Out for Good and Party Crasher

Dear Urvashi,

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Sorry, I didn't mean to engage in any "ad hominem smearing." I was just trying to get a little banter going. After I teased that you supported communist kleptocrats in Nicaragua in the '80s, you could have come back that I supported drug-running Contras. I wouldn't have minded. If you can't laugh about the Cold War, what can you laugh about?

Anyway, back to the substance. I just don't believe America is not engaged in the "conflict of two paradigms about sex." That's because, first, despite your description, I suspect almost nobody in this culture believes sexual pleasure is "inherently dangerous." I know a lot of people who are members of the religious right, and believe me, none of them hold anything close to that view. Some of them talk quite openly (you should see me blush) about the pleasures of skinny-dipping, different sex acts, weekend marathons between the sheets. It's just that they engage in these things with their spouses. A lot of people who get their information about, say, evangelical Christians from the New York Times and such places have these notions of a tribe of tight-lipped Puritans. That couldn't be further from the truth.

The phrase, "inherently dangerous" leapt out at me because it's the second time you've used the word dangerous in this exchange. On Day 2 you wrote, "Being pro-sex is a dangerous thing--for heterosexuals and homosexuals--these days." I confess I must be blind to the menace. I don't see mobs storming MTV or the set of Friends. I didn't even notice a great popular upsurge to lynch Bill Clinton or Monica Lewinsky. What I see is best sellers by Orthodox Jews on the joys of Kosher sex.

Moreover, America today seems radically anti-contentious. Far from going off on crusades hoping to track down alternative lifestyles, most people are happy to leave well enough alone. I'm one of those people who think the culture war is largely spent. Most people have reached a new, reconciled middle ground and the old battle cries no longer resonate. One of the frustrating things about the books we are supposedly talking about is that they treat the debate over homosexuality as if it were something waged by the professional gay organizations on the one hand and the professional family organizations on the other hand. Anybody between Tony Kushner and Phyllis Schlafley is left out. But that's where the real important transformation is taking place.

Finally, let me just say that that throughout our exchange I've been a little frustrated by your level of generalization. Maybe it is because you are at home with academic jargon and I'm just a hack journalist. But I've tried to raise concrete situations. Way back, I repeated that I believe that anybody who has more than five sex partners in a year is probably doing something sleazy. I don't want to get hung up on a number, but if I had a friend who was sleeping around like that, I would think less of him or her. I'd try to tell him to cut it out, for his own good. It's in these kinds of situations that all the talk about norms and "over-determined" sex drives really faces reality. I don't believe I ever got an answer on how you would react in such a situation.

Let me close with one other real-life situation. All week, after I finish my Slate entry, I've been going home early. The whole family hops in the minivan (yes, I own one) and we drive an hour so my eldest son can play in a baseball tournament. This little league tournament requires an enormous amount of shared trust between relative strangers. The coaches, both those of our team and the opposing team, teach a style of sportsmanship that we parents basically all share: It's good to be competitive and to try to win, but you shouldn't argue with bad calls by the umps, you shouldn't slide too hard into the opposition, you shouldn't show emotion when the other team messes up. Furthermore, we parents in the stands have to obey certain unspoken rules. We don't compare kids. We don't get too emotional either way. We will all be there for the team game after game. (This means giving up a half-day of work, day after day, as the team progresses through the tournament.)

Furthermore, this tournament requires relatively stable families. Baseball is a sport that requires immense practice and repetition. Parents have to be out playing catch in the park day after day for years. (Not that it's a sacrifice; it's the most fun we have.) And to raise a family and still have time for that kind of play, it's best to have two parents around. Furthermore, kids have to absorb certain study habits in order to learn the rules and obey orders. They have to learn traditional values like deference and discipline.

This tournament has been great. Amid all our high-flown talk about norms and transforming culture, this is the concrete reality I want to preserve. I don't see any reason why an individual's sexual orientation should bar them from taking part in this. I wouldn't mind if the coaches or umpires were gays or lesbians, or if the parents of some of the other kids were. But if there's going to be some social transformation that messes with the stable two-parent family (which tolerance of promiscuity does), or which erodes the shared and unspoken social codes that we little-league parents share, then I get off the boat. Maybe I am imposing my bourgeois-minivan/little-league value system on others. Tough. The only thing I'd say is that if we've learned anything from the social disruptions of the past half-century, it is that we shouldn't underestimate the value of the mundane joys, and we shouldn't put them at risk for the sake of somebody's pie in the sky radicalism.

Anyway, I've enjoyed sort of meeting you. And we have spent so much time talking about sex I'm sure some of our entries will be showing up on the search engines when the teen-age boys go looking for smut. That should mean more eyeballs for Slate, thus making Bill Gates happier.

If we've done that, our exchange has not been a total loss.

All the best,
David

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David Brooks is a senior editor at the Weekly Standard and has recently completed a book on upscale culture in America, to be released in the spring of 2000. Urvashi Vaid is the author of Virtual Equality: The Mainstreaming of Gay and Lesbian Liberation (click here to buy the book) and director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Policy Institute. This week they discuss Party Crasher, by Rich Tafel (click here to buy the book), and Out for Good: The Struggle To Build a Gay Rights Movement in America, by Dudley Clendinen and Adam Nagourney (click here to buy the book).

Click here to read an addendum to last week's Book Club in which William F. Buckley Jr. quotes himself in self-defense.

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