Dan Savage and hypocrisy within the gay rights movement

I'm in favor, as a matter of first principles, of gay rights. I think it's laughable to suggest that the government should have the ability to restrict who its citizens can have sex with, and who they can enter into the legal contract of marriage with. But I frequently find myself at odds with the public face of the gay rights movement, to the extent that such a thing exists, and I have a profound discomfort with what I perceive as common attitudes within gay culture.

Consider Dan Savage.

This is, I think, a perfectly common attitude among gay men. It certainly is prevalent among the gay men I know. I find it entirely offensive, and deeply tragic in the context of the gay rights movement. Gay people have been fighting for the right to self-define, for decades. They are fighting for the right to say "This is who I am. This is my identity. And I have the right to behave in whatever manner I see fit, given my self-identification." Now, sadly, gay men have fallen into the habit of declaring themselves the arbiters of everyone else's sexuality. Megan Carpentier at Jezebel ably points out the frankly bizarre tension between Savage's acceptance of less common sexual practices and exclusionary rhetoric towards bisexuals.

The identification of gay rights solely with a physiological basis for homosexuality is, as I've alluded to in the past, a major mistake for the movement. The argument goes something like "He/She can't help being gay. Therefore they should have the right to have sex with members of the opposite sex." This is at once insulting, self-defeating, and an impediment to the kind of self-determination that used to be a hallmark of the gay rights movement. To begin with, the evidence that homosexuality has an identifiable physiological origin is not nearly as strong as activists like Savage make it out to be. The evidence that it is purely genetic is even less strong; in fact it is nearly nonexistent at this point. I think it is very likely that homosexuality is at least partially physiologically determined, and I find it likely that there is at least some degree of genetic predisposition to homosexual behavior. But the science is nothing close to complete or compelling. This kind of political pressure on science never produces good science and rarely produces sound public policy.

Let's say for the sake of argument, though, that there is some sort of purely physiological basis for homosexuality, and even that it is a purely genetic phenomenon. What are the consequences for public policy? Say you had a test for homosexuality. If the right to engage in homosexual sex follows purely from the fact that someone has physiological biases towards performing that sex, there is no reason that the state shouldn't deny people who don't have the gene the right to have gay sex. Right? If we develop such a test, should we go around and hand out gay and straight cards to people based on the test results, and criminalize their having sex with members of the "wrong" gender? That certainly isn't sexual freedom or the right to self-determine. But it follows perfectly from Savage's conception of the world, where people-- and in particular, gay men-- are perfectly free to pronounce the truth of another person's life and put up their ugly, constraining wall.

The fallacy of the superior morality of the most oppressed is seen often in discussions of gay culture. Because gay men and women are oppressed, there tends to be excuses made for aspects of gay culture that we might otherwise find distasteful. Sex in public, for example, absolutely is a prevalent feature of certain subsets of gay culture. But it's wrong; people shouldn't have sex in public. It violates some of our basic notions of the expectations of living in a community. The Larry Craig incident wasn't distasteful because Craig was (allegedly) soliciting gay sex. It was distasteful because he was soliciting public sex. That's illegal, and it's wrong, as people don't have the right to engage in sexual activity in public space. But I remember a great deal of apologetics concerning his actions, and I think it's because Craig is perceived as gay, and people don't want to be seen as being critical of gay culture.

This is similarly true for comments like Dan Savage's. Telling another person how they feel, and what is legitimate for them to feel, is an act of incredible intellectual violence. Savage, I'm sure, imagines himself as both a freedom fighter and a truth teller. But attempting to peer into the mind of others undercuts both freedom and the truth. No one can tell another what they really feel, and it is both foolish and deeply unfair to try. Savage's comments are acts of simple bitchiness, the common kind of cruelty and arrogance that is constantly excused when it comes from gay men, again because it's "a part of gay culture". This is the worst kind of multicultural excess, the absolute nadir of acceptance culture: the refusal to take a principled stand against immoral or callous behavior. Gay men have no special insight into the hearts and minds of others, and they have no special privilege to engage in petty and and inhumane behavior.

Call Savage for what he is: a bigot. He wants certain people to have the right to self-identify, but denies that right to bisexuals. He engages in the rhetoric of freedom and personal liberty but puts up a wall between certain people and their preferred self-definition. People know how the feel and know who they desire. We have no right to tell them either what other consenting adults they are permitted to have sex with, and we equally have no right to tell them what their own heart feels. Savage is utterly identical, in this situation, to the mother insisting to her son that he isn't gay, or the preacher who is certain he can cure another of their mistaken notion of their own homosexuality. The only difference is that Savage's bigotry is protected by precisely the mechanisms of tolerance that should be condemning him with full throat.

Update: I don't think that Savage favors restricting people's right to have sex with whomever. But I think that sort of thing is a natural consequence of his kind of restrictive feelings.

Update II: Noah Millman asks some very interesting questions in the comments.

I can only, in the face of these questions, turn again to a philosophy that has guided me well in the past: to judge people based on their actions. That may seem contradictory to my preference for allowing people to self-define. But I think that judging people by what they do both empowers them to make the truth of their own life, and also has certain advantages as a method for outside observation as well. There's a great elegance to this basic framework, as it neatly excises the need for the always tangled and often authoritarian impulse to declare what others true motivations are. There's been a lot of discussion in the blogosphere lately about hidden racism or hidden racial codes and messages. I think privileging behavior helps to deflate claims that someone is secretly racist or crypto racist.

Of course, I've failed in the past to equitably apply my philosophy. I can pretty much guarantee that I'll do so again. But I'll keep trying, and hopefully there will be some commenters around to call me on my little hypocrisies.

Is it strange that I should, in a sense, not believe in "a homosexual" or "a heterosexual", but only homosexual or heterosexual acts? Perhaps. It doesn't mean that I don't think people have heterosexual or homosexual longing. It means that I don't have access to their longing, and thus I can't say how they are really feeling. One of the strange aspects of Savage's beliefs is that I could just as easily say that I don't believe he is really homosexual. I have precisely the same evidence that he has than any given self-identified bisexual isn't really bisexual. Of course, Dan Savage talks openly about his own homosexual behaviors. But then people like Savage don't particularly care if bisexuals have sex with members of the opposite sex. We're constantly scolded that someone can routinely have sex with members of the opposite sex and yet really be gay. Couldn't that be true of Savage as well? Couldn't his love for his husband be fraudulent, according to his own world view? Couldn't he secretly hate having sex with his husband? Couldn't he be living a double life? Savage, after all, puts no stock whatsoever into the professed self-identification of bisexuals. Why should I put any stock in his?

Again, what a deeply strange and fundamentally cruel thing this is. No one can open their hearts and minds and reveal their true consciousness to us. When we declare that people don't believe what they claim to, or feel the way we claim to, we trap them in a web of innuendo. Like the fascist government who accuses a citizen of thought crime, we accuse them of something that they cannot possibly disprove. Is this the kind of thinking the gay rights movement, writ large, wants to endorse? I know this is corny, but my favorite encapsulation of what a movement of sexual freedom should be comes from Angels in America, where Belize tells Roy Cohn about his vision of heaven. It's a heaven where people are free, and don't have to submit to others' conceptions of how they have to act or feel. That goes equally for evangelicals declaring homosexual behavior an abomination and for self-identified gay men declaring the limits of sexual freedom.

No homosexuals and heterosexuals, only homosexual acts and heterosexual acts. No racists, only acts of racism. No hypocrites, only acts of hypocrisy. No declaring anyone at an end. Everyone has to remain a process and not a product. That doesn't mean, for example, that you don't punish someone who's guilty of a crime. We can judge his or her acts and punish them accordingly, as a society. What we must not do, though, is to declare him for ever to be of the category criminal.

It's been put to me that this is an impossible way to really live, and that's probably true. I'm sure I'll violate this code myself again and again. But there's no other framework for interpreting other people and their value that I feel comfortable being a part of.