Summary of Chapter 2
The second chapter of The Trouble with Normal is titled, “What’s Wrong with Normal?” In this chapter, Warner primarily focuses on the gay rights movement of the 1990s. He explores at greater length the “purification” of identity he discussed in the previous chapter. This is when people with a gay or lesbian identity coerce other gays and lesbians into having more “respectable” sex so that they can be accepted as normal by straight society. The problem with this approach is that it increases stigma. Instead of challenging straight society in order to change the definition of what “normal” even is, it accepts the straight norm and makes queer people change instead.
Warner traces this tendency in the gay community all the way back to early activism in the 1950s. In that decade, gays and lesbians formed an organization called the Mattachine Society. The purpose of this organization, one of the first gay rights groups, was to gain acceptance of gays and lesbians in mainstream society. In other words, its goal was integration. Its strategy for doing this was to tell mainstream society that gays and lesbians were just like everyone else. Unfortunately, in order to make this claim, the Mattachine Society had to present an image of gays and lesbians indeed being like everyone else. It adopted a “respectability politics” in which the only gays and lesbians who could be seen in public were those who were the most respectable, which meant no public discussion of sex was allowed. An identity originally about sexuality desexualized itself in order to be accepted by straight society.
This is a politics of policing gays and lesbians instead of challenging the society that stigmatizes them, and it was a politics that intensified in later generations. Although the 1970s are sometimes seen as a period of “gay liberation,” in which sex and sexuality were embraced by gay men, the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s again dampened public discussion of sex and sexuality. AIDS disproportionately affected gay men, whose communities were decimated in urban areas like New York City and San Francisco. Because AIDS is caused by a sexually transmitted virus, HIV, the stigmatization of gay sex intensified during this period. Some gay activists argued that gay men should abstain from sex, and the idea that having sex was reckless and homicidal became widespread. Here again, activism moved away from asking for structural change, like government support of safe sex campaigns and AIDS research, and toward policing and stigmatizing sex itself.
One tragic irony of this movement in the AIDS discourse is that it actually exacerbated the epidemic. AIDS activists showed that the best way to distribute information about life-saving safe-sex practices, like using condoms, was in an environment in which sex could be talked about freely and without shame. The stigma attached to gay sex shut down this kind of environment, leaving information about safe sex harder to come by. In this case, Warner argues, gay rights activists should have learned from previous experience how ineffective a “respectability politics” is. But activists did not learn their lessons from the past, Warner argues, because gays and lesbians don’t have the same institutions to support this kind of memory. Straight people have cultural and political institutions to preserve their history, but gays and lesbians do not, and therefore are more likely to repeat the mistakes of the past instead of learning from them.
Thus, the 1990s also repeated the same mistake, in Warner’s view. Warner surveys a number of influential mainstream commentators in the gay community, such as Andrew Sullivan, a co-editor of the New Republic. In 1993, Sullivan wrote a famous essay about how gays should embrace becoming normal. He appealed to a sense of being “post-gay,” which means one’s gayness doesn’t influence who one is. Warner thinks this is wishful thinking. It is an attempt to disavow a sexual identity because of the shame it includes. Moreover, this depoliticizes the lives gay men live. To be gay in the 1990s is still to face forms of discrimination, as well as health issues related to lack of access to forms of safer sex and treatment. The obsession with appearing normal overlooks these kind of structural inequalities that gay people experience precisely because they aren’t normal, or experience issues and challenges that other Americans do not.
Warner traces this obsession with being normal back to the 19th century, which saw the rise of statistics. Once sociologists and political scientists were able to survey people and determine what was “average” in a society, people wanted to be in the “average” category. In the 20th century, this was particularly exacerbated in relation to sexuality with the work of Alfred Kinsey, who surveyed people on their sexual tastes and activities in order to establish averages within that domain of experience as well. Gay activists like Sullivan yearn to be in the average category. In fact, Warner notes a whole trend in mainstream gay politics, which he calls “official” gay politics. Organizations like the Human Rights Campaign, the largest LGBT organization, have amassed a large amount of money in order to argue that gay and lesbian people are normal and therefore deserving of the same rights as straight people.
The problem with this kind of movement, according to Warner, is that it is another form of respectability politics that shames people instead of demanding recognition of their humanity. People shouldn’t have rights because they are “normal”; rather, people deserve rights because they are human, whether or not they are an “average” human. Once again, Warner advocates for a queer politics rather than an “official” gay politics. As organizations like the Human Rights Campaign have gotten larger, they have left behind queer spaces in which people contest “normality” itself. Queers recognize that enforcing a sexual norm is ridiculous, because no one is completely normal. The point is that aspiring to "be normal" will always result in failure. Instead, people should advocate for the flourishing of different kinds of sex and sexuality, freed of a need for these kinds to be “respectable.”
Analysis of Chapter 2
Because this chapter focuses on the gay rights movement, it is useful to put 1999, the year Warner’s book was published, in context within the larger history of the gay movement. We discuss the LGBT rights movement at more length in an extra section of this study guide, but for now it is useful to know some general outlines. The 1990s were often seen as a period of backlash against some of the progress of the gay rights movement from the previous decades. Policies that explicitly excluded gays, like Don’t Ask Don’t Tell (which prohibited gays from serving openly in the military) and the Defense Marriage of Act (which defined marriage as between a man and a woman), were both passed under the Clinton administration. These policies came to be the focus of a lot of gay rights advocacy, but that meant that gay rights became concentrated in Washington, D.C., in particular, through lobbying Congress and the President. This is one of the dynamics that Warner protests, because concentrating the gay lobby in one area makes it less representative of the larger queer community.
This turn to lobbying of national policies also marked a change in tactics from the previous decade. In response to the government’s neglect of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s, many queer activists developed strategies of direct action, staging spectacular protests, for instance. These protests brought the queer community together in solidarity. They thus created a queer public in addition to challenging local, state, and national policies. But the turn to lobbying makes the most important thing in politics not people and community, but money. Warner thinks this is particularly damaging to the queer community.
In writing this chapter, as a queer person primarily to other queer people, Warner is not only challenging these oppositional ideas, however. He is also trying, through writing, to create the kind of queer public he wants. It is important for queer people to write about and to each other, Warner suggests, in order to build a world together. That’s why there is also a sense of intimacy in this chapter. He is creating a dialogue that others can join. Having dialogue and creating a public sphere for discussion is related to Warner’s astute explanation for why queer activism does not learn from the mistakes of its past. Warner says this is because queers do not have the institutions to facilitate the memory that makes it possible to learn from the past. In another influential essay, co-written with another founding figure of queer theory, Lauren Berlant, Warner describes the difference between the social worlds of straight society and the more fragile worlds of queer culture:
[In] most contexts the social world is understood, not as constructed by reference to types or projects, but as instantiated whole in a form capable of reproducing itself. The family, the state, a neighborhood, the human species, or institutions such as school and church—such images of social being share an appearance of plenitude seldom approached in contexts of queer world making. (558n22)
Without churches, schools, or the family form, Warner calls on queers to find other ways of creating a world and sharing information. This will become a topic he elaborates on at more length in Chapter 4.
Another latent theme in this chapter that will get more play in the next chapter is the idea of privilege within the gay community. Warner complains of “post-liberationist” gays who think the major battles have already been won, which is why now it’s time to settle down and get the right to marry. Warner suggests that those who think this way are likely to be the most privileged within the queer community: white, rich, cisgendered, and healthy. For transgendered people who are disproportionately targeted for violence or people of color who face additional stigma, this sense of liberation is likely to be more elusive. In suggesting that privilege is at play in the issues gays are fighting for, Warner is calling on the queer community to be more equitable within the community, looking after the most disadvantaged instead of leaving them behind.
