Review of The Tolerance Trap
Review of The Tolerance Trap
Review of The Tolerance Trap
popular media, and marriage itselfas tactically expedient, but strategically dubious.
After recounting the meteoric appearance of homosexuals in popular culture and politics
over the last fifteen years, Walters remarks, "Truth be told, this has all happened pretty
damn quickly." Her point is that it has been perhaps a bit too easy. By eschewing
confrontation and instead seeking acceptance into highly symbolic institutions firmly
embedded with core heterosexual norms, the recent gay rights movement has managed to
secure unprecedented social visibility, while our society and its institutions remain
fundamentally unchanged, except that gays are now enthusiastically encouraged to
emulate and aspire to the traditionally heteronormative ideals of marital monogamy and
martial discipline. Traditional sexism and homophobia, meanwhile, remains vigorous, as
any cursory review of assault and homosexual suicide statistics, or of Republican rhetoric
and policy initiatives, reveals.
Walters focuses on three dominant discourses which have inspired and run
through the contemporary, now "mainstream," gay movement. In addition to gays in the
military (broadly thematized as gay citizenship or national belonging) and gay marriage,
she identifies the critical role debates over the "cause" of homosexuality have played in
the development of the gay tolerance narrative and its reception. Walters points out that,
"there is, inarguably, an overwhelming 'born with it' ideology afoot that encompasses gay
marriage, gay genes, and gayness as a 'trait' and that isof courseused by both gay
rights activists and anti-gay activists to make arguments for equality or against it." We are
familiar with this discursive turn as it continues to play out between anti-gay factions
claiming homosexuality is a "choice" which can be "cured," and pro-gay factions
claiming sexual desire is a biologically determined trait inherited at birth. The irony that
this "turn" essentially reverses the polarity of the prevailing political sensibilities of the
gay liberation era (when anti-gay conservatives held that homosexuality was a pathology
and radical gay activists insisted that queer gender was a conscious choice to reject
heteronormativity) is not lost on Walters. Beginning with the Human Genome Project in
1989, however, gay activists turned to the idea that homosexuality could be legitimated as
a genetic "fact." Their opponents quickly turned the other way, now claiming that
homosexuality is an unnatural "choice" which can be influenced (and changed) by the
environment. Walters acknowledges that public consensus clearly favors the notion that
homosexuality is an inborn, quasi-biological trait, largely rejecting anti-gay claims that
homosexuality can be cured through "reparative therapy," but she is highly critical of how
and why public discourse has moved in this direction. The popular narrative supporting
the idea that gays are "born that way," she argues, has emerged as an almost hysterical
dogma, based not on scientific evidence, but on retrograde notions of "gender
essentialism," which assume a binary dichotomy of naturally occurring genders defined
according to sexist, heteronormative criteria.
[A]s sexual orientation comes to be viewed as a core, an unchangeable and
immutable part of the self, so too does gender get depicted as stereotypically pink
and blue, oppositional, dualistic. A whole series of equivalencies are embedded in
mainstream biological narratives: natural = good = immutable = inevitable; male
homosexuality = feminization; sexual acts = desire = identity. I can't help
wondering how this narrative structures social perception and the quest for equal
rights. If tolerance rests on immutability and immutability rests on some