PLEASURE PRIPRINCIPLES

BY CALEB CRAIN

QUEER THEORISTS AND GAY JOURNALISTS

WRESTLE OVER THE POLITICS OF SEX

26 PLEASURE PRINCIPLES PLEASURE PRIPRINCIPLES

Nearly two hundred men and women have come to sit in the sweaty ground-floor assembly hall of City’s and Gay Community Services Cen- ter. They’ve tucked their gym bags under their folding chairs, and, despite the thick late-June heat, they’re fully alert. Doz- ens more men and women cram the edges of the room, leaning against manila-colored card tables littered with Xerox- es or perching on the center’s grade-school-style water foun- tain, a row of three faucets in a knee-high porcelain trough. A video camera focuses on the podium, where activist Gregg Gonsalves and law professor Kendall Thomas welcome the audience to a teach-in sponsored by the new organization Sex Panic.

It might have been the Sex Panic flyer reading danger!

assault! turdz! that drew this crowd. Handed out in ’s gay bars and coffee shops, the flyer identified continuing HIV transmission as the danger. It pointed to the recent closing of gay and transgender bars and an increase in arrests for public lewdness as the assault. And it named gay writers Andrew Sullivan, , , and as the Turdz. The flyer, however, is not how I first Kramer, or Sullivan with hisses, boos, thing called queer theory. Relatively found out about the Sex Panic meeting. and laughs. The men and women here new, queer theory represents a para- A fellow graduate student recommend- tonight feel sure of their enemies, and as digm shift in the way some scholars are ed it to me as a venue for academic the evening advances, these enemies thinking about homosexuality. It pro- networking. “It’s a Who’s Who of queer condense into one creature, a hyphen- poses that traditional notions of lesbian theory,” he told me. “You should go.” ated neoconservative bogeyman named and gay identity may be as confining as Indeed, speaking at the teach-in are the Rotello-Signorile-Kramer-Sullivan. homophobia itself. Queer theory’s independent historian Allan Bérubé, Where did this sex-negative monster presiding spirit is Michel Foucault; its 1996 winner of a MacArthur “genius” come from? And as a wounded Signorile stars are Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and grant and author of Under asked in print several weeks later, “Why Judith Butler. But it was Michael War- Fire: The History of and Women would esteemed scholars...do this?” ner, now one of Sex Panic’s informal in World War II; NYU professors Phil- leaders, who in 1993 put together the lip Brian Harper and Lisa Duggan; and AT THIS POINT, Rip van anthology that crystallized queer the- Rutgers’s Michael Warner, one of the Winkles of lesbian and gay politics may ory as a movement: Fear of a Queer deans of queer theory. In the audience be scratching their heads, even if they have Planet (Minnesota). As Warner wrote are the well-known academics Douglas napped for only a couple of years. Andrew in his introduction to that collection, Crimp, Jeff Nunokawa, Ann Pellegrini, Sullivan and Larry Kramer are allies? queers don’t want “simple political and Carole Vance, as well as nearly every Kramer famously helped to instigate both interest-representation.” To liberalism’s lesbian and gay graduate student I’ve the Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC) offer to tolerate and gays as just ever met. and the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power another minority, queer theory says no. (ACT UP). Sullivan sprang to prominence Instead, queer theory declares it oppos- DURING THE teach-in as the Roman Catholic Thatcherite es all identity pigeonholes on principle Bérubé will sketch a history of American appointed to edit . How and aligns itself with anyone who trou- “sex panics”; Maura Bairley of the New could they be confused? bles gender or sexual norms, including York City Gay and Lesbian Anti-Violence Every member of Sex Panic I speak drag queens, transsexuals, and sex work- Project (AVP) will report that earlier this to either regrets or downplays the group’s ers. According to Warner, the move year sixty-seven men were arrested over ad hominem attacks and name-calling. from “gay” to “queer” is a radical two days in a single World Trade Center (A late revision of the teach-in flyer change, representing “a more thorough restroom; attorney Bill Dobbs will excised the word “Turdz.”) “It’s a mis- resistance to regimes of the normal.” explain the new city zoning law due to take to focus on these individuals,” Lisa Despite the highly theoretical vocabu- close an estimated 85 percent of New Duggan says. “The mud-wrestling scene lary, in Warner’s view, queer theory has York’s 175 adult businesses; and a mus- is not interesting.” But it might not be a distinct politics, and Sex Panic is an tachioed drag king named Murray Hill wise to look away from the brawl too instance of that politics put into prac- will campaign for mayor. But it is hard soon. The emotions in this debate stem tice. for me to shake the feeling that these from intellectual disagreements that are performances are beside the point. This no less sharp for being hard to see. THOUGH Sex Panic now tags crowd is angry. In his introductory Some of these disagreements pit the them as “neoconservative,” gay remarks, Kendall Thomas refuses to value of gay male promiscuity against reporters Gabriel Rotello and identify the people he calls “the backlash the dangers of HIV transmission. Oth- Michelangelo Signorile began their boys—gay positive but sex negative.” ers involve the struggle for authority careers in good standing with the left. But the speakers who follow him are not between ivory-tower academics and Both got their start at New York City’s so reticent, and the crowd rewards market-savvy journalists. But perhaps legendary magazine, pioneer anyone who mentions Rotello, Signorile, the sharpest disagreement is over some- of a new, brasher, and more sophisti- cated gay journalism. Signorile headed ACT UP New York’s media committee from 1988 to 1990 and was one of four co-founders of the activist group . As the advance guard and lightning rod of the controversy, he was once praised by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick as “the Jacques Derrida of gossip,” a deconstructor of the closet. Rotello spent years writing angry arti- cles about the politics of AIDS in what he calls a “guerrilla war against the pernicious agenda of blame.” He vehe- mently attacked Michael Fumento’s The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS, which labeled gays “the rats and fleas of the new plague.” Rotello could be speaking

28 PLEASURE PRINCIPLES DOMESTIC PARTNERS CEREMONY, SEX PANIC MEMBERS AT GAY PRIDE PARADE, 1997 SAN FRANCISCO, 1996

To Michael Warner, sex with a stranger is “transformative.”

for both Signorile and himself when he about them had. demic: Gay men are doing just fine with writes that throughout most of his One catalyst was a Berkeley–based safer sex, thank you very much.” career “I not only followed the party psychologist named Walt Odets. While Odets is central to the Sex Panic line, I helped write it.” counseling his uninfected patients, debate. Although they’re on opposite The party line among gay activists in Odets uncovered a number of reasons a sides of the fence, Signorile and Warner the early 1990s held that AIDS need gay man might want to expose himself both cite Odets’s work to support their not mean the end of gay sexual libera- to HIV: guilt over surviving HIV-posi- arguments. Not coincidentally, Signorile tion. With condoms and a little versa- tive lovers and friends, fear of losing his and Warner are also two of the best- tility, gays could figure out “How to emotional connection to them, envy of known gay figures to confess to unsafe Have Promiscuity in an Epidemic,” as the support and respect accorded to sex in print. In a September 1994 column the title of a Douglas Crimp essay put people with AIDS, a wish to be punished for Out magazine, Signorile reported it. But several years ago, that consensus for sexual desires that society had taught letting himself be fucked by a Navy offi- on AIDS and gay sex started to disinte- him to despise, and anxiety to be done cer—a “classic gay hunk: tall and mascu- grate. Epidemiologists had long noted with waiting for a seroconversion felt to line, with a buzzed haircut, razor-sharp that despite aggressive campaigns to be inevitable. More controversially, cheekbones, a body of granite, and a promote condoms, roughly a third of Odets felt that in some (rare) cases, a Texas drawl.” In a January 1995 article gay men continued to have unprotected gay man in good mental health might for The Village Voice, Warner, then anal sex. In a survey of predominantly decide that unprotected sex meant HIV-negative, reported a series of intox- sexually active gay men conducted in enough to be worth the risk. In confer- icating unsafe encounters where “the New York City between 1993 and 1995, ence papers and privately circulated quality of consciousness was...like impulse for example, 32.1 percent of the essays that formed the basis of his 1995 shoplifting.” Warner described how pow- HIV-negative men had had unprotect- book In the Shadow of the Epidemic: erless he felt, writing that “my monster ed receptive anal sex within the previous Being HIV-Negative in the Age of AIDS was in charge.” three months. For years, gays had man- (Duke), Odets criticized the peppy and The experience of unsafe sex chal- aged to celebrate their successes in HIV diffuse messages that HIV-prevention lenged both men to come to new under- prevention without confronting this workers had glibly handed out with standings of themselves. The journalist stubborn remainder. But in late 1994, condoms. Almost single-handedly, looked to the culture around him. Signo-

CALEB CRAIN (LEFT) REUTERS/LOU DEMATTEIS/ARCHIVE PHOTOS (RIGHT) CALEB CRAIN (LEFT) REUTERS/LOU DEMATTEIS/ARCHIVE although the facts had not changed, the Odets dismantled what he called “one rile began to criticize the unexamined gay willingness of the gay community to talk of the truly grand fallacies of the epi- hedonism that had encouraged him to

LINGUA FRANCA OCTOBER 1997 29 put a higher value on sex with a well-mus- ments, issued warnings to thirty, and shut stranger is like a metonym.” cled Navy officer than on his own health. down nine. To counter GALHPA’s activities, He wrote passionately, if somewhat sen- GALHPA’s actions infuriated War- Warner started an organization of his sationally, about the steroids, drugs, ner and many other activists, who sus- own: the AIDS Prevention Action extravagant parties, and “body fascism” pected Rotello of hiding a hostility to League (APAL), a precursor to Sex Panic. that he felt narrowed and crippled gay life. sex inside the Trojan horse of a public Both groups petered out as the issue The queer theorist, on the other health campaign. According to Warner, dropped from news coverage, but one hand, looked inward, to the unruly and Rotello’s attack on the sex clubs mis- legacy of the 1995 debate was that a asocial force within him that wanted to took gay culture’s innovative, nonstan- group of prominent academics realized be unsafe. Struggling to articulate a new, dard forms of sexual intimacy for “a that the state regulation of public sex was distinctively queer approach to HIV pathological, instinct-driven, thought- an activity they wanted to oppose. prevention, Warner warned AIDS edu- less, reductive animality.” Sex clubs, cators that “the appeal of queer sex, for QUEER theorists take as a founding many, lies in its ability to violate the principle the counterintuitive suggestion responsibilizing frames of good, that Foucault made at the conclusion of right-thinking people.” While Signorile the first volume of his History of Sexuality: urged gay men to reform their sexual “The rallying point for the counterattack ethics, taking the feminist attempt to against the deployment of sexuality reform straight men in the 1970s as a ought not to be sex-desire, but bodies model, Warner argued that sex between and pleasures.” According to Foucault, men, as a queer act, would always escape lesbians and gays would not be liberated if not defy ethical systems. At the very if they affirmed that their sexual desires least, a queer effort at HIV prevention defined their identities; they would only would have to resist concealing uncon- be further inveigled into a way of thinking ventional or self-destructive sexual that labeled and policed them. Instead, desires under a moral prohibition. MICHELANGELO SIGNORILE Foucault suggested, all people, whether Meanwhile, Rotello’s journalism had classed as homosexual or heterosexual, “Gay culture’s view of sexual entitlement,” writes Rotello, “has been intellectualized by gay academics in scandalous ways.”

undergone a sea change. He had come should resist categorization by breaking to believe that, although his old enemy down sexual identities into their compo- Fumento had been homophobic, what nent acts and by divorcing the practice he had predicted was turning out to be of sex from the tyrannous insistence that true: In America, gays were offering HIV it mean something. an ecological niche that non-drug-inject- The premiere of queer theory is ing heterosexuals did not and probably Duke’s Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, a mar- would never offer. When a bathhouse ried woman who writes about male-male called the West Side Club opened in New sexuality with such empathy and acumen York City in January 1995—the first in that she has lured hundreds of graduate over a decade—Rotello attacked, calling students into following in her footsteps. it “a bathhouse like the legendary bath- Her prose has both cosmopolitan flair houses of old, those bustling hives of GABRIEL and a generous spirit that opens up new contagion that helped spread death ROTELLO vistas, finding homoeroticism (and its throughout the gay male world.” Rotel- fertile twin, the fear of homoeroticism) lo and a new group, Gay and Lesbian Warner points out, are sometimes the in authors whose writing has long gone HIV Prevention Activists (GALHPA), first place where queers who spend unsuspected. Meanwhile, Berkeley pro- insisted that any sex club that condoned childhoods in alienation at last find fessor of rhetoric and comparative liter- behavior riskier than voyeurism and themselves. Anonymous gay sex can be ature Judith Butler has given to queer mutual masturbation should be shut. In “transformative,” he adds, pointing out theory a certain density of vocabulary their zeal, GALHPA (although not Rotel- that most straight people never experi- and the notion that gender is a kind of lo personally) met with city officials and ence anything remotely like it. Talking involuntary drag. For her, sexual identi- broke one of the most solemn taboos of about public sex, Warner sounds almost ty is a straitjacket—not a pretty frock you gay activism: They asked the government Whitmanesque. “The phenomenology don or doff at will. The best way for to intervene. Health officials agreed that of a sex club encounter is an experience lesbians and gays to loosen the stays, more careful monitoring of sex clubs was of world making. It’s an experience of Butler suggests, is to acknowledge, high- warranted. According to the local news- being connected not just to this person light, and exploit the artifice and provi- paper LGNY, in 1995 the city made but to potentially limitless numbers of sional nature of all identities.

nearly fourteen hundred separate inspec- people, and that’s why it’s important Sex Panic’s Michael Warner came to (BELOW) MORGAN (ABOVE) MICHAEL WAKEFIELD DAVID tions of between forty and fifty establish- that it be with a stranger. Sex with a queer theory from an unexpected direc-

30 PLEASURE PRINCIPLES tion. His first book, The Letters of and Sex Panic, on the other hand, the Republic (Harvard), explored speak what Sedgwick calls a “uni- the cultural meanings of print in versalizing discourse.” They see colonial America’s emerging pub- what married men do in tearooms lic sphere. The subject was Haber- as their business because they feel masian, not even remotely homo- that disowned, deviant desires sexual—and that remoteness seems affect everyone in society, even (or to be what incited Warner to edit perhaps, especially) those who do Fear of a Queer Planet. Lesbian not admit or act on them. and gay studies, he felt, had been Queer theory’s taste for public examining subjective and aesthet- sex and its distaste for community ic angles to the exclusion of social norms are both evident in Policing ones. And social theory had been Public Sex: Queer Politics and the taking heterosexuality for granted. Future of AIDS Activism (South Queerness offered a way to rethink End Press, 1996). Released in the both the social realm and the place wake of the 1995 GALHPA-APAL of homosexuality within it. wars, the anthology was edited by But when queer theory inves- MICHAEL WARNER Dangerous Bedfellows, a collective tigated the social, it discovered of NYU graduate students. “We that almost the only thing all lesbians the goal of lesbian and gay politics is to are focusing on acts rather than identi- and gays have in common is a memory bring homosexuality inside Rubin’s ties,” the collective declares in the intro- of noncommunity. Queers, Warner charmed circle, then the goal of queer duction, sounding a distinctly queer declared, are “a kind of social group politics is quite different—to abolish the note. Along with analytic essays, Policing fundamentally unlike others” because, circle altogether or, where this seems includes interviews with sex-club owners, unlike most members of a race, ethnic- impossibly utopian, to remain outside transcripts of legal documents, Odets on ity, or gender, individual queers spend the circle as an act of protest. HIV prevention, and Bérubé on the their childhoods in isolation, sometimes As an issue that draws out the antag- history of bathhouses. “Gay culture’s view of sexual entitlement,” writes Rotello, “has been intellectualized by gay academics in scandalous ways.”

even hating the group they will later onisms between lesbian and gay identi- The book also contains evidence of identify with. For Warner, the shared ty and its queer critique, public sex—in queer theory’s troubled relation to eth- queer experience of not belonging is not clubs, parks, or restrooms—is exempla- ics. The editors’ desire to “screw with merely a wound or defect but an under- ry. Sex Panic’s willingness to shelter the notion of a totalizing queer leader- appreciated political force: He celebrates almost any kind of nonstandard sexual ship class or gay ‘community’” lets in it as “an objection to the normalization behavior under its umbrella confounds voices that are radically free of any trib- of behavior in [a] broad sense.” a traditional gay activist like Signorile. al or group affiliation. But in politics, as Queer theory yields a politics very “I think most people who’ve come out opposed to literary criticism, it can be different from that of traditional lesbian of the closet don’t have a lot of concern unsettling to listen to a voice uncon- and gay identity. To visualize the differ- for married men who get arrested in strained by responsibility to a commu- ence, it might help to borrow an image toilets,” Signorile says. His allegiance is nity. Between the same covers, Odets’s from Gayle Rubin’s essay “Thinking to men and women who have publicly chapter on HIV prevention lies uneasily Sex.” Imagine that soci- identified themselves as with the essay by the HIV-positive for- ety controls and defines homosexual and can mer porn star Scott O’Hara, who writes, sex by drawing a therefore be engaged in “The life of a Negative, at this point in “charmed circle” around dialogue and changed our history, seems to me to be the most it. Inside the charmed and mobilized political- irrelevant and pointless of positions,” circle are all the good ly by the gay culture. and who applauds the attractive “strong and normal kinds of In the language of personality” of a friend who intention- sex—for example, mar- queer theory, Signorile ally got himself infected. And it is not ried, heterosexual, speaks a “minoritizing reassuring to hear the owner of the West monogamous. Outside discourse,” a term Side Club both deny that what he runs are all the bad and coined by Sedgwick in is a sex club and say, “If I were to get unhealthy kinds, such as Epistemology of the Clos- AIDS today, it’s my own fucking fault. promiscuous, sadomas- et. For him, gay identi- I deserve it”—apparently restricting the ochistic, for money. For ty defines a subset of the blame for infections that occur in his the last half century, population, and closet club to the decisions his clients make as homosexuality has been cases are deserters in individuals.

ROBERT FOX/IMPACT VISUALS ROBERT FOX/IMPACT a disputed border terri- this minority’s battle for In places, the theoretical sophistica- tory, half in, half out. If recognition. Warner tion of Policing seems only a shade

LINGUA FRANCA OCTOBER 1997 31 removed from old-fashioned rationaliza- known as “the circuit,” “the scene,” or tion. In an April 1994 Newsday article, “the A-list”—who consult only their own for example, Rotello had described the pleasure. Rotello hammers away at what unprotected anal intercourse that he he calls the “condom code,” the belief witnessed in a sex club as a “sex murder/ that condoms can both prevent HIV suicide.” Upset by his imagery, Danger- transmission and preserve gay liberation’s ous Bedfellow Alison Redick analyzes experiment in sexual permissiveness. Rotello’s text as follows: Adopting the language of ecology, Rotello calls condoms a “technological Several false equations are at work in this fix,” an attempt to erase a problem’s account. First, the act—unprotected anal sex—is equated with the contraction of consequences without confronting its the virus, which is then equated with underlying cause—in Rotello’s opinion, death. Not only is this an inaccurate set the gay-male norm of multiple, concur- WALT ODETS Odets tried to find out why a man might expose himself to HIV.

of conclusions, based on assumptions rent partners. Rotello demands a about the serostatus of the individuals engaged in the act, but the equation rethinking and an adjustment of sexual AIDS = Death produces a representation behavior by gays as a community, not just of the disease that is both dangerous to as individuals, because mathematical PWAs and complicit in homophobic reactions against the epidemic. models predict HIV transmission rates will not fall so long as even a small “core Rotello’s representation is alarmist, and group” of gays continue to be highly Redick is correct to say he condenses promiscuous. probabilities into certainties. But anal sex Rotello knew whom he was likely to without condoms is the most common anger most. “Gay culture’s very male way gay men become infected with HIV; view of sexual entitlement,” he writes, seroprevalence among gay men in cities “has been intellectualized by gay aca- is widely estimated to be 50 percent; and demics in ways that would be considered LISA DUGGAN although people infected with HIV may scandalous if they were coming from live for decades—especially now, thanks straight men talking about women.” tionary screeds by Rotello and Signorile.” to new protease inhibitor treatments— Then, in late May, as if to throw salt in Says Gonsalves, “And we thought, why there is not yet a cure for AIDS. Rotello’s the queers’ wounds, Larry Kramer don’t we do something about this?” characterization may strike Redick as praised in an editorial that Gonsalves recruited among grassroots homophobic, but her critique looks excoriated gays for enshrining promis- activists, and Warner, along with art uncomfortably like denial. Why shouldn’t cuous sex at the center of their literature critic Douglas Crimp (whose boyfriend, it anger Rotello to watch two men who and culture. “Do we see Anna Karenina Damien Jack, is a member of the same do not know each other fuck without being fucked by her husband or her lover support group), recruited scholars. rubbers? Sorrow or concern might also once, twice, a hundred times?” Kramer About fifty people showed up at the first be an appropriate response, but merely asked. “In her cunt, up her ass? Then Sex Panic organizational meeting in late to parse the representational politics being tied up and pissed upon? Surely May. Kendall Thomas, who teaches seems a little cool. gay culture is more than cocks.” critical race theory at Columbia, suggest- Queers struck back almost at once. Sex ed a teach-in as the group’s first event. ALMOST a year after the Panic was born in the apartment of Treat- The involvement of Warner and Dangerous Bedfellows anthology ment Action Group staffer Gregg Gon- Crimp would itself be reason enough to appeared, Signorile and Rotello elabo- salves, after an April meeting of an link Sex Panic to queer theory, but War- rated their side of the public-sex debate HIV-positive support group that includ- ner spells out the connection explicitly. into book-length arguments. In April ed Warner. “We had our support group,” He points to the participation in Sex 1997, Rotello released Sexual Ecology: Gonsalves says, “and at the end, it moved Panic of many who do not identify as AIDS and the Destiny of Gay Men to talking about Gabriel Rotello’s new lesbian or gay, ranging from straight men (Dutton). In May, Signorile followed his book, and we all got sort of exercised and married women to people allied with friend’s book with Life Outside: The about it.” the transgender and female sex-worker Signorile Report on Gay Men: Sex, Drugs, “We were just sitting around and communities. Says Warner, “We’re not Muscles, and the Passages of Life talking about how depressing it was that simply advocating a redemptive gay (HarperCollins). Both titles build on the we kept hearing these stories about bars identity and its acceptance by the main- writers’ earlier journalism. Signorile being closed,” says Warner. “And then stream.” criticizes gay culture for allowing its we kept turning to the gay press, and But how do you mobilize people to

aesthetic and moral values to be set by a instead of seeing coverage about this or act politically for their desires? And what NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PHOTO BUREAU (ABOVE) DUKE PRESS (BELOW) small group of wealthy white men— resistance to it, we would see these reac- kind of politics emerges if you make the

32 PLEASURE PRINCIPLES attempt? Queerness, as Megan’s Law as a sexu- instance of either behavior during the Warner defines it, under- ally dangerous predator,” teach-in. Someone in the audience mines a great deal. It jailed for four years for cattily suggested that the man join opposes “not just the nor- having sex with underage Sexual Compulsives Anonymous. As mal behavior of the social boys and now tracked by Kendall Thomas admitted at the time, but the idea of normal the police. He was met the Sex Panic teach-in was a “frankly behavior.” This might be with a silence that was partisan gathering.” Still, it is odd that wishful thinking—as both stunned and the side of this debate in favor of destig- charming and as unlikely respectful. In the history matizing sexual desires cannot listen to to be realized as Godwin- of lesbian and gay activ- a would-be monogamist as indifferent- ian anarchy—but queer ism, sex with minors has ly as to a convicted pedophile. theorists claim they take often been the issue that subversion as a principle, forces new grassroots AT first glance, it is hard to see why not a gesture. Queers movements to decide gay marriage and promiscuity cannot lie want to rescue desires that what to include and what down together peaceably, the lambs have been disavowed by society, and as to exclude from their own charmed circles. beside the wolves. And in fact a peaceable a matter of principle they refuse, while This government-tagged sexual predator kingdom is Sex Panic’s explicit position. doing so, to judge or master them. But represents a question Sex Panic has not “In order to be for a sexual culture,” says won’t the things queers discover on these yet answered. No one in the room either Warner, “you don’t have to be against missions of nonrecovery always appear seconded or reproached him. But he may intimacy or against couples or against as violations of the ethical system they yet force Sex Panic to choose between commitment. It’s a false choice.” resurface into? “We might even say,” political viability and pure queerness. But at stake is a community norm, Warner writes, “that queer politics At the very end of the evening, not individual choices. The fight to set opposes society itself.” Shouldn’t another man stood up and falteringly that norm is a zero-sum game, even if self-conscious queers, then, expect soci- said that he felt the gay community’s individual decisions to respect, defy, or ety to panic at the sight of them? celebration of multipartner sex made it ignore it are not. Defenders of gay mar- During the question-and-answer peri- more difficult for him to maintain an riage certainly see it that way. As Rotello od after the teach-in, a man stood up to exclusive, long-term relationship. He wrote in The Nation, “The core of the announce he was “what is known under was interrupted and heckled—the only [queer] objection—that marriage would

OC 19 Stanford 1/2 horiz FPO

LINGUA FRANCA OCTOBER 1997 33 provide status to those who married and a negative image of gay men who have Rotello wrote, “If gay men begin to make implicitly penalize those who did not— sex.” a virtue of confessing that they don’t seems essentially correct.” Or as Jonathan It may be that Sex Panic’s catholic sex always have safer sex...won’t that create Rauch wrote in a New Republic essay that positivity is the group’s most valuable a new community norm in which unsafe Warner likes to quote, “It is not enough... contribution to the debate over HIV sex is acceptable?” Rotello now says that for gay people to say we want the right prevention. Warner insists on under- if he could make only one revision to to marry. If we do not use it, shame on standing why some men have high-risk Sexual Ecology, he would clarify that he us.” sex. “Moralizing may help us feel supe- is in favor of men talking about why they Queers may doubt and resist norms, rior, but it’s not going to help them,” have unsafe sex—if their goal is to get but the ferocity of Sex Panic’s response he says. “There’s a utopian longing community support not to have unsafe suggests they too sense that on this behind almost all of these things that sex in the future. But it is also true that question, only one side will win. Rauch’s some people want to just dismiss. That’s against Odets’s sympathetic depth psy- use of the word shame “should really what queer theory can bring to the dis- chology of sexual risk takers Rotello’s trouble anyone who has progressive cussion.” book pits a dismissive list of the “justifi- politics and supports gay marriage,” At times, Rotello and Signorile sug- cations and excuses” gay men use when Warner says. “It also shows that howev- gest that merely to talk about the motives asked why they have unsafe sex. er liberal people like Rauch and Sullivan behind unsafe sex is tantamount to claim to be, they’re constantly abjecting approval. In Sexual Ecology, for example, EVERY Thursday night at eight o’clock, Sex Panic meets at the Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center. The only structure to the meetings is a ring of chairs and a pair of co-facilitators, who change weekly. When I visited, the group was planning two September events: a second teach-in, this time at the NYU law school, and a historical slide show by Bérubé that would double as a protest against a new curfew on the West Village piers—a curfew that Sex Panic says is being selectively enforced against OC 26 young queers of color. How effective is Sex Panic as a polit- ical force? “Controversy is the tool [we] have right now,” Bérubé says. “We make Freeman a little disturbance so people notice there are other voices.” When university pro- fessors stand up to defend public sex, 1/2 island people pay attention. But although they drew a sizable audience, Sex Panic lost its first scrimmage against Rotello and Signorile with a fumble. Key to the message of Sex Panic’s first FPO teach-in was its urgency. “Not since Stone- wall have we faced so much harassment,” their flyer read. Sex Panic’s claim of a shutdown stood on two legs. First, accord- ing to the Anti-Violence Project, more gay men were reporting that the police had arrested them for public lewdness than in previous years. Second, the city had recent- ly closed a number of gay bars and clubs. For Sex Panic, these two phenomena were linked. At the teach-in, Maura Bairley of AVP accused authorities of “smoking gay and lesbian people out of the clubs, onto the streets, and into the jails.” Unfortunately, no one in Sex Panic had researched either claim thoroughly. When pressed by LGNY, AVP, to its credit, offered hard numbers. Comparing

34 PLEASURE PRINCIPLES its data on the first six months of 1997 closed in the 1950s no public official to its data on the first six months of 1996, admitted to a coordinated crackdown. “It the organization reported a 61 percent is correct that there is no conspiracy,” rise in arrests for public lewdness. But Duggan writes by e-mail, hypothesizing the raw numbers AVP released were less that instead there is an uncoordinated impressive: Eighteen arrests were report- trend caused by larger forces, which are ed to the group during the first half of also squelching public spaces for debate 1996, twenty-nine during the first half and expression nationwide by defunding of 1997. Scattered over half a year, elev- the National Endowment for the Arts and en additional arrests in New York City corporatizing large portions of public life. looked like something less than a crack- The city’s sanitizing of Times Square for down. Disney, she feels, is emblematic of this Rotello and LGNY editor Paul Schin- process. dler also dissected the club closings Sex Against the press’s steady salvo of facts, Panic had lumped together. Several had Sex Panic fires back with interpretations. been closed under charges of drug traf- It is a tactical mistake that academics in

ficking—for example, those owned by the humanities often make when attacked SEX PANIC AT GAY PRIDE, 1997 Peter Gatien, a mogul of straight as well by journalists; to say Rotello’s discourse as gay nightlife. Others were shut for failing to have the cabaret license required by New York City law to permit danc- ing—an expensive legal hurdle but one that many gay clubs meet. Again, the monolithic image of oppression targeted at gays seemed to crumble. In Chelsea, the current roost of New York City’s itinerant homosexual com- munity, a new boutique, café, or bar for lesbians and gays seems to open every month. The West Side Club that so OC 08 angered Rotello in 1995 is still in busi- ness. Furthermore, as Rotello notes, “the current edition of Homo Xtra lists thir- ty-six advertised venues where gay men Holt can ‘get off’ in commercial sex establish- ments in New York.” If Sex Panic has not been crying wolf, its members need to explain why. They 1/2 island point to 1995, when the city closed many adult theaters because agitation by Rotel- lo and GALHPA had brought higher surveillance, as documented in the Polic- ing anthology. But as LGNY’s Duncan Osborne has reported, since January 1997 New York’s health department has issued only one warning and closed only one establishment—and that temporar- ily—which suggests that the panic in question may already be over. Warner responds to LGNY’s coverage by spinning it. Rotello, he points out, has moderated his once-strident lan- guage. “Compare Rotello’s rhetoric now with his tabloid columns a couple of years ago,” Warner says. “He seems to have realized that he is in danger of losing support in the middle.... The rightward slide of the debate has been slowed.”

CALEB CRAIN Duggan offers a more provocative answer. She points out that when clubs

LINGUA FRANCA OCTOBER 1997 35 monopolizing the media, Warner wrote lesbian ideal of “fidelity in relation- that “the phone lines have been cut” ships”—to be sonorous rather than accu- between mainstream gay journalists and rate. And he sensed that Rotello’s heart liberationist queer academics. Indeed, I was in “the inherent superiority of could only find one scholar in lesbian and monogamy” to an extent not entirely gay studies with even an attenuated good justified by epidemiology alone. word for Rotello. Martin Duberman, In fact, when I relay Warner’s defense Distinguished Professor of History at of sex clubs as “world making,” Duberman CUNY and founder of its Center for agrees. “I’ve been defending what I’ve Lesbian and Gay Studies, gave Rotello’s been calling sexual adventuring for thirty Sexual Ecology a qualified favorable years,” Duberman says. “This kind of review—in The Nation, of all places. When adventuring is an essential part of learning I tell Duberman that his review surprised about one’s sexuality and forming a com- EVE KOSOFSKY Michael Warner, among others, he munity. It’s not like I don’t believe every- SEDGWICK Queer theory opposes all identity pigeonholes on principle and aligns itself with anyone who troubles gender or sexual norms.

is homophobic or sex negative does not chuckles. “I was a little surprised myself,” thing that Warner is saying.” Nonetheless, answer his claims about the epidemiolo- he says. “That’s what happens when you Duberman describes Rotello’s book to me gy of AIDS. As Rotello retorted to a Sex keep an open mind.” as “a conscientious and caring attempt to Panic letter writer, “No honest, nonjudg- Duberman had reservations about deal with what seems to be a real problem.” mental discussion of how AIDS happened Rotello’s book. It disturbed him that But he is nearly alone among scholars in to gay men, or how it could be contained, Rotello wanted to regulate sexual behav- judging Rotello’s approach to be “genuine should be ruled off the table because ior but had not spelled out how to rec- and...worthy of respect.” somebody believes it’s offensive.” oncile that goal with individual freedoms. While I was working on this article, He found some of Rotello’s generaliza- a friend told me a story that helped to IN A recent Nation article that attacked tions—about “the ageless lessons of distill the real problem that has split the

“right-leaning gay talking heads” for social cohesion,” for example, or the journalists and the Sex Panic scholars. DUKE UNIVERSITY/JIM WALLACE

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36 PLEASURE PRINCIPLES (He said the story was true, but it might as it tumbles three men into one bed it inside, where close quarters give the tribe’s be urban legend; think of it as a thought turns gay sex into a conversation about members daily evidence that people are experiment.) Bob has sex from time to ethics. No matter how traditional the limited, disappointed, and compromised. time with Adam; they aren’t boyfriends. coupling may look, there are never just If queer theory stays too enraged to join Adam is HIV-positive, something Bob two men involved when gays have sex. this conversation, it will never be guilty and Adam both know. Together, one This is what makes anonymous queer sex of taming or trapping sex. It will always evening, they pick up a third man, Chris. utopian and metonymic for Warner and be able to point out another way of orga- Bob knows that Chris is HIV-negative what makes monogamous gay sex eco- nizing sex, or not organizing it, that would and that Chris does not know Adam’s logical and responsible for Rotello. be more free. It will always be able to take serostatus. While the three are in bed It may be that queer theory has no an ambiguous comfort in the fact that together, Adam starts to fuck Chris questions to ask about the sex-act-cum-con- present-day sex is not the utopia it might without a condom. This makes Bob versation in my friend’s anecdote. A be. But then queer theory will be only anxious, but he does not say anything to theory that resists assembling acts into academic. stop it. identities may not be able to help individ-

Queer theory opposes all identity pigeonholes on principle and aligns itself with anyone who troubles gender or sexual norms.

As a puzzle, the story has several easy uals trying to negotiate with one another. Caleb Crain is a graduate student in and unsatisfactory solutions: Adam is evil, A theory that protects sexual acts from American literature at Columbia University. Bob is a coward, or Chris is an idiot. moral valences may not be able to help His essay “Leander, Lorenzo, and Castalio: Probably most gay men today would gays judge and adjust their sexual behav- An Early American Romance” is forth- choose the third solution—in part to ward ior or reward and punish their peers. coming in Early American Literature. off consideration of the other two, like Maybe queer theory as an enterprise the owner of the West Side Club when senses that it will look promising only as he said, “If I were to get AIDS today, it’s long as it speaks from outside any tribe my own fucking fault.” However, what or community. Or maybe queer theory interests me about the story is not any has to stay outside by definition. But single answer but the fact that as casually debates over ethics are always fought

OC 03 Blackwell 1/2 page horiz

LINGUA FRANCA OCTOBER 1997 37