Gay Sera, Sera

A regular feature of gay pride marches in London in the 1980s was a political veteran known as The Bionic Dyke, who chose not to stay within the confines of the parade but instead to march through the bystanders, lustily singing her version of a classic Doris Day number (retitled “Gay Sera, Sera”). One year, she agreed to take on the role of parade marshal and found herself faced with a contingent of celebrity gays, grouped by the organizers in a phalanx to increase the slim chance of the event’s being noticed by the newspapers. One of these celebrities, the actor (now Sir) Ian McKellen, who had only recently gone public with his sexual nature, made the mistake of treating her, as she felt, as if she was some sort of personal assistant, expected to do his bidding. She corrected this false impression with a fierce harangue, asking him how old he was as a gay person, and then supplying the answer: As a gay person he wasn’t even one year old, while she herself was at least a teenager. That note of exasperated dismissive seniority is one this review is pledged to avoid--however great the temptation.

Andrew Sullivan’s first sexual experience, his “first undoing,” took place 10 years before this book’s time of writing; it was in 1990 that he first referred to gay people in print as “we” rather than “they.” That’s a rather tight schedule for turning yourself into a cutting-edge theorist and community spokesman--a bare decade from virgin to sage. In the same period of 10 years, Sullivan traces a progress in the broader culture’s attitude toward the gay minority “from . . . fearful stigmatization to . . . awkward fitful acquiescence.” He doesn’t seem to worry that he is projecting his personal journey onto the world at large and then reading it back as history.

The subtitle of “Love Undetectable,” “Notes on Friendship, Sex and Survival,” presents the topics of the book’s three self-contained essays in reverse order: survival comes first, with “When Plagues End,” a consideration of AIDS in the light of the combination therapies which promise to rescind its virtual death sentence. Then there is sex, in “Virtually Abnormal,” an assessment of what Freud and modern homophobic therapists (reparative therapists) make of homosexuality. Finally comes friendship, examined in “If Love Were All,” which combines philosophical speculation with memories of Patrick, one particular friend lost to AIDS.

In the first essay, Sullivan is careful to make clear that he isn’t saying that AIDS is over, even for those with access to the vital medication. But he is right to point to the way the epidemic shifts in philosophical category, once it becomes survivable for even a small proportion of those stricken by it. Members of a whole generation, including Sullivan himself, have the possibility of putting their living wills in a drawer, rather than on the kitchen table in full view, and renegotiating their contract with life itself. How will this extraordinary change of state--from death’s door to life’s living room--affect people? Will they be able to take up where they left off? Will they experience, even, a certain disillusion, when the horizon retreats to something like its former distance?

This is a fascinating new subject, but Sullivan’s exploration of it is disfigured by the same perverse agendas that characterized the book which made his name, “Virtually Normal.” Sullivan is a Catholic who, when the objections to homosexuality are religious, seeks to dismantle them without actual criticism. He’s like someone removing all the screws from a piece of machinery, hoping it will fall apart all by itself, when he’s out of the room. He isn’t above a certain amount of sectarian point-scoring, describing the suicide of a friend as “an ineluctably Protestant fate,” as if no Catholic equivalents could be found.

When he’s considering gay life before AIDS, though, the gloves are off. His attitude towards classical gay liberation is bafflingly furious. He stipulates, without evidence, a coercive orthodoxy of promiscuity which enforced, when the virus came, a collective way of death. These people defended the “abattoirs of the epidemic” (presumably the bathhouses) and facilitated a world in which gay men literally killed each other by the thousands. On the rare occasions when he mentions an actual achievement of early gay liberation, he gives no credit. Referring to the American Psychiatric Assn.’s 1973 removal of homosexuality from its list of disorders, he attributes it to intense political pressure. An uninformed reader could easily conclude that it was a presidential decree that did the trick, rather than the activism of a generation the author has decided to despise.

“Love Undetectable” contains elements of a number of distinct forms of writing--journalism, autobiography, philosophical paper and political manifesto--but it tends to display their respective weaknesses rather than their strengths, and the incompatibility of the assumptions involved is hard to ignore. The journalism in the book is rudimentary--a matter of attending the Black Party at the Roseland Ballroom or a Halloween parade in San Francisco and recording his impressions (“underneath, there was an air of strain” and “an air of going through . . . the motions,” respectively).

Despite the importance he claims to attach to observing who gay men “actually are,” Sullivan is content to rely, for purposes of rhetorical illustration, on thumbnail sketches of his acquaintances (“Take Greg, a Washingtonian I’ve known for years”) or second-hand anecdotes. A friend, for instance, remembers seeing a young man on the piers in New York City sobbing after being publicly pleasured; Sullivan has no difficulty in divining the state of mind of someone he never even saw (“spiritually and physically jackknifed by the experience, severed into two incompatible parts”), nor in criticizing those who would “posture over that man on the pier,” failing to see him “as a complex moral and physical being.” If that isn’t posturing, what is? At times like this, readers will be reminded that Sullivan as a schoolboy was a prizewinning debater. He is still essentially a rhetorical performer.

If Sullivan hardly bothers to survey the world outside, then when he turns his gaze inward, the results are disconcerting. His preferred style of introspection is dialogue with a book. To cope with his friend Patrick’s death, he reads Augustine, and his memories of the man are interspersed with, even overwhelmed by, a survey of friendship down the ages, from Aristotle to Montaigne and Michael Oakeshott. Sullivan has ambitions beyond the mere literature of loss and aspires to make a contribution to the philosophy of friendship: Patrick provides him with what is essentially the text for a sermon. He makes some good and eloquent points as well as some dry and dutiful ones, but the overall impression is more of a term paper than an outpouring with any sort of emotional spontaneity.

But then spontaneity is hardly a part of Andrew Sullivan’s project. His priority is to force the pace toward a perfectly homogenous self-esteem, although the consequence of this seems to be a stubborn residual sense of shame, a shame hangover which he assumes to be universal but may actually be particular to him. Diagnosed as HIV-positive, Sullivan was startled to find that even he, “someone who had thought and worked and struggled to banish the stigma and the guilt and the fear of my homosexuality,” reflexively perceived his illness as a judgment on him. He reveals that he recovered his self-control with more thought and work and struggle, and came to feel liberated by his infection because “it forced me to confront more profoundly than ever before whether or not my sexuality was something shameful (I became convinced that it was not).” Perhaps this time his confidence will last.

It’s an ominous sign, though, that when he reads the articles and books written by “reparative therapists”--those who set out to fix gay men’s sexuality on its supposedly destined object--he describes their “promise of pain and release” as striking “deep, redemptive, and painful chords in the homosexual psyche” and refers to “the shame that refuses to relinquish its hold on even the most self-confident of homosexuals.” Thought and work and struggle have their limits, above all where a person’s sex life is concerned. It would be nice if Sullivan’s new-found sense of reprieve allowed him to struggle less, perhaps even to enjoy more.

A debater need command assent only for a moment, but the coolness of print demands greater consistency or a more complex self-portrait. The contradictions which Sullivan tries so hard to suppress keep popping back up. About faith, for instance: At one point Sullivan confides that “at the moments I have needed it most, it has slipped quickly away from me, it has receded into a terrible loneliness and fear,” yet 50 pages later he refers to the first and only time in his life that “the option of real doubt presented itself” to him. Even then, this was not loss of faith in a supreme being but the momentary conviction that God was evil.

Some of the notes struck in the essay on friendship jar with what Sullivan posits elsewhere. If the Christian churches were wise to teach “the primacy of caritas to eros” and foolish to propagandize for “the marital unit and its capacity to resolve all human ills and satisfy all human needs,” then what becomes of Sullivan’s crusade to secure the right to marriage for homosexuals? For that matter, what becomes of the rather cloying tribute, earlier in the book, to heterosexuality itself (“the vast journey between a heterosexual man and woman is . . . a wondrous, worthwhile, and ennobling one”)?

Sometimes the view outside and the view inside are simply incompatible. Sullivan is uncomfortable with promiscuity in general but defends his own (“even casual sex” was far from baleful or destructive, in his experience). He explains the apparent contradiction of being someone who “celebrated and articulated” the channeling of sex into “love and commitment and responsibility,” but whose practice was other, in terms of feeling “unable to live up to the ideals I really hold.” This can sound like hypocrisy under another name, particularly in light of the principle he quotes later in the book: “a personal religion is best defined not by what he says he believes but simply by what he actually does.”