Andrew Wolcott, as quoted: “Andrew Sullivan attracts so many personal attacks because he makes it so easy… like a bad tenor begging to be pelted with fresh produce.”
What he calls “personal attacks,” Sullivan and I would call “fisking.” I don’t do politics, but this isn’t politics, it’s culture. Let’s get going, shall we?
“Assimilation and Its Meaning: The End of Gay Culture,” The New Republic (do a BugMeNot to bypass subscription gate):
Slowly but unmistakably, gay culture is ending…. On the streets of the big cities, on university campuses, in the suburbs where gay couples have settled, and in the entrails of the Internet.
Where Sullivan trolls for guys to shoot something up his entrails?
Who can forget MilkyLoads? And were you aware that Andrew Sullivan had a Friendster ad? And did you know he still does? Yes, of course, what kind of loser still uses Friendster? When I learned of it in ’03, I made a tagged accessible PDF which you may read for review purposes. (I added the first page of his current ad.)
[L]ook at bar life. For a very long time, the fundamental social institution for gay men was the gay bar…. But the Internet dealt them a body-blow [typical Sullivan hyphenation sic ]. If you are merely looking for sex or a date, the Web is now the first stop for most gay men.
Like Andrew Sullivan.
In fact, it is beginning to dawn on many that the very concept of gay culture may one day disappear altogether. By that, I do not mean that homosexual men and lesbians will not exist – or that they won’t create a community of sorts and a culture that sets them in some ways apart.
In other words, gay culture (a community “of sorts” and “a culture that sets them in some ways apart”) actually will not “disappear altogether.” This simple paragraph tells you everything you need to know about Sullivan, who can say one thing and its opposite in the same breath, then turn around and decry you for picking the wrong one of those options and supporting it yourself.
Most of the older male generation was dead or exhausted; and so it was only natural, perhaps, that the next generation of leaders tended to be lesbian – running the major gay political groups and magazines.
Actually, dominating them. It’s always seen as dangerous to hire a gay man to run a gay organization because gay men are obviously sexist, plus they’re men, and gay-male sex creeps out everybody but other fags. Whereas lesbians people can kind of get into.
Rex Wockner wrote about this in four different articles:
(Try looking at this in a way you find more palatable. If qualified people with disabilities keep applying for jobs but never get hired, is there something else going on?)
Lesbians also pioneered a new baby boom, with more lesbian couples adopting or having children.
Twice as many as gay men, but it’s not as though we aren’t doing it. This seems like reiterating a stereotype to me (“gay” parents are lesbian parents).
But the offspring of such leading Republican lights as Dick Cheney, Alan Keyes, and Phyllis Schlafly are all openly gay. So is the spokesman for the most anti-gay senator in Congress, Rick Santorum.
It’s not like it could be prevented, or that political affiliation of one’s parents has anything to do with it. One does not choose one’s parents. Additionally, aren’t half these people flat-out turncoats, rather like Sullivan, who not only left his country of birth but voted for Kerry?
A gay child born today will grow up knowing that, in many parts of the world and in parts of the United States, gay couples can get married just as their parents did.
In a part of the United States. What happens if the gay child’s parents are also gay and married already? Sully seems to assume every gay child has straight parents (actually, parents plural) and lives in a nation where gays have fewer rights and responsibilities than straights, like the United States.
[Y]oung gay kids look and sound increasingly like young straight kids.
You’ve got to be kidding. Twinks have the worst gay accents of all! This seems like a projected fantasy (Sullivan is prone to those): Big, tough, bruiser teenage boys can be gay too. They always could be. But gay boys are no less likely now to turn out nelly, neurasthenic, and waiflike. I see no change at all in how gay teens look or sound.
As gay men have become less defensive about their masculinity, their expression of it has become subtler. There is still a pronounced muscle and gym culture,
of which Sullivan, an avid bodybuilder, is a part.
Their concept of what it means to be gay is very different than that of the obsessive gym-rats [typical Sullivan hyphenation sic ] with torsos shaved of every stray hair.
Sullivan’s difference is he doesn’t shave.