And just in case you thought I was exaggerating about Andrew Sullivan . . .

. . . here he is in Times Online, just yesterday:

The Clintons have always had a touch of the zombies about them: unkillable, they move relentlessly forward, propelled by a bloodlust for Republicans or uppity Democrats who dare to question their supremacy. You can’t escape; you can’t hide; and you can’t win. And these days, in the kinetic pace of the YouTube campaign, they are like the new "28 Days Later" zombies. They come at you really quickly, like bats out of hell. Or Ohio, anyway.

Now all this may seem a little melodramatic. Perhaps it is . . . One senator is still mathematically unbeatable. But that will never capture the emotional toll that the Clintons continue to take on some of us. I’m not kidding. I woke up in a cold sweat early last Wednesday. There have been moments this past week when I have felt physically ill at the thought of that pair returning to power.

"Unkillable"? "Propelled by bloodlust"? Yes, the girl has definitely lost her mind. But this time around there is this intriguing, probably unconscious, bit of psychological self-revelation:

The Clintons live off psychodrama. They both love to push themselves to the brink of catastrophe and then accomplish the last-minute, nail-biting self-rescue. Before too long the entire story becomes about them, their ability to triumph through crisis, even though the crises are so often manufactured by themselves. . .

Ah, Andrew. Whatever happens at the Democratic convention, we hope you get help.

Why all the conservative gay-hate for Hillary?

Okay, this is off-topic, but it is something I've been wondering about, and it does at least partly concern the larger culture: why do Internet queens Andrew Sullivan (right) and Matt Drudge (below) hate, hate, hate Hillary Clinton quite so much, much, much? I leaned toward Hillary over Obama (although I'm happy to vote for him) because - can we be honest? - Obama is so obviously a blank slate, and in his short career he's never made much of an impression, except on the political pulpit. In fact, somehow I sense from him a certain disinterest in even getting things done in principle. Those imagining this paleoliberal messiah will be able to usher in a post-polarized paradise I think may be in for a very unpleasant surprise. But hey, I could be wrong - and after all, just because the Clintons ran the government supremely well once before, why the hell should we invite them back? I mean, that would mean facing the threat of oral sex in the Oval Office!

But oh yeah, what I wanted to write about - the general hatred of the press for Hillary, and the intriguing fact that this is best channeled by two conservative homosexuals on the Net. I know, I know, Drudge is supposed to be closeted, but please - I don't see why we have to play along with his private psychological drama here. So my question is: are these two representative of gay conservatism in general, and is gay conservatism actually representative of something in the culture at large?

I guess the nub of this admittedly amorphous query is American sexism, and how the Hillary-Obama match-up seems to hint what many have suspected but never articulated: that this country is more deeply sexist than it is racist. Rush Limbaugh can openly call Hillary a 'bitch' or a 'feminazi,' but he wouldn't dare trade in racial stereotypes with Obama. Or will he, eventually? Will racism, in the end, turn out to be just as virulent as the sexism that's apparent now?

That's entirely possible, but just this minute I'm intrigued by our sexism, and how it's being reflected in these gay commentators. There's a general perception that gay men and straight women share some sort of Sex-in-the-City-like sisterhood, but it isn't really true; in the end, gay men are men, not women, and there's a surprisingly nasty sexism that often surfaces out of our gossip and conversation. There's also often a lingering animosity between gay men and lesbians (who have reportedly been prominent in Hillary's circles). Yes, gay sexism exists, and it could certainly manifest itself against Ms. Clinton.

Still, making this simple case against Drudge and Sullivan (Sullivudge? Drullivan?) is tough, because both are such slippery customers. Drudge, of course, is hard to analyze because he doesn't really write that much, and his eponymous Report is a wacky, pack-rat mosaic in which space aliens and bat boy schmooze with Putin and Bush. Drudge's background is in McDonald's and 7-11 management, and it shows. It's easy to view him - via the lens of affectionate patronization - as more a trailer park eccentric than some envious Internet queen.

As for Sullivan - well, like the rest of the cream of Oxbridge and Harvard, he can push out a rich chunk of rhetoric from the old mental sphincter faster than just about anyone. But at the same time, even his fans I think would admit he's batshit-crazy; indeed, that's part of the fun of reading him: he's got the intriguing charisma that comes from being very fucked up, and his edge of hysteric, indignant offense is always pushing against the polished surface of his prose. Then there's the simple outline of his personal history: the promiscuous gay bottom who demands the right to marry within the Church, the conservative who claims he was pro-Gore (though he generally eviscerated Gore), then cheered on Bush before turning on him, too, all while insisting that Catholicism can be reconciled with libertarianism - really, the list of contradictions is just too long and too weird. I mean not many village sluts would have the cojones to demand a white wedding from the Pope, but Sullivan's up to the challenge. And this is, interestingly, what makes him so American; he often rhapsodizes about his love for our country, and I believe him, because we're insane in exactly the same way he is: we, too, are piously pseudo-religious, and believe fervently, if incoherently, in our right to perpetually, indignantly re-invent ourselves.

Some, of course, might ponder Sullivan's hatred of Hillary as actually a kind of endorsement (after all, he said of Gore things like: "fundamentally a political coward . . . a corpulent Cassandra . . . weaselly . . . one of the most naked opportunists in American politics"). And Sullivan's often driven by personal vendetta under the cover of principle (his long campaign against Howell Raines, who reportedly fired him from the Times, is one example). So maybe the current vitriol is just payback from the nineties. And is Drudge, meanwhile, still in some sort of psychological battle with his liberal, Jewish parents? Perhaps. Still, it's worth pondering the meaning of the curious correspondence between these two gay scourges.

Blowing the whistle on gay commitment

The New Yorker magazine recently sponsored a contest for an "updated" version of its venerable mascot, Eustace Tilly - and a "gay" version, or maybe "gay leather" version, is at left (the original Eustace is below). The contest has inspired a small dust-up between reigning gay Internet queens Dan Savage and Andrew Sullivan, who draw different conclusions from the image - and its subject's notably unenthusiastic consideration of a wedding ring.

For once, however, Sullivan's claws were definitely in, not out. This is all he said on his blog about the cartoon:

Suspended between the past and the future, like the rest of us.

Savage still managed to take this the wrong way, in a big way:

Hmph. Any fool can see what Sullivan means by that crack: Gay Eustace, in his leather vest, cap, arm bands, gloves, and dog collar, looks down his nose at a gold band. Gay Eustace contemplates the wedding ring and the future it represents, a future characterized by family and commitment. The leather gear Gay Eustice wears, of course, represents a past characterized by promiscuity and sexual excess. When Sullivan asserts that Gay Eustace is suspended between the past and the future, between the wedding band and the leather gear, he is arguing that commitment and dog collars are mutually exclusive. To move into the former you must, Sullivan would have us believe, unbuckle the latter.

But fear not, fanciers of canine couture! Savage goes on:

That is not the case. A man, gay or straight, can wear a wedding band and enjoy all it symbolizes—commitment, stability, family—and wear the fetishized skins of dead animals if that appeals to him. In fact, we should encourage him to do so.

If we want to strengthen the institution of marriage—and that is what all in the gay family values movement want (although I’m starting to have my doubts about Mr. Sullivan)—we must fight with every tool at our disposal the pernicious notion that marriage, by definition, must always and everywhere signify the death of sexual experimentation and adventure. A man, gay or straight, can be married and trot about Manhattan in a dog collar, if it pleases him and his spouse. And he should be able to do [so] without the depth or sincerity of his commitment being called into question . . .Sexual dissatisfaction and boredom are frequently cited by divorcing couples as a factor in their decision to split up. If we wish to stem the tide of divorce, Mr. Sullivan, we should not promote the idea that life presents us with an either/or choice between wedding bands and leather outfits in appallingly bad taste. We should make singles and couples, gay and straight, aware that they can have their commitments and their sexual adventures too.

Full disclosure: My boyfriend and I are going to IML this year.

Okay, so Savage isn't exactly a disinterested party in the debate. But then who is? I was struck by this little imbroglio and how it corresponded to the tricky politics of Blowing Whistles, which got at least one pan from a gay critic that read as slightly hysteric self-defense. In the play, the lead character, Jamie, has agreed to a somewhat-open relationship with his partner, Nigel, in which they share threesomes with the agreement that neither is ever to pursue said dalliance further than one night. But over the course of Pride weekend, Jamie faces up to the fact that Nigel can't live up to his half of the bargain: after we see Jamie hang on (just barely) to the agreement in the face of severe temptation, we learn that Nigel has, in fact, been shagging everything that's not nailed down, just as Jamie had feared. And Jamie walks out.

That, of course, is the story of one relationship. But stories like these tend to represent archetypes almost automatically on stage, and the two gay critics who wrote on Blowing Whistles both perceived it, to varying degrees, as a condemnation of gay promiscuity. Which left neither very comfortable.

I wasn't too surprised by these responses. I have to admit, Blowing Whistles is the first "gay play" I've ever read that pondered sexual freedom critically at all, even though such liberty has long been criticized in hetero culture, and gays have often claimed their eventual goal was to be enfranchised in said culture. Some have argued (from both sides of the political fence, as it were) that the "gay agenda" is, or should be, to actually transform the culture of heterosexual commitment. (This sentiment, in more bigoted form, is what often moved beneath the debate on gay marriage.) And indeed, Todd savages the larger, ditzily-libertarian culture that the indulgence of gay sexual license has produced; when he ridicules the "pages and pages of whores" that fill up the back end of gay magazines, he might as well be talking about any number of alternative Boston papers and sites, and the commercial culture they represent, which is hardly supportive of monogamy - not even "open" monogamy. And how is the average critic (many of whom get their paychecks from that culture) going to react to such a statement? My guess is, not too sympathetically.

But some folks from a local chapter of Boston Bears, at least, seemed to feel differently on opening weekend. They watched the show quite quietly - I could feel them bristle at times, as it were - but also with conflicted sympathy. And why shouldn't they? Blowing Whistles is one of the few plays I've read that deal with the issues of my life as I live it; I don't generally have to deal with Hollywood power brokers, or seraphim crashing through my ceiling. But as anyone who's been in a long-term gay relationship knows, fear, recrimination, and betrayal are always very much a possibility, and it's simply silly to pretend otherwise, or avoid open treatment of gay life onstage and retreat into standard martyr-hero-or-sidekick schtick.

As for Dan Savage (and Andrew Sullivan) - I suppose it's possible to construct on a blog a vision of a loving couple that constantly fucks other people - but something tells me that on stage this would never fly; indeed, theatrically, Dan and his partner could never do better than a laugh line on Saturday Night Live and its multiplex offspring. And the idea that one can demand the respect due commitment in society, while reconfiguring that commitment offline (or rather on line) into something else entirely, is, at best, pretty bogus. Respect and promiscuity tend to be odds - or, as Harvey Fierstein put it decades ago, "nobody marries a slut." Except, of course, another slut. Not that there's anything wrong with that. But can't we at least stop pretending, as Nigel puts it in the play, that we can have our cock and eat it, too?