cover image Gay Ideas: Outing and Other Controversies

Gay Ideas: Outing and Other Controversies

Richard D. Mohr. Beacon Press (MA), $25 (311pp) ISBN 978-0-8070-7920-1

In one of these combative, impassioned, often controversial essays, Mohr, professor of philosophy at the University of Illinois, defends ``outing'' (making public another person's homosexuality against that person's wishes) as a moral act, a means to prevent gays from participating in their own oppression. Reviewing the Supreme Court's dismal record on gay rights, he argues that the Court's recent decisions on homosexuality are instruments by which federal courts are reversing blacks' civil rights. The author chides the gay activist group ACT-UP for a tendency to embrace ``quick leftward-leaning ideological fixes.'' He interprets the AIDS Quilt commemorating AIDS victims as ``a source of ideals,'' not merely a political statement. Mohr finds homoerotic resonances in Wagner's Parsifal and splices this analysis together with 36 explicit artworks by Robert Mapplethorpe and others in an attempt to show that ``gay men have more to offer democracy than democracy has had to offer gay men.'' He also exposes anti-gay stereotyes as sources of unexamined fear and hatred. (Nov.)