Customer Reviews

Gay Ideas

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It took me several years to take Gay Ideas seriously as a book of legal analysis of discrimination issues that compared the United States Supreme Court decision in 1984, quoting:

"Private biases may be outside the reach
of the law, but the law cannot,
directly or indirectly, give them effect" (p. 57)

with the six official reasons given by the military for barring lesbian and gay soldiers. Having a Supreme Court that applies "the ordinary high-tier equal protection analytic that it had nominally set out for itself" (p. 56) in a chapter called "Black Law and Gay Law" makes hemlock for Socrates seem like an ordinary remedy for what people think.

I was looking through some things I wrote in 1995 to see if I could find a better example of how arguing about people who claim to be victims is the cultural scar Americans have learned like I learned how to confront Professor Walter Arnold Kaufmann for coming to the United States in 1939 as a Jew who had been born in Germany in 1921. Bob Dylan was my Mr. Jones in that confrontation. People are such moving targets that the best joke is to laugh at where people have been like it was in the Lenny Bruce "Thank You Mask Man" :

What the hell do you want the horse for?

For the act.

Reading this book was an exercise in democracy for me, and it wasn't too surprising to find the idea that promiscuous gay encounters are a much better paradigm for democracy than anything that heterosexists ever thought up. At times, it hardly seems likely that any country will actually embrace democratic ideals as heartily as gay liberation has been emphasized in the American media, but this perspective serves to demonstrate a real relationship between political theory and the ideas in this book, and there are a lot of ideas in this book.

Before saying anything unfortunate, I should admit that my closest brush with insanity about these things might involve a sexual situation which was purely hetersexual, involving a woman who was proud that she was 18 years old and no longer subject to certain restrictions which our society imposes on children, but that my own belief that women turn into old frumps at the age of 28 was what made it crazy for me to think that she had a long way to go before she would be 28. I really don't know enough about gay men to speculate on when any of them might reach my feelings on what they do and react in an insane manner about their own behavior, and it is pure speculation and fantasy on my part that any of them will ever look back on their behavior in quite the same way as a woman who has become an old frump who calls her husband at work every day to tell him, "I love you," but who doesn't quite mean it the same way as when two of us were headed back to work, after lunch, and I told her, "I forgot to nibble on your ear."