Unsullied
By Truthteller on June 12, 2008 at 2:58 AM in Andrew Sullivan, Barack Obama, Cultist Thugs, GLBT, Obama's Thugs, Obamedia
According to Andrew Sullivan, I am a “poseur,” for I have the temerity to disabuse him of the false notions he and others propagate at the Obama campaign’s behest. It is, to be sure, a mighty presumptuous allegation for old Sully to level. What identity does Andrew Sullivan believe I desire to assume? And how, exactly, have I failed to attain that subject position? Or does Mr. Sully believe I desire to be him?
So I am a poseur in Sully’s warped mind. How can this be? I have not engaged and will not engage in the libidinal economy of unprotected, promiscuous copulation Sully seemingly enjoys. I quote The Nation:
Like many a preacher and politician before him, Andrew Sullivan, the neoconservative gay pundit, was caught with his pants down. The story goes like this: Some time ago, Sullivan, who is HIV positive, took out an anonymous personal ad on a website called Barebackcity.com, which advertises itself as the “one stop source for bareback [i.e., unprotected anal] sex.” He listed himself under the screen name “RawMuscleGlutes,” posted two headless photographs, and solicited bareback sex, preferably (although he did not say only) with other HIV-positive men. He also indicated an interest in “bi-scenes, one-on-ones, three-ways, groups, parties, orgies and gang bangs,” but not in “fats and fems.”
But I will not disparage those who do, even if their online pseudonyms are unimaginative compound barbarisms such as “RawMuscleGlutes.” And I am also not one to disavow and degrade the feminine and the obese with the phrase “[n]o fats or fems.” For I do not fear and loathe the feminine excess that lies within. Sully, however, does and will, even if this entails repudiating other aspects of his identity he necessarily ignores in order to maintain his phantasmatic matrix of subjectivity. I quote The Nation again:
Sullivan was the editor of The New Republic during its most reactionary days, the writer who from his perch of smug privilege announced the end of the AIDS epidemic in a 1996 New York Times Magazine article, a proclamation that has proved fatally premature for most of the world. He has made a career out of disparaging gay activists for their radical “liberationist” agenda, attacked gay male culture for its “libidinal pathology” and queer politics for its “psychological violence.” As the self-appointed champion of gay marriage, fidelity and “normal” homosexuals, Sullivan has railed against the “sexual pathologies that plague homosexuals,” lambasted the “cartoonish, buffoonish similarity” of gay male bodies made in “manic muscle factories” and analogized unprotected oral sex with murder. As recently as last month, he criticized Bill Clinton for his “sexual recklessness” and “oblivious, careening narcissism.”
My rectum, thankfully, is not a grave, and I am proud my sanctimonious pronouncements did not contribute to the discourse against which Leo Bersani and others had to rail during the height of the AIDS epidemic. I also know I would never reinscribe tropes of normativity in an attempt to derail modernist queerness, as I believe all heteronormative notions of identity and sexuality should be dismantled with a vengeance. Sully, on the other hand, views me as one of those queers who is waging “psychological warfare,” which renders his decision to refer to me as a poseur all the more curious. Allow me to be didactic: Sully is reactionary and gay, and I am radical and queer, critically queer, and we not coincidentally support different candidates for President. I am not Sully’s poseur, and I am not a moralist who criticizes a President for enjoying fellatio before spinning on my heels and engaging in raw sex with multiple men in a tryst I arranged online. Political analysis for me is not one grand reaction formation.
But let us focus on ideology and not on sexual practices, however mutually constitutive the two may be. Similar to other neoconservatives, Sully is attempting to shed the postmodern nostalgia that lined his pockets during the 1990s as he leaps headlong onto the lucrative Obama bandwagon. Or perhaps the neoconservative postmodernism of Sully has been retained, for his candidate, Barack Obama, seems to uphold a similar ideology. How else does one explain Francis Fukuyama’s endorsement of Barack Obama? Fukuyama, a neoconservative historian and panegyrist of neoliberal global hegemony, impetuously pronounced the “End of History” in 1989, just as Obama has recklessly posited “postpartisanship” and an end to the “excesses of the 1960s and 1970s” in his attempt to complete Reagan’s project of liquidating the modernist legacy of FDR in the name of a politics that is mobilized around nothing but a manufactured commodity cum politician. Postpartisan, posthistorical, postmodern, postracial: differences will be cast aside in the name of a vaguely defined platform devoid of substance and devoid of any real social goals and aspirations. But at least this allows neoconservatives such as Sully, Fukuyama and others to atone for their past Republican sins. Wealthy postpartisans desire unity, I guess, but their insidious unity is at the expense of those who rely on the modernist project of social equality in order to obtain resources to which they have been denied access.
Resolutely modernist, resolutely queer, resolutely committed to Civil Rights, resolutely committed to the completion of FDR’s social project, I remain unsullied with Sully’s sexual and ideological baggage. I am, in other words, anything but Sully’s “poseur.” My modernist and Democratic convictions have remained and will remain consistent, while neoconservatives and former Republicans such as Andrew Sullivan will jettison any and all principles they once upheld in order to become Barack Obama’s postmodern, postpartisan, postpolitical prostitutes. Let us hope Sully and others will at least use prophylactics as they render their bodies and what is left of their minds into so many fungible objects to be used and abused post haste by the highest bidders. Sully can call me a poseur, and he can refer to my prose as “toxic,” but at least I and others know that my mind and body are clean, not diseased and certainly not meretricious.
by Ronald Scott
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