Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / PREVIEW: Andrew Sullivan
Transcript
- 0:00Get a humans welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas and what a treat, what a delight
- 0:08dissecting dangerous ideas, arguing for dangerous ideas, wrestling with dangerous ideas has
- 0:14been the life's work of today's guest, the one and only Andrew Sullivan.
- 0:19He was one of the most famous and influential people arguing for gay marriage long, long,
- 0:26long, long before it was popular. He was the first person to publish a major article about it
- 0:31to write a major American article about it. That was back in 1989. He wrote the book on it in
- 0:361995 that was entitled Virtually Normal and when the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage
- 0:42in the United States in 2013, many intellectuals and political journalists looked at Andrew Sullivan
- 0:48and anointed him the most influential political writer of his generation. He was born and raised
- 0:54in the UK. He went to Oxford University then he moved to America and got his PhD in politics at
- 1:00Harvard University and as a gay British Catholic conservative in America, he began to dominate
- 1:09cultural debates. You would see him on TV all the time on Bill Maas show. You would read him
- 1:14in print in London's Daily Telegram for the Sunday Times or the Atlantic magazine or Time
- 1:19magazine or the New York Times magazine or New York magazine arguing about everything from AIDS
- 1:25to the Iraq War to Barack Obama's candidacy. Andrew also pioneered online journalism as one of the
- 1:32first superstar bloggers. He created the online blog Daily Dish in the year 2000 and around that
- 1:39time a little fetus by the name of Josh Seps became aware of Andrew's blog and subsequently
- 1:46of the book that he had written back in 1995 virtually normal and it blew the top of my head off.
- 1:54Here was this strange, articulate, liberal-minded, egalitarian, universalist sort of 19th century
- 2:03Catholic Englishman arguing, convincing not just America as a whole but American conservatives
- 2:10specifically that gay people should be able to get married. We talk about that fight, the
- 2:16opposition to gay marriage from gays themselves in the 80s and 90s, the transgender culture wars of
- 2:23the 2020s, the experience of living through HIV and AIDS. Andrew is HIV positive himself has been
- 2:29since the mid 90s. We talk about the LGBTQIA plus community Andrew's college life in Ronald
- 2:36Reagan's America and how he won over a conservative country to what was then a radical gay agenda
- 2:43and how liberals might just be able to do it again. I hope you enjoy as much as I did the one.
- 2:49The Onal. Andrew Sulla.
- 2:54One day I'm going to ride an old biocuriness, you're going to be called Flem. It's a memoir
- 3:00because I've just drowned in Flem's and I was a little kid. I have the worst lungs,
- 3:05what they do is give me Flem. Oh my goodness. Does the sea air have the Flem?
- 3:11No, the ocean. No, you need deserts basically. If you want to cut down on the Flem,
- 3:21you don't want to go to places full of mold spores, rotting wood and currently a big blast of
- 3:27tree com everywhere. It's like it's an arboreal bucaki out there right now. What is it?
- 3:34Is it sap or what's the pollen pollen right? Oh, I wouldn't be good with that. Yeah. Yeah,
- 3:41no, it's just I guess everywhere and everything. Well, if you want desert, then you can come to
- 3:47Australia and walk from Sydney to Perth. We've got a list. There's like thousands of miles of
- 3:53nothing apart from that. Well, I shouldn't say nothing. The indigenous elders would shoot on
- 3:57if I said nothing. It's a timeless, you know, bounty, but there's no, there's no jacket.
- 4:05When I was, when I was about 12 years old, I watched Walk About on TV, which is my introduction
- 4:10to Australia, I guess. Don't even know it. Oh, come on. Sorry. It's a very famous movie in the 70s
- 4:17called Walk About with Jenny Agata and this aborigini kid and it's it's you should look it up.
- 4:24Walk about. All right. It's a big story. I mean, I'm sure it is. I'm sure it was before I was alive.
- 4:36See, you've got the fuck off energy now. It doesn't. I was in college.
- 4:43I would not.
- 4:52Oh, fuck you. Welcome back to Andrew Sullivan Scrolls IMDB. I'm just trying to prove I didn't
- 4:59look at it. Looking for a small Australian movie. It was quite life-changed you for a young man
- 5:05because it was there was nudity, which you don't really see. There were boobies, which of course
- 5:11didn't do a huge amount for me, but it was, it was stirring somehow, stirring in the
- 5:17loins for 12-year-olds amount. I was, yeah, there's, it wasn't there like a whole thing about like
- 5:22young kids before pornography would get national geographic magazines so that they could see the
- 5:27pendulous breasts of native women. Well, I'm curiously masturbated over like, you know,
- 5:34African tribes people. No, I, I used to wait for the Sunday, every now and again, you get a
- 5:43Sunday magazine and they'd have some maybe some sexy guys in it and occasionally they'd do
- 5:52fashion spreads and so on. I remember this once fashion spread happened of boxes shorts and
- 5:58they had lots of boxes in boxes shorts. I get the palm, very clever. But I was, I was, I was
- 6:04bowled over by this. I couldn't believe so I used to wait, wait till the thing had gone all
- 6:09because they would pile them up about four weeks of time and when it was about to be trashed,
- 6:13I would slip it out and cut them out and you would slip it out. My own little comic roll with
- 6:18the palms on slipping it out. Little comic, the cutout comic book of all these hot men. There
- 6:25was. That was what I was doing when I was 12 or 13. What's the Sunday magazine that would have
- 6:29these pseudo photographic boxes? Oh, right. It was all at once all it was. Right. In a new time.
- 6:36In a new time. Yeah, right. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you may, it may do. Yeah. Well, you did what
- 6:43you had to, didn't you? You did. I mean, I imagine, well, so it talked to me first about just after
- 6:49that when you got to the States and when you were like bang around in the 80s, I'm interested in this
- 6:54period and what that was like. Like, I mean, what's it? Was it like being at Harvard in the 80s?
- 7:00Well, I arrived in America at a very weird moment. I arrived just after the LA Olympics and just
- 7:07before the Reagan re-election. And so America was about to come, basically, who was having this
- 7:15incredible conversation. It's going from worse to bad to terrible to offensive. Super exciting.
- 7:21But the adult content label on this episode. It was that people were nationally orgasmic. It was,
- 7:29this was Ferris Bueller's Day Off period. Yeah. This is Reagan running for re-election. This
- 7:34was morning in America time. The place was, it's very hard to explain. It was very helpful to
- 7:40understand coming here to feel this energy. I remember beforehand, before I came to America,
- 7:48I never expected to stay because I had very snooty English attitudes towards the place,
- 7:56stupid snooty English attitudes towards the place. But when I got here, the excitement was
- 8:03palpable. I wore a Reagan 80 button in my English high school. So that's how out there I was,
- 8:12which believe it or not, this pissed off Kirstaumer, who was in my own class.
- 8:20And presumably the point. It was part of the point, yes. I loved this new wave of
- 8:31individualism, of anti-collectivism, of standing up to the communist once and for all,
- 8:43restoration and some kinds of respect for religious belief and religious life. I mean, it was
- 8:50and a vindication of the free market. It was, these were heady times, if you were a young right
- 8:57winger, especially if you were a very lonely young right winger in your own class and your own
- 9:03educational stratum. And so you kind of went out of the limb in the late 70s, early 80s with
- 9:11Thatcher and Reagan. Everybody hated you. Then you appeared group. Then it turned out they were
- 9:17awesome. They really were. I was spoiled in a way. They were really among the most effective
- 9:25politicians of my lifetime. And I was on their side. So it was, it was really amazing. And that whole
- 9:31ride through the 80s through the fall of the wall in 89. And then the wonderful 90s, which
- 9:39was what we'd all been hoping could happen once we got past the cold war. That was a very
- 9:45exhilarating time to be thinking and alive as a sort of ride of center person in the elite.
- 9:52And how did your social groups intersect like we have this image of 1970s gay life in places like
- 10:00New York being is very underground and kind of debaucherous and almost radical, you know, pre HIV
- 10:06place of hedonism, this subterranean universe. But then you're talking about quite a buttoned up
- 10:12Reagan era kind of elite conservative milieu. Where were you?
- 10:18Well, I was, I was at Harvard. So, um, it was up the road. And so, you know, it was Harvard.
- 10:28Liberals were dominant. You are a weirdo because of this. But nonetheless, I was having a ball.
- 10:37I wasn't out really at that point. Um, I certainly had never had any interaction with other dude.
- 10:44It took me a couple more years. No, maybe not quite that long, but a little while
- 10:49before I screwed up the courage as it were to try that out. And America, of course,
- 10:57was a fantastic place to do that because it was the equivalent of coming from a small town
- 11:02to a big city in a way. No one knew who you were really. So all that stuff was left behind. And I
- 11:09had already developed whether I liked it or not, a kind of profile in England you do. I mean,
- 11:15you if you went to Oxford as I did and you you were president of the union as I was and
- 11:21in the in the in the theater there and in the in the social world there and in the intellectual
- 11:27world there, you already marked out to be a member of the British elite in a way. And I was one
- 11:34of the classic ones who was, uh, came from a family with no real college, no college education.
- 11:41Um, um, but ambitious and this was how they bought you off, you know, they gave you this amazingly
- 11:50illizion, beautiful time in these beautiful buildings in this dreamy town. Um, and,
- 11:59and then Harvard struck me as a little bit of a knockoff of all that, but I liked it nonetheless.
- 12:05Um, so what did you say you were reading Aristotle and Plato and teaching political theory to
- 12:12undergraduates and reading history and doing what I liked it. It really wasn't really wasn't anything
- 12:18much than that. Um, so you weren't you weren't falling around with guys in college. You were,
- 12:23you were basically celibate and how did that so this element? How did you think about gayness?
- 12:27I mean, because it was pretty soon after that that you were writing, you know, public pieces about
- 12:32gay marriage and the foundation of work and like one of the first big pieces in the late 80s about
- 12:37arguing for this thing that at the time sounded completely hair-brained to everybody at a time when
- 12:43even gay sex was still illegal in a lot of states, including in Australia. Um, and so what's the
- 12:49trajectory from being a celibate closeted like not even part of the community to like the, the flame
- 12:56carrying champion? Well, there's a, you know, there's a, there's a personal story in a way as well as
- 13:04a, let's say, a political one. What's the personal one? The personal one is that, you know, one day I,
- 13:12I go to a party where I'm introduced to this guy who's a airline pilot actually. Um, and actually
- 13:20a really charming dude and I say, well, let's go for date.
- 13:25A date, okay, so I went on a date with this guy. Before I went on the date, I went to confession.
- 13:32I did and I sat down and I said to give me father for I'm about to sin.
- 13:39Um, I want to be honest with you. I'm pretty sure I'm attracted to this person. I don't know
- 13:46what's going to happen on our date, but I, and I don't feel I'm doing anything wrong as such. Um,
- 13:53and I just want to get it out there, you know, because I know what I'm not supposed to do. I don't
- 13:57know what I'm going to do. And the priest said, what do you want to learn? Because, uh, the priest,
- 14:04he was wonderful, actually, and was gay and had a boyfriend the time I didn't know, but I
- 14:08subsequently found out said, well, I can't tell you, you know, that you can, you know, commit a sin,
- 14:15but I, but I would encourage you to come back here next week and we'll keep the the conversation
- 14:21going, the dialogue going about you being a young man in the church and, uh, it was very important
- 14:29for me to kind of be up front with the church on this from the get go. I wasn't going to run from
- 14:36and then it happened and I mean, nothing happened. I mean, I didn't really have what you might
- 14:43think of as sex sex for a couple more years, but, uh, I, uh, I was amazed that, uh, how different
- 14:53my life felt as soon as I realized that everything would make more sense this way. Um, and the
- 15:02exhilaration and the relief of coming out of a very, very strict, um, I guess the word repressed
- 15:13might be one word for it, but I didn't look feel that repressed, but I was definitely expressing
- 15:18myself in ways that I can now see what partly a function of repressing something inside myself.
- 15:27And as soon as that happened, as honestly, it's very simple. As soon as I realized there's
- 15:32nothing wrong with this, in fact, this is kind of amazing. That was it. I came out to everyone,
- 15:39almost immediately. I told my friends, I told the woman I was sort of dating. Um, I,
- 15:46an important person to advise. It was important. Yes. Uh, and she was wonderful about it and,
- 15:54and so that was that. That was really what happened. I went on to my work and I was, I, I,
- 16:00I went on a few days. I went out to this disco, local disco and Cambridge, which is really,
- 16:06really fun. And does it still exist? I think it does actually. It's called campus man reyes in,
- 16:12it's in central square. Um, and, and Friday nights were a real excitement. Um, but I was also
- 16:21big into theater, actually. I, um, I played Hamlet on the, at Harvard, and I played, um,
- 16:28Allen in Equus and directed, directed, uh, my own version of four quartets by Elliott. I was in
- 16:35the most sort of Venice on the, the, the, the main stage in the American Playhouse. And that's
- 16:41what I had been at Oxford too. I'd really been known as an actor and debater rather than as, uh,
- 16:46a thinker writer. What was the most challenging thing about playing Hamlet?
- 16:51The part itself, you know, it's, you, you wrestle with it and you're like, who is this person? And
- 17:00shockingly, the text doesn't really help you. The, the, he's actual character, like,
- 17:07it's strangely elusive. Uh, well, that's the part of it. It's nothing to hang on to. I know,
- 17:12it's nothing to hang on to. You realize that he's sort of an impersonation of pure thought.
- 17:19And so he's, and so attitude to act that was a real challenge because some of the
- 17:27scenes don't make a huge amount of emotional sense, actually, is, I don't think I haven't really,
- 17:33I certainly don't think I mastered it, but I had a good go at it. And we did the uncut. So
- 17:38the other challenge you think was actually remembering it all just part in Shakespeare.
- 17:45Had you seen, I've seen you'd seen the Olivier film. No, I had no, okay, good.
- 17:51Because that would have been impossible to shake. Like it's such a distinctive performance.
- 17:55Yeah. Which is why I wouldn't want it, why I'm to have seen it. Um, uh, and we actually did it.
- 18:01It was, it was funny. It was, this was, this dates it. The, the theme music was Frank and
- 18:06goes to Hollywood. Um, and, uh, and the, the advertising campaign on, on the campus was called
- 18:14Frankie says relax. Um, and no, Hamlet says relax. Sorry if you give me, and, and it was, it was,
- 18:21it was too all modern dress and done in a sort of weird amphitheater with, with, with bleachers,
- 18:28either side, it was fun. Really fun. And, um, and at this time, are you writing sort of political
- 18:34and cultural stuff as well? Are you just, no, no, I am, I'm writing my papers. I'm, I wanted to
- 18:40take time out. I, and this sounds naive, but I was. I, it's genuine too. I wanted to figure out
- 18:45what I thought about the world. You know, I had, I, I sort of emerged rather overly and formed,
- 18:52really, as a young person. Um, I was super gracious. It was way too ahead of my skis, really.
- 18:58I, I thought I knew everything, but I hadn't experienced anything. So it was sort of,
- 19:03I had the sort of buddhist syndrome, is it where I looked like a human being and seemed
- 19:09but I had not even been a human being. Yeah. Uh, and so I, I wanted to say, well, I'm going to
- 19:16read all of it. I'm going to start from the beginning. I'm going to start with, you know,
- 19:19Plato. I'm going to start, I'm going to do the entire thing. And, and I did. And I loved it.
- 19:26And I had, it was incredibly fruitful experience, uh, the whole thing at Harvard.
- 19:32I'm very, very lucky and I have nothing. And, and with, and I, with Harvey Mansfield,
- 19:38he was my supervisor. He's another joy of it. We, I would spend every Friday, I'd go to his
- 19:44place, his offices and we would spend an hour reading Plato's Republic. And we got through in
- 19:51two years, we got to book six. Um, and just to be able to sit there with one of the great, uh,
- 19:59scholars and weigh the words of this person who lived and wrote, you know, two and a half
- 20:06thousand years ago, um, longer than that and longer than that, uh, was just an amazing thing.
- 20:15And I wanted to write and I had spent, and I've been an intern at the Daily Telegraph in
- 20:21London the summer before I came to America. And so I applied in the summers,
- 20:29uh, for internships in places. And I spent the first summer, however, traveling the states
- 20:35with a friend of mine. And we went through, I think we went from Miami to San Diego, up to Seattle,
- 20:42back to Boston. We did the whole thing. Yeah. It was amazing. And did you go through the
- 20:48working on it? Yes. Absolutely. Absolutely. I loved the South. It's hence some beautiful and, uh,
- 20:57exotic to me. And I fell in love with certain parts of them. I fell in love with motel sixes.
- 21:03I fell in love with, I fell in love with Denny's. I fell into Denny's. Yeah. I fell in love
- 21:09with, with the American Dino. It's amazing food. And I went with a certain, long menu that has
- 21:18like every single kind of type of, you know, chicken schnitz, chicken schnitz, it's always like
- 21:23pasta on the side of bazillion different things. How can you have like a roast chicken and also a
- 21:28pork loin? Like what are they doing? Yes. Yeah. And it all be served by a number of 50 something
- 21:34year old, old ladies who had been there for 25 years. Yeah. And took no shit from anyone. Yeah.
- 21:41Reddably efficient. Yeah. What they did. And for an Englishman, they kept refilling my coffee,
- 21:47which I know in 1985, six, uh, for an English person, that was kind of a shock. The sheer
- 21:55land of plenty. Um, I mean, I don't actually have a cigarette in their mouth while they're
- 22:00pouring your coffee. They're about to. It's, it's, well, they just damn shame if that's the case.
- 22:07And he out of their mouth as they give it to you. Um, I hadn't been to a restaurant until I
- 22:11went to college. I mean, the idea would go out to a restaurant. I mean, we didn't have the money.
- 22:17Yeah. It was a ridiculous expense. Um, but this is relatively cheap and a little stipend. I was
- 22:24awesome. This is a time when, I mean, if it's 8586, then AIDS is just beginning to ravage.
- 22:30It is. Well, right. It's starting to make headlines and your and George Michael's freedom was on
- 22:35the radio. Right. Right. And part of the, you know, the response from gay people and from gay
- 22:42intellectuals was to split into a couple of possible camps, one of which is this is the time to
- 22:47double down on the fundamentally radical vision of, uh, of gayness that the sexuality should be
- 22:53a catalyst for an overhaul of culture and a, and a demolition of stayed conservative patriarchal
- 23:00traditions. Um, and then the other side of which you were one of the most prominent advocates
- 23:05was actually this is an opportunity to bring us into the fold of small-seat conservative
- 23:10cultural values. Yeah. Well, for me, it proved the ghetto was not viable.
- 23:18AIDS. We needed AIDS did because we needed the world. We couldn't do this ourselves. We needed
- 23:24the science. We needed the research. We needed the drugs. We needed the contacts. We needed the
- 23:28reach the straight people to persuade them. There was, this was proof positive that shutting
- 23:35yourself off in a tiny little radical enclave was fine unless shit happens and you have to realize
- 23:43you, you live in a broader society and you have to come to terms with how you integrate in
- 23:48that broader society. And of course, the first thing was preventing death. I mean, that was the
- 23:54first thing before you got to politics. It was like, first of all, how do we stop this? Secondly,
- 23:59if we get it, how do we help each other? Um, and I was, I was not, I mean, back then the,
- 24:07in the eight people forget, the eighties were not where when AIDS was really, really, really
- 24:12happening. The nineties were when AIDS happened. The deaths peaked in 95. So although it was happening,
- 24:18it was terrifying. It was scared. It didn't really become this unbelievable onslaught of sickness
- 24:27and death until the nineties really got going. And then it just almost doubled every year. It was
- 24:33just insane. And so my, I mean, I saw this from the corner of my eye as it were. I wasn't really
- 24:43that sexually active. Uh, when I was in Boston, growing my PhD, um, I definitely got in touch
- 24:51with a lot of local gay groups. I wanted to, uh, start, uh, organizing the gay right then because
- 24:58it was actually the first elected young gay Republican in Boston. I went to Bill Well, the man called
- 25:04Mike Duffy. I knew back then. This is 1989. Anyway, long story short, I was out. I was feeling my
- 25:12way in the world. I was a grown up finally. And I did an internship at the New Republic. And
- 25:19I had a great time. I came back for a visit around the editorial meeting. There was a conversation
- 25:25about domestic partnership and AIDS. And they said, well, they looked at me suddenly as if I was
- 25:33supposed to have an opinion. They all kind of knew I was gay, but I hadn't really written or said
- 25:37anything about it at that point. Certainly not too many straight people. And I'm like, well,
- 25:42I don't see why we can't just get married. Why, why, why isn't that the obvious conservative
- 25:50position? You want people to commit to each other. You want them to exercise responsibility. You
- 25:56want them to be part of their own families. Uh, it would also be an incredible psychological
- 26:04healing process for us to be able to participate in the critical institution and ceremony of
- 26:12family life, which we had been excluded from. So I found myself saying this instead of
- 26:19in an argument. And Kinsley looked at me and he said, you should write that. And in fact,
- 26:25you should write that now. You're still not scared. You're not too scared to write it. So I'm
- 26:31like, oh, whatever, Michael, I got to go. So he said, no, do it. So I went back and bugged me.
- 26:35I was embossed and bugged me. So I just wrote this out rather briefly. He sent it back with some
- 26:40smart as usual edits. I was like, okay. And I realized this means I'm kind of out to the world.
- 26:46Even though I didn't say I'm out gay and it didn't only a gay person would have written such
- 26:53an article at that point. No straight people ever wrote about anything gay. So if you wrote about
- 26:59it, you were suddenly the gay person. Well, especially not as an idea or as radical as that.
- 27:03I mean, for young listeners, it's probably hard to imagine how quickly things have changed. But
- 27:08even when I was, you know, in school in the late 90s, it was when it was a perfectly acceptable
- 27:18thing to be gay in big progressive cities like the one that I lived in. But it was still weird,
- 27:25fringe, different. And the idea of it being of something like marriage being on the table was,
- 27:34it was not in our universe until I read your book in the early 2000s. And I realized that there
- 27:39was actually a case for it. And then it could actually happen at some point in my lifetime. But
- 27:43the idea that it would happen within a decade was fanciful. Yeah. And I personally didn't
- 27:50think it would happen in my lifetime. I mean, I thought it was an interesting thought experiment. And
- 27:56as I sort of voiced it, I realized, you know, why hasn't this been raised before? I would say this
- 28:04when I went out and give some talks about this. I began to give some talks. And I would say things
- 28:09like, you know, people are asked me why are you bringing this up? And I'm like, well, the real
- 28:14question is, why did we never have the self esteem to raise it before? Why did we always think
- 28:22we're unworthy of it? That's what this is about. This should have been it's the most salient
- 28:28institution to an emotional experience of love and relationship. That's it. That's how we
- 28:37measure it. That's how we define it. That's how we think of it. And we somehow deep down thought,
- 28:45we're not worthy of this. We shouldn't have this. We can't. And then we'd made it made ourselves
- 28:49feel better about this by saying, well, we don't want it anyway. It's all a bunch of patriarchal
- 28:56heterosexual bullshit. And again, people find this hard to believe. But I'll tell you the truth is
- 29:04that in the first, like, maybe 10 years, the strongest opposition came from Gaze.
- 29:12My book, Virtue Normal, was picketed by the lesbian Avengers. I was targeted as a right-wing fascist.
- 29:23It was regarded as a betrayal of homosexuality being a favor of this because
- 29:29we just articulate what the most generous interpretation of their perspective would be.
- 29:35That we were buying into an oppressive, violent, patriarchal institution that had excluded us
- 29:43and we were thereby accepting and going over the enemy. And you were groveling for what
- 29:50they've created instead of building your own future. Yes. To which my point was, well, if you
- 29:56wanted to do that, fine. You could do whatever you want with your life. You already can.
- 30:02But it was an interesting moment. I mean, in 95, when Virtue Normal came out and I was in London,
- 30:09actually, I did an event there and they would let you just give your own speech about gay
- 30:15marriage. That was too much. They always had to have someone to push the other position. This is
- 30:20in the gay world. They had to have another gay person to tell the world that they didn't believe it.
- 30:26The condescension was unbelievable. He was this kid, this creep, this whoever.
- 30:36We did the little thing and then after it was Q&A and someone stood up and it was pita-tachal.
- 30:40I don't know whether he pita-tachal is. He was a legend. He was the biggest gay rights person
- 30:44in the UK at that point and still is a pretty prominent activist there. And he said, I just
- 30:52want you to know that here in England, we despise marriage. We reject marriage as a patriarchal
- 31:00institution that we thoroughly disown. It was huge round of applause and there was quite
- 31:07and then Wade Feet responded and I said, well, let me just say this, with all due respect pita,
- 31:14you don't reject marriage because you can't reject marriage because marriage has never been offered
- 31:21to you. I'm fighting for the right for you to reject it and the place then went very silent and
- 31:31then I felt this wave of applause begin and you realized, oh, I'm not trying to tell people,
- 31:38you need to, you know, you need to all get back into your Victorian outfits or anything. I am
- 31:42arguing that we have a choice. We should be able to choose like every straight person does.
- 31:47Do I want to live my life with a formal commitment to another person forever or not? You have to
- 31:55and many days won't. I'm sure and fine. It's up to you. I'm not a moralizer here but I do think
- 32:04it would be humanizing for us. I do think it would be good for us to have some kind of idea
- 32:11where our sex and love will end up. I have some future for ourselves as we know heads and I do think
- 32:19that would help us develop a stronger internal society that could be more immune to things
- 32:27like AIDS and HIV and also would heal our families and it's a way in which we can
- 32:37explain to straight people that we're human like them. In fact, instead of spending our lives
- 32:43reminding them why we're different than them, why we're queer, why we're weird, we might,
- 32:51at the same time, recognize that we have a lot in common with them. We grew up with them.
- 32:56They are we are part of their families. We don't have our own gay, we born to straight families
- 33:03and we are humans and we love as well as get horny and the two mix up and we've understood
- 33:12as humans for a very long time that this coupling in responsibility and exclusivity is a
- 33:22enobling and worst wild thing and I'm sick of having it demeaned in some way.
- 33:31What's so interesting, Andrew, about that moment that you're articulating, that repost is that
- 33:39it universalizes the question and it appeals to foundational basic beliefs that people have
- 33:45about freedom and liberty. Basic instincts, what you're doing is you're basically flipping the
- 33:50script and saying yes, you're looking at it this way but here's a way that I can present it to you
- 33:55which is tethered to actually deeper values that we all share. They really have nothing to do
- 33:59with gayness or not gayness or marriage or not marriage that have to do with the human instinct
- 34:04for self aspiration, for soft determination, for a control of one's destiny and so on.
- 34:08And to be able to make the choices that you want to make. And what's striking about that is
- 34:12that we've lost on the left so much of that art of persuasion, right? We've lost the ability to
- 34:18tether our ideals to deeper widespread universalist aspirations that middle America and middle
- 34:26Australia and middle Britain hold and we've become increasingly, I suppose, shrill and isolated
- 34:32in the way that we try to articulate our vision for ourselves, for our group and our rights and our
- 34:37and it's like, what's that? I've got a human. Well, if you've listened to this much of the
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- 34:50So you should listen to the rest of it and the way you do that is by subscribing to the premium
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- 35:59that, that's fine and I'll see you the next free episode, I guess. Take care.