The Virtually Normal Andrew Sullivan

A new gay series!

Since inviting myself on

Daniel Oppenheimer

’s excellent podcast Eminent Americans to spill the tea on Andrew Sullivan, I’ve been thinking a lot about his life and legacy (don’t worry, he is still very much alive).

Like another famous homosexual, Andrew Sullivan contains multitudes. He was born in 1963 to an Irish Catholic family living in the South of England. Throughout his childhood, his mother was often hospitalised due to mental illness. After attending a Catholic primary school and being discovered to be a gay genius, he was admitted to Reigate Grammar school,¹ then Oxford (where he excelled in acting and debating and was elected president of the Oxford Union), then Harvard (where he wrote his PhD thesis on Michael Oakeshott).²

In 1989, The New Republic published his ground-breaking article “Here comes the Groom”, making a conservative case for gay marriage, which he expanded upon in his 1996 book Virtually Normal: An Argument about Homosexuality. He became editor of The New Republic in 1991, notoriously publishing an extract from Richard Herrnstein’s and Charles Murray’s book The Bell Curve, together with a raft of replies, in 1994. Anne Leibovitz photographed him for GAP in 1993.

In 2000, he started blogging at The Daily Dish, often several times a day, sharing his unvarnished thoughts and feelings about everything from living with HIV to smoking pot daily to advocating for the Iraq war (which he later felt so guilty about that he published a record of his posts on the subject entitled I Was Wrong). In 2007, he got gay married. From 2016, he wrote for New York Magazine. In 2020, he launched The Weekly Dish newsletter and podcast here on Substack, where he can still be found railing against Trump and the transqueers.³ In 2023, he got gay divorced.

Rather than attempt a full retrospective of Sullivan’s oeuvre, I want to focus on Virtually Normal, which was hailed as a seminal text at the time. The conservative intellectual Kenneth Minogue praised it lavishly in the then still relevant (?) National Review:

Andrew Sullivan has done for homosexuality what John Stuart Mill did for freedom: he has presented the whole range of social opinion about his subject with lucidity and fairness, and gone to work refuting most of it … Only those familiar with the deep wells of the history of political philosophy … will recognize the scale of his achievement.

To do justice to this whole range of social opinion, I’m planning to do a series of posts which could serve as a classical liberal foil to

David Sessions

’s series on Foucault’s L’histoire de la Sexualité (Sullivan is not a fan) to help settle the question of whether now is the time to say goodbye to gay identity politics, or to double down on it?⁴

In an article for the Chronicle of Higher Education last year, Tae-ho Kim and Blake Smith advocate for the latter position, at least in academia. They argue that a specifically gay collective identity needs institutional protection not only from queer theorists such as Michael Warner, but also from the politics of assimilation that they associate with Sullivan:

It seemed that for both Sullivan and Warner, for conservative pundit and queer theorist alike, gay men, lacking a specific and legitimate collective identity, will eventually have to either disappear into the “normal” or merge into a coalition of the oppressed. Such patterns of argumentation, in fact, remain visible to this day in such commonplace statements as “I’m more than my sexuality” and “labels are limiting” employed by conservatives and progressives alike. Both groups summon gays to disappear.

This is a rather funny accusation to direct against Sullivan, who can’t stop sounding the alarm about the disappearing homosexual (it’s like we’re an endangered species or something). Responding to similar critiques at the time in the Afterword to Virtually Normal, he insisted that “the aspiration for political equality is not — and can never be— identical to the aspiration to cultural homogeneity”.

However, Sullivan’s purported distinction between cultural and political considerations often gets blurred. While he bends over backwards to be gracious to the men of the cloth who would condemn him to hell, he shows little sympathy towards the critical theorists who would condemn him to a life of postmodern nihilism. He criticises liberals for trying to eradicate private discrimination, while suggesting to conservatives that if gays were given the option of holy matrimony, they might tone down the depravity a little:

There are very few social incentives of the kind conservatives like for homosexuals not to be depraved: there’s little social or familial support, no institution to encourage fidelity or monogamy, precious little religious or moral outreach to guide homosexuals into more virtuous living. This is not to say that homosexuals are not responsible for their actions, merely that in a large part of homosexual subculture there is much a conservative would predict, when human beings are abandoned with extremely few social incentives for good or socially responsible behavior.

I don’t know if Sullivan ever seriously believed that given the option of respectable bourgeois marriage, gay men would be less attracted to excess, but that is not quite how things transpired.⁵ In the era of maximalist liberalism, gays wanted to believe that we could have it all: we could have our wedding cake and eat it, sue the bigot who didn’t want to bake it and have a threesome with the hunk who did. Straight men and women seemed eager to adopt the sexual norms of gay men, not the other way around,⁶ with a few experiencing a “queer awakening” of their own.

But that seems like a bygone world now, one in which we could have quaint conversations on the nuanced differences between “gay” and “queer”. In a recent article for Unherd, Valerie Stivers explores how the vibes might be shifting on gender and sexuality, focusing on the figure of Miles Yardley, previously known as Salomé, or Pariah the Doll:⁷

Today, he is graceful, tall, and girlish in photos, and easily passes as a biological woman. But he has grown to regret his transition for a host of what are becoming the usual reasons: concerns about how cross-sex hormones were affecting his health; physical pain; fatigue with what other detransitioners have called “trans OCD”, an obsessional focus on one’s body; and a dawning realisation that the desire for transgenderism spawned from an original mental-health issue that being transgender wasn’t fixing. “I was never comfortable with it,” Yardley tells me.

Like some male-to-female transitioners, he says that at least part of his attempt to become a woman was in order to cope with same-sex feelings of attraction without having to declare himself as gay. He now objects to the characterisation of sexual orientation as a fixed and immutable identity. He also rejects the idea that being a feminine boy meant he was actually a girl. “Gay and trans are the same thing”, he tells me. “Both result from an original trauma to your gender that can be healed”.

The detrans narrative is familiar by now, but the ex-gay angle is an unexpected throwback promoted by Yardley’s housemate, “another micro-celebrity, the alt-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos”. Milo’s trajectory is emblematic of how the alt-right went from being a broad church in 2016 to a much narrower one now. Nevertheless, a few micro-celebrity turncoats do not necessarily signal an end to legal rights and social recognition, which remain much more firmly embedded for gays and lesbians than for trans people, thanks in part perhaps to Sullivan’s more conciliatory approach to social conservatives. Do other gender and sexual minorities have something to learn from this rhetorical strategy?⁸

In my next post, I’ll consider Sullivan’s argument that same-sex attraction is a natural variation in human sexuality and that one can refute prohibitionist arguments based on natural law without rejecting the spiritual authority of the Catholic Church altogether. I’ll offer my lapsed Protestant perspective and attempt to answer a question that has been buggering me since I attended underwear night at Club Church in Amsterdam:⁹ can one be a Christian in a darkroom?

1. Sullivan has described attempts by the 70’s Labour government to replace selective grammar schools with comprehensive schools in the name of equality as “radicalising”. Here is a good interview on his early influences.

2. Five years before her marriage to John Bailey, the 32-year-old Iris Murdoch had a brief but passionate love affair with the 50-year-old Oakeshott. They were both philosophers with a keen awareness of the limits of reason.

3. Please note that the term “transqueer” is Sullivan’s, not mine. The title of this post also alludes to the fact that the virtual has all but abolished the concept of normal for all of us.

4. To my non-homosexual readers, firstly my condolences. Secondly, I invite you to consider how far the analogy can be stretched to fit any identities you might be blessed/cursed with. After all, the question of what it means to be a [homosexual] person, if considered in any depth, starts dissolving into the more fundamental question of what it means to be a person.

5. As a general rule, male homosexuals don’t take kindly to lectures on sexual morality, least of all from other homosexuals. Although this does not preclude many of the younger generation from delivering sermons on intersectionality. See for example how the Bad Gays podcast decided to introduce the author of A Normal Heart:

Whatever values the queer community espouses, respecting one’s elders is evidently not among them.

6. Apologies to any lesbians who feel left out of this conversation.

7. IIRC John Pistelli once wrote on his super secret tumblr that he would cast Salomé as Paglia opposite Anna Khachiyan as Sontag in his yet unmanifested play on the aesthete and the moralist. Speaking of Anna, I appreciated this “living obituary” for the Red Scare podcast.

These may be niche concerns, but they happen to concern my niche.

8. As I’ve noted before:

Working on a piece on Andrew Sullivan’s 1996 book Virtually Normal: An Argument about Homosexuality has made me wonder whether there is any trans equivalent. Could there be? Butler, Faye and Chu put forward strong Lacanian, Marxian and Nietzschean cases, but show little interest in engaging with those with different perspectives on their own terms and the market hardly seems interested in the respected economic historian Deirdre McCloskey’s classical liberal Episcopalianism. Naomi Kanakia is one of the most incisive writers on this platform, but she has publicly stated her intention of not becoming the Thomas Chatterton Williams of trans. It may be that rational argument as cultural force is kaput. But even old-fashioned aesthetic attempts at pulling at heartstrings like Boys Don’t Cry seem to be out of style. What is the strategy here?

9. It wasn't exactly Sodom and Gomorrah, but it wasn't far from what religious conservatives (if there are any left) imagine when they think of the contemporary equivalent of Sodom and Gomorra. Watching the near-naked men on the dance floor and the pretty vanilla pornography playing next to a shrine to Conchita Wurst (the bearded Austrian drag artist who won Eurovision in 2014 with the song “Rise like a Phoenix”), I couldn't help but hear

Paul Franz

’s voice in my head:

So yes there will be life as prayer, life as cheap fun. Action without end that ennobles, action without end that degrades.

But perhaps there is more than one type of prayer.

I would also like to thank

Gnocchic Apocryphon

for prompting me to look into Harry Jaffa’s edifying writing on the subject of homosexuality and natural law, including an imaginary dialogue between Ted Bundy and one of his victims:

The Bible punished both sodomy and murder with death. Sodomy is no longer regarded as a crime, or even as immoral. Why then should murder—or rape?

But more on that next time. To end on a lighter note, here is a faggy little dog from Adriaen van Utrecht’s Pronkstilleven (1644), especially for

Cameron Steele

: