In article <1993Dec2.041535.6258@lclark.edu> bab@lclark.edu (Brian Bringardner) writes: >Has anyone read Bruce Bawer's book "A Place at the Table?" I would >be interested in opinions of this definitely politically incorrect >book. I read it last weekend, and I've been thinking about it all week. The first thing to say is that it's a serious, thoughtful book by someone who genuinely believes that he has the best interests of gay people in mind. The next thing to say is that it's so full of contradictions that it's hard to know what to make of it. The announced purpose of the book is to demonstrate to a gay teenager that he can be a happy conservative. (The book is addressed almost exclusively to a male audience.) But it reads much more like a long exercise in self-justification by a gay conservative who is having trouble holding on to the illusion that his conservative friends really value him as a human being. The extensive autobiographical sections are by turns painful and boring. The book opens with the author spying a young, butch teenager eyeing gay magazines in a bookstore. The author laments what that teenager is going to learn about being gay from those magazines. What's intriguing here, and what I'm still puzzling over, is that this scene is a reenactment of the cruising that the author laments, and, moreoever, the object of the cruising is clearly a teenager. The author expresses a desire to recruit this teenager to his own image of gay life, though, of course, being the upstanding citizen he is, he passes on the opportunity. What is the author saying here? Is he deliberately setting up this cruising scene to contrast it with the popular image of homosexuals? Or is the irony completely lost on him? Judging from his thorough (and surprising, given his literary credentials) inability to appreciate irony demonstrated elsewhere in the book, one seriously wonders what his intention is here. The author early on develops the theme of the isolation of "subculture" gays (I still haven't figured out whether I'm one or not; I've lived almost all of my life in the suburbs, but I identify strongly with the denizens of the Castro and Greenwich Village), contrasting that with the healthfulness of living among heterosexuals. (The value of having primarily heterosexual friends is assumed, not argued.) But the book concludes in its most powerful scene with the painful, public humiliation of the author and his "companion" by a heterosexual couple they have longed believed to be among their closest friends. In this scene, the author discovers that these people whose friendship he values don't respect his life or his relationship at all. One might expect that such a rejection would cause a moment's reflection about the value of such a friendship. It might also instill in one a little sympathy for those gays who feel the need to challenge heterosexual "friends" from time to time, lest they too discover in such an ugly way that their friends are just saying the right things as best they know how. But no such sympathy is to be found in this book; those "in your face" gays are just alienating heterosexuals. [As an aside, I can't imagine any gay person whose perspective hasn't been warped by the New York Times actually calling his lover a "companion." Here Lassie, Lassie.] Other contradictions include repeated rantings at gay leaders in the early 1970s for their emphasis on the right to have sex instead of the right to marry. The author's analysis at first seems completely ahistorical, completely ignoring the social conditions that focused gays' activism of the period on sexual freedom, not yuppiedom. But later, the author lets on that he is fully aware of those social conditions, and, moreover, acknowledges that until about 10 years ago, even he would have found the idea of gay marriage laughable. Even leaving aside the question of the desirability of gay marriage, the acknowledgement that the very idea of it was unthinkable 20 years ago undermines the criticism of those who did not argue for it then. The problem, the author asserts, is that "subculture" gays hold themselves out as representative of all gays. But, he insists, most gays are actually like him. (Well-to-do, white, male, Manhattanites?) If (heterosexual) people would just realize this, their prejudices would disappear. So anything that makes them think that most gays are like the "subculture" gays is counterproductive. Gay pride parades are a definite no-no, unless the participants are wearing suits and carrying briefcases. The first problem here is that the gays the author wants to see in a parade would never in a million years show their faces publicly, and he acknowledges this fact. The bigger problem is that people like him wouldn't even be calling for a parade of suits if there weren't the parades we have today. His book is an explicit reaction to the gay images he sees; he has been prompted by the current images to offer his own. Now we have two competing images, and I think that's great. The author might wish that the relative strengths of these two images were reversed, but at least we have those images. If it were not for the images offered by the parade people, there would be no images of gay people, just more silence and more private suffering. The suits would happily have stayed in the closet. And why is it that "subculture" gays are vilified for purporting to represent gay people? (Do they actually so purport?) At the same time that they (we?) are criticized for this, they (we?) are also criticized for failing to recognize that the religious right does not represent Christianity. But the religious right claims to represent Christianity at least as much as "subculture" gays have ever claimed to represent gays. In fact, a group of evangelicals has just named Marilyn Qualye "Christian Woman of the Year." And about irony. The author describes with contempt Joan Jett Black's campaign for the presidency in 1992, in which she declared something to the effect of "When all those people voted for Other, I knew they were voting for me because I'm the most Other Ms. Thang here." But we don't want to be seen as the Other, the author laments. In its context, JJB's statement is not only uproarioulsy funny, but makes exactly that point about Otherness. But because it's coming from a black drag queen, it couldn't possibly be that deep. I could say more, and I could be more organized. There are lots of things going on in that book, some of them illuminating, but many of them reflecting the author's still evolving understanding of his place as a gay individual.