The homosexual millennium: is it here? Is it approaching? - issues pertaining to homosexual demographics, theater, books, and AIDS

National Review, June 7, 1993 by Richard Grenier

"It is New Year's Eve, December 31, 1999. The century is ending, but the millennium has arrived. That is, the homosexual millennium has arrived. Oh, there were dark and bloody times. The Queer Wars racked the country, American cities were soaked in blood, Pat Buchanan was assassinated. But thanks to Act-Up, Queer Nation, the Lesbian Avengers, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance, the Sexual Minority Youth Guidance Center, NOW, the ACLU, the NAACP, CORE, the AFL-CIO, the Urban League, the Supreme Court, Jesse Jackson, Rosa Parks, and the series of Marches on Washington, an idyllic peace now reigns in the land, with homosexuals sitting at the right hand of whomever one is supposed to sit at the right hand of. The cure for AIDS was found long ago but kept hidden by Phyllis Schlafly, Bill Dannemeyer, and Louis Sullivan. But most of those people are in prison now, and in any event the great pestilence is over. Siskel and Ebert are out of the closet. Amy Carter is living in lesbian bliss with Cher's daughter Chastity. Hollywood is remaking the Barbra Streisand-Robert Redford The Way We Were with Barbra's son Jason in love with Tom Cruise. Homosexuals can marry now and have fashionable wedding ceremonies in which friends and family unite joyfully. Able to live in happy domestic relationships with the full respect of the community, they seem to have given up their compulsive sexual promiscuity and settled down as ordinary couples just like anybody else. Everything is open to them. They love each other and everybody else. Happy twenty-first century!"

$THIS, AT LEAST, is the slightly fanciful dream of the future-partly quoted, partly paraphrased - from The Night Larry Kramer Kissed Me, an entertaining monologue written by David Drake and wittily performed by Erick Paeper to packed houses in Greenwich Village. Earlier passages of the monologue are realistically descriptive of the homosexual life, some passages rather somber. But as it happens there is substantial reason for satisfaction in the homosexual world these days. Another Gay and Lesbian March on Washington has been held. President Clinton has received a delegation of gay and lesbian activists at the White House-a first. The Hawaiian State Supreme Court has legitimized gay marriage. Despite opposition, Mr. Clinton has reaffirmed his intention to lift the ban on gays in the military. And the AIDS epidemic receives voluminous, daily attention in all branches of the media and almost obsessive attention from Hollywood stars at award ceremonies.

Actually, whether there is a truly national AIDS epidemic under way has just been sharply questioned. A detailed study published in February by a committee of the National Research Council has suggested that AIDS is not a threat to the general population at all, being confined to only 25 to 30 clearly delineated neighborhoods around the country. There is a genuine AIDS epidemic, however, in the arts and entertainment industry, where homosexuals and AIDS sufferers have become (as used to be said of the women's movement) "the latest thing in Negroes." In the last few months, major U.S. publishing houses have put out at least 19 novels about AIDS and homosexuals. Although compared, by the New York Times, with works of art about the Holocaust - attesting to "the human imagination's capacity to confront and ultimately redeem incalculable suffering" - these books are a dreary lot. We read again and again detailed accounts of the eccentricities of the "gay" life; there are hard-core sexual encounters, much heavy breathing, AIDS lesions, sometimes a stricken, lonely wife, death, all suffused with abundant pathos and appeals for compassion and understanding, and enlivened only by the occasional flash of camp humor. The best of the lot, in my view, is a British import, Monopolies of Loss, a collection of nine spare, stoic short stories by Adam Mars-Jones, in which AIDS is barely cited by name. None of these books has arrived anywhere near anyone's bestseller list, the books' style and content largely limiting the readership to homosexuals who want to read about themselves.

Kinsey's 10 per cent figure for the proportion of the population that is homosexual is by now discredited. The new study by the Battelle Human Affairs Research Center places exclusively homosexual males at 1.1 per cent, which might help to explain the modest book sales. Such a figure might also explain why U.S. mass-market show business has been distinctly reluctant to climb onto what might not in fact turn out to be a bandwagon. Commercial television, playing to its distracted, inattentive, free-entertainment audience, has made a few sallies into the field, but mainstream Hollywood has remained leery, so far having released only the modestly budgeted Longtime Companion a couple of years ago. The first major picture about AIDS and "homophobia" is in the offing, however. Jonathan Demme (Silence of the Lambs) has just finished shooting Philadelphia, in which a top-flight corporate lawyer (Tom Hanks) contracts AIDS, is dismissed from his law firm, and naturally sues. His lawyer (Denzel Washington of Malcolm X) is a homophobic black, but in the course of the movie they learn to love and understand each other. When the film opens in the fall, well see if the mass movie audience learns to share this love and understanding.