Interview with the Vamp

Why Camille Paglia hates affirmative action, defends Rush Limbaugh, and respects Ayn Rand

Virginia Postrel from the August/September 1995 issue

(Page 6 of 7)

I was already in the process of considering the degree to which one has to accept Freud's idea of civilization and its discontents. Everything that is civilization is based on some form of instinctual repression or delayed gratification. And maturity is really about realizing the limits on one's ego, and where social reality begins. I don't believe in obedience, total obedience. I am a '60s social activist. I believe that where there is injustice, one must act out to remedy it, and I'm very confrontational in my life. But I began to realize that I had been very insulting about institutions--that in point of fact, institutions are civilization. They are not oppression. They are civilization.

Reason: When you write about gay men, you seem to appreciate them mostly as exemplars of the dramatic in life, of rebellion against bourgeois society. But I personally know a lot of gay men who want bourgeois lives, and that is very much the cutting edge of at least part of the gay movement today. People want to be themselves but to have committed relationships, to be very bourgeois.

Paglia: It's an argument going on now in the gay world, with Bruce Bawer coming out with his book [A Place at the Table] on that side and so on. What I'm saying is the contribution of gay men to culture, what makes them highly individual in the history of culture, is not that they are settling down and being like everyone else--that is, just responding to their natural and normal human needs--but rather what they have done in terms of the history of consciousness.

That's part of my argument, for example, with my friend Harvey Mansfield, the conservative at Harvard. His argument would be that homosexuality is antithetical to civilization and to culture, that it is disruptive and anarchic. And my argument is the opposite: that gay men--not all gay men, but many gay men--have in fact built Western civilization. That their contributions to the history of consciousness and the creation of art have been major in making the West what it is--for whatever reason.

It is natural to want to settle down. There should be an experimental period in one's life, it seems to me, where one tries everything new, but if you continue in that stage beyond, let's say, age 30, I think that that kind of restlessness is a sign of immaturity rather than creativity.

Reason: Right now there's a lot of nostalgia among people who define themselves as communitarians, on both the left and right, for the 1950s. You portray the 1950s as boring and claustrophobic. What do you think of this current nostalgia?

Paglia: The '50s were a wonderful time if you happened to be a blonde WASP cheerleader. Great! But if you were Jewish or gay or a tomboy, like me, or any kind of dissident, it was a very repressive and conformist period.

David Halberstam's book [The Fifties] is talking about how wonderful the '50s were--it was a very vigorous time. Well, he's a little older than me. So what he is remembering is authentic. There was indeed a very vigorous Jewish culture at that time. I think the New York world for Jews at that time, intellectual Jews, was wonderful.

But please! For my generation, the baby boomers, born just after World War II, the '50s were a horror. I don't care what David Halberstam says about his experience. It is just inaccurate. Certainly there were things going on that led to the '60s, absolutely. I've said this all along that the beatniks were the precursors. But they were the adversary culture--the oppositional culture. They were stereotyped and pilloried everywhere. Anyone who tries to say that mainstream culture was fab in the '50s, they're just not thinking straight.

Reason: Most of the nostalgia isn't of the intellectual, Halberstam variety. It's that families were stable, streets were safe.

Paglia: It is true. Things were very stable. But the point is that we've gone through enormous cultural changes. Just take the example of the automobile. I remember riding my bicycle to school in Syracuse--it was about 1957, '58--and riding quite an enormous distance on this old bicycle, and there were hardly any cars. You wouldn't dream of doing that today. The number of cars has not tripled but quadrupled. In photographs of New York City from the '50s, you can hardly believe how little traffic there is.

All of a sudden there was an enormous explosion of people who owned cars. Cars became very dangerous. Young people were driving cars. Then the '60s unleashed the dangers of assassinations and kidnappings and murders, and all kinds of stuff.

You can't go back again. The idea that we can recreate that, that is just crazy. It's absolutely crazy. We are moving forward, for good or for ill.

Reason: Somebody once described you as "Ayn Rand on mushrooms." I'm curious whether at some point in your life you've had any encounter with Ayn Rand's work or people influenced by her.

Paglia: Ayn Rand was an enormous figure for people who were intellectuals in college in the mid-'50s and late '50s. I entered college in '64, so I never heard her name in college. She was just gone.

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