Books, Arts & Manners: A Politics of Homosexuality

Virtually Normal: An Argument about Homosexuality, by Andrew Sullivan (Knopf, 209 pp., $22)

ANDREW Sullivan, editor of The New Republic, 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. Even those he terms “prohibitionists” are not dismissed as merely “homophobic.” He has little patience for the vulgarities of gay lib and certainly rejects the tactic of “outing.” The more plausible conservative and liberal positions are expounded as part of a dialectic contributing to his own positive suggestions. Only those familiar with the deep wells of the history of political philosophy on which Virtually Normal has drawn will recognize the scale of his achievement. A preliminary chapter recounts his own experience of coming to terms with his homosexuality in the course of a Catholic education in Britain. As a dustjacket blurb remarks, this is, among other things, a moving book.

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Kenneth Minogue

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Virtually Normal: An Argument about Homosexuality, by Andrew Sullivan (Knopf, 209 pp., $22)

ANDREW Sullivan, editor of The New Republic, 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. Even those he terms “prohibitionists” are not dismissed as merely “homophobic.” He has little patience for the vulgarities of gay lib and certainly rejects the tactic of “outing.” The more plausible conservative and liberal positions are expounded as part of a dialectic contributing to his own positive suggestions. Only those familiar with the deep wells of the history of political philosophy on which Virtually Normal has drawn will recognize the scale of his achievement. A preliminary chapter recounts his own experience of coming to terms with his homosexuality in the course of a Catholic education in Britain. As a dustjacket blurb remarks, this is, among other things, a moving book.