Case to the Contrary.

Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community

by Robert Putnam Simon & Schuster. 544 pages, $26.

While this journal focuses mostly on books with ostensibly gay and lesbian content, it is an increasingly important task to review influential mainstream books for their treatment of sexual politics. One such book is Robert Putnam's widely reviewed Bowling Alone. Putnam's thesis (which goes back to a 1995 article by the same name) concerns the decline of social and communal ties in the U.S. and its larger impact on social life. Scarcely noted by GLBT reviewers thus far, this book is relevant to gay and lesbian politics in contemporary America (and other Western societies).

Putnam is aware of gay issues, and here he is already ahead of mainstream American social science, which has studied race, class, and gender as major social divisions but rarely sexual orientation. Early on in the book Putnam refers to the marginalization of people in the 1950's and 1960's--"the golden age"--based on sexual orientation. And unlike most mainstream political scientists, Putnam knows about Stonewall. Thus it is striking that he totally omits one of the most remarkable examples of the creation of social capital in recent U.S. history, namely the community-based responses to AIDS. Starting with the safe-sex programs that were invented by gay men in San Francisco and Houston in the early 1980's and encompassing the creation of large support and educational organizations, of which Gay Men's Health Crisis was the model, and a huge range of cultural and political responses--the Quilt, ACT-UP, buyers' clubs for drugs, etc.--AIDS generated an extraordinarily broad response. Of course it often involved m any people who were not gay, but this response was essentially the product of a pre-existing sense of shared identity and community of gay people around their sexuality. The very idea of People With AIDS grew directly out of gay liberationist ideas of "coming out" and asserting an otherwise invisible identity.

These developments have been widely chronicled, both in fiction and nonfiction, though they tend to disappear from popular culture. Both Rent and Philadelphia manage to erase the role of gay politics and AIDS service organizations from their stories. American drama prefers the story of the heroic individual to any recognition of collective endeavor. The basic premise of Philadelphia would have been mined had Tom Hanks turned for help to any of the numerous AIDS legal organizations that would have willingly defended him. Nothing in Putnam's book suggests that he would not find the response to AIDS an interesting case, and one worth pursuing. What's most striking is that in the research that went into the making of Bowling Alone, which involved literally hundreds of people--his acknowledgments take up many pages, and, as he admits, tend to refute his own basic premise--no one seems to have drawn attention to the example of mobilization, altruism, and community-building around AIDS.

Does any of this matter? I think it does. The response of gay/lesbian organizations to ADS--and not only in the U.S.--is an important assertion of the continuing viability of community participation. Indeed, it is social capital in action. Not only does it question the thesis of Bowling Alone, and do so in ways possibly more powerful than the examples Putnam cites, it also questions a certain view of gay/lesbian Americans as narcissistic, apolitical, and only interested in partying and sex.

I am a political scientist who's written two books on gay and lesbian politics, and it would be nice to feel that the work I and others have been doing had some impact on mainstream political science. But there's a bigger challenge here, and that is, how do gay and lesbian academicians start influencing mainstream social scientists? Earlier this year, I attended the American Sociological Association annual trade fair, a monstrous gathering spread over two cavernous D.C. hotels. I was speaking at a session that related the theme of the conference--oppression, liberation, and domination--to the particular experience of gay/lesbian movements. In my innocence I had anticipated that there would be nongay people there who'd be interested in this general theme and would attend this session. Instead, the audience was essentially limited to those already associated with the gay/lesbian caucus, so it became a sort of consciousness-raising session.

I strongly believe that the gay response to ADS is one of the major successes of a certain sort of social action over the past two decades, and an important counterexample to the triumph of self-centered individualism that is typified by both Putnam's metaphor and books like Bonfire of the Vanities. It would be gratifying if our achievements were better incorporated into the larger conversation Putnam has unleashed around what he terms in his subtitle "the collapse and revival of American community."

Dennis Altman is the author of The Homosexualization of America (1982).