“Official” Gay and Lesbian
Throughout The Trouble with Normal, Warner makes reference to the “official” gay and lesbian movement and community, represented by such people are Larry Kramer and such organization as the Human Rights Campaign. According to Warner, these people and organizations, which receive the most attention from the press in the United States, are primarily interested in being accepted by and integrated into the larger American society. That means they focus on a form of “respectability politics” that aims at presenting gays and lesbians as normal.
Queer Public
In contrast to the “official” gay and lesbian movement, a queer public refers to people who have rejected “normal” as a goal and stand in opposition in some way to the dominant society. In a queer public, the shame attached to sex is taken for granted and is a common condition shared by all. A queer public does not try to be accepted by mainstream society but instead challenges society. The goal is to get society to ask how and why it stigmatizes certain groups of people, instead of contributing to that stigmatization.
Normal Society
One of the lessons of The Trouble with Normal is that no one is wholly “normal.” Everyone in some way or another deviates from a statistical average of sexual behavior, and no one completely lines up with society’s image of what the norm should be when it comes to sex. “Normal” society is thus not defined by actual behaviors, but by a certain orientation: the desire to be normal. In other words, according to Warner, normal society values having norms attached to sex, even if they don’t embody these norms. This society refers to people who contribute to making a hierarchy of sex in which some sex is “good” and some sex is “bad.”
Bill Clinton
Bill Clinton was president of the United States for almost all of the 1990s, and as a result he is a central character in Warner’s book about the sexual politics of the 1990s. On the one hand, Clinton is responsible for or associated with many of the policies that are discussed in The Trouble with Normal, including Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, which prohibited gays and lesbians from serving openly in the military, and the Defense of Marriage Act, which prohibited federal money from going toward same-sex couples. But Clinton is also a symbol of a victim of the larger sexual hysteria in American society because of the impeachment proceedings that began in 1998. Clinton’s impeachment focused on his sexual conduct with another woman, and it is an example of the shame inevitably attached to discussions of sex.
