Thunder On The Right

What is wrong with Stanley Kurtz

by Michael Bronski

An old-time lefty like me doesn't often get noticed by a neocon rag like Commentary. Imagine my surprise, then, when I discovered that I'd been quoted in this month's issue as a "radical advocate of same-sex marriage."

In fact, I am not particularly an advocate of same-sex marriage at all. That was my first hint that Stanley N. Kurtz's article "What Is Wrong with Gay Marriage" was a bit cracked. Kurtz, an adjunct senior fellow at the conservative Hudson Institute, claims that while the majority of the American public opposes same-sex marriage, "this opposition, through real, is, by and large, silent." He goes on to argue that this silence is being enforced on the majority by a "relatively small group of deeply committed partisans" -- gay activists "supported by the cultural elite, including the mainstream media." And to make matters worse, he says, the proponents of same-sex marriage -- particularly Andrew Sullivan, the former editor of the New Republic -- have sneakily changed their tune. Whereas they once argued that gay marriage would make the institution stronger for everyone, they now claim it as a civil and human right -- an argument that leads straight to polygamy.

But the real reason same-sex marriage is bad, according to Kurtz, is that marriage exists so that women (who nest by instinct) will domesticate men (who are, at heart, sexual adventurers). Might this not also work for gay men? No way! For "the complementarity of the sexes lives on and will not be eradicated." Did you know that "the woman who pulls down a six-figure salary still waits for a man to call for a date, and the woman who comfortably commands men at the office still waits for a man to open the door for her"?

The intellectual poverty of Kurtz's article gleams through in every sentence like silvery thread in a cheap bridal gown. The editors of Commentary, which is published by the American Jewish Committee, should at least have raised their eyebrows at his phantom cabal of gay activists and the "cultural elite" -- which recalls the anti-Semitic slurs suggesting the existence of a Jewish cabal with excessive social and economic powers.

What's really disturbing, however, is his view of male and female sexuality, which might have been lifted from one of the Victorian feminists' social-purity campaigns. Skulking around in his "quest for sexual conquest," Kurtz's emblematic heterosexual man is a bounder who needs the love of a good woman to domesticate him in legal marriage. (Gallantly, Kurtz also approves of divorce laws that are "typically much harder on men as the `naturally' promiscuous partners than on women.") He paints heterosexual relations as a complex web of emotional dependency and sexual avarice, veiled threats and curiously playful mind-fucks -- a cross between a bad Joan Crawford movie, Operation Desert Storm, and a John Waters lampoon. The lives of women and men struggling to live together in ethical, fruitful, and happy relationships are reduced to silly or hateful parodies.

That's not my own biggest complaint about the article, though. My real regret is that Kurtz quotes from my 1998 book The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom -- and he never once mentions the title.