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 et's
face it: Sex is downright undemocratic. It isn't democratic that
some people should look sexier than others.
Nor is it democratic
that, as a condition of getting pleasure or love, people should
have to kowtow to conventions of masculinity and femininity. In
fact, even when they're enthusiastically embraced, masculine and
feminine ways are a standing insult to liberty and equality. It's
undemocratic that a man should take more charge than a woman when
it comes to driving, making money, the remote control, or the sexual
act itself. What's that you say? Part of the point of democracy
is to leave people free to make their own private choices about
beauty, sex, and love? That, my friend, is merely a rationalization
for private bigotry. People need to be reeducated: taught to ignore
physical appearance, taught to treat men and women alike, and taught
to eliminate all traces of inequality from their sexual fantasies.
This line of
thinking explains in a nutshell why feminism, in its more frank
and consistent versions, has never managed to break out of the academy.
At bottom, feminism is a futile attempt to democratize sex. But
sex is incorrigible. In a sense, sex is a grown-up way of getting
back to all those undemocratic pleasures of childhood — caring and
being cared for, demanding and giving in, escaping and being caught,
bouncing and being bounced, finding someone — or being someone —
who's too cute for words — and who belongs to you, and you alone.
You name it. Nine times out of ten, if it's sexy, it reeks of exclusiveness
and hierarchy — and has little or nothing to do with democracy.
Democracy protects our right (within reason) to be sexy as we see
fit, but democracy certainly doesn't describe, or account for, sexiness
itself.
That brings
me to Tom Cruise, who has just announced a $100-million libel suit
against Kyle Bradford, a gay male porn star who claims that his
secret affair with Cruise was the real reason for the recent breakup
of Cruise's marriage to the lovely Nicole Kidman. Cruise maintains
that this rumor has seriously damaged his marketability as a leading
man in films that feature "heterosexual romance and action
adventure." According to Cruise's lawyer, "While plaintiff
believes in the right of others to follow their own sexual preference,
vast numbers of the public throughout the world do not share that
view and, believing that he had a homosexual affair and did so during
his marriage, they will be less inclined to patronize Cruise's films
…".
It's hardly
surprising that an actor known for his James Bond-style roles would
object to claims that a secret homosexual affair had destroyed his
marriage. But Andrew
Sullivan, maybe Washington's quickest and canniest pundit —
and a tireless and honorable crusader for gay rights — is distressed
by Cruise's lawsuit. According to Sullivan, Cruise's suit exposes
Hollywood's hypocrisy on gay issues. If Hollywood's moguls are as
pro-gay as they claim to be, asks Sullivan, why aren't there any
openly homosexual leading men? Cruise's suit, says Sullivan, is
really just ostensibly liberal Hollywood's way of "sending
a deliberate message to gay stars and actors: Stay in the closet
— or your career is toast." And by the way, asks Sullivan,
"what exactly ... is incompatible between being gay and 'action
adventure?' (Is Cruise peddling stereotypes as well as urging gays
in movies to stay closeted?)"
However trivial
this tiff might seem, it speaks volumes about the follies and foibles
of today's movement for gay rights. Increasingly, that movement
is pursuing a futile and counterproductive effort to democratize
sex — to force people to act as though something as real and profound
and undemocratic as sex itself — simply does not exist.
Everyone knows
that a movie star's magic is closely bound up with his off-screen
image. The old Hollywood system was built on that truth, and anyone
old enough to remember how disappointed young girls were as, one
by one, the Beatles got married, will understand that a performer's
charisma cannot be completely separated from his off-stage life.
But now we're supposed to believe that it's blatant discrimination
if, having been told that he betrayed his famously beautiful wife
for a gay male porn star, women find it harder to fantasize about
— or men to admire and emulate — Tom Cruise. The denial of reality
here is patent.
Of course a
gay man is perfectly capable of playing either a heterosexual romantic
lead (Rock Hudson proved that), an action adventure hero, or both.
But in Hollywood, fantasy is currency. A gay James Bond isn't going
to bring men to the theater. A gay boy-group won't sell copies of
Tiger Beat. To condemn this as prejudice is to declare war
upon sex itself.
No doubt the
reply will come that this sort of logic could have justified racism
in sports. If we'd given in to the prejudice of white audiences;
if we'd catered to the well-established difficulty of identifying
with sports heroes of another race; there would have been no Jackie
Robinson, and thus no professional sporting world as we know it
today.
It's a great
argument. The desire to think of a sports hero as a good and noble
person in real life is immensely powerful. And for that very reason,
allowing blacks into professional sports really did signal, and
help to provoke, a much-needed expansion of our capacity to identify
with the lives and struggles of someone of another race. But the
analogy to sex just doesn't hold up. Precisely because we insist
on making a connection between the fantasy on screen and an actor's
real life, a homosexual actor playing a heterosexual romantic hero
short-circuit's an audience's ability to fully enjoy his movie roles.
There's no real analogy to sports, but it would be something like
finding out that your favorite baseball star was actually bored
by the game and was only in it for the money. The point is, from
the audience's point of view, a star's public performances should
extend, not contradict, his real-life roles. That may often be an
illusion, but the need for that illusion is real. And nowhere do
fantasy and reality blend more powerfully or inextricably than in
the delicate game of sex.
A more revealing
analogy to the gay leading-man issue is "lookism," that
infamous bogeyman of radical feminism, quickly rejected by the public
at large as a laughable instance of campus P.C. It may be unfair
to treat people differently simply because of their looks, but it's
both an inescapable human reality, and an ineradicable part of our
sexuality. And Hollywood, of course, is the worldwide capital of
lookism. The fundamental problem with the modern gay-rights movement
is that it falls somewhere in between the nobility of the civil
rights struggle, and the hopeless absurdity of the battle against
lookism — but can only see it self in the light of the former.
Andrew Sullivan
isn't just an advocate of gay romantic leads in Hollywood; he is
also the most articulate and influential spokesman for the movement
to legalize same-sex marriage. And Sullivan's vision for Hollywood
tells us something of profound importance about the meaning of same-sex
marriage.
The institution
of marriage offers special support and encouragement to heterosexual
couples. Its purpose is to keep the sometimes fragile bonds between
couples from fraying — ultimately, for the sake of the next generation.
Marriage accomplishes this, in part, by encouraging the feeling
that men and women belong together; that they complement and complete
one another; that their deepest fulfillment rests with one another.
Gay marriage is guaranteed to undermine that feeling, and thereby
to advance the process of turning a sacred union (whether in the
literal religious sense or not) into nothing more than a temporary
and infinitely malleable contractual arrangement.
Agree or disagree,
it is certainly possible to argue, as does Andrew Sullivan, that
as a way of expressing social approval for homosexuality, gay marriage
is a change worth making. But it is simply not credible to argue,
as does Andrew Sullivan, that this fundamental transformation of
the institution would in no way undermine heterosexual marriage.
The demystifying effects of state-sanctioned homosexual coupling
on the institution of marriage will be quite like the effects on
a schoolgirl crush of a rumor that Justin Timberlake is gay. It's
true that in either case, heterosexual disappointment "sends
a message" to gays that they are not full players in the game.
This may be "unfair," but the unfairness of sex simply
cannot be got rid of.
Maybe 97% or
so of the population is straight. It's a tragedy that our social
and cultural institutions must often slight the best interests of
the minority in favor of the best interests of the vast majority,
but it's a fact that these interests often run at cross-purposes.
An influx of gay actors playing heterosexual leading men will surely
mean a decline in ticket sales. And just as surely, gay marriage
will strike an immense blow against the prestige and power of marriage
— at least for the overwhelming majority of the population. This
is not completely democratic; but it is completely real.
A world in
which sexuality had finally been tamed by democracy would be a world
without Tom Cruises and a world without marriage. Tom Cruise and
Nicole Kidman have been elevated to stardom in the first place only
because of lookist prejudice. Surely there are better, if less visually
appealing, actors out there. And marriage itself, in an important
sense, is "undemocratic." The strictly democratic solution
to sexual relationships would be an infinitely flexible series of
contracts binding any number or gender of people, for any length
of time, under an endlessly variable set of rights and obligations.
But the overwhelming fact of heterosexual dominance — and the compelling
social interest in encouraging family stability for the sake of
the next generation — make marriage as we know it the central and
necessary institution that it is.
It is entirely
possible to believe that society has a compelling interest in keeping
marriage in its present form, while still supporting a goodly amount
of freedom in private sexual conduct. That's where Cruise's lawyer
got it wrong. There's no real contradiction between the right of
others to follow their own sexual proclivities and the understandable
preference of moviegoers for heterosexual actors to play heterosexual
parts. The right to practice homosexuality obligates no one to treat
an actor's homosexuality as irrelevant to their praise and enthusiasm
for that actor.
So if all those
liberal Hollywood types are hypocrites, maybe the accusation ought
to be reversed. Maybe the real Hollywood hypocrisy is to pretend
that gay marriage isn't going to undermine marriage itself, when
everything you know about the way the world works is telling you
that it will.
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