{"id":888,"date":"2009-12-22T20:49:00","date_gmt":"2009-12-22T20:49:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/2009\/12\/888\/"},"modified":"2009-12-22T20:49:00","modified_gmt":"2009-12-22T20:49:00","slug":"888","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/evetushnet\/2009\/12\/888.html","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

EVERY DAY IS LIKE SUNDAY<\/span>: So a chain of events led me to read a lot of reviews of Andrew Sullivan\u2019s various books. Here are some comments on the reviews. For reference, I think Virtually Normal<\/span> is his weakest and Love Undetectable<\/span> is brilliant; LU<\/span>\u2018s third section, about friendship, I think is genuinely life-changing and beautiful, whereas its middle section, about psych theories of homosexuality, is really weak. Apparently this places me at odds with pretty much everyone who got paid to review these books.<\/p>\n

So\u2026 Margaret O\u2019Brien Steinfels reviews Virtually Normal<\/span> in Commonweal<\/span>.<\/a> On the one hand, it\u2019s adorable to see a time when Commonweal<\/span> could challenge gay-lib without three thousand disclaimers. On the other hand, \u201chomosexual or lesbian\u201d is slightly hilarious.<\/p>\n

On the more serious tentacle, I really like how Steinfels draws out the contradiction here: It\u2019s really hard to argue for gay marriage if you have the good taste to find homosexuality interesting<\/span>. One of the more depressing features of the pro-gay-marriage arguments is their tendency to act as if any differences between men and women, or between straight and gay relationships, are banal and beneath notice. This seems like an excellent way to make yourself stupider.<\/p>\n

And on a fourth tentacle, I\u2019m fascinated by how little work Steinfels had to do to feel as though she\u2019d successfully refuted Sullivan\u2019s arguments. I think her argument is anorexic; and yet at the time, of course, this sort of dismissal was thought \u201cprogressive.\u201d Sullivan can measure his success by the degree to which Steinfels\u2019s arguments on marriage now seem wafer-thin.<\/p>\n

[EDITED\u2013that was unclear to the point of appearing self-contradictory. What I mean is that Steinfels\u2019s earlier \u201carguments against\u201d gay marriage are naively dismissive, and really privileged\u2013she isn\u2019t even trying to look at the world through Sullivan\u2019s eyes, and she isn\u2019t even considering that that\u2019s something she should do. She is normative and thus gets to judge him, and that\u2019s obvious<\/span> to her. But the later paragraph in which she uses his own words against him, and asks<\/span> why what he wants should be called marriage at all, strikes me as persuasive and even a possible way to open up new options for gay couples. Without the insistence on banal sameness, maybe we can come up with new models for love\u2013some of which will be Catholic, some of which will be really-not-Catholic, but all of which will be more sublime and honest than the usual love-is-love-is-love oatmeal.]<\/p>\n

And, especially: Steinfels\u2019s review makes me wonder what aspect of Sullivan\u2019s famous \u201cWe Are All Sodomites Now\u201d<\/a> essay isn\u2019t \u201cliberationist.\u201d He more or less made his name as an anti-liberationist gay man; yet his essay shows all the most striking characteristics of what he described as liberationism, e.g.: a focus on acts vs. identities; a dissolution of boundaries between heteros and homos; the deployment of homosexuality to undermine heterosexual self-understandings; the absolute moral equivalence of intercourse and sodomy.<\/p>\n

I mean, Sullivan\u2019s essay is wrong on its face, and it only takes one night at a crisis pregnancy center to figure that out; but I\u2019m not super interested in that right now, more interested in whether the \u201cgay conservative\u201d position always collapses into liberationism if you push.<\/p>\n

(To which the obvious response is, \u201cYeah, Sullivan\u2019s probably a closet liberationist. But Jonathan Rauch is actually a gay conservative, so you should take up your fight with him.\u201d That\u2019s fair, but no fun; Sullivan is the Kate Bornstein to Rauch\u2019s Julia Serano. The fact that I learn more from Rauch and Serano is probably related to the fact that Sullivan and Bornstein are much more open to the aesthetic and religious dimension of life.)<\/p>\n

Norah Vincent reviews Love Undetectable<\/span> for the National Review<\/span>.<\/a> First, I like Vincent, and I\u2019m glad to see this extremist getting her praise from NR<\/span>! But more substantively, this is not a good review, largely because it isn\u2019t even attempting empathy. I mean\u2026 AIDS memoirs are not inherently worthless, so I don\u2019t get why Vincent thinks she can dismiss Sullivan\u2019s book by making the obvious point that it\u2019s basically an AIDS memoir.<\/p>\n

I also think she\u2019s deploying faceless AIDS-stricken Africans against Sullivan\u2013she\u2019s weaponizing racism in a way I find really distasteful. Her review has nothing to do with AIDS in Africa except<\/span> insofar as it\u2019s a stick with which to beat Sullivan. I can\u2019t respect that.<\/p>\n

Gilbert Meilander reviews Love Undetectable<\/span> for Commonweal<\/span>.<\/a> Once again, someone thinks the section about dumb psych theories is the best part! I don\u2019t even know what to make of that.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, Meilander\u2019s critiques of Sullivan\u2019s essay on friendship are very well taken.<\/p>\n

Moreover, the classical notion of the friend as \u201canother self\u201d may, in fact, cut against Sullivan\u2019s claim that one must first love one-self in order to be capable of friendship. We need the friend as \u201canother self\u201d so that we may come to know who we really are. Hence, an attempt first to know or love oneself, to suppose that I must first be a person capable of friendship, may be self-defeating. Something must first be risked in friendship if we are ever really to become \u201cselves\u201d capable of sustaining deep personal bonds.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That\u2019s just lovely, and hardcore and challenging. I think Sullivan\u2019s essay is an amazing beginning for an investigation of friendship. Meilander\u2019s review\u2013like all the works Sullivan actually cites, and recommends\u2013takes it further.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

EVERY DAY IS LIKE SUNDAY: So a chain of events led me to read a lot of reviews of Andrew Sullivan\u2019s various books. Here are some comments on the reviews. For reference, I think Virtually Normal is his weakest and Love Undetectable is brilliant; LU\u2018s third section, about friendship, I think is genuinely life-changing and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1071,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-888","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nEve Tushnet<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"EVERY DAY IS LIKE SUNDAY: So a chain of events led me to read a lot of reviews of Andrew Sullivan's various books. 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