A Place at the Table. The Gay Individual in American Society.

"The love that dare not speak its name." In the age of Oprah, can there be anything that remains unspoken? Bruce Bawer's earnest effort to speak for homosexuality ultimately demonstrates the frustration-perhaps the inevitable frustration--of the task. As Bawer notes, "homosexual" sounds too clinical, "gay" seems to be a political statement. "Queer" is a term of opprobrium--unless it is Queer Nation parading Gay Pride. And, if "homophobia" is the opponent, the nature of the fear remains unspecified.

I raise these rather superficial naming issues because I have no great faith that we have a current public language to discuss homosexuality in terms which finally illuminate. (I am not much more optimistic about discussing sexuality in general; homosexuality is just a particularly vexing matter.) My lack of confidence in reaching rational discourse and sexual wisdom is made more profound by the quality of Bruce Bawer's effort. A Place at the Table is a balanced, nonpolemic case for full acceptance of homosexuality by society. It is not a case for simple tolerance; Bawer, a political conservative and practicing Christian, hopes for the institutionalization of stable homosexual partnerships in marriages recognized by church and state. Homosexual marriage is seen as a check on the morally destructive excesses of the subculture of bars, bathhouses, and one-night stands that is often defined and championed as the definitive gay "life-style." A Place at the Table is unusual in the catalogue of commentaries on homosexuality in condemning not only "homophobia," but also the radical sexual politics of what Bawer calls the "gay subculture."

Because of the sobriety of Bawer's book and the obvious anguish from which it is written, it deserves a more complex answer than a short review allows. However, there are some deep issues that simply must be addressed in any discussion of sexual life. The most salient for Bawer's argument is choice. It is crucial to most arguments for tolerance or acceptance of homosexuality that sexual orientation is given, not chosen. Bawer restates this claim repeatedly:

One can approve or disapprove of somebody's actions, opinions, beliefs; but it is meaningless to speak of approving or disapproving of another's innate characteristics. To say that someone approves or disapproves of somebody's homosexuality is comparable to saying that one approves or disapproves of somebody's baldness or tallness.

There are two crucial questions to be raised: Is homosexuality genetically innate (like tallness) and, even if it is genetically innate, does that necessarily remove it from evaluation?

The claim that sexual identity occurs "by nature" is often stated; it is a mainstay of conservative heterosexual critiques of homosexuality and homosexual apologists. To critics, heterosexuality is by nature, homosexuality is "unnatural" and perverse. Gay apologists accept the general point about "nature" but claim that homosexuality is also by nature--maybe even from a homosexual gene. I find the view that sexual orientation is "natural" unpersuasive. Bawer offers no real "proof" that homosexuality is "by nature," rather he insists that others respect the feeling of homosexuals that their sexual direction is given, a necessary compulsion.

I have no doubt that many homosexuals feel that their sexual direction is a "natural" compulsion, but such a claim seems to fly in the face of the manifest plasticity of human behavior. Humans have been properly characterized as the most sexual of all animals because of the detachment of our sexual drives from the periodic biologic triggers which dominate the animal kingdom. We have a repertoire of sexual fashions, fantasies, and fetishes that wildly transcends nature's rather restrictive procreative interests. It seems to me that Freud was basically correct in defining human sexuality as "'polymorphous." Sexual orientation is one of the complex ways in which the human spirit attempts to deal with the messy confusion of being in a body.

If Freud's polymorphous view is correct, does this mean that mature homosexuals like Bruce Bawer could be/should be urged to "choose" the socially dominant/morally correct(?) heterosexual orientation? Probably not. If homosexuality is not "first nature," one suspects that in many cases it is "second nature": a habit of being-in-a-body that is as compulsive in its way as a genetic urge. If one is a critic of homosexuality, one might liken it to an "addiction"--a deeply ingrained habit which may be near impossible to change. If one is a defender (and not committed to the "by nature" view), it might be likened to a "call," a sort of sexual vocation. (Bawer notes that "coming out" stories in the gay community read much like Christian conversion tales. Being "called" conveys the sense of inescapable destiny claimed by homosexuals.)

I am not happy with either "addiction" or "vocation." Addiction sounds too destructive to comprehend committed and loving homosexual unions. "Vocation" may be better, but to be usable one would need an extensive discussion of the vocation of sexuality in general. To what are we called in our sexual life? To answer that question one would need a phenomenology of sexual response and interaction that is largely unavailable.

Let me turn to the second salient claim. Suppose one admits that homosexuality is natural, first nature, in the genes--what does that prove? I start from a position of "radical freedom": nothing in nature comes with a value label pro or con or neutral. Human beings have to decide how to value what nature offers. As Adam names the beasts of Paradise, so we get to name the beasts of our psyche and natural endowment. No matter how fixed and inescapable the facts of nature, we may choose a life-stance which accepts, rejects, or ignores the "given." Dylan Thomas urges his dying father to "rage against the dying of the light." If someone considers such advice "irrational," it is because he/she has placed death in the neutral category: a fact of life to be ignored, carpe diem.

I submit, then, that even if sexual direction is a natural endowment, that fact alone fails to settle ultimate value. The argument requires an elaborate middle term justifying our human ways with sexuality. Such an argument, note, applies equally to a supposed heterosexual "natural" tendency. It should not come as a surprise to Christians and Buddhists that free sexual activity is not necessarily regarded as necessary or the "best" choice in life. If celibacy is a morally viable option, it cannot be the case that sexual expression of any sort is a necessary condition of health and the good life. It is at least theoretically possible, then, to regard sexuality (either kind) as a natural curse to be transcended. As ancient Cephalus says to Socrates in the Republic, age has finally freed him from that raging beast.

Celibacy or even moderate sexual restraint is not currently fashionable; an active sex life of personal choice is advised on all sides as the key to happiness--often as the only happiness. Maybe so, but one does long for some deeper justification of this pop-cultural claim than is articulated on the talk-show circuit. One of the virtues (in my mind, at least) of Bawer's critique of the homosexual subculture is his rejection of the slogan "Everything I do is gay"--as if sexuality were the sole key to life and value.

I have, however, some sympathy for subculture apologists who want to move homosexuality from the neutral-by-nature to the chosen-by-culture category. I don't agree with the culture that they advocate, but at least they want to insist that this sexual "vocation" has a valuational perspective. Bawer quotes (unfavorably) Donna Minkowitz's claim that gay culture "threaten[s] the family, male domination, and the Calvinist ethic of work and grimness that has paralyzed most Americans' search for pleasure." She goes on to agree with Pat Buchanan that the gay rights movement is a "cultural war for the soul of America."

Minkowitz takes the issue of "choice" to the proper place. I suspect that many adult homosexuals have no real "choice" about their sexual direction; it is at least second nature to them and it is not clear that a committed "monogamous" homosexual relation is such a dire social spectacle that it cannot be tolerated and even valued. The choice issue is not with individuals, it is with the culture and social institutions.

Let us suppose that the issue for the culture is one of sexual vocation. To what are our children to be called in their sexual life? As with all life's large and lesser callings, the culture and its institutional structures will offer counsel and clues. Assume for the sake of argument that sexual orientation emerges from and within culture out of the polymorphous urges of our basic biology: should there be cultural cues commending one or the other sexual orientation and/or sexual life style? Unless one is convinced, as Bawer seems to be, that there is an absolute dichotomy between the born homosexual and the heterosexual, it would seem an appropriate question for parents to address in forming the sexual habits of their children. To be sure, the origins of sexual orientation are obscure, but if one knew the pedagogy of sexual habituation, are there reasons for pursuing heterosexual habits or do they lead inevitably to Minkowitz's "sad" relationships?

To be sure, that is a big "if" in the above argument. Sex and child rearing are muddled enough that children may emerge homosexual no matter what. Nevertheless, whatever the confused character of child rearing in family, school, and society, it does not seem inappropriate to continue to commend a heterosexual calling to the young. What worries (rational) critics of the gay movement, is the claim that sexual orientation is destined and/or indifferent. Bawer opens his book with an incident in which he observes a teen-ager surreptitiously leafing through gay magazines at a newsstand. He sympathizes with the youngster who, he assumes, must be homosexual and is struggling with how to "come out." My own view is that sexual confusion is at least as common in the young as suppressed homosexuality. Bawer seems committed to canonizing the first curiosity.

Bawer ends his book with a fervent plea for recognizing homosexual marriage. How far can a committed homosexual relation conform to the meaning of marriage? Under the individualistic, contractarian assumptions of modern "marriage," there may be no great problem. If marriage creates a legal space for "couples," sexual orientation may not be important. If one resists homosexual "marriage," it must involve the cultural symbolism of marriage--and the law is, for better or worse, also a cultural symbol. Culture is acquired, what we do not get from nature: the education of each generation. In the sexual acculturation of succeeding generations, are homosexual and heterosexual unions to be regarded as equi-valued?

Several years ago, John Garvey wrote in Commonweal an eloquent defense of celibacy. He pointed out that most of the arguments used to defend this odd life-choice were specious. Celibacy is a kind of fast for a spiritual purpose but it gets defended as if fasting was a way of staying thin. George Bernard Shaw characterized marriage as "the most licentious of all human institutions"; I suppose that might serve as a commendation in the present age. The vow of celibacy--and the vow of marriage-witness to a larger life than can be justified or understood by the individualistic assumptions of contemporary society. I would argue that heterosexual marriage as a cultural institution (not necessarily in its obvious historical flaws and failures) has a special, larger-than-life meaning that cannot be captured even by loving, stable homosexual couples. Heterosexual marriage connects the couple to humanity's longest saga, connects to the family from which every homosexual emerges but to which he does not finally return, connects back as symbol to the ultimate fecundity of nature. Heterosexual marriage as a cultural symbol is larger than a life which is just mine (and thine).

The loving commitment of gay couples, often so poignantly carried forward in selfless devotion to a lover stricken with AIDS, is not to be cast aside as mere perversity and sin. Nevertheless, heterosexuality, I believe, symbolizes a larger, perhaps even a darker and more mysterious scenario of humankind. As Luce Irigary says in An Ethics of Sexual Difference, "man and woman, woman and man are always meeting as though for the first time because they cannot be substituted for one another." It is Adam and Eve again in every age and day. Homosexuality, despite the tragedy of AIDS, may really be "gay"; heterosexuality expresses a wonderment, a tension in difference, that eludes or transcends the simple gaiety of sex. It is in that deep story that our sexualities must be ultimately assessed.

Dennis O'Brien is president of the University of Rochester, and author of God and the New Haven Railway (Beacon).