Andrew Sullivan’s story is undeniably unimaginable. He is an HIV-positive gay Catholic conservative who grew up in a poor, nearly illiterate Irish family in the tiny English village of East Grinstead who went on to become as one of the most powerful writers in America.
Sullivan is really quite dadddylicious... I think I would do him.
I disagree with Sullivan on so very many issues, yet he is one Conservative who not only makes sense a great deal of the time, he also is eloquent, informative, well researched & not locked into any single ideology. He represents so much of the character that the Right Wing Conservatives rail on about: intellectualism, discussion, & truth. Hmmm… maybe he is actually liberal in a bear costume.
Sullivan is the author of 5 books, including The Conservative Soul, which argues that the American right has strayed from "true" conservative thinking. His writing has been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, The Atlantic, The Economist, & New Republic. Sullivan has appeared on political talk shows: Face the Nation, Nightline, Meet the Press, & he is a regular on my much loved- Real Time with the Bill Maher. I am a daily reader of Sullivan's political blog- Daily Dish, which moved from the Atlantic website to Newsweek this spring. Daily Dish is in the top 10 of the most read blogs on the Internet.
Born in Britain, Sullivan moved to the United States in 1984 after studying at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government. After earning masters degree in public administration in 1986, Sullivan went on to write for The New Republic & then became editor in 1990. During his tenure at The New Republic, the magazine won 3 National Magazine Awards for General Excellence, Reporting & Public Interest. After resigning in 1996, Sullivan became a contributing writer & columnist for the New York Times Magazine, a regular contributor to the New York Times Book Review & a weekly columnist for the Sunday Times of London. In the summer of 2000, Sullivan became one of the first mainstream journalists to experiment with blogging, & grew a large following with andrewsullivan.com's Daily Dish. He has blogged independently & for Time.com, & in 2007 Sullivan moved his blog to The Atlantic Online, before the switch to Tina Brown’s site for Newsweek, where he now writes several posts every daily.
As a boy, Sullivan slowly realised that he was gay, yet he had no vocabulary to understand it. He says he didn’t hear the word “gay” while at school. Sullivan: “It’s hard for people to understand now, but there was a total silence about homosexuality. It was unmentioned & unmentionable. When I was 8 years old, I asked his mother if it was true that God really knew everything about you. She said yes. Then I answered: ‘ there’s no hope for me, Mum’”
After years of trying to suppress his sexuality that Sullivan claims: “ I had emotional blockage that really warped my personality”, he allowed himself to fall in love & have sex. On a visit home he finally told his parents he was gay. His mother said: “Oh my god. I’d better make a cup of tea.” His father wept. Sullivan had never seen his father cry before. Sullivan said: “What’s wrong? I’m fine.” His father replied: “No, you don’t understand. I’m crying because of everything you must have been through, & I did nothing to support you.” Sullivan: “It was the most honest expression of love I have ever heard.”
Sullivan’s sideswipes with the liberal gay establishment is easy for me to understand. The gay rights debate has been reshaped in the past 2 decades, much because of Sullivan’s writing. He penned the first major article in America calling for gay people to be given the right to marry, & he was brought to task by other gay people for it. He was shunned by gay rights groups & in gay bars he was reviled & dubbed a “collaborator” & physically attacked. The case was made that he was asking gays to assimilate, act less “gay” & model themselves on straight marriage. Sullivan was opting into the very system gay people wanted to destroy.
Sullivan suggested a radical change for the gay rights movement, from an argument that we are different to the insistence that we are the same as straights. Sullivan published Virtually Normal: An Argument about Homosexuality. The book took the homophobic right & the gay left to task & made the case for absorbing gay people into existing social institutions, especially marriage. Sullivan sees this position as fundamentally conservative & I have to agree with him. I never have understood while the Conservative Right Wing rails against gay people as promiscuous & reckless, & stressing that we can not be married & have families. It has occurred to me that by their very own standards, they should be rejoicing that we want to marry.
When it was discovered that Sullivan was advertising for unprotected sex on a bareback website, his detractors went full tilt with the revelation & spotlighted it as a scandal. Sullivan made it absolutely clear he was HIV positive & only sought other positive sex partners. Sullivan: “It was vile. It was published everywhere, & they sent it to my mother & my bosses. They wanted to destroy me.” His critics claimed that this proved Sullivan’s argument for gay monogamy was a fraud. Sullivan: “I was never a hypocrite. Never… No gay man writing at that time was more open about their sex life than I was.”
Sullivan has taken position that is disarmingly honest: “One side has excoriated promiscuity; the other side has glorified it. & both have, in the process, erased the human being in the middle. I felt, & often still feel, unable to live up to the ideals I really hold.” He even admitted to having unprotected sex with another HIV-positive man. When quarries if there is a part of him that subconsciously wanted to get caught? Sullivan: “No. I wanted to get laid!”
Sullivan intends the next battle is to “turn Christianity against the fundamentalists”. For him, “their certainty is the real blasphemy; their desire to control the lives of others the real heresy; their simple depiction of the Godhead proof positive they do not really understand him. In the Gospels, the men who set themselves up as arbiters of moral correctness are often the furthest from God, he says, while Jesus urges people to see beyond fetishising rules & commandments to their own conscience.”
5 years ago Sullivan met Aaron Tone, a younger actor & artist, & fell in love. In 2007 they were married in Provincetown, at a small ceremony for family & friends. It was where, 15 years before, when gay marriage seemed an impossible dream, Sullivan had composed his tome-Virtually Normal. They live together with their 2 beagles in an apartment in Washington DC.
If you follow my little spot on the Internet, you can surmise by my writing & my age, I am daunted by the prospect, that with the inevitability of Marriage Equality for all people in the USA & as the walls come tumbling down around the argument that gays are the product of the devil & that their unions will be the ruin of civilization, gay people will assimilate to the point of loosing their gayness. This concerns me, as I have grabbed hold of being an outsider as my badge of honor. Even though I am married & live in a city without a gay ghetto (gays are everywhere in Portland), in my heart I want us to still be queer. Ours is a rich & rare history. Even when I find Andrew Sullivan to be wrong, the fieriness of his arguments strengthens & stirs me on to be defiant & different.
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