Perfect Enemies: The Religious Right, the Gay Movement, and the Politics of the 1990s

The religious right and the gay movement, this book contends, have a lot in common. Both are outsiders, considered fringe groups by the general population, and each brought the other to national attention in the political arena in the 1990s. Jerry Falwell is quoted as saying, ""If homosexuals didn't exist, we'd have to invent them."" Attacks on gays more than anything else, gay journalists Bull and Gallagher contend, have catapulted the religious right to the prominence it has enjoyed for much of this decade. A well-researched case for this is meticulously presented, but in arguing it, Bull and Gallagher have managed to write merely another gay attack on Christian conservatism--a commonplace centrist condemnation of evangelism. The book does succeed, however, in giving a well-documented and contextualized account of the skirmishes between the religious right and gay rights, and for this alone, it is valuable. But in being aimed primarily at the gay market, this fails to be the breakthrough book it could have been. (Sept.)