Talk of the Town - More on Andrew Sullivan January 23 2002

Two weeks ago, I wrote a column about gay pundit Andrew Sullivan's strange fundamentalism, focusing on the way his dogmatic insistence that homosexuality be "normalized" according to his own standards parallels his insistence that people who don't share his political positions regarding Islam and the Middle East are un-American.

As part of that column, I disclosed that I was the primary source in last year's scandal in which Sullivan — who has scolded gay men for their promiscuity for more than a decade — was revealed to be aggressively advertising for unprotected anal sex on a public Internet site, even though he is HIV-positive.

Several Internet sites popular with journalists picked up the column. It also was linked to Jim Romenesko's column on poynter.org. The latter, which often features debate about ethics and journalism, was the main locus of discussion about the reporting of last year's scandal, which was broken in print by Mike Signorile. Much of the debate centered on the question of Signorile's not identifying his sources — namely me.

Since that column was printed, I've received at least 200 e-mails, and all but three have been mainly positive. Many raised the same questions, which I'm taking the space to answer here.

Why did you decide to reopen this issue?

I don't think the issue — Sullivan's fundamentalism — has ever been closed. On the same day my column was printed, salon.com featured an amazingly distorted essay by Sullivan in which he basically blames Bill Clinton for Sept. 11. I was stunned that Salon ran the essay, especially after editor David Talbot wrote a piece critical of Sullivan's paranoid grandstanding a few months earlier.

Salon superficially redeemed itself a few days later by running a reply by Joe Conason, who exposed Sullivan's outright factual misrepresentations.

The point is that the Sullivan story — in its largest sense — demonstrates the death of ethics in journalism. It is dubious enough that Salon conflates reporting and commentary and probably excuses its lack of fact checking on the argument that it's printing opinion. More disturbing is that, even after dissing Sullivan, Salon gave him a platform to continue his grotesque prevarications, demonstrating that sound and fury matter more than good reporting and thoughtful commentary. Need more proof? Conason's reply fell off the contents pages after a few days, while Sullivan's story continues to get hyped.

Wasn't it an invasion of Andrew Sullivan's privacy when Mike Signorile, on the basis of information you gave him, printed a story about his sex life?

If reporting Jimmy Swaggart's play with prostitutes or Eddie Murphy's run-ins with transvestites was an invasion of privacy, then yes. But the fact is that Sullivan, like Swaggart and Murphy, have made their careers as moral arbiters.

Put aside the issue of homosexuality. Sullivan has remained utterly obsessed with Bill Clinton's sex life, even reporting allegations that the former president was "inappropriate" with a young waitress in a restaurant in the U.K. months after he left office — and, weirder still, during the very week that the allegations about Sullivan appeared. He wrote, too, that Jesse Jackson should disappear from politics because of the revelations that he'd fathered a child outside his marriage. Yet the arbiter claims a right of privacy for himself.

I don't bother myself with the question of hypocrisy in this matter. All of us behave in ways we wish we didn't. Sullivan has written in his books that he has a taste for promiscuous sex. But that — like the preacher who admits in a sermon that he's stolen a cookie — is just a way of bolstering his moralism.

I always remind myself of that statement by Paul Veyne: "You may know fraud by the warmth it exudes." The fraud here, as I wrote earlier, is not simple hypocrisy, but the absolute refusal to question a philosophy that dogmatizes, moralizes and exempts its advocates from its practice. It virtually raises them to the level of those members of European royalty who send the little people to church while they preserve for themselves the pleasure of perversity so inherent to sex.

What's wrong with "normalizing" homosexuality?

It's a fantasy of media. Homosexual desire by its nature is subversive, because it is a minority expression. There have been many cultures in which it's accepted, but none in which it hasn't been considered rather outre.

In his book, Virtually Normal, Sullivan crystallized the agenda of assimilating homosexuality into the mainstream — normalizing it — by disappearing its outre expressions. By subscribing to that, we render every gay young person who feels "different" a freak in his own community's eyes. Last week, Sullivan opposed the proposal to begin a gay television network because, he weirdly argues, it will counter the assimilation of gay people into mainstream media.

You said in your column that you didn't like the way the story turned into a barebacking report. Why?

For the same reason I think Swaggart's sin is, in the larger picture, unimportant — and probably inevitable. I think dwelling on it is a way of avoiding necessary questioning of his brand of Christianity. I came to a disappointing realization during this scandal: Most people were angry that Sullivan fell not because they don't share his vision, but because they do and hated that he didn't live up to it. It occurs to very few people (including those who reported the affair) that it's the philosophy — not the sexual practice, bad as it is — that is the main problem.??