00:08:00.900He has this reputation as a kind of gay social conservative, as a guy who looks at a gay pride march and is like, isn't this all going a little far?
00:08:10.940But I think it's important to push back on this notion that he's, you know, merely trying to shield gay men from social opprobrium.
00:08:19.600He is, in fact, participating in the social opprobrium, right?
00:08:22.260One of his agendas and one of the reasons he supports gay marriage is not just that he thinks that this kind of assimilation into a recognizable form of, like, bourgeois life will make gay men less vulnerable to homophobic attacks.
00:08:41.220He actually does, in fact, think it would make them more virtuous, right?
00:08:43.620He wants them to be closer to monogamous, closer to, like, recognizably participating in this kind of prescribed vision of adult life.
00:08:56.400Yeah. He blames not the gay movement, but really gay people themselves for certain actions and thinking, and he's very explicit about this in the recent New York Times piece, as enabling the Nita Bryants of the world, right?0.97
00:09:09.460this is a through line of his. They would not come for you. And also, you shouldn't do it.0.95
00:09:14.880Unprotected gay sex is murder, is what he says, I believe, in Love Undetectable. It is strategically0.99
00:09:20.660wrong to carry on the way we're carrying on. And in fact, there's something wrong with carrying on
00:09:26.840that way. You are making the conservatives be homophobic by being so gay. And if you were a0.99
00:09:34.000little less fruity about it. They would just be all hunky-dory. Yeah, which gets us to a very
00:09:39.780interesting moment in Andrew Sullivan's life. So just to catch up with him briefly, he leaves
00:09:43.500the New Republic in 96. In 98, I believe he's a Times columnist. And then in the early 2000s,
00:09:50.840there's this, I think immediately before 9-11, really, there is a blow up around him when
00:09:57.420he gets outed in a very interesting way, right? Wait, he was not out of the closet yet.
00:11:58.580It's gross. You are asking our listeners to think about Andrew Sullivan having sex, which I think most of them probably don't want to do.0.95
00:12:19.520On the one hand, you can see Sullivan's point when he's absolutely outraged by this.
00:12:27.360If he had said he's HIV negative in those ads, yeah, go ahead, like mention this to people, but he's very open. And as he himself observed in his 90s reporting about the gay community, of course, given how many gay men were infected with HIV, like certain practices had to evolve around this status, right?
00:12:48.600So in some ways, there really shouldn't have been a problem.
00:12:52.960The problem becomes that basically, as Richard Goldstein puts it in a piece in The Village Voice,
00:12:59.820explaining why it was probably right to publish this or to disseminate this,
00:13:04.340was that this ad describes precisely the kind of, quote,
00:13:07.500pathological creature who normally raises Sullivan's wrath.
00:13:11.540And that's, of course, it's a really interesting moment.
00:13:14.300I don't know if I 100% agree with that.
00:13:16.160what is interesting is that that is exactly the way outings of anti-gay preachers used to go
00:13:23.860right that's the reason why people disseminated those like well look if he just says like oh i
00:13:29.160don't have an opinion on this and then goes to a gay club that's fine but it's all about like
00:13:33.700you know man on dog this and worse than hitler that and then suddenly you're like
00:13:38.280at the shaft like i'm sorry what is this right he's doing something that he has described as
00:13:44.520akin to murder, right? Like very recently. And I think the outers would defend their
00:13:50.100actions here by saying, like, listen, the wrong of his hypocrisy compounds the wrong of his
00:13:56.760homophobia, of his contempt for this group, right? It implies a station of moral superiority from
00:14:03.660which he's issuing these judgments, which he in fact does not occupy. And that is, we're newsworthy
00:14:09.380for somebody of such stature i think very few people except maybe some of inter sullivan's
00:14:15.300allies on the social right would describe the like actual underlying sexual practices here
00:14:19.440as inherently immoral right like this is almost kind of tame um assuming that he is doing due
00:14:26.600diligence around safety which might be a little ambiguous from this ad um there's nothing here
00:14:32.480that, like, offends me in the sexual contact being sought,
00:14:36.340what offends me is the homophobia of this guy0.95
00:14:40.500and the role of hypocrisy in underlining it.
00:14:44.880There's a great book by Tim Dean about the subculture
00:14:47.420of barebacking in San Francisco called Unlimited Intimacy.
00:16:45.080the nutmeg state it comes for us all it like barebacking is a not kidding there's nothing
00:16:51.720wrong with it in the abstract yeah it's just a little irresponsible i can imagine ways to live
00:16:58.840in connecticut responsibly sort of bridge port and up uh not nowhere west of that so i i don't
00:17:05.360want to dwell on it and i don't think it's ultimately like anyone's finest hour few outings
00:17:10.800ever are but it is interesting in that it does give the sense of like this guy who thinks he can
00:17:16.940play I think I last time I described it as hopscotch like he can be inside the community and1.00
00:17:20.900outside of it and that's okay if it's the big LGBT umbrella I feel like it's a little annoying but
00:17:26.240like okay but this as Tim Dean is saying like is a community that is really quite unique that you
00:17:31.740and I would probably have real trouble navigating at all and that really presumes and depends on so
00:17:39.060much and then to have this guy pretend not to be part of it like andrew sullivan could have written
00:17:45.360a gay life gay death about it and made it really really moving and interesting but no it's instead0.50
00:17:51.040it becomes this kind of chiding thing that ingratiates him to people who believe the worst
00:17:56.600about these people right who believe the worst about that community and who frankly believe that0.51
00:18:00.700that community stands in for all lgbt people right so this kind of do i belong do i not belong like1.00
00:18:06.360okay maybe you're a heterodox gay or something like that or you're just kind of an asshole0.99
00:18:12.140and the other thing that's really important is how he reflects on this so i think we'll i'll1.00
00:18:17.320stipulate to the fact that if that happened to me i'd be pretty outraged turfs do this they'll
00:18:21.420like find trans women's dating profiles and put them on the internet and there's a there's a0.98
00:18:25.740degree to which like people get to talk about what you do in public right it's the content of the0.69
00:18:30.660talking that they're that i really object to which is just like there's a mean spiritedness to it
00:18:34.540And there can be at times a mean-spiritedness to these outings, even if I'm like more sympathetic to the motivations for why.
00:18:44.360I think like most people, if they had their personal ads displayed with all the kind of like undignified vulnerability that that position implies, like it would make us mad.
00:18:58.080I think Paul Robinson in his book Queer Wars points this out that this type of Michelangelo Senorile versus Andrew Sullivan fight on outing really is a fight between two moralisms, right?
00:19:12.480Like they're each pretending at a kind of liberality, but like, in fact, like, no, they both have very, very clear senses of how you ought to live your life and the wages of deviation from that, right?
00:19:23.840I don't think we've covered Michelangelo Signor really. Do you want to explain for our listeners who that is?
00:19:28.480Yeah, I mean, he's the big outer of that time, right? And he's probably the most, so Paul in his book on gay conservatism picks him as a gay conservative.
00:19:36.980And he's like, he's probably the one who'd be objecting to that the loudest. He's like, I think it's true because there is this moralism behind it, behind outing, right?0.56
00:19:46.220Right. Which is why it's funny that Sullivan, who's frankly, when it comes to a young woman's tweets or a intellectual's remarks on 9-11, is remarkably, or a transphobe's insane rantings, is perfectly happy making very personal things public.
00:20:02.900Right. The actual objection is not to the tactic, but to the underlying goals to which the tactic is being used.
00:22:21.660So this is an essay called The He Hormone.
00:22:24.020And this is sort of the beginning of Turf Sullivan.
00:22:26.480He's becoming interested in the positivity of masculinity, not positivity in the sense that it's good, although he probably thinks that too, but the idea of masculinity as a thing in the world, observable and valuable.
00:22:39.640It's an affirmative entity as opposed to just like the absence of girliness.
00:22:44.860Yeah. It's an object in the world as opposed to a social construction, right?
00:22:48.720Right, right. We should posit what is going on here. Andrew Sullivan starts taking testosterone.
00:22:56.480to treat some health conditions he's got that he doesn't love.
00:23:00.260Because of this, once again, synthetic and medically administered treatment,
00:23:05.380he comes to understand masculinity as like a pre-social natural state,
00:23:09.940a biological condition that arises spontaneously
00:23:12.880as opposed to something that is created through like historical and social conditions.
00:29:10.360He's like, I want this to be my special boys club for very important guys.0.98
00:29:17.040The notion that they might have to be in political allegiance with lesbians who they find annoying and also just like less important than they are by virtue of being women.0.61
00:33:03.640I don't know. I won't pretend I've never walked into a gay bar and been like, oh, Jesus Christ, like this is exhausting and not my scene and I don't want to be here. And what I have done in those scenarios is leave.1.00
00:33:19.600And not mistaken my personal mood and preferences for a symptom of a cultural pathology.
00:33:26.000And I think it's very, very important to note. It's the way these people are dressed. It's the hair. It's the village people lookalikes, meaning I'm guessing handlebar mustaches or whatever. Right. Like this, the assimilability and gender are linked here. I think this is going to be a talk about the emasculation of gay politics.
00:33:47.480You know, you could see a version where gay men being non-threatening and feminine might work in our favor in terms of assimilation, right?0.99
00:33:57.800Like, I've certainly found that it kind of does.
00:34:13.280Well, unfortunately, effeminacy does not necessarily preclude that, but still, I think it's really noticeable here that that, to me, just reads like a real leap, and it's an interesting leap, right?0.69
00:34:24.360If only we were to sign on to the gender binary in the way we're meant to and realize our destiny as men, we would be much more assimilable.0.51
00:34:33.180The carrying on and the gender variance are one.0.55
00:34:35.920There's something of Ernst Rheim's like masculinist homosexuality that we talked about in our 1933 episode on the essay about male homosexuality as actually potentially being the logical endpoint and like crowning achievement of male supremacy, right?
00:34:52.420You can be such a man. You can be so full of this pure masculine energy of acting out upon the world that not only are you personally masculine, but you refuse to have your masculinity contaminated by proximity to women. This kind of like, fellas, is a kind of gay to be straight. It's like the notion that like gay men have a means of dispensing with women altogether and should aspire to that.
00:35:21.960Rome thought of it as a kind of warrior ethos.0.95
00:35:24.820It did set you apart from the rest of society.
00:35:27.160That's not what Sullivan's doing here.
00:35:28.600No, Sullivan is like, this will make us the whiniest pundits of them all.
00:35:34.840Like, those paragons of fucking masculinity is kind of bizarre, right?0.98
00:35:37.920I mean, this is a moment when, frankly, the idea that heterosexual men might be a little too namby-pamby, right, like, is starting to really take hold.0.99
00:35:47.100This is the beginning of the metrosexual discourse as well in the early 2000s.
00:35:52.320I think this is a little earlier, although the word existed, but it wouldn't have circulated around Sullivan, maybe.
00:35:57.300This is pre-Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, right?
00:36:00.200But it's this really interesting thing that the kind of variance he perceives in the gay community that is a problem.
00:36:09.260Like, if he said, oh, we spend too much time in the gym and getting jacked, and therefore we can't fight for our rights, I'm like, I don't think that's true either.
00:36:16.500But I could see that as a purely economic argument, you could make it, right?
00:42:15.980The other thing that these pundits do when they're looking to be scared is they mentally preclude any possibility that the young person might be joking.
00:42:32.480Or like speaking with a degree of irony or self-deprecation or detachment, right? There's this presumption of like immediate sincerity in everything that every young person says, which I don't – I think the internet would drive me absolutely insane more so than it already has if I was just reading everything with the presumption that nobody was ever joking.
00:42:55.780And I think that's kind of what's required for him to keep erecting these straw men of what the gay rights movement is and what the feminist movement is.
00:43:02.920I mean, a movement famously given to irony. But here's the thing, right? This is something I wrote about in my Cancer Culture book, that like the same people who are like, oh, this person who's saying men are bad cannot possibly be ironic, will retreat into I was being ironic the moment they get any pushback too, right?0.60
00:43:22.440It's always like, oh, I am this ironist and I'm being playful.0.98
00:43:26.220They just can't follow me, these overly moralistic assholes.0.96
00:43:28.960This reminds me also of our episode on Pamela Paul, who I think has a lot of impulses, like very similar to Sullivan's.0.97
00:43:36.120Not only did she, like him, sort of like presume this membership in a community to which he had not really joined,
00:43:45.220But she also wanted a presumption of being read with a kind of playfulness without really like signposting or earning that kind of credit from her readers, but then would also not attribute the same sort of playfulness to those she was reading and writing about.
00:44:04.240there's a way in which having been made the object at that time of my life around me too
00:44:12.720when I became the source of this controversy and people like Andrew Sullivan started like
00:44:15.880collecting my tweets I got like really an education in kind of the futility of trying
00:44:22.420to make yourself understood to these people right like there's no way I could have done that
00:44:29.440that would not have elicited so much bad faith you know what I mean
00:44:33.240at one point during that whole debacle that i was i was at the center of a media controversy
00:44:39.580it's not a really interesting story you can look it up if you want to but like this media critic
00:44:44.740wrote an account of this incident that wound up being sympathetic to me and i heard from this
00:44:52.820person later that after their piece was published andrew sullivan sent them a long email which
00:45:01.100included this dossier about what a bad person I was and how they shouldn't have taken my side
00:45:07.300in the Me Too controversy in print. So in case you think this is just something he idly
00:45:11.660accumulated, he's been very committed to his anti-Moyra Donegan policy and has gone out of
00:45:18.460his way to try and persuade others to his side and discipline those who disagree.
00:45:22.220It's really also interesting the way he picks examples. We're going to get there,
00:45:26.760but like, there's so much, like the amount of bad faith that he employs in a lot of these debates is,
00:45:32.500I think it's getting worse with time, frankly.
00:45:35.240Have you noticed that it's getting worse? What do you mean?
00:45:37.500I'm thinking here of a passage in the New York Times piece, which we'll get to, right,
00:45:40.600where he singles out friend of the pod, Chase Strangio.
00:45:43.960Chase Strangio, a attorney for the ACLU, doing a lot of their most prominent trans rights work,
00:45:50.740and a guy who gets misinterpreted and listened to in bad faith,
00:45:55.760like more or less every time he opens his mouth.
00:49:02.680We'll get to it, but it's also noticeable.
00:49:04.540We've now been tracing Andrew Sullivan making these kinds of complaints about activist spaces in the LGBT community for the last, we've done about 20 years of that, and we're going to do 25 more years of that.
00:49:15.120So 45 years of LGBT history, he has been complaining about this.
00:49:19.460If you look at the piece in the New York Times called, by the way, I don't think I've mentioned that yet, how the gay rights movement radicalized and lost its way.
00:49:27.620he's telling I think his straight readers a story where this stuff that he blames people like Chase
00:49:34.760for happened in the last 10 years since Obergefell this is ostensibly a look back after 10 years of
00:49:41.000Obergefell and kind of a reflection on why it might well go away well Andrew you've been making
00:49:47.820the same complaint about illiberalism and about language policing etc etc since act up days since
00:49:56.24088, since 87. It's patently disingenuous to pretend that this is a development of the last
00:50:04.200few years because if it's a problem at all, which I don't concede it is, it's a problem that's been
00:50:09.800in activist spaces for decades. It was true when we were fighting for gay marriage. People were
00:50:15.300having weird language debates in activist spaces. It's sort of their thing. It's their kink. Some
00:50:21.020people some people like hairy butts some people enjoy debating language endlessly low adrian
00:50:26.960boo i'm sorry i i had to go there but there are some good faith criticisms that i think he0.86
00:50:34.620lobs against the gay movement fair enough whatever but it gets less good faith with time because
00:50:42.160it's like you've been making it right recently it went bad recently it turned authoritarian0.97
00:50:48.500And, you know, the recent stuff, that's very worrying and you're right to be worried about that straight people.
00:50:53.020He's trying to justify his own position by saying that it's an emergency that requires urgent addressing, even though he has in fact been crying about it for like 30 years.
00:51:03.320Yeah. Just to give one example from that article still, the words gay and lesbian have all but disappeared.
00:51:10.280LGBT became LGBTQ and then LGBTQ plus and more letters and characters kept being added.
00:54:43.180I go to, you know, not to make ugly, not to engage in ugly stereotypes, but like, down Main Street, Wichita, Kansas, people might believe this.
00:55:23.460I think we've taken great care to extend a great deal of generosity to Andrew Sullivan.
00:55:28.720And I think people will notice we're going to do less and less of that. And that's not because he necessarily gets worse, but because the plausible deniability for these kinds of positions becomes more and more threadbare the longer this goes on, right? Like with our anti-woke pundits of today, right? This kind of shit works for two or three years because it exploits a very specific, discursive situation.
00:55:52.440But then when you do it about moral panic after that one, and the one after that, and the one after that, it's like, okay, kind of feels like you're A, not part of this movement. It feels like time is just a flat circle for you. It feels like maybe you're not representing the historical record well. And when you say, I'm with these people, I share their goals, you're just lying.0.99
00:56:13.180so in the spirit of not extending that much more sympathy to him let's talk about his turn towards
00:56:22.980a national security homocon you'll notice that basically in these masculinity pieces that we
00:56:30.940were just reading we're inching up to the summer of 2001 a time i remember well and that i'm
00:56:37.040guessing moira remembers indistinctly not as well the fall of 2001 was a you know it's kind of a
00:56:48.000blur of american flags yeah so many flags yeah i must at this point date myself and say that
00:56:54.680for me this was a very formative year and for my political understandings it has really been
00:57:01.580perhaps the most significant one it's also when hung and i first got together so that's nice
00:57:05.500oh yeah oh god you guys have been together for a long time oh yeah oh yeah you made it look who
00:57:10.880says andrew sullivan that gay relationships don't last yeah well that's very sweet i didn't realize
00:57:17.360you guys have been together for so long yeah and it's just it's where i first really became aware
00:57:23.060of andrew sullivan like the gay stuff like i was sort of faintly aware of but i was taking queer
00:57:28.180theory seminars and hanging out with trans kids so like i was not you were not his target audience
00:57:33.700No, I think Swarthmore College in general was not his target audience, but he became this very powerful voice in what I would call the homocon to Islamophobia pipeline.
00:57:45.820It's much more of a European thing. I think of this as less pronounced for Americans because our Islamophobes tend to be also quite homophobic.
00:57:53.340Yeah, so it does exist in the United States as well. Bruce Barr makes this pivot after 9-11. Jonathan Rauch turns dissatisfaction with the queer left orthodoxy in the 90s into sort of war on terror cheerleading in the aughts. But you're right, it is much more of a much more of a European phenomenon.
00:58:15.160And maybe we should say, he had stopped writing for the New Republic, he had stopped a brief
00:58:20.580gig at the New York Times magazine, and he was now mostly blogging, although a lot of
00:58:26.360his 9-11 texts also do come out in various publications.
00:58:30.540But I think the blogging is important.
00:58:32.880For people who weren't there or who weren't that aware, it was a crazy time and it was
00:58:38.720really a time when the fact that we all could form thoughts and put them on the internet really
00:58:46.240was starting to show some of the qualities that it has today things were happening very very quickly
00:58:51.520you know right like i i remember brushing my teeth and hearing on the radio that like a plane had0.99
00:58:56.620crashed into one of the towers of the world trade center being like what a fucking moron i went to0.98
00:59:01.460my job at the campus language center and they're like did you hear that a second plane hit and1.00
00:59:06.600we're like oh shit well this is a whole different thing now like things were happening in real time
00:59:10.640and of course a lot of people turned to cnn but like a lot of people also turned to the internet0.65
00:59:14.780to sort of like get information these are the early days of political and news blogging was
00:59:20.200like sort of coming up simultaneously with the advent of the war on terror and the there were
00:59:26.380these guys offering political hot takes on the internet with no real qualification beyond their
00:59:31.720own supreme confidence and andrew sullivan was among them yeah and so i'm inclined to be a little
00:59:39.560forgiving of sullivan's immediate reactions to 9-11 because it was a crazy time because things
00:59:45.160were moving so fast and because very frequently of course with a blog you don't have an editor
00:59:50.840saying like maybe we should cool it and clearly sullivan was disturbed and panicked and bit
00:59:57.620traumatized by all this stuff but through his panic and confusion they're threatened something
01:00:02.080else i think there's no other way of putting this but the man had the raging hard on for0.99
01:00:06.200finally doing away with all the namby pamby lefty shit that he had hated all along frankly0.99
01:00:11.980in order to finally get to the cracking of heads 9-11 is a permission structure to believe what0.98
01:00:18.500he always believed but harder and to basically delegitimize the people he had disagreed with
01:00:53.860But I take your point, which is to say what you get the sense of is a man unleashed. This is a man, again, in high moral dungeon, getting to beat up on the people he's always wanted to beat up on with a whole new vocabulary and a far greater level of ferocity than he might have reasonably mustered.
01:01:13.020In July of 2001, the readiness with which Sullivan embraced this idea of America as a deeply wounded nation, a wound that allowed for all manner of exclusion and nastiness, was a kind of fucked up mirror of how he felt, or many in his generation had felt, about AIDS, right?
01:01:33.940The first piece he writes after 9-11, I believe is on the 16th, so five days later, one of the lines there is like, why did it have to be a perfect morning, right?
01:01:42.800There's a kind of ready-made mourning, ready-made woundedness, which a lot of people expressed and felt at the time.
01:01:50.520And 9-11 was, on the East Coast, a breathtakingly beautiful day, weather-wise.
01:01:55.120Which also made the footage of it particularly clear.
01:06:12.500During that 24 years, there has been no intensification of the so-called far-left hegemony on college campuses that Sullivan identifies here.
01:06:22.780But he's warned about it every year in between, I would bet.
01:07:50.960We would like for you to stop doing it.
01:07:52.840Well, you know, it is a long career in which several intellectual pathology
01:07:58.160continuously reassert themselves. Like when you're playing a game of whack-a-mole, that's how it
01:08:03.080feels. And we don't want to sort of like yada yada the last 25 years of his career. I will say
01:08:09.040to Sully's credit, after very predictably being a real big cheerleader for the Iraq war
01:08:17.080in its run-up, he really seems to have taken to heart in a way that very few of the pundit
01:08:23.380cheerleaders of that invasion did uh that he was wrong about something and he's been going around
01:08:29.920like truth coming out of her well to shame mankind like remembering people who cheerleaded it and
01:08:37.280didn't you know properly atone the way he felt they should have and he did that for a while when0.87
01:08:43.580the iraq war was going to shit and it is one of these moments where you kind of have to hand it
01:08:48.680You know, this is a flash of acidity, of examination, of a capacity for shame, of an understanding of one's own complicity that he does seem capable of, which makes it all the more conspicuous when he doesn't demonstrate it later.0.95
01:09:04.840one of the interesting things is that like i think people often treat him as this kind of
01:09:09.460sui generis figure and i think we've been trying to push back on that a little bit step after step
01:09:14.840and to say in that combination it may be pretty unique but he does travel paths that other people0.99
01:09:20.340have traveled no shame in that but it's just like he's not as much of an outlier the kind of homo
01:09:26.120con to iraq cheerleader pipeline was shared with several other gay conservatives and at the same0.68
01:09:33.280time, his path away from George Bush is that kind of neocon Iraq cheerleader to tepid Obama-friendly
01:09:44.500punditry to then never Trumper. And I think that's a trajectory we know. And again, no hate,
01:09:50.540like there are definitely worse ways to have responded to the last 20 years. Again, there are
01:09:54.360people who have fully beclowned themselves and these people by and large have not. At the same
01:09:59.560time i think that his reaction to 9-11 and to the iraq war kind of foreshadows some broader
01:10:08.120pathologies i think that he didn't quite manage to wrestle down right to seriously suggest in the
01:10:16.440fall of 2001 that a dominant left whatever that was i guess john carrey or whatever was powerfully
01:10:23.240undermining america it feels like alternative history having been there it's like where the0.97
01:10:28.660fuck did you get that? And it seems to me important because over the course of the next0.90
01:10:32.220quarter century, while he's blogging, while he's at New York Magazine, when he starts moving to
01:10:37.420Substack, there is this odd thing where like on the one hand, he himself appears to move to the left
01:10:43.100on a bunch of these issues. But at the same time, he starts peddling exactly these kinds of
01:10:47.920counterfactuals about the resurgent right wing, right? I always think of that line from the Royal
01:10:54.060Tenenbaums, right? Everyone knows that conservatism has ascended. What this book
01:10:58.700supposes is, what if it weren't? The other thing he doesn't really grapple with is
01:11:05.920the ideas behind his kind of left punching right after 9-11, which is, and I hope we've been able
01:11:16.380to drive this home, a form of what Jasbir Puar calls homonationalism, right? That is to say,
01:11:22.680Part of why Sullivan goes all in on the American project of bombing different countries to smithereens is that this is a way for gay men specifically, but probably gay women too, probably not transgender people, to join in the nation-making project and to mete out violence and therefore become respectable.
01:11:44.520It was a form of respectability politics through the national security state.
01:11:49.280And while the individual adventures that he had endorsed in the early aughts sort of he stages pretty public disillusionment with and says, like, this was a mistake, the broader project of like, guys, this is our chance to be adults in the room.0.78
01:12:05.400It's our chance to be accepted into the national family by finally fucking behaving like that strikes me as something that he just never disavowed.
01:12:16.320There's a deeper structure of like wanting to belong, wanting to be a part of the polity that that he didn't interrogate.0.90
01:12:24.820And I think it comes back to bite us with a piece like the New York Times piece that we're all working towards the one we started with.
01:12:35.400the other point to make is probably one that lisa duggan makes about andrew sullivan which is that
01:12:45.620there's a kind of accommodation with neoliberal policy goals and with a neoliberal state
01:12:51.300one that becomes less and less muscular and more and more focused and fixated on security
01:12:57.660and on sort of safeguarding the absolute minimum of rights duggan writes quote he only asks that
01:13:03.560gays be allowed to exist within this neoliberal landscape so long as they support sentimental
01:13:08.640masculinist nationalism and challenge nothing. And in some way, you could look at that line0.86
01:13:15.380from Duggan, which he wrote like 20 years ago, and look at his New York Times opinion piece,
01:13:21.580how the gay rights movement radicalized and lost its way, and notice that really what he's
01:13:25.920charging them with is, hey, you didn't just confine yourself to existing within this neoliberal
01:13:32.580hellscape and support sentimental masculinist nationalism and challenge nothing like that was
01:13:38.220your mistake right there that seems to be his thesis so i'm sure lisa duggan will be like i
01:13:42.840feel pretty good about it you're supposed to reconcile yourself to these oppressive structures
01:13:47.440not challenge them what are you doing yeah yeah and so maybe with that we'll just given the
01:13:54.240advanced hour i do really feel like we've trudged through the wilderness together like just mud up
01:13:59.640to our knees, sweaty and exhausted through this like long challenge with Andrew Sullivan.
01:14:05.700Like a mirage in the desert, a weirdly tie-dyey rainbow beckons, which is the accompanying
01:14:14.260graphic, at least on the internet, for how the gay rights movement radicalized and lost
01:14:28.560This is an op-ed he published on the Times Opinion page where only the best ideas are ever foregrounded.
01:14:36.560And it's like a vertical rainbow, like the traditional colors of the old-style rainbow flag.
01:14:44.540But as the stripes go down the screen, they become more and more bled out like a too-wet watercolor and start to smear and become this sort of undifferentiated purple.
01:14:58.560Like a they-them pronoun of visual presentation. In case listeners have not encountered this piece,
01:15:06.940congratulations. If you want to hear an in-depth discussion of it, I would recommend having a
01:15:13.080listen to our friend Matt Bernstein, who went over this with someone who's actually name-checked in
01:15:19.280the article, which is Chase Strangio. Chase Strangio, a favorite punching bag for
01:15:24.620transphobes everywhere and the other thing to point out about this is i notice here it says0.99
01:15:31.420listen to this article and it's 25 minutes so it's long as shit this is a guy you can tell has
01:15:36.960been uh his own editor on substack for a long time like i mean i noticed that with myself my0.97
01:15:42.580substacks are fucking long man it is a form that has democratized publication in some ways but0.54
01:15:49.400has also just like added fuel to the fire of writers most narcissistic instincts but like they0.99
01:15:55.200let him go on for thousands and thousands of words and the quite valuable digital real estate
01:16:01.980and print real estate of the new york times opinion section to talk about how the gay rights
01:16:07.480movement has lost its way by being too nice to trans people yeah so i don't know if we can go
01:16:15.560through all of this, but I said earlier that basically there are positions that I think
01:16:22.340one can assume or hope or infer that Sullivan took in good faith 30, 40 years ago. It's a little
01:16:31.500less possible to credit him with that now. And this essay really suffers from that. There's a
01:16:38.620really fascinating version of history here like where you're just like not only do i know that's
01:16:46.060not true i know it not even on the basis of being a gender scholar i know it for having lived through
01:16:51.620it i know it from having been a gay man during that time and what's more i know sullivan knows
01:16:57.640it too so it's like why would you tell a just so story it's a matter of public record that this is
01:17:03.080not true one being for instance the very premise of the article which is that there's this big
01:17:08.160change. The gay rights movement fought for marriage, and now this new breed of activists
01:17:15.160has taken over, including Chase Strangio, who are hijacking it and driving it into a ditch.0.71
01:17:20.700And it's like, yes, you, Andrew Sullivan, may have put gay marriage first on the agenda in 1989,
01:17:26.580but the people who brought it home were these very people that you're now attacking for allegedly
01:17:31.460going crazy, right? Or he goes on and on about like, well, you know, we were very, very respectful.
01:17:37.640we were not radical i was there for all this shit we were called radical for this stuff too0.92
01:17:43.100and there is a long tradition of deliberate provocation and smears from the right of0.96
01:17:50.520radicalism and quite a bit of like deliberate avowed proud radicalism in the gay rights history
01:17:56.700which he has to raise to tell as you say this just so story a very polite very incrementalist0.55
01:18:03.180very low-expectation liberals getting their wedding registries.
01:18:08.740And we have to add that, of course, the thing that Chase had just argued before the Supreme0.89
01:18:13.540Court is exactly the kind of incrementalist and, hey, let's just defend our rights shit0.98
01:18:20.100that he's allegedly so in favor of.0.98
01:18:22.660Surely, making decisions about your own body and about your own medical treatment or keeping
01:18:28.620those between you and your doctor would seem to be a pretty straightforwardly like that's not a
01:18:35.060radical demand it's not like everyone should get injected with tea or something like that right
01:18:39.100this is a good point is that the aclu's argument in scrimetti which is the nominal peg for andrew
01:18:45.460sullivan's anti-trans screed was in fact like a very minimalist i'll say libertarian like argument
01:21:46.040It's like, they will just lie about you.1.00
01:21:47.480I mean, the radical feminist lesbian groups
01:21:50.660chased Nambla out as if with brooms, right?1.00
01:21:53.520They were very militant about policing this boundary0.97
01:21:57.780around those who do sexualize children
01:22:00.040and do victimize children, both because it's politically disadvantageous, but also because0.99
01:22:04.280it's fucking wrong to advocate for pedophiles. The radical feminist lesbians, who I think he0.98
01:22:10.220would be very eager to disavow himself, are the ones who, in fact, did police that boundary,0.96
01:22:14.980right? And it didn't work, right? The Anita Bryant-style smear that gay people were out to
01:22:22.280sexually abuse your kids, and therefore you can't allow them to be teachers, to be regular parts0.98
01:22:28.840of public life, was something that this movement got smeared with anyway.
01:22:33.400Maybe let me quote him again here. And here I would invite longtime listeners
01:22:36.840to see whether they can spot the problem with this particular line of argumentation.0.86
01:22:43.140Quote, so what did the gender revolutionaries go and do? They focused entirely on children and1.00
01:22:48.160minors, partly because the adult issues have been resolved or closed to it, and partly because true
01:22:53.020cultural revolutions start with the young, meant overhauling the education not only of children
01:22:57.400with gender dysphoria but of every other kid as well so first of the gender revolutionaries did
01:23:06.440not do this we have a i think our second or third episode which lays out that the first thing that
01:23:13.420after after overgefell that the anti-gay right went after was uh bathroom bills right they were
01:23:19.560like we're trying to figure out how to target trans people that failed and that is when they
01:23:24.820decided to pivot to two issues, you know, trans people in sports and gender transition care for
01:23:32.360minors. This is not something that anyone on the gay rights side chose. These are cultural war
01:23:39.900issues handpicked in some case by committee and focus group in order to smear the gay rights
01:23:46.240movement, which is exactly what's happening now, which Sullivan in some bizarre way seems to
01:23:50.900almost recognize. What is undoing the advances that he celebrates is the fact that they found
01:23:57.680this kind of Archimedean point from which to attack these newly won rites. But he thinks it's
01:24:03.540like, oh, the mistake was that they went after the children. It's like, no, Andrew, those are lies
01:24:07.980they told about us. And I find it weird that you believe that. I mean, it's a classic Darvo tactic,
01:24:14.120Right. I do feel that studying sexual violence and attempts to reveal it has like unlocked so much of conservative thought for me. Right.
01:24:23.800Because what this is, is casting the victims as the aggressors and casting self-defense, which is what Chase Strangio was doing at the Supreme Court after Tennessee volunteered to pass this trans care ban as a kind of aggression.
01:24:40.960right like your self-defense is in fact an offense against me because my hurting you is neutral and
01:24:47.960you defending yourself is not neutral that is very much a diversion from the mean that Andrew
01:24:54.260Sullivan sees himself as trying to restore yeah so first off we have this very strange kind of
01:25:00.560way in which history is just manhandled in this essay like history he knows better and I think
01:25:06.840you're right i think you said at the very beginning you made the joke that like the right never acts
01:25:11.860it only reacts and that's like exactly what's happening here he's like anti-gay people are just0.95
01:25:16.960acted upon right that is all that's happening here and the mistakes really are all coming from gay
01:25:22.740people andrew sullivan reminds me of that it's a meme but it's a still from a simpsons video
01:25:27.000where like mrs lovegood the pastor's wife is screaming won't somebody please think of the
01:25:33.920children and he's like oh won't somebody please think of the children won't somebody please think
01:25:42.020of the homophobes like these people who are just trying to be bigots in peace are so affronted by
01:25:49.300your aggressive existence and they need defending and it's like no actually the existence of trans0.83
01:25:54.560children or of trans adults or of gay adults is not an act of aggression towards these people0.97
01:26:01.540It's just that they don't want to share the world with us.1.00
01:26:04.440The second thing that I think listeners who've read this article may not have noticed is the way history and repression sort of comes back in funny ways.
01:26:15.400You may have found it strange that Andrew Sullivan is only second to J.K. Rowling in somehow being obsessed with trans kids being really gay kids that have been misled, right?0.80
01:27:48.840in this way that is emphatically not more comforting.
01:27:52.140i don't know i don't know what like this guy's just never listened to a woman talk about her
01:27:56.940experience in his life so his example for this is basically oh when i first was coming out as gay
01:28:02.760like sometimes oh female friends would be like hey have you considered whether maybe you're a
01:28:07.080girl really like did that really happen i'm sure someone said that to me at some point okay having
01:28:12.440gone through puberty as a gay boy like i understand what not fulfilling gendered expectation looks
01:28:20.040like from what my friends describe gender dysphoria to be like it is nothing like that and yeah i when
01:28:26.220they describe it to me it's like someone describing migraines that i don't have right like you clearly
01:28:30.060are having a bodily experience that is nothing like mine which andrew sullivan would know if
01:28:35.980the people that he met and whose stories apparently break his heart he'd actually listen to like it
01:28:40.720seems very very strange but why am i saying that this is history sneaking up in ways that he sort
01:28:47.140can't control because i think you're absolutely right this war on gay kids for him is a war on
01:28:53.180gay boys why is he so worried about this well he thinks i think of the transgender identity0.64
01:28:59.200as a genocide of gay men like himself it's like okay it's just aids again like you're repeating0.98
01:29:06.280your 1990s traumas which are real to be clear like under this guise and you just cannot see0.96
01:29:12.720that reality really doesn't conform to what you're imposing on it here you're just you are
01:29:20.260in this repetition compulsion which i find in its own way under smoothing but like you gotta
01:29:26.020move past it bud it's just not it's it's you know it's not that what's that line from the big
01:29:31.480lebowski face it andrew there is just no connection i can see that one connection which might be that
01:29:37.160Like one reason it might seem to Andrew Sullivan, like there are suddenly all of these trans teenagers and children when there are comparatively fewer trans people in his own generation, is that a lot of the trans women particularly of his generation died of AIDS, right?
01:29:55.180There is a demographic after effect of the AIDS crisis where, you know, there are indeed fewer gay men of that generation than there used to be.
01:30:05.440You can see how it gets displaced, the grief, the anger.
01:30:11.640But now he's just, he's hurting people who don't deserve it and their children.
01:30:14.860I just will never understand this impulse.
01:30:17.820The other thing we should mention is that this umbrella of identities that has been able to agree on very little over the last 40 years emerges yet again,
01:30:31.960as always in Andrew Sullivan, as this all-powerful repressive force, right? By drift,
01:30:39.600activist extremism, a social media bubble, and suppression of... This is how he thinks
01:30:46.540the gay rights movement went so wrong. He thinks they're illiberal because they have a different
01:30:52.220opinion from Andrew Sullivan. And this is a misperception he's so predisposed to at this
01:30:56.420point, he doesn't even notice it as such anymore. Like, it's weird to think that the village voice
01:31:01.020is illiberal. For like, outing people, like, you may not like outing. It's not like Stalinism. It
01:31:06.500just isn't. You may not have agreed with what Susan Sontag wrote after 9-11. It's not Stalinism.
01:31:12.440It just isn't. And you may not like neopronouns. But guess what, bud? It's not Stalinism. It just
01:31:20.240isn't. Maybe it's Maoism or the Dreyfus Affair. Oh, yeah. Or possibly McCarthyism. It is McCarthyism
01:31:28.320if you think about it from the left yeah i know that this is a conservative tendency that predates
01:31:35.180it but it does also strike me as among other things another way that the internet has broken
01:31:39.720people's brains right it's like now you can see people who disagree with you and it is harder to
01:31:46.240tell what is an opinion other people have that are different from yours that you know you just
01:31:52.780get to ignore and go about your day with versus what is actually a suffocating consent. And I
01:31:58.200think that, you know, Andrew Sullivan is really online. I think that's one of several problems
01:32:05.600with this guy's thinking. So he makes the move, what, in 2020 to the Daily Dish, his Substack
01:32:12.000newsletter. And, you know, I have a Substack. If people want to subscribe to my Substack,
01:32:17.420they can totally do that. I don't know if you found Substack to be very good for your thinking.
01:32:22.120I found it a good outlet for certain kinds of thinking.
01:32:24.800I've been very careful to keep some of my thinking off of Substack.
01:32:27.780There is something where your thought processes will fit the space you give it,