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BEYOND QUEER: CHALLENGING GAY LEFT ORTHODOXY, Bruce Bawer, ed. The Free Press, 1996. 304 pp., $25.
Gay rights parades, those annual celebrations of the 1969 Stonewall riot, are festivals of the shocking. In cities across the land, Dykes on Bikes, looking for all the world like Hell's Angels, roar by on souped-up Harleys. Elaborate floats carry flocks of perfectly primped, besequined young men, queens for a day. And someone usually parades wearing only a smile.
Bruce Bawer despises those parades and the hypersexualized image of gayness that they convey. Pride days do not show his gayness, and amid the continuing struggle for tolerance they offer a "bonanza for the [intolerant] religious right." In A Place at the Table, published in 1994, Bawer spoke up for homosexuals whose sexual orientation, while more than a bedroom sport, amounts to less than a life. He wrote that book to describe "normal" gay life to the confused adolescent who, standing at a newsstand, furtively slips a gay porn magazine between the pages of Rolling Stone; to celebrate gay couples who have created their own havens in a heartless world; and to nudge the gay silent majority, those who don't act up or act out, into making themselves known.
Beyond Queer is the follow-up, a collection of essays written by people who think more or less as Bawer does. The authors of the thirtyeight chapters, all but two of them men, include familiar names like Andrew Sullivan, former editor of the New Republic, and some fresh voices, among them an Orthodox rabbi who shows off some fancy Talmudic footwork. Their immodest intention is to draft the platform for a new gay politics, one that rejects the in-yourface tactics of radical "queers," and the identity politics of "the gay establishment" in favor of a quieter push for acceptance and assimilation. Up from the Ghetto would have been an equally apt title...