Oh My God, Karen, You Can't Just Ask People Why They're White!
I had not intended to return to this subject so quickly, if at all (rather, I had intended to one-up Peter Beinart, and I think I still will do that, but I need more time than I’ve had to do that argument justice), but Andrew Sullivan keeps drawing me back in.
In this case, with:
In some ways, I’d argue that the closet makes one’s orientation more central to your identity than among openly gay people. . . Sustaining the closet for a lifetime must necessarily change you deeply. It reaches into the core integrity of a person, and his courage and self-worth. Closet-cases can enable crime (look at the Catholic church); they can over-compensate by trying to win universal favor at all times; they can subliminally try to prove their straight credentials by opposing gay equality; they can get enmeshed in conflicts of interest which cannot be exposed without exposing their actual reality.
This is why the question matters. And why, much as we might like to, we cannot simply wish it away.
This is a substantive argument! This I get!
If I understand correctly, he’s making an old fashioned argument about the importance of personal character for anyone aspiring to great political power. Individuals who are closeted, whether only to the public at large or to themselves as well, are living a lie, and as such should be presumed to have questionable character.
On some level, I imagine Andrew would make this argument about any important aspect of a person’s life. But one’s sexual orientation is so fundamental, it’s hard to think of any aspect of one’s life that could be more central. If your public (and maybe even private) identity is wrapped tightly around a fundamental lie, then you are fundamentally a liar. So that’s something we have to care about.
And I basically agree with this point. Somebody who is not out to themselves is somebody who has some real, fundamental work to do – and they should do it now. Somebody who is out to themselves, but only to themselves is living in a very dark, lonely place. And they’ve probably also got some work to do.
The closest comparable I can think of to someone living in the closet is somebody passing for white who is “actually” black (i.e., has significant black ancestry and was raised with a black identity), and while this analogy is problematic on multiple levels, it’s hard to imagine that if the public discovered that such-and-such politician was passing, that they wouldn’t conclude that fact was a real problem.
Nonetheless, as Gretchen said, you can’t just ask people why they’re white. There are people who are out to friends, family, colleagues – but not customers. (I have a friend whose partner, totally out on his home turf, does a lot of business in Africa. He’s not out to anybody in a business context because it would create problems in some places, and deciding case-by-case who to be out to would be just too complicated.) There are people who are out to friends, colleagues, neighbors – but whose mother would just never understand, and why can’t she die happily deluded? Or what about the fellow who, thankfully, was honest enough to talk over with his wife what he finally understood about himself, but you know, neither he nor his wife want to move on to new lives until the kids are in college. (Two friends of mine grew up in homes where this was the case.) There even are people – particularly women – who went through a queer phase and then, well, straightened out. (Actually, I’ve never met any men who followed this arc, but I certainly know women who have. My original post on this subject was entitled, “Are You Now Or Have You Ever Been A Lesbian.”)
Andrew’s standard is an exacting one. There’s a sharp line between straight and gay, and between in and out, and you need to be on one side or the other of the first line and, wherever you are, you need to be out about it, or we’re not sure we can trust you with the kind of power that a Supreme Court Justice has. That’s it, right?
I’m not willing to be that tough. Sometimes life is messy and it doesn’t mean that you yourself are a mess. And besides, I’m not really sure how Andrew would actually implement his preferred rule. After all, if you did ask everybody who applies for a given job, “are you gay?” – well, unless somebody comes forward to out them, how are you going to prove someone who answered, “no” is lying? Is it just going to be open season? Because if it is, then all that stuff that is not analogous to fundamental sexual identity – all the sexual kinks and quirks that abound across humanity – well, it’ll be open season on all that as well. It’s just the way it is.
Which is why my initial response was: the way Andrew is talking is just plain rude, and if he wants to be rude he should man up and be rude in person.
I agree with Andrew on the goal. I would like to see a world where everybody is out to themselves and to the widest practical circle of the rest of us. Truth, honesty – all that good stuff. I think you get there, over time, by leading by example (getting to know yourself, and being honest about who you are), and treating other people as if they are doing the same (treating “out” as the default condition even as you respect the privacy of anybody who isn’t out to everybody). And if Andrew had said, “you know, lots of people I know are gossiping about whether so-and-so is gay, but I have no evidence she is, and she’s never said she is, so if she is then she’s a closet case – and all I want to say is that I don’t want a closet case on the Court; in fact, in this day and age, I think it should be an automatic disqualifier” – if he’d said that, and left it at that, he’d have been making a clear, direct point, and one that could be debated as a matter of principle by, well, even by the nominee herself, without forcing anyone to give the lie direct.
Much virtue in if.
“I would like to see a world where everybody is out to themselves and to the widest practical circle of the rest of us.”
I think the folks freakin’ the eff out over privacy issues on Facebook would disagree with you about such a world being ideal.
And I’d still like to know how Sullivan got HIV. I also think knowing how many times he’s cheated on his husband would do a lot to help us better understand his writings on all sex-related matters.
Mike
— MBunge · May 21, 02:54 PM · #
The rumor is he contracted it from anal intercourse with your dad.
— james garner · May 21, 03:10 PM · #
So Andrew says, “Closet-cases can enable crime (look at the Catholic church); they can over-compensate by trying to win universal favor at all times; they can subliminally try to prove their straight credentials by opposing gay equality”.
But what we know about Elena Kagan is precisely that she didn’t oppose gay equality. She was a rare public figure who actually took a stand for it. Doesn’t it seem a little funny that Andrew, who has hectored politicians for years on the issue doesn’t seem willing to extend any credit to her for adopting a stance that was certain to exact a political cost? She had always had ambitions about being appointed to the court, and certainly knew that there would be politicians who would make an issue of her actions at Harvard. It was not a popular issue; supporting it took courage.
What are we left with? Is Andrew implying she’s going to “enable crime? Or is he saying that the criterion should be personal authenticity, pro or contra gay rights? Rand Paul is authentic; is Andrew saying he would be a better candidate for the supreme court? Andrew once, in another age, made intellectual arguments for gay rights that were grounded in abstract argument, to which one could presumably subscribe, whatever one’s orientation or political orientation. Now he dismisses actual action on the issue ostensibly because Kagan doesn’t conform to his idea of how a gay person should comport themselves given high visibility, even when they adopt positions that he has argued ad nauseum are the correct ones.
I think what he has effectively done is release anyone formerly persuaded by his arguments on behalf of gay rights from any moral responsibility to join the movement to advance them. Because when crunch time came, and someone who actually delivered on them was appointed to the highest court, he withheld his endorsement, on very flimsy philosophical grounds.
— fw · May 21, 03:43 PM · #
Strong points, fw, but after the amazing summer they spent in Mykonos, your dad will forgive any and all of Sullivan’s philosophical shortcomings.
— james garner · May 21, 04:30 PM · #
I suppose that’s possible, James. My father has given money to a gay political candidate, part of whose agenda was the advancement of gay rights. So perhaps, unbeknownst to me, Andrew persuaded him of the virtue of doing so.
But then, that would make him a closet case, which, according Andrew, would invalidate any of his political opinions.
But why don’t you share something about yourself? Like, how is it you’ve come to believe that you are actually funny? These humorless interjections of yours can’t be helping your personal life at all.
— fw · May 21, 04:51 PM · #
It’s precisely the taboo scent of your dad’s political opinions that lures men far and wide.
— james garner · May 21, 06:27 PM · #
Who knew that Maverick was such a douchebag?
— Erik Vanderhoff · May 21, 07:03 PM · #
Among Victorian architecture buffs, your dad’s restoration skills are legendary. . . as are his shapely buttocks.
— james garner · May 21, 07:58 PM · #
The funniest example of a closet case in history is the Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954 that brought Joe McCarthy down. McCarthy’s chief of staff Roy Cohn, had a crush on a young assistant he had hired, G. David Schine. Schine got drafted and the lisping Cohn was trying to badger the Army with accusations of Communist subversion into letting Schine stay in Washington near him. The Army-McCarthy hearings played out on TV for many days with everybody trying to restrain themselves from blurting out loud, “Isn’t this all just a big homosexual hissy fit?” At the end of the fiasco, the Senate censured McCarthy.
Schine, by the way, moved to Hollywood, became a movie producer, married Miss Sweden, and had six children.
— Steve Sailer · May 22, 01:34 AM · #
Two points:
1) I know men who acknowledge their homosexual desires, but don’t like them, and try and live a chaste or straight life. I’m sure Andrew would say they are in denial of their “true character” or some such, but they think acting on their homosexuality is a sin (heck, I think even the Church calls their condition “objectively disordered”) and want to live lives of virtue.
2) Not only does Steve Sailer run the world’s greatest blog, but he writes some of the world’s greatest comments.
— Arminius · May 22, 02:41 AM · #
One point only:
I also know men who acknowledge their homosexual desires, and if it weren’t for the Sailer ring of preferred cockblock, imagine all the room Arminius’ mouth would have for homosexual sin.
— james garner · May 22, 06:36 AM · #
While the source of Sullivan’s assertions regarding homosexuality may very well arise from a sexist application of stereotypes, his continuance of this crusade has nothing to do with her gender. It has to do with the possibility of Kagan contradicting his presumption that the only way you can express sexuality is to do it the exact same way he did. For him, “the closet” – in all of its negative glory – is a binary construct that you’re in unless you announce your homosexuality and make it the pivotal aspect of your public identity. This insistence that Kagan is doing something awry for keeping her sexuality to herself arises from his belief that unless you – as a gay person – make your sexuality a defining feature, you’re abdicating your moral, intellectual, emotional and political duty.
To characterize this as misogyny misses the dynamic of cultural manipulation in his commentary. And what it’s revealing of is not so much his views on women (though things can be inferred from his immediate pouncing on the lesbian angle), but his views on gay people. Not only does he think that the concept of choice and variety shouldn’t factor into how a gay person should process and express their sexuality, but he thinks that a gay person that isn’t completely (and even publicly) out is being a “bad gay”. He’s measuring the morality of someone’s stance on homosexuality based on the political benefits of their stance, and he’s using the closet as a tool that lends a specious justification for it.
His usage of the closet isn’t intended to be accurately descriptive, it’s intended to be a rhetorical bludgeon. That’s why he’s adding so much baggage to it – up to and including the implication that non-completely-out-gays are emotionally tormented liars who deny a fundament of their personality. By doing so, he’s avoiding the task of having to prove how this is germane to how Kagan will rule, and how it will factor into her qualifications as a judge. What makes this pernicious isn’t just the narrow application of his definition, or the amount of speculatory projection involved or even how disconcerting his inquiry is. What makes it pernicious is that he’s using what the closet would mean for HIM as his only template. And because he can pull the “You’re a straight person who doesn’t get it!” card, very few people are making a concerted effort to contest the disgusting nature of his campaign and the logic behind it.
This is the codification of Closet Politics, and it’s infuriating to see – not just because it’s difficult to combat without being smeared as homophobic/ignorant, but because the manipulative and bullying peer pressure behind identifications of “the closet” and “closet-cases” is largely invisible to people who aren’t recipients of that rhetoric. Sullivan and those like him (read: Aravosis and Dan Savage), are amongst the most detrimental people with regard to gay rights, and it’s jarring seeing how quickly they embrace baseless stereotypes and generalizations just for political advantage. They don’t really care about Kagan’s status as a judge, they care about her capacity as a cheerleader who can directly or indirectly advance their mindset.
Noah Millman can wrap the arrogance, self-indulgence, and bile behind Sullivan’s crusade in mannerable language all he wishes, but that doesn’t make it any more defensible. Nor does it remove the irrelevance of a (presumably) single person’s sexuality from the context of this debate. This entire debacle has been shameful, and I would be pleased if more respectable people made it their business to point that out. This doesn’t just hurt Kagan, it hurts perceptions of how homosexuality can be expressed. Sullivan’s campaign limits the versatility of what “respectable” with regard to homosexuality can be, and in his quest for equality, he denies even potentially gay people a freedom that straight people frequently enjoy: the ability to determine for themselves what “none of your business” means once your conflicts of interest and professional record has been decided.
— The Operative · May 22, 05:19 PM · #
Very interesting take; and Sullivan’s overwrought description of the pathologies of the closet is also bizarre because, historically, citing prominent individuals who were not open about their sexuality—and probably for good reason in most cases—has been a central argument in favor of acceptance of homosexuality. Whitman, Melville, Tchaikovsky, Alan Turing, G.H. Hardy, Wittgenstein, by way of example, are held up, justifiably, as instances of major historical figures who made outsize contributions to our culture and civilization. and who also happened to be gay.
But now Andrew has convicted them all of a litany of sins in his rationalization for opposing Kagan’s appointment to the court.
— fw · May 22, 06:12 PM · #
By the way, on the question of Andrew Sullivan’s sexism, am I correct in saying that the only laudatory ‘award’ he bestows is the Yglesias award? And that the one reserved for the chief objects of his opprobrium is the Malkin Award, for which Ann Coulter is disqualified in order to give others a chance?
He can’t name any awards in honor of a woman who embodies some virtuous trait? Why not?
— fw · May 22, 07:19 PM · #
fw,
Nathaniel was just a really good friend, so please stop spreading that gossip— it’s really none of your business.
— Herman Melville · May 22, 08:53 PM · #
I can’t speak to the others, but no honest person could examine the lives of Walt Whitman and Alan Turing and conclude that they just “happened to be gay.” These were men who were very much out of the closet. Turing was prosecuted by England for his homosexuality. That doesn’t strike me as consistent being “in.”
— Chet · May 23, 06:36 PM · #
Chet, I’m sure I haven’t misspoken in these two cases, with respect to the question at hand, which is whether they concealed their sexuality. Whitman vigorously denied it, insisting that he had fathered children, though the claim of paternity, I believe, has never been verified. Turing was forced by law to live a closed sexual life, like all gay men and women at that time in England, and, yes, was persecuted for being gay, and eventually killed himself.
Now, regarding the author of Calamus, and the frankly homosexual imagery he employed, or knowing what we know about Turing, who I believe made trips into New York when he was studying at Princeton, presumably because the gay culture there was not so stifled as it was in London, you would have to acknowledge that their sexuality was a central aspect of their lives. But it was a part of their lives that was lived in secret, even if that secret was revealed through a government investigation. Would they have made a different choice in a more enlightened era? You would have to believe so.
But, I think the point supports the argument presented above, which is that that whether or not someone chooses to disclose it, their sexuality is still a central aspect of their lives.
Obviously, we should aspire to a society that is completely tolerant of homosexuality, so that no one fears the consequences of being honest about their personal lives.
What I find kind of amazing about Andrew’s “Do Ask, Do Tell” policy is that it rehabilitates the worst features of the old sexual McCarthyism. He’s suggesting that men and women who conceal their sexuality have criminal propensities. That is EXACTLY the reason that Turing was persecuted. And by the way, anyone involved in the intelligence community was subjected to the same kind of prosecutorial scrutiny because they were presumed to be a security risk, vulnerable to blackmail. These eager-to-please, reprobate closet gays that Andrew conjures up are the very same stereotypes invoked in Turing-style inquisitions. And not just here; those harrowing show-trial scenes in Before Night Falls show the same kind of intolerance in Cuba, under Castro.
— fw · May 23, 08:28 PM · #
By way of an addendum, I would note that Elena Kagan has, through proxies, said that she is not a lesbian. But continuing to think about it, it seems to me that even Andrew’s Catholic Church analogy is inapt. Haven’t we made the distinction between being a pedophile and being gay? It is the former who are to blame for the abuses in the Church, right? Isn’t Andrew saying otherwise?
— fw · May 23, 08:57 PM · #
This morning, Colin Farrell woke your father with a kiss. Upon opening his eyes, your father realized it was not Colin Farrell who kissed him but your mother, and he was wracked with disappointment.
— james garner · May 24, 02:58 AM · #
I’m sorry but I think you’re quite wrong. Again, Alan Turing was prosecuted for being gay; his legal defense was an affirmative one, a strange tack to take if it was his intention to conceal his homosexuality. Indeed, the only reason he was charged in the first place was because he filed a criminal complaint against one of his lovers for theft and disclosed his relationship with the thief to police.
Nobody who reads the poetry of Whitman can think it was written by a straight man. Surely! As far as parenting goes, well, many gay men are also dads. Surely I don’t have to tell you that homosexuality is not a kind of voluntary infertility.
Again, and within the confines of their society, those were figures who were pretty open about their homosexuality. In Alan Turing’s case you get the feeling that the prosecution came as an utter surprise, as if he couldn’t believe that England would prosecute a gay man for being gay in modern, freewheeling 1950.
— Chet · May 24, 02:54 PM · #
Chet, for the record, I said that Whitman was gay, unequivocally. I only remarked that, to my knowledge, he denied it when asked for the record.
The same for Turing. Homosexuality was illegal in the UK. I would be very surprised if he was ‘out’, in the sense that we understand that word today.
— fw · May 24, 03:20 PM · #
As it was in the United States, up to about ten years ago. Again – Turing was only ever prosecuted because he told the police that his gay lover had stolen from him. Why would he testify to that if it was his intention to be in the closet?
“Out” in the sense that we understand it today? I understand it to mean not actively denying or concealing ones’ homosexuality. Turing certainly fits that definition.
— Chet · May 24, 07:27 PM · #