Babylon Sister

David Link from the February 1995 issue

(Page 2 of 2)

When she moves into her major sub-theme of homosexuality, however, Paglia seems to get tangled in her own reasoning. She begins by saying, "Homosexuality may be the key to understanding the whole of human sexuality." There is some important truth here. Opposing ideas enlighten one another, test limits and theses you can't examine in a vacuum. One of the reasons we cling so firmly to the view that gay men are "them" is that it so conveniently distances us from uncomfortable notions about our own sexuality we'd just as soon not face. For example, Paglia shows how the "bacchanalia" gay men in New York and San Francisco went through in the '70s helps illustrate how the absence of women affects male sexuality irrespective of sexual orientation. While a lot of people use that example to prove how uncontrollably promiscuous gay men are, viewing gay men as men reveals deep aspects of men's sexuality that we can't see in heterosexual relationships by definition.

As in the rest of her writing, Paglia has no patience for sentimental arguments about homosexuality. In the context of procreation, Paglia argues that homosexuality is every bit as unnatural as the religious right says it is. But while accepting Biblical proscriptions against homosexuality for this reason, she aptly dismantles the right's objections with the observation that we not only have a right to defy nature, but that the greatest glories of civilization, even civilization itself, are monumentally unnatural. We defy nature all the time, and point to our accomplishments with pride, from the Pieta to the Panama Canal, from Antigone to Fred Astaire.

Paglia views homosexuality as a supreme form of natural defiance, and thus civilization. She points out that "gay male consciousness, as I have experienced it, is stunningly expansive and exquisitely precise. Gay men have collectively achieved a fusion of intellect, emotion, and artistic sensibility." It is from such observations that she suggests a biological connection between homosexuality and art: "Men are not born gay, they are born with an artistic gene, which may or may not lead to an artistic career. More often, they are connoisseurs, aesthetes, or simply arch, imperious commentators with stringent judgments about everything."

I wish. As a highly opinionated gay man, I guess I have always aspired to being an arch, imperious commentator, and I suspect most people would love to believe they fuse intellect, emotion, and artistic sensibility. Unfortunately, as anyone who has ever been to a gay rodeo knows, more than a few of us gay men have a rather clunky sense of aesthetics. I don't want to trade anecdotes, but only to suggest that sometimes Paglia lets metaphor leak over into stereotype, with some rather dire results.

As we learned during the gays-in-the- military debate, homosexuality still packs a wallop as an idea. Paglia's triumph has been in locating the idea of homosexuality within the broader context of all sexuality in art and culture. But few of us view our lives in the structured terms of art. Paglia's focus, though, is limited to sex as indicative of something bigger than itself, sex as topos. That literary approach, based on Paglia's reading of Freud, diminishes reality and even diminishes Freud, who recognized that sometimes you can smoke a cigar and not have to think about your mother. Paglia, who rejects nihilism, won't bear the thought that life can't always be shaped and ordered into meaning.

This makes for a real gap between the grand theories about lives and the measly details of conducting a life, and leaves a lot of people baffled. If gay men can't procreate and don't happen to have the wit and style of Noel Coward, they're pretty much useless as metaphors in Paglia's universe, and their defiance of nature leads to nothing. How do you account for all those homosexual farmers and shop owners and assembly-line workers Neil Miller has written about?

The limitations of Paglia's analysis show up most colorfully in her objection to lesbians who use dildos. If dildos are so pleasurable, she posits, why not go on to real penises? If a person's sexual life is simply pleasure-oriented, the conclusion is pretty obvious. But the argument breaks down if you include motives beyond sex. When you move on to real penises, there's generally a man attached to the other end. If you believe, even if you're being a sentimental fool, that sex and other aspects of life are connected, complications arise in the real penis scenario that don't appear in the dildo scheme. Examining the story as an archetype leads to a grand explanation that satisfies intellectually, but when the story is part of someone's real life, different considerations come into play, some of them pretty prosaic.

The danger is that what may be true intuitively, or even statistically, will not be true in individual cases, and the individual case might take exception to being swept into a theory that doesn't include him. In holding gay men responsible for AIDS because of what happened in the '70s and early '80s, Paglia leaves out the vast numbers of gay men who were not in San Francisco and New York during those years, and the many who were but had no personal taste for the goings-on of the smart set. Even accepting the lowest numbers about who is really homosexual, nowhere near a majority of gay men are infected with HIV. The theme of natural defiance and consequent punishment is one thing as a metaphor, but it's something else again when you use it against an ordinary guy in Topeka who got it into his head that he could live his life authentically and not have to pretend he was attracted to women, but who wouldn't know amyl nitrate from Emile Zola. There is nothing worse than being held responsible for lives you are not leading, errors you have not made, failures you are trying to avoid. Anyone who has ever objected to prejudice is saying no more than that.

Paglia is not prejudiced by any means, and critics who make such a charge are willfully misreading her work. But her complete dismissal of all social constructionist arguments leads to that misreading. For example, she believes law cannot affect the prejudice many heterosexuals feel about homosexuals and gays should just accept this. But, that idea breaks down in the face of Paglia's broader and better argument that to some extent we pay attention to cultural cues, sometimes in defiance of our most fundamental natural instincts. Sometimes we can learn better. Murder is a primal urge, something even the most civilized of us might feel moved toward now and then. But we have learned how to resist the temptation, and are better for the resistance. That's what civilization is, "a defense against nature's power."

There is no reason to abandon hope that heterosexuals can resist prejudice, and every reason to believe the contrary. The point of great art is to teach empathy, illustrate the variations and the possibilities, walk us through points of view not our own. And the point of government is to try to move art's best lessons into practice, to enforce against nature what civilization it can. Accepting a little social constructionism (it's not an all-or-nothing affair) means that prejudice isn't something we have to live with, any more than murder.

As Paglia says, defying nature may be the most glorious thing about human beings. It's a little unfair of her to imply that, in this area at least, heterosexuals are civilization-impaired.

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