Review: Beyond Queer by Bruce Bawer

Reviewed by Jeremy Winnick, May 2006

Here’s an example of a book that ought to be given a good review. It’s intelligent and thoughtful. Yet I cannot recommend it. It’s not that there’s nothing here worth bringing home, but the material is most painfully out of date. I suppose a fate like this awaits any political book. But here we have a book about gay conservative politics published in 1996. Ten years may not seem long, but consider the following:

• The bad boy of the era is Patrick Buchanan, whose 1992 Republican National Convention speech left the gay community angry and raw. Who thinks about him today?
• The bad boy of today, Fred Phelps, is unknown in 1996 because Matthew Shepard is still alive.
• Gay marriage is heavily discussed, having received national attention due to the Hawaii Supreme Court decision of 1993. But Vermont and Massachussetts are not mentioned because the watershed decisions that will occur there haven’t happened.
• Gay characters are just starting to appear in the mainstream media, but Ellen has not yet come out, and neither Will & Grace nor Queer Eye have been conceived.
• David Brock is still conservative. His book Blinded by the Right won’t appear on bookshelves until 2001.
• The last word from the U.S. Supreme Court on private, consensual, age-of-consent gay sex is the 1986 case Bowers v. Hardwick, in which the court upheld Georgia’s sodomy law. The reversal did not come until Lawrence v. Texas in 2003.

Indeed, what this book does very well is what it does not intend to do: it shows us just how far we’ve come.

Beyond Queer is a collection of articles written for journals and newspapers between 1989 and 1996. Bruce Bawer, author of A Place at the Table, divides the articles into sections and provides an introduction to each. The authors include Bawer himself, Andrew Sullivan, Paul Varnell, Jonathan Rauch, and others.

For some of you, the notion of a gay conservative may be an oxymoron at best and deeply troubling at worst. I appreciate the spice that politics can provide to any conversation, and why groups like SGM are careful to state how unaligned they are politically. But for those who are curious, I will provide a glimpse into conservative thinking with the following quotes.

(From Jonathan Rauch, Beyond Oppression, on hate-crime legislation): “Why is it more terrorizing or socially destabilizing to stab someone because he’s Jewish, for instance, than to stab someone for his sneakers? The former signals that Jews are in danger; the latter signals that everyone is in danger. Tying the fight against violence to other political agendas clutters and compromises what needs to be a clarion message: violence is intolerable, period.”

(From John W. Berresford, A Gay Right Agenda): “Finally, we should stop seeing AIDS as anybody else’s problem. The sad fact is that every gay man who got AIDS by sex got it from another gay man, and by doing something he chose to do. People with AIDS deserve sympathy, but it is the sympathy one extends to a chain smoker who comes down with lung cancer.”

(From Daniel Mendelsohn, Scenes from a Mall): “The day that we finally get our rights will, ironically, be the day when any gathering that is based on the solitary fact of a shared sexual identity will have become obsolete. The most difficult issue facing gay men is not how or when we will secure our liberty, but what we plan to do with ourselves once we’re truly free.”

Thoughtful? Yes. But not all articles stand up so well to the ravages of time. Nevertheless, I would be very interested in a 2006 edition of this book. I’ll let you know if I find one!