"I wanted the title to capture some of the ambiguity of the subject," said Sullivan, who spoke at Emory Nov. 11 before an audience of about 300. "The title reflects what I believe about the subject. The emotional needs to be loved and to feel part of a community are the same for gays and lesbians as they are for heterosexuals. In that sense, we are normal. Our experience is the human experience. But homosexuals make up a small minority of the larger society. By mere statistical inference, we are not normal. As we grow up, our experiences are different from those of heterosexuals. So we are not interchangeable with heterosexuals. That's the paradox of homosexual life: to live constantly in this ambiguity. We're normal, but we're not normal.
"I also wanted a title that would outrage people on both sides of the issue to get them all involved," Sullivan said jokingly.
In his role as editor of The New Republic magazine since 1991, Sullivan is accustomed to being criticized from people across the political and cultural spectrum. His calls for full societal equality for gays and lesbians, including marriage rights, have made him quite unpopular with political conservatives. On the other hand, many gays and lesbians accuse of him of being an apologist for homosexuality, primarily because of his appeals to end what he terms a bitter "culture war" between homosexuals and heterosexuals. During his Emory appearance, at which he concluded the American portion of his book tour, Sullivan again stressed the need for the ending of longstanding hostilities.
"This book insists that the subject of homosexuality has to cease being marginalized and ghettoized, and not accessible to anyone of any background or belief," he said. "There is too much at stake to continue this discussion in a private language. The culture war is not benefiting anyone or illuminating anything." Sullivan also said that in a war, where force and might usually carry the day, minority groups tend to lose to the majority.
"We need to move from a position of war to a position of peace," Sullivan continued. "We need to bring about the beginning of a negotiation for some kind of truce." According to Sullivan, he wrote his book to offer an argument based on an important fundamental principle: that it is "possible in a liberal democracy to talk in the language of reason."
"When neutral people listen," Sullivan said, "they ultimately can be persuaded to change their opinion by a stronger argument. In this case, that argument is the one held by those who are arguing for fundamental change in the way society deals with homosexual persons."
In his book, Sullivan discusses four political perspectives from which society has traditionally dealt with gay and lesbian people: prohibitionism, liberationism, conservatism and liberalism.
*Prohibitionists believe homosexuality is immoral, a social problem that must be suppressed and policed, and that government should create policies to eradicate it. "The most powerful defenders of prohibitionism are the religious right," Sullivan said, "but it is also deeply held by the Nation of Islam and the Catholic Church. Prohibitionism dominates the governments under which 95 percent of gays and lesbians live."
*Liberationists believe that homosexuality, as well as an array of other socially based identities, does not have a core existence in human beings, that it is merely a social construction, a figment created by those in power to control the powerless. "For the liberationists," Sullivan wrote, "the full end of human fruition is to be free of all social constructs, to be liberated from the condition of homosexuality into a fully chosen form of identity, which is a repository of individual acts of freedom."
*Conservatives (in the European tradition to which Sullivan refers) tolerate homosexuality privately, but are publicly disapproving. "A large number of people, both straight and gay, fall into this category," Sullivan said. "This is the politics of the closet." Conservatism is based on an interdependent relationship between gays and heterosexuals, Sullivan said. Heterosexuals depend on gays not to oppose their public disapproval so long as gays are being privately tolerated; and gays maintain a contract of silence by living closeted lives in exchange for private acceptance by heterosexuals.
*Liberals view homosexuals in terms of a political minority and the attendant difficulty of protecting that minority from the majority. "Liberalism relies heavily on the construction of laws that protect homosexual citizens from heterosexual citizens," Sullivan said, "a model that was inspired by the civil rights movement."
While liberals traditionally have viewed themselves as allies of gays and lesbians, the liberal civil rights model for gaining equality will not work for the gay rights movement, Sullivan said, because gays and lesbians do not face the same types of legal and segregational barriers that African Americans faced in the 1950s and 1960s. Rather than legal or governmental remedies, Sullivan said that equality for gays and lesbians will come through the effects of individual experiences of heterosexuals as they become more aware of the role that gays and lesbians play in their lives and in society.
When the noise and rhetoric of the culture war has ceased and those individual experiences of revelation become more commonplace, Sullivan said, then homosexuals and heterosexuals will begin the process of learning from one another and shaping a society that values people of all sexual orientations.
--Dan Treadaway