Theoretical battles.

It's popular on campus, but queer studies is under attack from both the Right and Left

Even the most seasoned gay or lesbian activist might tremble at the mere thought of being interviewed by 60 Minutes Mike Wallace. But for Michael Warner, a professor of English at Rutgers University, it offered a rare nationally televised opportunity to defend "queer studies," a much-maligned academic discipline that explores how homosexuality has helped shape history, literature, and art.

"Wallace tries to get you off-balance by asking really difficult questions," says Warner, 39, the editor of Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory. "So rather than simply defend, I challenged him whenever he said something phobic or ignorant. What the critics try to say is that sexuality should be out-of-bounds as serious academic inquiry. But it has been central to philosophy and literature from Socrates to Freud and after." Still, a clearly skeptical Wallace was unmoved by the argument.

The dramatic exchange between Wallace and Warner--which aired on the March 22 edition of the CBS show--was the most visible skirmish in the ongoing debate over the highly theoretical field. Conservatives have lambasted queer studies programs as an affront to more traditional academic pursuits. Ward Connerly, a member of the University of California board of regents, suggested in June that ethnic studies programs, including gay studies, lack "educational value." Even some gay activists have attacked the validity of parts of queer theory.

First surfacing in the early 1980s, queer studies is an offshoot of cultural studies, which investigates the roots of social and political structures. Queer theorists deconstruct texts and culture to uncover hidden biases and meanings about sexual orientation.

No longer relegated to women's studies and graduate seminars, queer studies is now regularly offered at dozens of colleges and universities. The University of Chicago started a gay studies project in 1997, and the University of Minnesota is setting up a Center for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies. The proliferation of the programs is a sign of their academic attractiveness. Indeed, queer theory has quickly supplanted in popularity and prestige "gay studies," a more traditional study of homosexuality in history and culture that began in the early 1970s, even though queer theory classes are often offered as gay studies courses.

"Gay faculty at colleges and universities across the country are a lot more comfortable asking to teach these courses than they used to be," says Martin Duberman, a distinguished professor of history at the City University of New York and founder of the school's Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies. "And as students are demanding such classes, schools have to respond to their needs as well."

Queer theory relies heavily on the work of gay French philosopher Michel Foucault, who died of complications from AIDS in 1984. Foucault believed that the concept of sexual orientation is a 19th-century invention that has isolated and bred hostility toward sexual minorities. The movement's best-known proponents are Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, a former Duke University English professor and author of Epistemology of the Closet, and Judith Butler, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of Gender Trouble.

Predictably, the proliferation of queer studies courses has become a lightning rod for conservatives. For instance, Sedgwick's essay "Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl" was singled out by journalist Roger Kimball in his book Tenured Radicals, `an attack on campus liberalism. On National Public Radio in October 1997, literary critic Harold Bloom charged that queer studies "helped destroy literary study in all the universities of the Western world so far as I can tell." Even gay conservative Andrew Sullivan has gotten into the act. In a New York Times profile of Sedgwick, he called queer studies "a sect restricted to the academy, which they control as a cartel."

Such blunt assessments, however, may overestimate the field's influence. Despite its sympathy for gay causes, higher education has generally resisted institutionalizing both gay and queer studies. Yale University, for instance, rejected separate offers by gay alumni Larry Kramer, a writer and activist, and David R. Kessler, a San Francisco psychiatrist, to endow gay studies professorships. Kramer termed the rejection an example of "extreme homophobia." This year at Yale, however, the women's studies program has been reorganized as women's and gender studies, and it will offer a gay and lesbian studies major, says Charles Porter, chairman of Yale's Fund for Lesbian and Gay Studies Committee. Some other universities are solidifying gay studies too. The University of Minnesota's center has a mission that includes organizing the gay studies courses that are offered in a variety of departments (at most universities, gay studies courses usually are in several different departments) as well as offering courses of its own. University of Minnesota officials also hope the center eventually will serve as a clearinghouse for research. The City University of New York's Center for Lesbian an(t Gay Studies is the first and still the only university-based gay and lesbian research center in the country.

Even as queer studies attempts to solidify its disparate? ranks, it faces criticism from within. Jeffrey Escoffier, who has taught a course titled "Queer Theory and the Sociological Imagination" at the New School for Social Research in New York City, argues that by supplanting gay studies, queer theory has distanced gay and lesbian academics from their primary audience. "Gay studies, when it first surfaced, addressed the gay community, which meant that its scholarship was stylistically accessible and meant to bolster a sense of identity and community," says Escoffier, author of American Homo: Community and Perversity. "Now queer theorists are mostly speaking to other academics in language that a general audience cannot easily understand. It has lost its political bearings." Duberman agrees: "I was in a study group recently, and we were going over the work of a queer theorist. I asked him what a paragraph meant, and he tried to explain. It could simply have been written in short declarative sentences."

Queer theorists dismiss criticism that they are more interested in the ivory tower than the real world of activism. "Academic queer theory draws its insights from the long history of gay organizing, not the other way around," Warner says. "People are forgetting the political principles of the 1960s and 1970s, and we are trying to remind them of them."

Indeed, Warner has played a leading role in Sex Panic!, a direct-action group organized to combat the closing of sex establishments in New York City and to protest sexual repression in general. He says the experience has taught him that activists can benefit from the insights of queer theorists. "One of the fundamental axioms of queer theory is that people don't conform to singular identities," he says. "That has important applications for AIDS activism, for example. You can't design HIV-prevention campaigns without understanding the diversity of people's sexual behavior."

But Bill Dobbs, a New York City attorney, longtime gay activist, and Sex Panic! member, says because of its preoccupation with theory, queer studies may not lend itself to the nuts and bolts of movement politics. "Activism is about information and knowledge," he says. "And the scholars who in many cases are in a great position to convey it are the least willing to put the time in on the streets necessary to create change." Dobbs suggests that the theorists' career considerations get in the way. "Their institutional affiliation is just too great," he says.

Looking for academics to be on the forefront of street activism may be asking too much, however. Duberman, who taught his first gay studies course in 1973, says that activists and scholars should appreciate the challenges they pose to one another. "Many activists find the challenge to identity politics too threatening to the way they view the world," he says. "The fluidity of sexual desire can be unsealing to anyone." For queer theorists, however, that is precisely the point.