This will take more than one post:
I used to admire Andrew Sullivan. Really and truly. In the early 90s, when he was editor of The New Republic, it was my favorite magazine, and even was in the late 80s when he was merely a frequent writer. As editor, Sullivan introduced me to such writers as Camille Paglia and Christina Hoff Summers (the three enabled me to get through an American university in the years surrounding 1990). I would tape Sullivan's appearances on C-SPAN and Crossfire, and clip articles by and about him (pack rat that I am, I still have those tapes and clippings -- along with many others to be sure). He was my favorite openly gay champion of homosexual marriage and ex-editor of a former pro-Stalin magazine.
Part of my admiration for him also had, truth be told, a personal angle. He was gay. And Catholic. And conservative, in many respects. More or less my age, and in several places, our biographies were only one degree of separation apart. This period was also, more or less, both the time that I came back to the Church and the time that it really HIT me that I was same-sex attracted. I fell in love with my best friend -- never acted on it; amiably lost contact with him after he married; he still doesn't know. I was confirmed in the faith in Easter 1992, but I still had an image of Catholicism as a cultural limitation, something bound to be felt particularly acutely by a man on his way to graduate school with intellectual/professorial pretensions.
CONT.
In that environment, at that time, and for me, the Sullivan of that era was reassuring, even inspiring. He was smart; his writing was funny in an informal way; he loved popular culture. He also was willing to wrestle with his conscience, the Church and homosexuality publicly. And even though the bout didn't turn out the way I hoped, it was at least an interesting and (at the time seemingly) genuine engagement and such a breath of fresh air in the era of ACT UP and Queer Nation. As an example of my environment at the time, when I was a Eucharistic minister shortly after Confirmation in a US college town, the majority of the training time dealt with what to do in case of gay demonstrators desecrating the Host or the Precious Blood.
In fact, the greatest reason I admired Sullivan at that time was because he wrestled equally publicly with those gay radicals. By his very existence and example, Sullivan assured me that God gave me an organ to think with, and it wasn't my penis. That nothing politically or religiously followed from the manifest unarguable fact that pictures of naked men gave me an erection. That even if "that" was biological, that biology still wasn't destiny. He was clearly his own man intellectually -- what I had to be if "that" wasn't going to go away. Even my use of the term "that" is borrowed from the first chapter of Sullivan's book "Virtually Normal" (the book as a whole being an extension of a TNR essay called "The Politics of Homosexuality"), where he described his first confused, half-understood feelings as a boy, which he called "that" one day in communion line. Exactly what I called it at that age. That prologue, "What is a Homosexual" is at one and the same time, intensely personal for him while feeling to me like he'd lived my boyhood. Even when I didn't think he succeeded in moralizing homosexual conduct (how could I), as in the "Virtually Normal" chapter section "The Prohibitionists," his prose was so clear and precise and well-argued that I could spot and underline in the book exactly where he stepped wrong (p35 and p42 of the First Edition hardback copy, for the interested). It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that Sullivan paved part of the way for me to come back to the Church.
-- END --
That last anon was me, obviously.
CM:
Thanks for this--excellent comments.
To be brief--I'm mad at Sullivan because that candor and insight which drew me to his site in 2000 seems to be drying up generally, and is completely gone as to religion. It's been frustrating to watch his decay into a hackneyed, predictable and uncorrectable man of the left on religious matters, and I simply passed the point where I could continue to read him. I admit many conservatives have been unfair and unsympathetic to him, but that doesn't explain facile and stupid comparisons worthy of Daily Kos.
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