From Free Life, Issue 27, September 1997
ISSN: 0260 5112

The theme of this book is that the gay community has stereotyped itself and has imposed a conformity upon its members that stifles their development and forces them to suppress aspects of themselves that do not fit the approved model of the gay lifestyle. In particular, gays or lesbians who admit to sexual attraction to a member of the opposite sex risk being shunned by their gay/lesbian friends. Each of the authors represented here is a gay or a lesbian who rejects the narrow confines of the stereotype and the bigotry that it breeds.

To a very large extent, this is a book written by gays for gays. It seems to presuppose a familiarity with the gay scene that non-gays are very unlikely to have. I felt that I was often not fully grasping what was said because I was unable to capture the contextually-implied meanings of the written words (i.e. where the context would be supplied by experience of the gay scene). Nevertheless, I hope that I can convey the general flavour of the book.

In the first paper, Mark Simpson satirises ‘coming out', gay pride and the gay scene in general. John Weir contributes a couple of papers. The first concerns information about HIV. He criticises the spending on health education as ineffective because gays are already fully conversant with the risks, but they still take them; and he cites the case of an AIDS educator who himself indulges in unprotected receptive anal sex. He refers to an increase in HIV infection among young men (especially non-whites) as a ‘second wave' of AIDS; and he blames positive images of HIV-infected men (as in the film Philadelphia) for reducing the fear of AIDS among gays. His second paper is a diatribe against the consumerism of middle-class gays who, he says, demand gay rights because they think that - being middle class - they are entitled to power. He also thinks that these gays are unrepresentative because the majority of ‘gays' are people in heterosexual relationships who have homosexual desires.

Lisa Power makes a plea for tolerance. She refers to surveys which show that around 1 in 10 gays/lesbians admit to having had sex with a person of the opposite sex (usually another lesbian/gay); yet such an admission within the gay community would lead to ostracism from ‘orthodox' gays for whom bisexuality is anathema. Jo Eadie says similar things in more convoluted language and complains that gay society is just as oppressive as the society it opposes. Paul Burston offers a defence of the film Cruising (Al Pacino) against the blanket condemnations it received from gay critics. He gives an intelligent criticism of the tendency among gays to censure any film which they see as presenting a "negative image" of gays.

Toby Manning criticises mainstream gay culture for its obsession with positive images, its righteousness, its uniformity, its penchant for campness and the indiscriminate adulation afforded anything deemed to be gay. Opposed to this monolithic mediocrity he sees an alternative, diverse, queer culture which is ignored by the mainstream. Ironically, his article is replete with the left-wing puritanism that sees making money, or prosperity, as wrong; so there are the customary condemnations of commercialisation, capitalism and (gay) business. The book ends with an unreadable article on butch lesbians by Suzanne Patterson and Anne-Marie Le Blé, followed by a would-be comic dialogue between a couple of transvestites, ‘Judy LaBruce' and ‘Glennda Orgasm' (which I personally found dull and unfunny).

However, the most interesting paper in the set is that contributed by Peter Tatchell, and that is the paper on which I will focus.

Mr Tatchell argues that heterosexual and homosexual are two extremes of a continuum which is populated by a diverse range of bisexualities, and that the vast majority of people fall somewhere or other between the two extremes, experiencing same-sex desire in some form at some time. Real sexual life is a lot more diverse and a lot more fluid than is allowed by the customary exclusive and rigid categories of straight and gay. The only reason this is not obvious is that people are inhibited from exploring their sexuality because of early exposure to prevailing puritanical beliefs and attitudes. Consequently, ‘gay liberation' was a perversion because it still forced people into pigeon-holes. Sexual liberation requires the recognition that we are all ‘queer', each in our different way. It amounts to the liberty to experiment with sexuality so that each of us can find out what suits us best at any particular time. This is seen as threatening by many gays who find security in their current gay identity.

In consequence, equal rights for gays is only a limited, "reformist", goal, though it helps in combating homophobia and so is an important step on the way to sexual liberation. Queer emancipation, on the other hand, dispenses with the old straight/gay dichotomy and "expands erotic boundaries in sex-positive directions" (p.47). Its aims are: reduction of the age of consent to fourteen for everyone; repeal of the puritanical laws against prostitution and pornography; introduction of explicit sex education in schools from primary classes onwards; and consequent diminution of all erotic guilt and repression, gay and straight.

In contradistinction to those who lobbied Parliament for equalisation of the age of consent in 1994, Mr Tatchell maintains that a lower age of consent for gay sex would probably lead to an increase in homosexual behaviour among the young (and that would be a good thing). For while he accepts that sexual orientation appears to become fairly fixed in the first few years of life, he points out that removing the social opprobrium and penalties attached to queer sex will make people more willing to accept and express formerly repressed sexual desires.

I think Mr Tatchell is right. I have been saying some similar things myself for some years, though my concern has been not so much bisexuality as other forms of kinky (or ‘queer') sexuality. But I do have a couple of reservations. First, reduction of the age of consent to fourteen is inappropriate as an aim of sexual liberation: it is just the kind of thing over which sexual liberationists can be expected to disagree (some wanting it lower, some a bit higher). Second, Mr Tatchell seems to be demanding that schools be required to introduce explicit sex education, and he may even want to prescribe what its content should be. That would be wrong. It would be merely replacing one imposed sexual orthodoxy with another one. I think schools should be free to introduce explicit sex education classes at whatever time they judge appropriate, and free to determine the content of those classes. But at the same time parents must be free to choose which schools their children attend. In short, schools should be privatised and deregulated. We will then find many schools doing what we think they should do if we are able to win the battle of ideas. But if we cannot win that battle, then we should not try to impose our views by force (especially since we might eventually discover that our views were mistaken).

What, then, remains of the aims of sexual liberation? I think simply this: getting the state out of our sex lives (roughly, no state interference in the sexual choices of consenting adults, and no state discrimination against people on the grounds of the sexual choices they make); freedom of expression so that people are not prevented from communicating about sex (this is implied by no state interference); and the spread of enlightenment through open discussion, criticism and persuasion, so that the more perceptive among us can encourage the rest to open their minds, to experiment and to discover and fulfil themselves and others.

Finally, there is a problem with Mr Tatchell's paper which I have suppressed so far. This is that, despite his exchange of gay liberation for sexual liberation, he has not entirely shaken off the old class-oppression perspective of Marxist and quasi-Marxist fairy tales (pardon the pun). Thus he still uses collectivist expressions like "society has determined that..." (p.44) and phrases of doubtful meaning like "culturally constructed" (p.42); he still speaks of "heterosexual hegemony" (p.48) and "straight privilege" (p.52); and he says "Homosexuality is thus a categorisation invented by straights to marginalise and constrain queer love within an identifiable, demonised minority" (p.44), and that "Heterosexuals are the ones who initiated the them-and-us conflict, and who continue to perpetuate it with their enforcement of homophobic intolerance" (p.48-49). But this kind of talk does not square with his ‘queer' theorising according to which almost all of us are in some way bisexual, and the problem is not "heterosexuals" but puritans. Indeed, given that many of the worst homophobes appear to be people who are actively repressing their own homosexual desires, it would seem that the persecutors of queers are not heterosexuals but, rather, queers who cannot admit that they are queer!

Danny Frederick