Yes, You Could Be Both Openly Gay and Conservative in the '80s
The novelist Thomas Mallon's journals reveal a side of the '80s that the standard gay histories—and standard conservative histories—tend to ignore.
The Very Heart of It: New York Diaries, 1983–1994, by Thomas Mallon, Knopf, 592 pages, $40
Writing in 1985, arguably the worst year of the AIDS crisis, the leftist columnist Christopher Hitchens attacked closeted gays who preached right-wing politics. Once "out" (or in many cases "outed"), Hitchens argued, these onetime conservatives would "evolve politically" and renounce the Moral Majority and President Ronald Reagan's foreign policy. Opening up about their sex lives meant veering to the left.
But openly gay and right-wing were not always mutually exclusive in this era. Thomas Mallon—acclaimed novelist, prolific essayist, professor of English literature, and self-described "gay neoconservative"—provides a perfect example. On coming out, he didn't evolve politically so much as become more of what he already was.
The Very Heart of It: New York Diaries, 1983–1994 is compiled from 30 notebooks written at a time when the world in general and New York City in particular were witnessing "the relentless spread of AIDS." It might be difficult to recall the climate of this era. About 30,000 people died of AIDS in America from 1981 to 1987. Many social conservatives regarded the disease as a Biblical plague for the sin of homosexuality: In 1983, Pat Buchanan—soon to be hired as White House communications director—wrote, "The poor homosexuals. They have declared war on nature and now nature is exacting an awful retribution." The conservative columnist William F. Buckley called for tattooing people with AIDS.
Mallon's diaries capture the nightmarish flavor of an era when gay sex could kill you. ("My mind…keeps running towards the Ultimate Horror, Killer AIDS," he wrote.) His diaries are replete with times he inspected his body for signs of the disease: Swollen glands, bruises, even freckles could be cause for alarm. Every day he lived in fear and was emotionally devastated by it: "I had my worst AIDS scare in months. I saw a reddish patch on my leg….I was convinced it was a sarcoma and I began to cry. I walked around outside…and resigned myself to death. This is the way we live now."
It is this emotional fragility that keeps him from being tested for six years: "Part of me would love to gamble & take the test & rejoice if it came back negative. But I can't risk what would happen to my mind if it came back positive. I can't do it…[Sex] doesn't kill you, it gives you nervous breakdowns." When he was finally tested negative in 1990, he fell to his knees and thanked a God the Catholic-raised Mallon never renounced.
Despite that faith, it's hard to paint Mallon as a social conservative. He disliked the religious right—the "religious crazies," he called them—and could not bring himself to vote for Reagan in 1984. "There are limits," he wrote, "to what one can do for one's anti-Communism and country."
But he also couldn't bring himself to vote for the alternative, Walter Mondale. Mallon was very much a neocon, and over the course of these pages his identification with the right does not fade at all. Indeed, it arguably does the opposite. As friends and lovers died painful, protracted deaths from a disease the Reagan administration was widely accused of failing to prioritize, Mallon became more supportive, even defensive of the president. "My conservatism grows stronger as the years go by," he wrote in 1985.
Much of this came from Mallon's anti-Communism. He endorsed the 1983 invasion of Grenada and backed the Strategic Defense Initiative. ("If Star Wars is such a will-of-the-wisp, as the TV boys keep saying, then why are the Russians so dead set vs. our having it?") He argued that Soviet dictator Mikhail Gorbachev "never granted one reform he knew he wouldn't have to," and he complained that Reagan wasn't getting enough credit for predicting "less than a decade ago" that communism was nearing its end ("Has one network or newspaper quoted that remark today?").
"I want to be in a world where one can hate [leftist Nicaraguan leader Daniel] Ortega and not be a fag-basher," Mallon wrote in 1987. "I believe in God and believes He wants me to make love to men. Why should that be so hard?"
Mallon's roster of political enemies certainly could have been composed by countless conservatives. He loathed President Jimmy Carter ("a mean little man" with a foreign policy team of "mediocrities"), Vice President Al Gore ("robotic and condescending"), and Democratic presidential nominee Micheal Dukakis ("a mushed mouth McGovern"). In these diaries, the leftist playwright Lillian Hellman is a fabricator, Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan is a Hitlerite who wants to put Jews and gays in the "gas chamber," and civil rights leader Al Sharpton is "a gangster." The United Nations is a "sinister place" that spouts "agitprop" and "Newspeak." New York union leaders want "to milk the city dry." During the 1992 presidential campaign, when he read Bill Clinton's 1969 letter to the draft board, Mallon concluded that the Democratic candidate was "trying to convince himself that he has been mostly making moral choices rather than career calculations."
And Mallon made sure to note that it wasn't just Republicans who could be heartless and repressive toward homosexuals. New York Gov. Mario Cuomo, he pointed out, wanted "to put in jail people who pass the virus on to others."
Mallon felt, he wrote, "no more pride in being gay than I do in being Irish."* He lamented that gays "swallowed so much of the leftwing hog and forgot that privacy was one of the things they were striving to protect in the first place." At the same time, he praised the previous generation of gays and connects their victories to his politics: "My own conservatism…will never to me feel incompatible with the fight they fought and achieved."
In other contexts, Mallon has called himself "a libertarian conservative." But one would be hard-pressed to find much libertarianism in these diaries. Apart from privacy rights, there is little here about big government; he had nothing to say in these journals about free markets. This book is valuable not because you will agree with all of it—or even, for some readers, with most of it—but because it reflects the hidden ideological diversity not just of gays in general but of gays who weren't conventional liberals or leftists. Other possible paths in that era ranged from the libertarianism of Duke Armstrong, a gay Republican lawyer who fought the San Francisco Democrats' effort to close the city's bathhouses, to the moderate conservatism of Andrew Sullivan, who argued against outing on the grounds that it violated people's privacy.
Like all good diarists, Mallon has a persona: He emerges in these pages as hard-working, opinionated, angry, pessimistic, and laugh-out-loud funny. So it's not as though this book is valuable only as a historical document. But it's fascinating as history too. These diaries, with their blizzards of editorial lunches, faculty meetings, and gay barhopping, reveal a side of the '80s that both the standard gay histories and the standard conservative histories tend to ignore.
*CORRECTION: This article originally mischaracterized Thomas Mallon's opinion of New York's Gay Pride Parade.
