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Eve Tushnet

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Last updated on: December 22, 2009 at 8:49 pm by Eve Tushnet

2009-12-22T20:49:00-04:00 Eve Tushnet

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

EVERY DAY IS LIKE SUNDAY: So a chain of events led me to read a lot of reviews of Andrew Sullivan’s various books. Here are some comments on the reviews. For reference, I think Virtually Normal is his weakest and Love Undetectable is brilliant; LU‘s third section, about friendship, I think is genuinely life-changing and beautiful, whereas its middle section, about psych theories of homosexuality, is really weak. Apparently this places me at odds with pretty much everyone who got paid to review these books.

So… Margaret O’Brien Steinfels reviews Virtually Normal in Commonweal. On the one hand, it’s adorable to see a time when Commonweal could challenge gay-lib without three thousand disclaimers. On the other hand, “homosexual or lesbian” is slightly hilarious.

On the more serious tentacle, I really like how Steinfels draws out the contradiction here: It’s really hard to argue for gay marriage if you have the good taste to find homosexuality interesting. One of the more depressing features of the pro-gay-marriage arguments is their tendency to act as if any differences between men and women, or between straight and gay relationships, are banal and beneath notice. This seems like an excellent way to make yourself stupider.

And on a fourth tentacle, I’m fascinated by how little work Steinfels had to do to feel as though she’d successfully refuted Sullivan’s arguments. I think her argument is anorexic; and yet at the time, of course, this sort of dismissal was thought “progressive.” Sullivan can measure his success by the degree to which Steinfels’s arguments on marriage now seem wafer-thin.

[EDITED–that was unclear to the point of appearing self-contradictory. What I mean is that Steinfels’s earlier “arguments against” gay marriage are naively dismissive, and really privileged–she isn’t even trying to look at the world through Sullivan’s eyes, and she isn’t even considering that that’s something she should do. She is normative and thus gets to judge him, and that’s obvious to her. But the later paragraph in which she uses his own words against him, and asks why what he wants should be called marriage at all, strikes me as persuasive and even a possible way to open up new options for gay couples. Without the insistence on banal sameness, maybe we can come up with new models for love–some of which will be Catholic, some of which will be really-not-Catholic, but all of which will be more sublime and honest than the usual love-is-love-is-love oatmeal.]

And, especially: Steinfels’s review makes me wonder what aspect of Sullivan’s famous “We Are All Sodomites Now” essay isn’t “liberationist.” He more or less made his name as an anti-liberationist gay man; yet his essay shows all the most striking characteristics of what he described as liberationism, e.g.: a focus on acts vs. identities; a dissolution of boundaries between heteros and homos; the deployment of homosexuality to undermine heterosexual self-understandings; the absolute moral equivalence of intercourse and sodomy.

I mean, Sullivan’s essay is wrong on its face, and it only takes one night at a crisis pregnancy center to figure that out; but I’m not super interested in that right now, more interested in whether the “gay conservative” position always collapses into liberationism if you push.

(To which the obvious response is, “Yeah, Sullivan’s probably a closet liberationist. But Jonathan Rauch is actually a gay conservative, so you should take up your fight with him.” That’s fair, but no fun; Sullivan is the Kate Bornstein to Rauch’s Julia Serano. The fact that I learn more from Rauch and Serano is probably related to the fact that Sullivan and Bornstein are much more open to the aesthetic and religious dimension of life.)

Norah Vincent reviews Love Undetectable for the National Review. First, I like Vincent, and I’m glad to see this extremist getting her praise from NR! But more substantively, this is not a good review, largely because it isn’t even attempting empathy. I mean… AIDS memoirs are not inherently worthless, so I don’t get why Vincent thinks she can dismiss Sullivan’s book by making the obvious point that it’s basically an AIDS memoir.

I also think she’s deploying faceless AIDS-stricken Africans against Sullivan–she’s weaponizing racism in a way I find really distasteful. Her review has nothing to do with AIDS in Africa except insofar as it’s a stick with which to beat Sullivan. I can’t respect that.

Gilbert Meilander reviews Love Undetectable for Commonweal. Once again, someone thinks the section about dumb psych theories is the best part! I don’t even know what to make of that.

On the other hand, Meilander’s critiques of Sullivan’s essay on friendship are very well taken.

Moreover, the classical notion of the friend as “another self” may, in fact, cut against Sullivan’s claim that one must first love one-self in order to be capable of friendship. We need the friend as “another self” so that we may come to know who we really are. Hence, an attempt first to know or love oneself, to suppose that I must first be a person capable of friendship, may be self-defeating. Something must first be risked in friendship if we are ever really to become “selves” capable of sustaining deep personal bonds.

That’s just lovely, and hardcore and challenging. I think Sullivan’s essay is an amazing beginning for an investigation of friendship. Meilander’s review–like all the works Sullivan actually cites, and recommends–takes it further.

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