So far you wrote about the far-right gay conservatives, the really easy targets. But what about the more moderate ' gay conservatives'? What about the people who don't care whether you have amazing multiple-partner gender-bending relationships, but who want gay marriage for their own personal reasons? I don't think their is anything inherently wrong with monogamy just because it's the "straight standard."
I feel as if this argument calls for casting off any traditions that might be labeled as hetero-normative without giving thought to WHY we are casting them off. I think that creating a gay culture based on NOT doing what the straights do is inherently limiting, because it's reactive, not proactive.
(I'm not just responding to your post here, but to the wider issue of queer counterculture vs. assimilation. Sorry if it's a little off topic.)
Dear Andrew,
I understand that I may have given the impression that I was calling for some kind of queer-revolutionary-ultra left wing new social order. However, nowhere in the post do I explicitly endorse this - my problem with the gay conservatives (in addition to their obvious insensitivity to gender issues - which is what I sought to address mainly) is the fact that *they* automatically assume that so-called "straight values" (i.e. - monogamy, marriage and all that jazz) are the right ones... If you read the main gay conservative works that I cited (apart from Paglia) you will notice that a critical discussion of sexual ethics is missing from most of them and that the viewpoint of "the average straight observer" (an imaginary construction in itself) is far too easily accepted. Indeed, one of the main books that (re)launched gay conservatism in the 1990s - Kirk & Madsen's "After the Ball" is entirely about how to "advertize" our queer selves to the "straight majority."
On the other hand, although I definitely do not agree with some of his arguments, Michael Warner places a discussion on sexual ethics at the heart of his book, "The Trouble With Normal," and thus, for me, it represents a work that is of much better quality, and more productive in terms of the kinds of discussions that it could spurn.
As far as more moderate gay conservatives, I really don't know any. From the way I see gay & lesbian history during the 1990s, much of the movement adopted the arguments and stylizations recommended by the gay conservatives (and this... I think.. is primarily for strategic reasons) - perhaps the individuals, organizations and communities that did this could be termed "moderate" gay conservatives.
As far as the assimilation vs. queer counterculture debate, I do sympathize more with the latter - however, I certainly agree with you that we shouldn't automatically cast off anything that's "straight" - instead, we should have open discussion and think about stuff - exactly the *opposite* of where the gay conservatives (and their moderate allies) took us in the 1990s, when marriage was called for and embraced with shocking abandon and other issues were ignored.
I am not saying that the work that the gay and lesbian movement has done in terms of marriage is not valuable or that it hasn't helped people in significant and profound ways. I am dissapointed that the robotic drive towards marriage rights (for a while) overtook the broader and more important issue of gender discrimination in society (which is what denying people of the same 'sex' to marry actually is). Indeed, while we were rushing towards marriage, rates of attack and discrimination against gender non-conforming people (which gays and lesbians inevitably *are*, no matter how butch or femme) has stayed pretty much the same - societal gender expectations are still markedly essentialist in character.
I'm getting kind of tired now, so I'll end with a quote, which sums up pretty well my problem with gay conservatives and the gay conservative influenced movement:
“Often these strategies [by the main gay and lesbian organizations] entailed hiding those LGBTs who presented any challenge to dominant constructions of masculinity/femininity or to the generally assumed one-to-one correspondence between sex, gender, and sexual object choice. In practice, leaders often attempted to hide butch lesbians, feminine gay men, transgendered people, and bisexuals from the public eye, creating internal divisions within LGBT communities."
This is exactly the kind of behaviour that gay conservatism promotes and it is, in my view, unacceptable.
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