Letters to the Editor
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Salon Still Hasn't Clarified Their Policy on Anti-Gay Writers.
Hats off to Margalis for your arguments and great research. Again, why is Salon publishing someone who spouts rhetoric against gay men that's precisely the same the Religious Right? On top of the quotes published in the past specifically on Salon, where Camille Paglia suggested the gay rights movement bore responsibility for Matthew Shepard's murder, and where Paglia cast gay men as some ridiculously generalized group outside of "nature," the quote you offer, Margalis, from Playboy, 1995 is unambiguous:
"I believe that nature rewards things that are in its best interest and punishes things that are not. Homosexual promiscuity is not in nature's best interest. Certainly not anal sex. Nature wants us to procreate." (Camille Paglia, Playboy Interview, 1995)
Even Playboy, in 1995, called Paglia on this. In fact, the interviewer's immediate response is "That's a dangerous attitude, the same message we hear from fundamentalists who say that gay men are responsible for AIDS and that their sexual practices are immoral." But does Salon consider similar questions about this writer? In 2007?
My point is that if anyone else but Camille Paglia had said this, would Salon be not only regularly publishing them, but praising them as a great "find"? We as readers have a right to know why this stuff is acceptable from Paglia, while Salon (presumably) wouldn't promote it otherwise, and I think Joan Walsh and the editors owe us a full explanation (they should be aware that without explantaion, this question, including Camille Paglia's quotes like the above, will be asked of Salon's advertisers. As I said, Salon has every right to publish whoever they want, no matter how racist, anti-semitic, or homophobic, but Salon's advertisers also have a right to know whose words their ads will be appearing next to. Let's see if they're comfortable supporting Salon's promotion of this voice.)
As to the letter writer "Happy Camper," who suggests I'm "reading into" Paglia's quotes, I'd 1) like to see how anyone is "reading into" the Playboy quote above and 2) argue Happy Camper is offering a thin and sanitized version of what Paglia is actually saying.
Here's another quote from that Playboy interview with Paglia: "AIDS is a price paid for sins committed in the Sixties, and by gay men who took free love to extremes throughout the Seventies and had unrestrained, decadent, pagan sex. I support paganism in all its forms, but a price must be paid. I believed in free love, too, but we were wrong." (Paglia, Playboy, 1995).
How does an appeal to EXACTLY the Religious Right's arguments, speak to your reading of Paglia, Happy Camper, that what she's really saying is: "by being so obsessed with fitting into mainstream American culture, gay culture has sold its soul. What has made gay culture so important historically is that it stood on the fringes of mainstream culture, critiqued it and re-energized it." Note Paglia also says in that interview (and note the wild generalizations that, once again, Playboy calls her on): "These groups alienated everyone they could. The radical gay groups, for instance, screaming at people, storming into St. Patrick's Cathedral, caused a backlash in certain communities that has caused even more homophobia. They managed to bring together people who have never spoken before. How stupid! Where is the thinking behind it?...My point is that you cannot force social change at a speed that it cannot go." (Paglia, Playboy, 1995)
Note that Paglia uses, again, a tired old chesnut of the Religious Right, mention of one Act-Up protest in 1989 at Saint Patrick's Cathedral, as though it's 1) a frequent event and 2) as though it represents widespread behavior of gay rights activists. In fact, the Act-Up event was condemned by a lot of gay activists (Act Up has always been controversial within gay communities) and the St. Patrick's incident was notable precisely because it was such a rare instance. Notice Paglia has to reach back six years at that point to find it.
But read those quotes in relation to Happy Camper's view of Paglia's rhetoric. Does this reading (or Paglia's actual argument) even make sense? So, it's okay according to Paglia to be pagan and transgressive, as long as you do so quietly and don't move too fast? Or else, "a price must be paid"? Like AIDS? From what she's actually said, rather than what we'd like her to have said, it's pretty obvious Paglia believes that gay culture should "stand on the fringes and critique society" about as much as Jerry Falwell (and she often borrows his rhetoric).
You suggest that "Obviously, you have never really read Paglia and I suggest that you begin with Sexual Personae." Well, I read "Sexual Personae" when I was 23. Even at that point, it was difficult to see Paglia's view of gay men as anything but limited (and hard to see someone as so "delightfully transgressive" when her work was so obviously indebted to the oldest of old warhorses Harold Bloom-- but with dirty parts). Though in that work she was speaking in her own "persona" as the "transgressive shock-jock academic," her interests in gay men, like those of the Religious Right, continually circle around linking it to extremes like sado-masochism and pederasts. That Paglia pretends occasionally to like such "transgressions" is both pandering and a sham. She usually turns it back into a condemnation of some generalized group, like "the sixties" or some "gay male world," as she does in those quotes listed above.
Salon may not be interested in responding to Paglia's remarks about how AIDS is the punishment for "homosexual promiscuity" or how "nature wants us to procreate," since they come from an interview with another publication (though I still can't imagine Salon happily promoting anyone else who made such comments, even if they made them in a low-circulation hometown newspaper). But I'm curious as to why Salon won't respond about the same type of sentiments, cloaked in slightly frillier language, that HAVE appeared in the past by Paglia on Salon, and why Salon is promoting homophobic discourse on its site.
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"Sorry, but I just had to write one last time to clear up a few things."
I think you did, for me at least, but not in the way you intended.
All that the pro-CP writers have to say, over and over and over again, is that the anti-CP writers "just don't get her", no matter how many specific examples and reasons are given for why we do indeed get her and that's why we reject her. Clearly, the CP fans take the rejection of CP as an insult to them -- we must be calling them stupid, basically, so they're calling us stupid right back. This is certainly what I get from your post. "Chris" has written who knows how many posts here praising CP and her supporters and not saying anything of substance, but the reasoned, researched and rational posts of Margalis are dismissed by you as meaningless? I would suggest you re-examine who does and does not "get it".
Here's what I've learned from all this: CP's fans are exactly who I would have expected them to be. If that's who Salon wants to have clicking on to their site, that's their right. Unfortunately for them, it seems clear that the majority of their long-term readers are not in that camp. If Salon wants to court these new readers at the expense of their old ones, good luck to them.