May 19, 2003

May 19, 2003

NO, ANDREW SULLIVAN, WE ARE NOT ALL SODOMITES

Yale Kramer

Sodomy= An unnatural form of sexual intercourse, especially that of one male with another. Oxford English Dictionary

Ordinarily I find Andrew Sullivan’s writing admirable, his take on the world of politics is serious and sound, and even some of his views on homosexuality are reasonable. But occasionally his gay ideology runs off with his common sense, and then watch out. His major new essay in a recent issue of The New Republic entitled “We Are All Sodomites Now” is a case in point.

The essay is another interesting example of Sullivan’s preoccupying life theme: the normalization of homosexuality. This theme is, of course, not his alone. It runs through the work of many gay writers; Terrence McNally and Tony Kushner, for example. But Sullivan has argued this notion more deeply and more intelligently than any of the others. These days it is rare enough to find a gay writer who is still willing to try reasoned discourse to persuade those who do not share his views. And once he gets his premises established his rhetoric is dynamite. He can spin straw into gold with the best of them—better than Rumpelstilskin.

The starting point of his new essay is the Texas law, currently being reviewed by the U.S. Supreme Court, that says that it is a crime for two men to engage in sodomy even if it is consensual and private, and even though it is not a crime for two people of the opposite sex to engage in sodomy. But the law is not really the fish that Sullivan is after: “The legal and constitutional arguments around this case are complicated and fascinating. But in some ways, they are secondary concerns. The most obvious question surrounding Lawrence vs Texas relates to a matter more fundamental than constitutional law. And it's a simple one: what is actually wrong with sodomy? Why is it immoral?”

The major thrust of the essay is Sullivan’s tortuous argument demonstrating that sodomy is not immoral and furthermore that everyone—gay and straight—does it. Ergo, gay=straight. Ergo, gays are “Virtually Normal” which happens to be the title of Sullivan’s recently published book.

Sullivan works this rhetorical magic by semantic sleight-of-hand and the use of ideological scholarship. Every ideology has a cadre of scholar-scientists whose job it is to find theoretical justification by the use of pseudo-expertise. The Soviet Union had its pseudo-geneticist Lysenko; Hitler had his pseudo-anthropologist racists; the creationists have their pseudo-experts; and the gays have a powerful cadre of pseudo-scientists and scholars who fortify their ideology. Dean Hamer is an example. Hamer is a gay biochemist who wrote a book about eight or nine years ago called “The Gay Gene” based on his “work” which purported to identify a genetic cause of homosexuality. He managed to get himself on just about every TV talk show in America touting his discovery. Needless to say the “work” has never been confirmed or replicated but after a front-page story in the New York Times which was never followed up or disavowed, there are probably many innocent people who still believe in the existence of a gay gene.

Sullivan has chosen as his ideological scholar a gay theologian named Mark Jordan on whose work "The Invention of Sodomy In Christian Theology" Sullivan bases his argument. He starts out by expressing an interest in the morality of sodomy, “The morality of sodomy, of course, is inextricable from its etymology…. From the beginning, Jordan argues, non-scriptural sources definitely associated Sodom with a variety of sins: pride, disobedience, inhospitality and sexual license. It was Augustine who first went further and linked the place to "stupra in masculos" (debaucheries in men) and "flagitia contra naturam" (violations against nature). But even in Augustine, the sexual sins of Sodom were not exclusively to do with same-sex sex. They were to do with sexual license, abandon, and what became known in Latin terminology as "luxuria," the sin of worldly excess, incorporating gluttony and drunkenness and general self-indulgence.”

In the very next paragraph Sullivan does his bait and switch. Switching from an interest in the etymology of sodomy to a redefinition of sodomy, he pulls this transformation out of his hat: “It's worth stressing here, then, that from the very beginning, sodomy and homosexuality were two categorically separate things. The correct definition of sodomy - then and now - is simply non-procreative sex, whether practised by heterosexuals or homosexuals. It includes oral sex, masturbation, mutual masturbation, contracepted sex, coitus interruptus, and anal sex - any sex in which semen does not find its way into a fertile uterus.” You can see where he is going with this. Anyone who engages in sex which is non-procreative is engaging in sodomy, hence we are all sodomists now.

Of course no one knows what the boys in Sodom did to deserve what they got. No one knows whether there was a Sodom. The fact is that anal intercourse between men is an invention of mankind and for whatever reason came, over the last thousand years or so, to be called sodomy. And it doesn’t matter why it came to be called that. It could have come to be called Newark, or cootchie-coo. Common actions in life are usually given names, like smoking or eating, and some names change in the course of history. Sodomy is one of those names. It is going out of fashion, but it is still in use today, especially in law. But whether it is called sodomy or not, anal intercourse is anal intercourse. It is not anything else. And even when the laws against private consensual sodomy are all expunged from the books—as they likely will be soon—it will not solve Sullivan’s problem.

Because his problem has to do with his moral sensibility—his own moral conflict between his wish to be free to like anal intercourse and his awareness that for some other people it carries moral opprobrium with it. And even if the straight world were to say to him, “Look, there’s no accounting for taste. For me it’s heterosexual sex, for you it’s homosexual sex. Let’s live and let live. You are free to do your own thing.” And in 2003 in most sophisticated places in the world that is more or less the prevailing attitude. (It is the position Horsefeathers takes. No law should apply to what is done in private by consenting adults.) But this is still not good enough for Sullivan, as he makes clear in the essay under discussion as well as his book “Virtually Normal.” He cannot conceive of a world in which heterosexuals and homosexuals can live together without either destroying one another or loving one another. The thing that seems to distress him most about those he calls conservatives is that somewhere deep down they disapprove of homosexuality. They may not want to prohibit the sin (as the so-called Prohibitionists do) or punish the sinner, but he senses their deep displeasure over it and somehow wants to change that. Either getting us straights to love gays and/or by denying the differences between them. But the first may not be possible, and the second is not true. Perhaps the best solution is a compromise—we need not all love each other or pretend we are all the same but we can tolerate each other. It’s called civilization.