IT’S BEEN interesting to note the disconnect between the journalists who’ve defended Sullivan (Mnookin, Salon news editor Joan Walsh, openly gay culture writer Cliff Rothman, and Southern Voice editor Chris Crain) and readers of MediaNews.org, who overwhelmingly support Signorile for having written the LGNY piece. (Walsh went so far as to say that she was “a little sickened” by the glee with which some posters have reveled in Sullivan’s humiliation.) The defenders have focused almost exclusively on Sullivan’s “right to privacy,” while the MediaNews.org readers have focused on Sullivan’s perceived hypocrisy.
Not surprisingly, Sullivan has latched onto the privacy argument. “There is no privacy,” he warns readers of his online screed. “You have no right to a personal space.” But in the wake of Bill and Monica, what are the boundaries of privacy?
Over the past three decades our ideas about what is public and what is private have shifted radically. Bill and Monica couldn’t get away with what JFK and Judy Exner or FDR and Lucy Mercer did. A public person’s private behavior — from alcoholism to spousal abuse — used to be off limits; it’s not anymore (hello, Wil Cordero). A decade ago the idea of “outing” closeted public officials who supported anti-gay policies seemed outrageous; now it is commonly accepted (hello, Jim Kolbe). To be sure, some of this is done with the highest moral and civic intentions. But other times — given the People-ization of popular culture — the motivation is more prurient. The reality is that the personal lives of public figures are now fair game, especially if those personal lives seem relevant to their public lives and statements.
Sullivan made a big mistake when he thought of the Internet as “private” space. To be sure, you can be anonymous — or, as the case may be, “HardnSolidDC” — online, but if someone finds out that you are a conservative journalist who is highly critical of gay-male sexual culture, you make yourself dependent on the kindness of strangers. And strangers don’t have any moral mandates to be kind, especially if you’ve been attacking them viciously in print and on the air for more than a decade. Let’s face it: when you have accused gay male sexual culture of having “constructed and defended and glorified the abattoirs of the [AIDS] epidemic” — as Sullivan did in his most recent book, Love Undetectable — and when it turns out that you engage in some of the very behavior you’ve criticized in the past, you are playing a very dangerous game. No one should be surprised that some — no, many — people find this newsworthy.
One of the ironies of this affair is that while Sullivan adamantly claims that his private sex life is “none of your business,” he is one of the most self-referential journalists working today. He inserts himself and his experiences into both opinion and news pieces. Reading through Love Undetectable and his other book, Virtually Normal: An Argument About Homosexuality (Vintage, 1995), we find out about Sullivan’s fears, his childhood, how he prays, and his secret boyhood crushes, often in near-swooning-schoolgirl style. There is nothing wrong with writing personally, but Sullivan is prone to writing articles that are derived from — and almost entirely limited to — his own experience, and then passing those experiences off as universal fact. His (in)famous 1996 New York Times Magazine piece “When Plagues End” purported to chart a momentous cultural shift attributable to the advent of protease inhibitors. “It’s over. Believe me. It’s over,” he wrote. Personal and eloquently argued, “When Plagues End” was a moving testament to one man’s relief. But as a piece of journalism, it was deeply flawed. First, it acknowledged only briefly that poor people around the world — who constitute more than 75 percent of all AIDS cases — would never have access to these drugs. Second, it paid no heed to the obvious, and even then indisputable, problems with protease inhibitors. (A terrible irony here is that the Sullivan scandal is blowing up at the 20th anniversary of the AIDS epidemic; the disease has so devastated parts of the world’s population, particularly in Africa, that Sullivan’s 1996 declaration now seems pathetic.) But the piece was hugely influential: many AIDS activists today will tell you that “When Plagues End” set a tone in mainstream journalism that allowed reporters to stop dealing seriously with AIDS for several years.
The recklessness that informed “When Plagues End” is evident in much of Sullivan’s writing. He is compulsively readable, and almost always engaging. But he is partial to sweeping statements that make little sense. And he makes many of his points by avoiding specifics and relying on often vulgar, if not inaccurate, generalizations. (Take this, from Love Undetectable: “The landscape of gay [male] life is, indeed, almost a painting in testosterone.”) His controversial April 2, 2000, New York Times Magazine piece on testosterone is a good example. Sullivan, who was taking testosterone shots as part of his HIV therapy, celebrated the hormone in a loopy paean riddled with misconstrued or out-of-date information. Internationally known molecular biologist Anne Fausto-Sterling said, “Sullivan so vastly oversimplifies hormone metabolism as to provide a cartoon.” Not to mention that the piece was overtly hostile to feminism. (“As testosterone becomes increasingly available, more is being learned about how men and women are not created equal. So let’s accept it and move on.”) The piece generated an avalanche of letters. There’s no question that Sullivan is great at stirring up controversy — but at what cost?
The most damning aspect of Signorile’s exposé was the specter of Sullivan regularly having unprotected sex with HIV-positive men — a charge, it must be emphasized, that Sullivan does not confirm in his response to Signorile’s article. While it might seem that unprotected sex couldn’t put an HIV-positive person at any additional risk, in the past seven years an avalanche of scientific and anecdotal research has shown that reinfection is a serious — and very dangerous — problem. If an HIV-infected individual becomes infected with different strains of HIV, it can make that person’s condition less treatable. Nevertheless, Sullivan dismisses the threat of reinfection in typically glib fashion: “I am aware of this theory and the slim reed of research it is based upon. I have discussed the issue with my doctors.... [B]ut to me, the evidence seems weak and hypothetical.”
My point here isn’t that Sullivan and his partners may be making dangerous health decisions — that, as Sullivan notes, is a private decision and one that he has discussed “with my doctors, and my current boyfriend and my last boyfriend, both of whom are HIV-positive” — but that, once again, Sullivan is shaping and twisting scientific facts and theories to fit his own personal narrative. If you are writing a literary memoir, this may be fine. But if you are one of the few openly gay, openly HIV-positive writers with a national platform from which to write about AIDS and influence current debate, then it’s another matter altogether.
IT’S IMPORTANT to keep one thing in mind that many mainstream commentators on the Sullivan scandal have missed: what goes around comes around. Sullivan’s complaint that he is being treated unfairly probably sounds very different to mainstream commentators than it does to those of us in the gay community that he has derided for years. Sullivan has repeatedly attacked gay politics for being “victim-based.” How ironic, then, that he now claims to be a victim himself — of, in his words, “the activists.” Indeed, in his rebuttal to Signorile’s piece, Sullivan compares himself to Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas (which shows you who his heroes are). And by paraphrasing Pastor Martin Niemöller’s famous quote that begins “First they came for the Communists,” he actually likens himself to the victims of the Nazis. Talk about grandiose. Sullivan also says that he is not paranoid, but it’s a stretch to believe that. And today, June 7, he is scheduled to give a talk on “The Emasculation of Gay Politics” as part of the New York Times speaker series. A descriptive blurb in an ad promoting the talk notes that Sullivan will delve into how “the gay community joined the victimology bandwagon” and how “New Left feminism changed forever a kind of gay politics.” Is Sullivan always thinking about his genitals?
Look, there’s no question that gay people know more than any other group just how potent sex smears can be. And while I’m indulging in some serious schadenfreude right now, I also wonder about the long-term impact this entire blow-up will have. Although revelations about the private sex habits of a public shame-monger are always enlightening, in this case Sullivan isn’t likely to be the only one who suffers. The exposure of Sullivan’s private habits merely reinforces the worst stereotypes and preconceptions about gay culture — yes, the very same culture that Sullivan has spent so much time criticizing. After all, if Andrew Sullivan, Andrew Sullivan, is looking to fuck around with strangers on the Internet, then what are all the other queers doing?
There’s nothing wrong with looking for sex, or love, or a good fuck on the Internet; millions of people do it every day. And for the most part, the public has a grown-up attitude toward this. Americans now comprehend the endless fallibility of human behavior better than they ever did — for instance, most people didn’t think Bill Clinton did anything wrong (although Sullivan, in last week’s London Times, was still ranting about his behavior). But they are far less willing to put up with cheap and easy moralizing, especially of the “do as I say, not as I do” variety.
The least of Andrew Sullivan’s problems is that his private sex life has become “news.” Maybe Sullivan would feel a little bit different about the gay community if he could put himself in the shoes of the legions of gay men and lesbians who’ve lost their jobs or their children because their private sex habits became public. In other words, things could be worse.
Michael Bronski can be reached at mabronski@aol.com.
