The Dishcast with Andrew Sullivan (private feed for kbockus@gmail.com)

Ross Douthat On Chronic Pain And Faith

Ross is a dear old colleague whose newest book, The Deep Places, is a memoir about his long fight against Lyme disease. In this episode we talk about the world of sickness, which we both know something about, and we debate our differing views of Pope Francis and our different levels of panic over Trump and CRT.You can listen to the episode right away in the audio player embedded above, or right below it you can click “Listen in podcast app” — which will connect you to the Dishcast feed. To listen to two excerpts from my conversation with Ross — on how chronic pain affects one’s religious faith, and on whether the Vatican should deny Communion to certain groups, such as the rich or the remarried — head over to our YouTube page.A religious reader writes:I listened to the first part of your interview with Johann Hari (whose book Lost Connections is in my library), and I have a small dissent. You said something (at 1:11:00) that I interpreted as a belief that Jesus was not literally resurrected, on the grounds that the resurrection is an accretion: “the Gospels themselves are oral histories written one hundred years later.” This sounds an awful lot like form criticism and is wrong. The Gospel of Mark was written 30-40 years after the crucifixion and the Gospel of John was written about AD 90. I recommend a book called Jesus and The Eyewitnesses by Richard Bauckham, who explains why this is probably so. It isn’t apologetics; it’s a serious academic study. However, what is even more important is that we know that one of the earliest pieces of oral history, written within months of the resurrection (I can’t explain how the experts know this, but apparently even Bart Ehrman agrees), appears in Corinthians 15:13, “For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance [a]: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scripture” … which apparently scholars date to within a few months of the resurrection. A more detailed explanation is here: The Gospels may be full of accretions, but the resurrection isn’t one of them. It is one of the first things. I think you misinterpreted me. It’s quite clear that the resurrection was believed by the earliest sources. My point is that what the resurrection actually has multiple versions in the New Testament, and what it means specifically — did he retain his body? could he walk through walls? could he disguise himself as someone else? —remains a little obscure. Another reader zooms out:After falling behind on your podcasts, I was able to catch up. While my comments are not timely, I feel the need to share them.Michael Wolff: He had a better understanding of Trump than anyone at the NYT, WaPo, etc. He really exposed the weakness of the coverage of Trump by mainstream media.Michael Moynihan: Very sharp and interesting. Gives you hope that there are sane journalists out there not afraid to expose the deficiencies of the CRT/Woke ideology. It made me wonder if young “woke” poorly paid journalists understand that they will soon be replaced by younger poorly paid journalists — who will criticize them.Michael Schuman: Pivoting to China (away from CRT) shows the breadth of the Dish. China is obviously a present and future problem for our country, and a problem that people (and politicians) know little about. Schuman’s suggestion that we expand our trade partners beyond China (TPP comes to mind) would be a wise course of action. We will never compete with China with American workers.Michael Lewis: As interesting as his books. Listening to him discuss the death of his daughter; and thinking about the difficult situation he faces grieving for her and supporting his family who is also grieving, I thought of those who speak of white privilege and how they should look at Michael’s tragic story as an example of how the world can, at times, cause everyone pain, no matter how white or wealthy.Wesley Yang: No one can say Andrew Sullivan talks over his guest anymore.Peter Beinart: I’m stunned at Beinart’s support for the direction of the media today and enjoyed hearing him challenged on the basis for that support. Did he really say there are examples of great writing from Nikole Hannah Jones? Where? Here’s a followup to the Schuman pod from another reader:I grew up with a foot in each world with a mixed background: father’s side is Irish/Polish from Boston, mother’s side is ethnically Chinese and has been educated in the US since the late 19th century but has called Hong Kong home since the 1970s. All four past generations have essentially split my life between the East and the West.Here is my dissent to the interview: When I hear Westerners talk about East Asia, there is a false parallel that most fail to understand. One must beware of the temptation to equate Christianity’s influence in the West to Confucianism in the East. In the West, we tend to define much of our history in terms of tension based on religion (think: Rome pagan vs. Christian, Crusades, Reformation, persecution of the Jews). Religion in East Asia, in contrast, has never had the same thematic influence. This could partly be traced to the ideology of Daoism, which implies significantly less individual agency and more flexibility. The Chinese are a pragmatic people, who believe in working with the tools they are handed, and are relatively private outside of the family unit. What I think many Westerners fail to understand is that the basic concept of morality and virtue is fundamentally different in countries that don’t have a Judeo-Christian concept of equality/sanctity of life. In many ways, Chinese culture is fundamentally more capitalist than American culture — money and morality are intrinsically linked (Lunar New Year traditions w/r/t prosperity, morality of luck/gambling, etc., no guilt associated with amassing capital). Until one understands this difference in values and ethics, it’s very difficult for a Westerner to understand Chinese culture today.  For example, I think you might be interested in investigating gender relations in China further. While femininity looks constricted to a Western eye, I have also observed women have more professional success in leadership roles in Greater China than in New York City (role of the woman in family, childcare, structure of families, power balances linked to source of familial wealth rather than gender). Also interesting is Shanghai’s tradition as a matriarchal society (the Soong sisters have a fascinating history).My point here is that understanding China today requires a similar approach to learning a new language: one needs to adopt a completely different mentality to understand the rules of play.One more reader keeps the debate going on Afghanistan:I’m disappointed that you’ve succumbed to the mob attacking Joe Biden’s decisions to get us out Afghanistan quickly. The unpleasant truth is that there was never any chance for a “happily ever after” scenario in Afghanistan. President Bush squandered that chance when he ordered most of our troops out of Afghanistan to search for WMDs in Iraq, and Trump cemented it 20 years later when he signed the peace deal with the Taliban handing over Afghanistan to the Taliban and returning thousands of their solders in exchange for their agreement not to target American soldiers. By the time Biden made his decision, there were no good options for an orderly evacuation, especially with the Taliban steadily advancing on Kabul.Biden’s menu for extraction consisted of only two realistic choices. Both required a leap of faith. The one he chose required the Afghan army to be able to hold out for at least three months in order for the US civilian and military bureaucracy to work around the extremely hostile refugee requirements imposed by the Trump administration. A much larger leap required the Afghan army to hold out long enough to negotiate a comprehensive settlement. Given that the Afghan army was three times the size of Taliban’s and better armed, it was reasonable for Biden to believe they could hold out for a couple of months. After all, we spent billions of dollars training them and decades touting their skill and courage. Unfortunately, the Afghan army was even more corrupt and cynical than imagined. Its sudden collapse and the flight of their president forcefully demonstrated that Afghanistan was a house of cards, resting on a phony army and corrupt government, ready to collapse at the first hint we were leaving.  The notion that we could have left secretly is the same type of magical thinking that pervaded our missions in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. The only other option was to redeploy several thousand American troops, but this violated the terms of Trump’s agreement and triggered a new set of risks.At least for now the Taliban are honoring their end of the bargain. They have not attacked US soldiers and planes. The tragic attack that killed 13 American soldiers was engineered by a branch of Al Qaeda, an enemy of the Taliban. The Taliban have also allowed any Americans wishing to leave to do so, and it is likely all US citizens wishing to leave will be able to return home. The Taliban have also allowed almost 100,000 Afghans to leave, many of whom fought against them in various ways. If American soldiers had reentered the fight, this cooperation would have vanished. If even one plane were shot down, imagine the loss of life and the desire for revenge, leading to more death.Certainly, Afghan women again are not being treated well. The Taliban government is a religious theocracy allowing little dissent, and there continue to be acts of extreme brutality. But are Taliban’s actions any worse than those of our close ally, Saudi Arabia? Worse than some of our own unholy acts in pursuit of the War on Terror?What is particularly tragic is that Biden is taking the hit for our collective failure and guilt, the one president who had the courage to end a failed and costly war. Thank you for subscribing. Leave a comment or share this episode.

Michael Wolff On The Trump Threat

Michael Wolff, a longtime media critic, and now the author of three Trump tell-alls, talks with me about the 45th president. How politically dangerous is he still? How delusional and mentally unbalanced? Will he run again? We get into it. You can listen to our conversation right away in the audio player embedded above, or right below it you can click “Listen in podcast app” — which will connect you to the Dishcast feed. For two clips of the episode — on the questions of whether the media confronted Trump appropriately and whether the madman will return to electoral politics — head over to our YouTube page.A reader writes:Your two-week vacation gave me time to listen to the Michael Lewis episode. Since Donald Trump is supposedly responsible for all of the country’s ills, here’s a counterfactual: If he had taken the California approach to controlling Covid, would he have been branded an authoritarian dictator who was denying Americans their basic freedoms? Had he taken that approach, along with Operation Warp Speed, I doubt he would have been hailed as someone who was doing his best to protect the public’s health. He knew how the media would portray an attempted federal shutdown of the country and his only response was to err on the side of less restrictions. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.I don’t disagree. That’s what a tribalized country does: one tribe cannot ever give a president of the other tribe the benefit of the doubt, even in a public health emergency. That applies to Biden now as well, of course. Another reader swung his support to Trump out of a reaction to the media:I come from a Muslim country and I’m a naturalized American. I was a registered Democrat for 10 years. I always voted for the Democrats. But in 2020, I voted for Trump, due to the lies of the leftist MSM after watching all WH press conferences in full. I saw the edited/manipulated sound-bite videos and I couldn’t believe the lies and the distortion. All those “mostly peaceful” protests ... simply disappointing.The left doesn't represent me anymore. I don’t like watching Bill Maher, Steven Colbert, John Oliver, or Trevor Noah anymore. I don’t share the same values with them anymore. I’m a **civil libertarian** before anything else. I'm tired of you guys’ constant Trump Derangement Syndrome cramps day and night. Switching to Afghanistan, a reader sends a view from his wartime:From the reader:The 2014 window view from Afghanistan that you posted prompts me to share this photo, taken through the window of a truck in Khost, Afghanistan in 2004. I was a hardcore neocon when I enlisted after 9/11, and of course I’m much chastened from those days. I enjoyed your writing all along the sad journey. My mom would send several days’ worth of the Dish in letter-format when I was in basic training — when reading anything but letters and religious texts were forbidden — and I continued reading you while in Afghanistan, when I could get to the Internet.Next is a dissent from an “ex British Army soldier who completed two tours of Helmand province and then worked for several more years as a civilian in Afghanistan.” It’s a powerful testimony, and the impact of the chaotic withdrawal on our alliances is something I haven’t fully accounted for:What you have wrong here is that whether to withdraw or not is barely half the question. It is possible to withdraw in a manner that isn’t reckless, petulant, tin-eared, chaotic and certain to inflict pandemonium on your partner nations. It is possible to let your allies and your own military actually plan for the tasks that withdrawal necessitates, whereas here it seems plain that the operation to extract people has not even had time to plan movements from the city to the airport (this in a city whose airport, as most people don’t know, is practically in the city centre). Biden, in short, has absolutely fucked not only Kabulis, but all of the US partner countries in Afghanistan, all of whom are absolutely swamped beneath this task. This is Biden pulling the pin without caring a shit for America’s allies. Good grief, Andrew, this is very far from “grown-up.” You seem to imply that the only people complaining about the exit’s manner are those who are opposed to it — I think you have that quite, quite wrong. There is no incoherence in the notion that withdrawal is necessary but the manner of it is an embarrassing and shameful episode which will damage enduring partnerships. That damage is worst with the British, who expended more blood and treasure than any other NATO country. What many British officials have internalised over the years is that the special relationship is largely meaningless as far as the Americans are concerned. But for the first time we have incontrovertible proof that first, the US doesn’t care about us, and second, the US is unreliable anyway. This may prompt a wholesale rethinking of British foreign policy. I really don’t think even Trump — even Trump! — could have done anything so spectacularly tacky, so profoundly deleterious to alliances.Thankfully, the Afghan guy who worked for me has happily made good his escape and has been housed in the UK with his family. The euphoria of learning that, set against the horror of what was going on in a city I once knew intimately, has created quite the swirl of dissonance for me.But anyway, thank you for the Weekly Dish (which I do pay for!) — it’s one of the highlights of my week. I’ve been an admirer of yours since I first saw your long CSPAN conversation about post-9/11 America with Hitchens ... who would be incandescent over this withdrawal!The reader is probably right on that last point — here’s Hitch on Afghanistan in late 2010, a year before he died:Many readers have opinions about how Afghanistan should have been handled. The first:When an army leaves, it must leave strong. We should have surged, say, 10K troops with mobile artillery, and as the Taliban melted into the hills in response, we should have set up defensive perimeters around Kabul and other collection points for US citizens and our allies, and withdrawn at our leisure, from a position of strength. And screw Trump’s deadlines and deals.Speaking of deadlines, another reader: Everyone who has followed Afghanistan knows that from roughly October to March, there is no fighting; it is just too damn cold and miserable. A more thoughtful person than Biden would have given a date of November 1 to begin leaving with everyone home by Thanksgiving. It would have sounded great. Another reader thinks we should have stayed:No American servicemember has died in Afghanistan for nearly two years. Less than 3,500 of them are even there, enabling the formerly free Afghans to stiffen what resolve they have, nevermind guaranteeing the equal status of women there, and providing America with an unblinking eye in the sky.That reader is incorrect regarding dead American soldiers (not to mention all the injuries and PTSD). From FactCheck.org:In fact, 11 U.S. service members were killed in Afghanistan last year, including four in combat, according to the Defense Casualty Analysis System. Twenty-three service members were killed in Afghanistan in 2019, including 17 in combat. No service members have been killed or wounded in action in Afghanistan in 2021, according to Defense Department reports as of Aug. 23.This next reader also wants the US government to stay in Afghanistan:In my view, keeping a presence there with 3,500 soldiers, a great airbase within minutes of Russia and Eastern China (not to mention Pakistan), an embassy with intelligence capacities (not to mention providing a modicum of rights and some cultural influence on millions of Afghans), seemed like a fantastic deal.Along those lines, another adds:There’s another concern: terrorism in the West and, particularly, in the US. My understanding is that through Afghanistan, we had an intelligence window into the comings and goings of various terrorists, some of whom have been identified as crossing over into the US from our porous Mexican border. That’s now gone.Another reader looks back in history:I agree with you on the failure and need to get out of Afghanistan, but I don’t think it was always a doomed effort. I think Afghanistan was lost the moment President Bush gave his Axis of Evil speech against Iraq, Iran, and North Korean. That speech said clearly that Afghanistan wasn’t really important, nor was eliminating al Qaeda. We have bigger fish to fry. It also said that we will make up stuff to justify invading a country we want to overthrow — by then, UN inspectors had shown our reasons were false. It named the next two nations on our hit list.Is it any surprise North Korea finished developing a nuclear bomb in 2006? They needed it for self-defense. The threat of destroying large parts of South Korea was all they had without relying on China. Iran had been moderating their stance, and there were reports that Iran was providing underground assistance in Afghanistan, since they didn’t want the Taliban in power either. Of course that ended, and in their next election they turned towards the most radical elements in their society. Their best defense is to stir up trouble in the region and keep the dogs snapping at US heels elsewhere by supporting terrorists throughout the region. An act of self-defense.Bush also diverted resources from Afghanistan that might have helped achieve a positive outcome in the early days of the mission. By the time our focus returned to Afghanistan, it was too late.Another reader worries about the future:You quoted Francis Fukuyama, who wonders why the US wanted an Afghan nation with a central government rather than a more logical tribal federation. The answer may lie in the ever-present capitalist influences that pervade our foreign policy goals. Afghanistan is a trove of extractable mineral wealth. Dealing with a central government simplifies the process of attracting the kind of investment necessary to extract that mineral wealth. Of course, now that the US is out of the way, look for Russia and China to try to insert themselves into whatever sort of political jigsaw puzzle evolves from the Taliban takeover. Neither country will have any problem stooping low enough to get under the morality bar that the Taliban has set.This reader is less worried about the future:Sorry, but I can’t get myself to say the withdrawal has been a disaster. This thing has to play out. Shame on Americans who haven’t kept up with events in a war being pursued in our name. We know deals have been made between warlords and the Taliban, tribes, military commanders, etc. We know the country is different today than in 2001, with a majority of the youth under 20 never knowing the Taliban. We know the Taliban faces a typhoon of problems and unruly constituencies. More than one person with knowledge of the situation has said it might be easier for the Afghans to resolve their internal conflicts without a foreign occupier weighing every move.  This is a dynamic situation. It’s easy to feel guilty or badly for the Afghan people, but nobody, including the Taliban, knows what this will look like even a year from now, much less five or ten.A quick question from a reader regarding the other war:I went looking for your book “I Was Wrong” about the Iraq War and it did not come up on Amazon when I searched “andrew sullivan.” Perhaps you might add a page to your substack where you could purchase your books? It would be better than giving Amazon a cut.“I Was Wrong” is actually an ebook available here for free. Lastly, a reader recommends a guest for the Dishcast:Might I suggest (again) Ross Douthat? I’d love to hear you two discuss the goings-on in the Church and the state of Francis’s papacy nine years on. Douthat also has a new book out soon, about his long illness with Lyme disease and his struggles with the medical establishment. Given your own experience with a disease that American medicine spent an awfully long period of time essentially ignoring — and your recent writings on how HIV has shaped your understanding of COVID — I thought this might be an opportunity for a really profitable dialogue during a period where the American medical establishment seems to be hemorrhaging credibility. Our reader has read our mind: Ross is slated for next week. Thank you for subscribing. Leave a comment or share this episode.

Andrew Sullivan On His Early Influences (Part Two)

While Andrew and I wrap up our two-week summer vacation (back on September 10), here is the second half of the very personal interview he did with journalist and friend Johann Hari (who wrote the bestselling books Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs and Lost Connections: Why You’re Depressed and How to Find Hope). To recap, the idea to re-air the 2012 conversation all started with this reader: I began reading Andrew in the early 2000s, and even though I’m a huge fan, I’ve never heard him systematically discuss his intellectual origins and development. […] I bet your listeners might enjoy hearing Andrew being interviewed thoroughly and in-depth about how he sees the trajectory of his intellectual life. (I know I would.)That posted email prompted another reader to write in:[Andrew] did an extensive two-parter with Johann Hari a decade ago, which covers most of the areas that your reader mentions. Johann put this out as his own podcast, which is no longer available online, but I have mp3 copies that I’m happy to share.A big thanks to our reader for saving the audio files from oblivion! I vividly remember listening to that interview, almost a decade ago, because it was one of the most riveting and revealing conversations I’ve ever heard from Andrew, publicly or privately. Johann has that effect.You can listen to the second half of the conversation right away in the audio player embedded above, or right below it you can click “Listen in podcast app” — which will connect you to the Dishcast feed. (The first half was posted here.) The second half includes an emotional recounting of Andrew’s best friend Patrick, who perished from AIDS in the middle of the book tour for Virtually Normal, a book he helped edit:Another part of the conversation tackles the nature of religious fundamentalism and natural law, especially when it comes to sexuality:For three more clips of Andrew’s conversation with Johann — about two of the earliest influences that made Andrew a conservative; on the genius of his dissertation subject, Michael Oakeshott; and on why true conservatives should want to save the planet from climate change — head to our YouTube page.In lieu of reader commentary this week, we are trying something different: a transcript of a podcast episode, specifically a July interview that Andrew did on Debra Soh’s podcast, focused on the AIDS crisis and the marriage movement. (We are thinking of making transcripts available for our most popular Dishcast episodes. Unfortunately we we don’t have the staff bandwidth to do every episode, since transcripts are a ton of work, even with auto-transcription tools.) Below is the second half of Andrew’s conversation with Debra, author of The End of Gender: Debunking the Myths about Sex and Identity in Our Society (the first half is here):Andrew: I could take you to a few leather bars, where it’s probably the last place now in America where raw masculinity can be simply celebrated, where it isn’t complicated. I mean, it’s in the presentation more than in the actual reality, but nonetheless it’s like, “Yay! Men like sex, we’re men, sniff my armpit, look at my back hair, and let’s go for it. And in a couple of weeks in Provincetown, where I am, we’re going to have Bear Week, which was the moment when a whole bunch of middle-aged overweight, hairy-back dudes who were able to actually be welcomed as integral to gay culture and gay society — which took a while too — instead of all these perfect little muscle bunnies that show up for circuit party.Debra: When I go to gay bars, it doesn’t matter where I am in the world. Sometimes I’ll go by myself even, just because I’m curious to hang out there — and everyone is always so nice. They’re a little bit concerned. They look at me and think, like, “Why is she here?” But they never ask me, “What are you doing here?” And they never told me to leave. And that’s one thing I love about it.Andrew: The thing that we are getting a little upset is, um, vast numbers of straight women coming in — especially this bachelorette party thing, where gay male spaces are just overwhelmed by women.Debra: Yeah that’s a problem. Because they’re disrespectful too. They get really drunk and they’re all over people — don’t do that. Be respectful.Andrew: We’re like zoo animals to them. And they want their Instagram photos in the cool leather bar. And we’re just like, you’re killing the mood. Like, you know, we don’t want to be mean and tell you to leave, but can’t you see that this is actually a place you might want to respect a little bit? I mean, they had a bachelorette party coming in, they’re playing bareback sex on the screens up there, and they will still sit there with their gin and tonic.Debra: It’s weird. I feel it’s changed, because when I used to go, I’d be the only straight person there. Now when I go out, it’s weird to see — you see a younger generation of straight kids there, and I’m like, this is crazy.Andrew: Well you take the word “queer”, which is now integrated into the LGBTQIA+ thing.Debra: Yeah, like I always say, I don’t like that word.Andrew: You can be definitely be straight and queer, you just dye your hair blue. And then when they do surveys of LGBTQIA+ people, we don’t know if that’s gay people or if it’s straight people in a mood. And my view is that you can call yourself whatever you want. You can have whatever sex you want. I’m a total “live and let live” person. But at some point language must mean something. And if the gay rights movement is essentially a movement of straight people, some gay people, lots of trans people, fighting on around questions of race and gender and deconstructing society and dismantling sexual norms and dismantling the sexual binary, then I don’t have a place in that movement. I’ve left it. I think a lot of gay men are just like, “We’re done.”The left elite that controls the media, that insists and controls the image of homosexuals so that we are always queer, always left, in which none of that diversity is ever explained. I mean, they are brilliant at promoting narratives that are not truth. So for example, we are constantly told that Stonewall was started and led by trans women of color, and that if it weren’t for trans women of color, we would have no rights. This is absolutely untrue. You only have to look at the photos. You only have to read the histories. It’s completely outrageously untrue. And yet now it is repeated ad nauseam.Debra: Well, it’s like you’re saying, because you can’t tell the younger generation, they just rewrite the history and they don’t know.Andrew: They’re going to write white gay men out of the entire history of the gay rights movement. They will not mention people like me. They will not mention anybody who played a part in the marriage movement. For example, we are, I mean, I’m particularly non grata, you know, I’ve never been given a single recognition by the gay community to any of the work I’ve ever done, because I’m not a left-liberal.Debra: That’s sad. That’s wrong. How did you deal with — you’ve gotten abuse from all over the political spectrum since disclosing your status as being HIV positive. What helped you manage and get through that? Because those attacks have been very personal.Andrew: Yeah, well, HIV led me to be subject to deportation for 19 years, which was a very frightening place to be in. And it’s lovely to hear left-wing progressives tell me they wish I’d been deported. The truth is you accept in some ways — and I learned this very early — when I was out as the editor of The New Republic. I was the only out journalist in Washington. I was only 26, but I was the only out one. So I was very prominent at the very beginning. And because of that, and a lot of fuss was made about me, I was supposed to represent everybody gay. Of course I didn’t. I said “I don’t, and I’m not going to, and I’m going to pursue my own view of the world.” And that was just not allowed, because I did not fit in to the existing left-power framework within the gay rights movement. I was basically ignored or attacked. But you get through it because you know what you’re doing is in good faith. You’ve actually made a difference. You can see exactly the arguments that you helped frame and create — they came to win the argument. You can see how in that fight for marriage equality, liberalism worked, in as much as I went and talked to anybody from the fundamentalist right to the crazy left. I talked to anybody. I went to Christian churches, I went to Catholic colleges. I had a policy of never turning down an invite, which is what you do if you really want to get your message out there, if you really want to talk. And that included countless TV and radio stuff. And then when I did an anthology on marriage, I actually included all the major arguments against it, which is unimaginable today. You would have a book that would sell, that would have different views of the same thing. Debra: You’re triggering. Andrew: Yeah, but we knew, I knew, that we had stronger arguments. I wanted them out there in public against the other arguments. I thought we would win if we just kept at it. And because so many other gay people saw this, they also began to come out and they also talked about marriage and they also talked about their own relationships. And the truth is that, when you see that happening and when you know that you played any part in someone’s wedding day, and you can see how healing that is to people, their families, their sense of self-esteem, their integration into culture — who gives a damn if I’m called a white supremacist on an hourly basis, because I’m not. And also the truth is, the gay community, the people I know and love around me, we have a lovely relationship. And your friendships and you — you rely on that. And gay people, most of us, we’re not that political. I come to Provincetown. This is my 26th season here. And all the people I know, know me as me — not as this writer or this other stuff. With that kind of friendship network and support network, you can get through most things.Debra: Yeah, because you know who you are, and people who love you know who you are.Andrew: I think the thing is to believe that you don’t care what anybody says about you, as long as it isn’t true. Now, if it’s true you should listen, to figure out what you’ve done wrong. But if it’s really not true, I mean, if they start calling you a white supremacist, as they do on — you know, literally every other tweet I’m called this — there’s nothing you could do about that. It’s their problem, not yours. I mean, they’re projecting on to you all these insecurities that are pretty obvious. And I learned from the beginning too, when I was the only openly gay person out there, the number of gay people who reached out to me and wanted me to be their idol or their representative, and I couldn’t be — I learned slowly over a few years to erect a boundary so that I wasn’t so emotionally vulnerable to all of that. But it hurts, it has always hurt. Of course it hurts you. I don’t want to get to a point where it doesn’t hurt. I just want to get to resilience. And also the thing about AIDS, and watching, you know, half your friendship network die, and contemplating your own death as you saw them die, because you knew you were going to go through the same thing — it’s liberating. I mean, I thought I would have a few years to live. Why fuck with the bullshit when you’re going to die in a few years? Why not tell the truth? The book Virtually Normal? I wrote that because I thought I was going to die and I wanted to write something now, to leave behind, so the arguments for marriage equality, which were otherwise not being made, could be done definitively. And I could leave that behind.And I wrote in the preface — dated it to the date of my seroconversion as a memory to myself — that this is why I wrote this book. So I think when gay people come out, first of all, they risk a lot. Or they think they’re risking a lot, and that’s liberating truth. And I think to face mortality young gives you this sense of perspective. I’ll give you a tiny little anecdote. After I got into all that mess by publishing a symposium on The Bell Curve — which you weren’t supposed to talk about, let alone debate — but I’d published a symposium, a piece from the book and 13 criticisms of it. And it was a huge fuss. And I nearly lost my job. It was besieged within the office. I upset a lot of people. At some point, Charles Murray said, “Well let’s go out and have a dinner, I’ll take you out to dinner to thank you for this.” And at some point he said to me, “This must be a really life-changing moment for you.” And I said to him, “It isn’t. You don’t know this, but let me tell you now: I’m dying of AIDS, and half my friends are. I’m in a crisis. This [the Bell Curve controversy] is not a crisis. This is a tempest of ideas and slurs and stigmas and realities and debates, but it’s not for me a major life event.”So there’s a certain liberation in having survived. And I think Churchill said there’s nothing more exhilarating than being shot at but not being hit. And I think the fact is, I’m still here, I’m still dodging the bullets. I do want to say, though, I hope you don’t mind me doing this: Next month my collection is coming out, which has all those early gay essays. I wrote about AIDS and the early arguments of marriage equality, all chronological. So you can see how the arguments developed over time.Debra: Listeners can’t see that Andrew held up his forthcoming book. So where can they get your book?Andrew: On Amazon, where you can pre-order on Amazon, if you want. It’s called “Out On a Limb: Selected Writing 1989 to 2021.” And it’s basically a greatest hits. Hitchens did his collection then dropped dead within a couple of years. So I hope it’s not going to happen to me.There is something wonderfully liberating about facing mortality when you’re very young and living through it, and the knowledge that that’s always there. And I’m still a Catholic. So for me, the truth matters. And people used to ask me, “Like, how can you be openly gay and Catholic?” And my response was always, “Don’t you understand: I’m openly gay because I’m Catholic, because the church taught me to tell the truth as a core virtue. I am not lying to you. You were asking me to lie about myself. I will not do that. That is not actually the Christian thing to do.”And so the conflicts, they are not as profound as you might otherwise think. And the truth is, actually, from the very get-go, the first time I realized I had this magic stick and it would give me all sorts of … whatever. I hate to say, but it’s true, I, um —Debra: It’s a sex podcast. You can talk about your magic stick all you want.Andrew: Well I’m talking about when I turned 13, 14, and I was like, “This is awesome. This can’t be wrong.” Obviously it’s not wrong. It’s happening spontaneously to me. I mean, I didn’t choose it, obviously. It’s not wrong. And there’s so much of it at the time, that how on earth am I supposed to save this up for one woman every year? I’m like no, it’s not happening. I had real wrestling with the arguments — though I also try to wrestle them to earth — but I’ve never had much sexual shame.Debra: That’s amazing. So before I let you go, what advice would you have for young gay men who may have concerns about how to approach sex and dating?Andrew: The idea that I’m giving advice to people, on dating, is quite bizarre. I’m in no a position to advise anyone. What I would say this is: You are lucky enough to have been born when all the major gay rights have been established. You’re the luckiest generation of gay people ever in the history of mankind. It has never been a better place to be gay than now in America. So live your lives, live them fully. Don’t be obsessed about this subject. Be yourself and also know that finding the right partner, the right person to be with you in that journey, is incredibly important. It doesn’t mean you can’t have sex, or you can’t date and do all sorts of things. But at some point that’s going to matter — choose wisely, if you can.But you don’t have to be political the way we had to be political. You don’t have to be an activist in the way that we had to be an activist — because we had to get to a point of equality. Now we’re there. There is a range of possibilities for you. And do not believe that a gay person is somehow restricted in the areas they can live and act and work in anyway whatsoever. Do not believe that being gay is somehow incompatible with being a construction worker or an airplane pilot or any of the other — don’t buy into any of the sexist stereotypes that want to turn gay men into women, or lesbians into men. Your job is to show what gay people can do. What we can give back to our society. And we have over the centuries done so much in terms of creating educational environments, in creating artistic achievements, and intellectual development — in the arts and the sciences. I mean, you have Alan Turing, who created the computer, as your idol. And he did that while he was being imprisoned for being gay and chemically castrated to prevent him being gay. And he invented the computer while he was doing that. So my point is, you have no excuse. Go out there and forge your own lives, obey no rules — as opposed to what you’re supposed to do. We can create a really wonderful gay future, and we can contribute — as we did to your life, Debra, as those men did for your life. We can be emblems of integrity and we can be emblems of responsibility. And we can be part of giving back, which is the most rewarding thing. So I’m more interested in what we can make of gay culture and of gay existence now, more than constantly worrying about oppression. The truth is — I hate to tell you this — but you’re not really that oppressed. And certainly if you think of any other gay human being who’s ever lived, you are certainly not that oppressed. When I was in my twenties, it was a crime for me to have sex with another dude in my bed, my own bedroom. So don’t talk to me about oppression. You have no idea. A lot of it’s in your own heads. Go be the people you always wanted to be and be proudly gay alongside it. And don’t listen to anybody telling you any rules about what gay people can be or should be.Debra: Alright, Andrew, thank you so much.Andrew: Oh Debra, that was lovely. Thank you so much for asking me. You know, the thing about this, we don’t have our own children. There are many of us in my generation that look to the young now and see them treating us as if we were dinosaurs who really need to be relegated to the past. And they don’t know what we did for them, or the toll it took on so many, and the agony that it created. And sometimes that amnesia hurts a lot. Maybe one of the things we also need to work on as gay men is building more relationships across the generations, so we can make sure that these stories, and this history, and this enormously transformative period can be conveyed. But we are unfortunately very age stratified. And the ability of older men to talk to younger men is not as strong as it might be. You know, we fought for the right for you to piss your life away in a dance club, if you want to. So that’s great! Go ahead, but have a thought for second of the people older than you, who went through the equivalent of a war and are veterans of that war and deserve a little bit of the respect that veterans of such wars tend to get. So thank you, Debra.Debra: Thank you. Thank you for subscribing. Leave a comment or share this episode.

Andrew Sullivan On His Early Influences (Part One)

This fortnight, while Andrew and I are on our annual Dishcation in August, we are airing a two-part interview of Andrew from 2012, conducted by the journalist Johann Hari (author of the bestselling books Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs and Lost Connections: Why You’re Depressed and How to Find Hope). The idea to re-air the interview all started with this reader:I began reading Andrew in the early 2000s, and even though I’m a huge fan, I’ve never heard him systematically discuss his intellectual origins and development. I know bits and pieces of the story — a provincial kid, debated at Oxford, proud Tory and Reagan supporter, came to the States, courted controversy at The New Republic, was a pioneering supporter of gay marriage, supported the Iraq War and lived to regret it, and so on. But I bet your listeners might enjoy hearing Andrew being interviewed thoroughly and in-depth about how he sees the trajectory of his intellectual life. (I know I would.) Another impetus for this suggestion is that I recently enjoyed listening to Glenn Loury do something like this on his own podcast. I loved it and learned a lot.That posted email prompted another reader to write in:One of your readers suggested that Andrew do an in-depth interview about his early life, his intellectual influences, etc. I listened to his interview with Giles Fraser, which was interesting, but he also did a more extensive two-parter with Johann Hari a decade ago, which covers most of the areas that your reader mentions. Johann put this out as his own podcast, which is no longer available online, but I have mp3 copies that I’m happy to share.Even Johann doesn’t have the audio files anymore, so a big thanks to our reader for saving them from oblivion! I vividly remember listening to that interview, almost a decade ago, because it was one of the most revealing conversations I’ve ever heard of Andrew (and I’ve known him a long time). Johann has a real knack for allowing people to reveal themselves.You can listen to the episode right away in the audio player embedded above, or right below it you can click “Listen in podcast app” — which will connect you to the Dishcast feed. (The second half of the interview will air next Friday. Update: here.) For three clips of Andrew’s conversation with Johann — on two of the earliest influences that made Andrew a conservative; on the genius of his dissertation subject, Michael Oakeshott; and on why true conservatives should want to save the planet from climate change — head over to our YouTube page.In lieu of reader commentary this week, we are trying something different: a transcript of a podcast episode, specifically an interview that Andrew did last month on Debra Soh’s podcast, focused on the AIDS crisis and the marriage movement. We may start making transcripts available for our most popular Dishcast episodes, rather than all of the episodes, because we don’t have the staff bandwidth right now, and transcripts are a lot of work. Let us know if you think they would be particularly useful, or if you have any ideas in general about the Dishcast: dish@andrewsullivan.com. For now, we hope you get some value from the transcript below, which gets very personal about Andrew and his friends who suffered during the AIDS crisis.Debra: I want to start by saying thank you so much for agreeing to do this. It’s really an honor for me to get to talk with you, especially about this subject. I guess I’ll explain to listeners what got me interested in wanting to do this episode. So my audience knows I’m straight, but I grew up in the gay community. When I was younger all my friends were gay men, and I really do credit them for helping me become the woman I am. I’m very proud of that. I love them so much, and I don’t feel there’s enough of a discussion about the AIDS crisis and what happened in the ‘80s and ‘90s. I feel like there needs to be more education about it, and I admire how open you’ve been about what you’ve been through. And I get so many questions from my audience, because I have a lot of young gay men in my audience, and they ask me about dating and sex, just like everyone does, but specifically in the context of this history and how to go about safer sex practices. So that’s what brought me to you.Andrew: I’m delighted to answer any questions or engage in various reminiscences, as you please.Debra: I want to start with a bit of a broader question in terms of coming out, because some of my audience, they live in parts of the world where it’s not acceptable to be gay, unfortunately, or they come from families where their families don’t accept them. What was it like for you when you were coming out? And also, what advice would you have for them?Andrew: Well, I came out in the ‘80s, and I was a gay boy entirely surrounded by straight people — the complete inverse of you. And I love them all. I never heard the word “homosexual” ever. I never heard any discussion of it. I never heard anything on the radio. It was never discussed in our house. All I knew: it was so awful that you couldn’t even mention it. And if you brought it up, it would immediately mean that you were gay, because who else would bring up such an appalling subject? I know it’s hard for kids today to understand that this was the atmosphere I grew up in. And it was not that long ago. I’m not that old.And so coming out was terrifying. I didn’t come out until I was in my early twenties and I had left England and arrived in America. I was able to sort of catch some of the extraordinary shifts in gay culture in the ‘80s, in Boston, and then in Washington, DC, and came out like that. I had never really said I was straight, ever, but I was asked outright when I was at Oxford, because I was president of the Oxford Union — the newspaper asked me, in 1981, “are you gay?” And I was like, “I have great relations with the men and women.” That was my only — I couldn’t, I wasn’t going to be drawn. But after that I came out and almost immediately told everybody — except my family. And eventually I had to go back and deal with them. Do you want me to tell you about that process?Debra: Yeah, please do.Andrew: I grew up in a Catholic family, with a strictly Catholic mother and grandmother, so I was brought up very profoundly within that tradition. So obviously that was a big worry for me. And secondly, my dad was the captain of the town rugby team. He was an athlete in school. He was the jockiest jock. He was the guy that all the guys used to hang out with. He was such a stereotypical male, and my brother and sister were like, “Please don’t talk about it, don’t tell Dad,” because they were terrified of his reaction. Apparently they had attempted to raise the possibility once, and my father had said at the time, “If he ever tells that to me, he’ll never be in this house again.” So I was terrified. But at that point, I was sort of part of the ‘80s revival of being proudly gay, even as we were surrounded by the beginnings of this horrible epidemic. And so I was like, I’m going to do it anyway. So I asked both my parents down to sit together in the living room and I was going to tell them something. And they were “What?!” I don’t normally ask them both to sit down. The usual means of communication was I would tell my mother something, she would then tell my father. And then if my father had anything to say, he would come back behind my mother — a fairly traditional kind of household in that respect. Anyway, I sat them down and I said, “I’ve come here to tell you I’m gay.” My mother said, “What?” I said, “I’m gay.” And she said, “What does that mean?” And I said, “I’m a homosexual. I always have been, I always will be. And I’m happy.” And she said, “Oh my God, I better go make a cup of tea” — which is what every English person does when the shit really does hit the fan.So she disappeared from the room, leaving me with my father. And suddenly he was bent double. I could see his shoulders shaking a little bit. And I realized he was sobbing. And I’d never seen my father cry before. It was basically unknown. I didn’t know what to do. But I said, “Dad, stop crying. There’s no need to cry. I’m okay. I’m okay.” But he kept on. And I said to him, eventually, “Well, can you tell me why you’re crying? And I can address that.” He looked up at that point and said, “I’m crying because of everything you must’ve gone through when you were growing up. And I never did anything to help you.”At that point I broke down. My father totally rose to the occasion. And since then he was rock solid — until he died last year — in my defense, and his pride in me as a gay person. My mother had a lot of issues about it, almost entirely because of the church, and she was never really comfortable. Because she felt it was going to — she had such hopes. I was the first kid in the family to go to college, and I had gotten into Oxford and then Harvard. And then I was going to throw it all away, by being gay? Why would you do that? I remember my first book, Virtually Normal, which was a case for marriage equality. After it came out, I said to my mother, “What did you think?” And she said, “Well, I didn’t really read it. I just want you to write a real book about a real subject, that isn’t stigmatizing to you and peripheral to normal good people.” At which point I kind of sighed and gave up — but she’s still, I mean, she’s still alive. And she loves me enormously. And only a few times did she drive me completely crazy.One of those times was in the epidemic, when my closest friend and I found out six weeks apart from each other that we were both positive. My friend died two years later, in an absolutely grotesque way. And at one point, when I was really, really in the dumps about it, because I’d just come from him, and he was basically a pile of bones, and in so much pain, and he couldn’t keep anything down and shat himself on the floor. This is a 31-year-old man. And I said to my mom, “I don’t know how much more I can do this.” And I was also a volunteer; I was nursing someone else to death at the same time, as a buddy. And my mother said, “Oh, Andrew, I wish you weren’t gay. If you weren’t gay, you wouldn’t have to deal with all of this.”And I said to my mom, “You know what, I’m going to put the phone down. If that’s all you can say — you wish that I weren’t me — at a moment when I need your support, because so many of my friends are in extreme crisis …” She didn’t know at the time that I had it too. I kept it from them. And so I said to her, “When you figure out why that is so horrible, what you just said to me, you can call me back.” It took a few months.That was the worst moment, because I just felt no one was there for me. And no one was. I mean, they didn’t understand. They just didn’t understand. We were living — I said this in an essay I wrote — like medievals among moderns. The COVID fatality rate, I think, is 0.1%, or something like that. Or not quite that low, but somewhere below 1%. HIV back then was a hundred percent fatal. Everyone died. It was not a matter of if; it was just a matter of when and how. And the way people died … it’s very hard to convey to people. It was not an easy death. It was a long, terrible series of nightmares. There was toxoplasmosis. Your immune system collapses. And after it collapses, below a certain point, other kinds of infections can come in, ones that normally your body would easily repel. But when they’re not repelled, they can take over your body. So for example, cryptosporidium, which is a little, little bug in the water that everybody drinks. But with people with AIDS, it just started to take over their gut and their stomachs. And so it ate all the food they tried to eat, before they did. So they started to become like skeletons. Or they would wake up one morning and a bug called toxoplasmosis might’ve gotten into their brain. A friend of mine literally woke up one morning and couldn’t tie his shoelaces, and didn’t know why Or cytomegalovirus — a friend of mine who was a photographer slowly, slowly went blind. At one point he had to have injections directly into his eyeballs. And I said to him, “I couldn’t, I could not look at a needle come right into my eye. How did you do it?” He said — I’ll never forget this — “because I want to see.”And pneumonia, pneumocystis, KS — Kaposi sarcoma — causes lesions all over you. Neuropathy — that was was huge. The man I volunteered for, to help him die, if you so much as brushed his feet with the sheet, he would scream in agony. And he was propped up on a couch day and night with gray liquid spurting uncontrollably out of his butthole. The sheer indignity of people.On top of the physical agony, they were unrecognizable. Their bodies were completely contorted. They were destroyed. They couldn’t see, they couldn’t breathe. They couldn’t eat. And you never knew what next was coming. I went once to a hospital ward and saw — this was the early part of the epidemic — people were still being sequestered into one ward, where the bodies were taken and put into black plastic bags, kept outside, quarantined. This was an AIDS ward. And my buddy who died — he used to be a big bodybuilder, but now he was 90 pounds at most. And next to him was a hospital bed, with the curtain drawn around it. From within it, I heard someone singing a pop song. I said to Joe, my friend, “Well, at least someone here is happy, you know, keeping their spirits up.” And he said, “Oh no, no. He died this morning. That’s his boyfriend singing. They’ve been together for 10 years. And he’s been barred. He’s been thrown out of their apartment. He’s been barred from the funeral. And that’s their song, that they sang. It was the song that was playing when they met, and this is the last place he’ll really be able to feel some physical contact with the husband who had just passed away. And the nurses can’t bring themselves to tell him to leave.”So it was not just the physical agony. It was the horrible stigma, the way in which people were treated, the indignity that they faced. And of course witnessing that, as I did, and many other instances of this, and also witnessing couples whose husbands were just magnificent in terms of sticking with people forever, you realize, I realized, that that must never ever happen again.And so that was the origin of the marriage equality movement. That’s the only thing that will stop this, and we will make sure it happens, and we will do so in honor of the dead. And that’s why we did it. And so the AIDS crisis was also as crucible for action.Debra: Would progress have been quicker, had being gay not been so stigmatized? Because homosexuality had only been taken out of the DSM less than a decade before the crisis began. You talk about the stigmatization. And I was reading about how, even in some cases, families couldn't bury their sons because again, the stigma around it, and also in some cases, funeral homes didn't even want to have the bodies there. So how do you think it might've been different if there was more acceptance of gay people?Andrew: You know, I’ve thought about that. And the truth is, I think it didn’t make that much difference to the trajectory of the epidemic. It made a huge difference to how gay people, gay men, were treated in that epidemic. And it had a huge impact on our radicalization and attempt to rebuild a future that granted us formal equality. But the truth is, the only way to stop the virus — apart from safer sex, which we could do ourselves — it turned out a very sophisticated set of therapies were truly on the cutting edge of research, helped in part by a big leap in computer technology, as well as massive investment by pharmaceutical companies that were attempting to find for the first time in human history a medicine that could stall a retro virus — a very, very smart virus that situated itself into your DNA and replicated there. It was really, I think, all about getting there quickly. And it really was a miracle that we got it by 1996, which is when there first started to be human trials. And so when I asked myself, how could that have been sped up when you look at the way in which technology was evolving to make those breakthroughs possible? I don’t think a huge amount. I think that a better, less brutally homophobic society would have done, would be to — first of all, notice this quickly and see it as huge story — and then develop treatments for the various opportunistic infections that were actually killing people, even as they tried the extraordinarily difficult process of isolating the virus, because we had no idea what it was. It took time. And then of course, to start testing possible combinations of drugs that might prevent it.I wish you could say, “Oh, if we had only been more enlightened, we would have immediately jumped to attention and gotten a cure within five years, and all these people wouldn’t have died. The truth is that the technology wasn’t there, the science wasn’t there yet, the computer graphics that we were able to model the precise shape of proteins that would come into a precise niche in a particular cell to block the transmission. It was a huge medical advance. And as late as 1995, we were being told it wasn’t working. It was a huge shock when suddenly the drugs started to work in combination with, because when the protease inhibitors were tested by themselves, they didn’t do everything they could have done. It turned out it was the added arm of protease inhibitors that rendered the entire combination therapy — the cocktail — viable. And by the time we really knew the disease was at large, it was already too late. It has a 10-year latency period. You don’t notice for about a decade. Of course at the beginning, there was a huge fight in the gay community about shutting the bathhouses, taking this seriously. There was a huge battle and, and men — great man, like Randy Shilts, God rest his soul — really fought that battle and won. But he was targeted as a right-wing fascist by left-wing gays. So that’s the other thing that was true: we weren’t all united. We were fighting each other at the same time as the disease, rather viciously. I’ve never experienced the kind of hostility from other gay men than I did during that period.Debra: Why is it that some gay men were saying that the bath houses shouldn’t be closed? Is it this sense that the virus wasn’t that serious of a thing to be afraid of?Andrew: It was more that the extraordinary trajectory of the gay rights movement. There was the beginning in the 1950s and ‘60s, the real pioneers, people like Frank Kameny, arguing for civil rights for homosexuals, walking in front of the White House in the 1950s, the first person who was fired in a security clearance for being gay and sued the federal government in the 1950s to say, “reinstate me, a real hero.” But then there was this merger with the ‘60s counterculture, and then it exploded with Stonewall. There really was this culture of sexual free expression, which became a symbol of liberation. And people just didn’t want to be told that their liberation was at an end, and the institutions that represented that liberation they clung to — however irrationally, however bizarrely. And it was not yet known for sure how this virus was contracted. Although it seemed pretty obvious you don’t want to be having unprotected anal sex if you don’t want to get this. And so that was the reason: there were political and cultural reasons to resist closing the bathhouses. And once again, it was a battle between the center-right of the gays and the left of the gays. And it’s been a continuing internal battle that is never really explained in the mainstream media, or even detailed.Debra: Yeah, I think that’s something that people don’t realize — that I’ve heard people say they don’t even like using the term “gay community” because it’s not homogeneous. And that you can’t really say that by being gay, everybody thinks the same way. And even for myself, for a long time, I foolishly thought, “If you’re gay, you’re liberal.” And it wasn’t really until I became a journalist that I realized, no, you can be conservative and gay too.Andrew: Almost a third of us voted for Trump last year. Now a third is not the same as the African-American community, or even the Jewish community in terms of Democratic Party support. The Democrats got the lowest-ever share of the gay vote last time around. So that’s interesting, but also it makes sense simply because, you know, as I’ve said before, gay people aren’t invented under a gooseberry bush in San Francisco and then unleashed across the nation to ensure that your interior design is perfect and your dinner parties are very well attended and very amusing to attend. Gay people are born randomly. We’re the only minority that’s born randomly to the majority. So we all grow up in straight contexts, almost all of us. I mean you didn’t, Deborah, but obviously you’re an exception to this. Certainly most gay kids, they're born in Arkansas and Texas — in the reddest of red states — they’re born seeking to be soldiers, doctors, lawyers, construction — there is a vast array of different kinds. And because we just sprinkled randomly through the population, and because we are not with other gays for at least, you know, a good couple of decades, usually there’s no community in that sense. And there’s also because we don’t have our own children. We can’t transmit the historical knowledge of the community to the next generation in a way that, for example, Jewish parents can talk about the Holocaust, or black parents can talk about the experiences of African-Americans in America, or Asian parents can talk about internment, as well as good stories of success. We don’t have kids. We can’t tell them that. They are being born to straight all the time. And some of those straight people are hyper liberal. Some of them are hyper conservative, and their gay sons and daughters can react or can conform or not conform. And that was the first thing I knew. The first time I went into a gay bar — to be honest with you, I was like, Jesus, I was expecting something completely out of RuPaul’s drag race, or some sort of leather festival. But no, there were all these bloody normal people hanging around dancing. They come from all walks of life, seem very straightforward. You’d never guess they were gay outside of this place. And I was like “Blimey! Who’s been lying to me all these years?” It kept me from coming out and it’s still true. Like there’s a way in which, I mean, I've gotten mad and I shouldn’t, because it's pointless, but the mainstream media will distort the reality of gay people in grotesque ways. And you would think, first of all, that there are only trans women of color in the gay rights movement. And you’d also think that we’re all queer, even though a hefty proportion hate that word. That, you know, we’re all obviously lefty and that we’re on board with the new alphabet movement, which is less a gay rights movement than it is at this point a trans movement allied with a racial justice movement, which is utterly unrecognizable as the gay rights movement was in the ‘80s, ‘90s, and even the first decade of the 21st Century. Gay men are no longer really regarded as part of this movement.Debra: Well, you guys are — gay men or just white men now, even if you’re not —Andrew: Well we’re the oppressors, if we’re white. And you know, the number of white gay men that are now allowed to represent, uh, the 2SLGBTIAQ+ community is vanishingly small. And most of these organizations now condemn a white male power, which includes the gays. Meanwhile, financially, a lot of these movements are funded by white gay men. At some point, somebody is going to say, “Why am I spending money to be told I don’t really belong in my own community?” Or we’re told, like lesbians are told, for example, that if those of us who support civil rights for transgender people and are thrilled by Bostock — the decision that basically put transgender people in the Civil Rights Act, and I’m very proud of that and want to support that and believe in transgender rights — nonetheless, if we say that we don’t want to have sex with someone presenting as a man, who has a vagina, we are bigots, we are transphobes. Because the core reality now of the 2SLGBTQIA+ community, so to speak, is that the core element is not sex — biological sex — which I think of as foundational to the definition of homosexuality. I mean, it’s the attraction of one sex to the same sex, right? Because we used to call it same-sex marriage. Now it is gender identity, which trumps that. So if you have all the biological capacities of one individual and you’ve transitioned, you are now a male. And if you are gay and not attracted to that male, you’re obviously excluding trans men from your dating or sexual pool. And that is offensive and bigoted. And so we’ve come full circle. I, at the beginning of the movement, was told by lots of right-wing church ladies, “You just haven’t met the right lady yet.” And now I’m being told, “You haven’t met the right person with a vagina yet.” And part of me is like, “No, I do not have to defend my sexual orientation.” The whole point of this movement was not to have to defend my sexual orientation. Now I’m being told I can’t own it. I can’t celebrate it because the trans movement has deconstructed sex into gender. And gender means that I don’t have a biological sex. I’m just gendered.Debra: I have a whole chapter in my book about this — chapter six in The End of Gender — about how lesbians are being told that they should like a penis if someone identifies as female. So you're the perfect person for me to ask this because I've been wondering why is it that these powerful gay men have essentially turned their backs on the movement?Andrew: Well it’s achieved its objectives. What more does a gay rights movement need to do? We have full civil rights. We have the right to marry. We have anti-discrimination laws for every branch of activity and we have the right to serve our country. If I told someone 20 years ago, that all that would be possible, they’d be like, “Oh, well, we’re done now.” And we are done. What else is there to do? What happens is that these groups that have existed to do that, they no longer have a reason to exist. So they come up with new reasons and they generate new controversies and they fixate on other questions. So that essentially, we now have a BIPOC trans movement that is operating in the carcass of a gay rights movement. And I don’t think that trans people really have much more to accomplish. I think once you’re in the Civil Rights Act, and once you can get your transition paid for, what we’re talking about now is a few small areas, such as whether children before puberty, especially gender nonconforming kids, have the capability to knowingly consent to permanent, irreversible changes in their body that will prevent them from fully becoming the sex they were born as. And that is a whole other question. There’s also a whole other question about sports. But these are not big questions, essentially, in terms of how many people they effect. And if you look at the Equality Act, which is what they want to pass, they've been trying to pass this since the 1970s. I mean, I was told I had to wait. I should shut up about marriage until we get that done. Well, if I had, we’d still be waiting. The Equality Act adds two things. It redefines sex as subordinate to gender, and it eviscerates any rights of religious people to exercise their conscience and say that they don’t want to be involved in anything to do with any particularly substantive gay or transgender issue. Which of course I’m against too.Debra: It drives me crazy with the kids, because I would think that these men know that those kids were them when they were young. I don't know how they wouldn't, because the research backs that up. I don’t want to go too much in this because my audience has heard me talk about this a million times already. But that’s what upsets me about it.Andrew: I’ll tell you this from my own experience that I, as a kid, before puberty, I had crushes on other boys. I even had a scrapbook where I would — because there was no porn for us. I didn’t even hear the word “gay”, let alone a picture. And I would cut out of Sunday magazines hot-looking guys and put them in my copy book. And I would draw the men I was attracted to because that’s all I had to go on. And they were dudes, they were definitely dudes. And in fact, they were big hairy dudes, which turned out to be my main predilection in men, as I grew up and grew older. But I didn’t know I was gay. I didn’t know what sex was. You don’t know really what sex was till you go through puberty.So there was some panic in some ways — that I wasn’t like the other boys. But then puberty happened. I couldn’t have been more psyched to be a man. I suddenly got this amazing 24-hour gift in my crotch. That was something that never stopped giving intense pleasure. It was the best thing that ever happened to me. I wanted to be more male. I actually, at one point was a kid, I poured my mother’s mascara, and I didn’t do my eyebrows, but I tried to get the little boy hairs on my chest to look black, so I could have a hairy chest. I was obsessed with every chest. Everyone’s different, of course, but I’m concerned that young gay boys who may be gender nonconforming, who may like Barbies, or may have experiments with lots of female activities, I’m concerned they could be pressured into thinking they’re not gay, but that they’re actually girls. And gay men have fought for a long time to be understood as men, not as something other than a man, not as something like a woman. Straight guys sometimes say to me, about me and my husband, “Who’s the girl, who’s the boy?” And I’m like, “You don’t understand. We’re both boys. That’s the point.” That’s more subversive — so much more subversive and so much more shocking to people than the notion that you’ll change your sex and conform to the male/female dynamic. (The interview continues next week with the second half) Thank you for subscribing. Leave a comment or share this episode.

Michael Moynihan On Afghanistan And Free Speech

Moynihan is one-third of the The Fifth Column — the sharp, hilarious podcast he does with Kmele Foster and Matt Welch — and he’s a long-time correspondent for Vice. In this episode we mostly cover the cascading news out of Afghanistan, but also bounce around to topics like old media, woke media, neocons and Israel, Big Tech, and third rails. We also reminisce a little about our mutual friend, the late Christopher Hitchens — like that one time Hitch called me a lesbian on air. You can listen to the episode right away in the audio player above (or click the dropdown menu to add the Dishcast to your podcast feed). Read the full transcript here. For three clips of my conversation with Moynihan — on our shared bewilderment over anti-vaxxers, on the need for intellectual humility and occasionally eating crow, and on gay men having a very different culture of consent and flirting — head over to our YouTube page.Two of the subjects that Moynihan and I covered in the episode — wokeness and anti-vaxxers — are discussed by readers below, spurred by previous pods with Wesley Yang and Michael Lewis. This first reader “really enjoyed your conversation with Wesley and his idea of the ‘successor ideology’”:I appreciated your and Wesley’s suggestion that a kind of racial anxiety feeds into both “woke” and Trumpist takes on culture, specifically the woke anxiety that America will soon (if not already) no longer be primarily black and white, and so they will be less justified in framing their projects in his mode. Yes, I agree! I am a mother of two young children. My family mostly hails from the British Isles (though it was a long time ago!) and my husband was born in Iran. Thus our children are, in the current understanding, “biracial” — or if you prefer, “brown” — or “white”? depending on the season? And yet, what an empty, grasping way to look at them! I shudder to think of the day my children will be informed by someone that they are growing up not with vegetarian, Catholic, urban, Persian, Muslim, musical, and Midwestern values and influences, but with “whiteness” or “brownness” to which they must confess some kind of allegiance. The absurdity of this idea should be obvious. Not just the absurdity, but the toxic crudeness of it all. Another multi-racial perspective from a reader:A recent piece at The Atlantic, “The Surprising Innovations of Pandemic-Era Sex,” reads like a parody of 1990s POMO-speak: “Many queer people are reimagining their own boundaries and thinking of this reentry period as a time for sexual self-discovery.” When you boil it down to ordinary English, the piece argues that any person should be free to have sex with whomever they wish and however they like.Well sure. Almost all readers of The Atlantic would agree. Those who don’t will not be persuaded by sentences like, “This drive stems from the fact that many queer and trans people — especially those of color — live under a kind of sociocultural duress in which our livelihoods and human rights are constantly subject to negotiation and popular debate, to say nothing of our physical safety.”It’s not surprising that the author, Madison Moore, is “an assistant professor of queer studies” at Virginia Commonwealth University. “Their” personal web page is here. I’m not sure how to name this kind of young gay thinker with whom I agree at root, but whose mode of presentation is … risible. They “discourse” only with each other and their university’s uneasy tenure committee.I myself am a white male gay boomer who bought a home in Central Harlem and lives there happily with my Black boyfriend. I studied for the Ph.D. in English at UCLA, progressing to all but dissertation. If even someone like me finds this kind of writing to be counter-productive for the cause, I’m not sure who else is left to applaud it.P.S. The conversation with Yang was tremendously fine. The crucial part came when you debated whether the successor ideology was merely a fad, or the ineluctable doom of liberalism, or something in between. Listening, I felt some hope.I too wince at some of the brain-dead grievance porn that now passes for “queer” discourse. But it’s particularly painful to read it in the pages of the Atlantic. A dissent from a reader:I tend to concur with your dislike of the “woke” ideas that have increasingly percolated in the media in recent years. However, I think your emphasis is misplaced. In my view, the essential problem with this ideology is its phoniness; the people pushing this rhetoric are from the professional bourgeois class, and many of them aren’t actually concerned about lower strata of society on their own terms — they’re definitely not concerned with the values of the working class and the indigent.If you accept this premise, then the ideology isn’t quite the threat to the liberal order that is your refrain. And the most effective response is not to continually sound the alarm about the danger of these people, but, rather, to mock them dismissively and then move on to more important topics (climate change, the rejuvenation of right-wing and left-wing authoritarianism, anti-vaxxers, mortality, love, the beauty of a perfect spring day, etc). The alarmism — which is being aped by Trumpist reactionaries — only perpetuates the culture war and doesn’t serve to push beyond it.Shifting to Covid, many readers have responded to the impassioned dissent from a vaccine holdout, starting with this reader:To the anti-vaxxer who asked, “What are the long-term side effects of the COVID19 vaccine?” I’m not sure it’s logical to fear the long-term side effects of a vaccine as opposed to the disease itself, whose long-term side effects are also unknown, and whose short-time side effects — particularly for some 600,000+ Americans — are all too well known. Another reader looks at the risks:We know from clinical trials what the side effects of the vaccine tend to be: mild flu symptoms and arm pain for most people, up to myocarditis and sudden death for a small sliver of people: “6,789 reports of death (0.0019%) among people who received a COVID-19 vaccine.” We’ve seen millions of people take the vaccines and no other serious complications emerge. There is a small group of probable side effects linked to a vaccine, because there is always a group of side effects tied to a disease. The reader leaves open that ANYTHING could happen longer term, but we know from other vaccines and disease theory in general that that is not the case.Another articulates the core reality of society, especially in our hyper-connected times:To put it briefly, respecting and fulfilling public-health requirements is an important component of the responsibility of being a citizen and justifies the exercise of the limited rights that we enjoy and help us prosper. Are there risks? YES. And we all share them, because the chaos that an unrestrained plague would sow is far, far worse. But the scientists have shared data and analysis methods, and they too have taken the vaccinations, so they’re in the same situation as the rest of us who fulfill their citizen responsibilities. Is your reader’s opinion, backed with unknown credentials, the equivalent of experts in virology, immunology, etc? Especially based on his/her communication style, the answer is NO.The husband in this video has a very effective communication style:A softer touch comes from this reader:Kudos to you for printing the letter from the anti-vaxxer — and not responding to being called a selfish bully! In any case, if your reader wants some of their questions answered, I would recommend one of the American Society of Virology’s vaccine town halls. They have real experts who try to answer whatever questions come up (Vincent Racaniello was on Aug 12th and he has literally written the textbook on virology). Don’t think this will necessarily change anyone’s mind, but everyone deserves to have their questions answered. A person who has changed minds on this is Frank Luntz, the famed GOP pollster. He volunteered to be featured in an episode of This American Life that hosted a town hall filled with vax holdouts. Here’s some key context from the narrator:Frank had a stroke a year ago in January, which is actually one of the reasons he wanted to work on this. The experience made him really angry with all the people who weren’t getting vaccinated. He says the stroke was this thing he probably could have prevented if he’d done what the doctor said. But he didn’t take care of himself, didn’t take his medication. And now, seeing people do some version of that, not protecting themselves by getting the vaccine, endangering themselves and others, it was driving him crazy.Another recommendation from a reader:This is what I’ve been sharing with people I know who are still hesitant, but it’s a bit of a commitment that I fear they won’t all make: Sam Harris’s discussion with Eric Topol, a cardiologist who famously challenged Trump’s head of the FDA during the vaccine rollout:A final reader has a quick dissent against me and then addresses the anti-vax reader:You wrote, “the most potent incentive for vaccination is, to be brutally frank, a sharp rise in mortality rates…” First, that would all be fine if unvaccinated COVID patients only harmed themselves. The fact is that morally (and legally) all those unvaccinated COVID patients will have to be cared for by healthcare workers who have been under extreme duress forever a year and are now asked to suck it up and do it again when an effective vaccine is widely available. (See Ed Yong’s recent article.)  So I respectfully disagree with your proposition to just “let it rip.” Since local and federal governments cannot mandate vaccinations, our only recourse is to encourage marketplace vaccine mandates. We should also stop the counter-productive demonizing of vaccine refuseniks, and provide local public-health officials adequate support to mount local public-info campaigns that engage trusted community allies to neutralize misinformation and provide non-judgemental evidence-based answers to people’s questions. I acknowledge the fear of the writer who defended his choice to remain unvaccinated because there is no guarantee that the vaccine won’t have some long-term side effects. But using that logic, polio would never have been eradicated nor ebola brought under control. Personally speaking, my father suffered polio as a child, an aunt and her newborn baby died from bulbar polio, and my sister is still recovering from a five-month hospital/rehab ordeal due to a near-fatal COVID-19 infection.  I’m firmly in the pro-vaccination column.That being said, we who are vaccinated took a calculated risk as well. We weighed the risks against the evidence that the vaccine minimizes serious infections and deaths from COVID-19. We made that choice in hopes of returning to a more normal life for us all. What I don’t accept is the right of the unvaccinated to unnecessarily stress healthcare workers, overburden the healthcare system, prolong disruption and viral spread, when a safe vaccine exists.  On another note, I appreciated your conversation with the incredible Michael Lewis. His analysis of the bumbling efforts of the CDC and government leaders was sobering and enlightening. And God bless him on his own journey through grief.I hope and pray that we will get through this pandemic. When we do, a lot more humility, empathy and brilliant thinkers like Michael Lewis will be needed to sort out what went wrong and how to fix it before the next pandemic. Thank you for subscribing. Leave a comment or share this episode.