably will. I mean, I adore this guy. But one thing I dislike about AIDS kitsch is this notion that one has to render these men into seraphic innocents in order to make them presentable to the American public.”

As a former “curb-crawler” who withdrew from promiscuity when AIDS hit the news and who is now in a monogamous relationship, Harris still “can’t see that having loads and loads of sex is anything to be guilty about.”

To some historians and critics, these arguments about assimilation and promiscuity seem old hat. “We’ve been hashing and rehashing these issues for the 25 years I’ve been in the movement,” Duberman says. “The trouble is, Americans are so desperately ahistorical and gay Americans are no different from any others. If it didn’t happen on the 6 o’clock news yesterday it hasn’t happened.

“Harris and Rotello may have pinpointed certain trends in certain limited segments of the gay population. But even within that population we’re going to see additional changes. Cultures don’t stand still unless they’re dead. And gay culture is hardly dead.”