Abstract
Drawing readers in with spirited cultural critique and witty autobiographical reflections, Suzanna Danuta Walters dismantles tolerance as an incremental gay rights strategy and laudable political objective. The Tolerance Trap offers a publicly accessible decoupage of the best cuts of research and theory from LGBTQ studies and queer theory and artfully builds a case for “robust integration.” While this is not a book intended to contribute to the academic sociological literature, it is a commendable and much needed work of public sociology.
Without pretense, Walters deconstructs the mainstream, commonsense, liberal tenants of gay rights discourse beginning with narratives of the closet and moving to a profound critique of “born gay” identity claims as a foundation for civil rights strategies. She brings together the best work of cultural theorists, historians, and psychologists to remind us of the contingent and conflicting nature of “coming out of the closet” as a prerequisite to genuine gay/lesbian identity and pathway to gay personal and political liberation. Rather than depicting our age as one of heightened gay visibility and acceptance where closets are easily exited, Walters brilliantly reframes the importance of visibility in terms of the problems of queer youth isolation and the project of normalization, asking readers to consider the Internet and public “real life” queer spaces where youth can play with identities and build community in a way that applauds difference rather than simulating hetero-gender normativity.
The Tolerance Trap rightly exposes “born gay” arguments as the skeleton in the mainstream gay rights closet. In the most sweeping and delightfully sarcastic critique to date, Walters dismantles the evidentiary, logical, ethical, and strategic foundations for gay immutability arguments. Social scientists have amassed heaps of evidence against a biological origin point for gay identity and have asserted strong evidence for the socio-historical construction of sexual identity as well as the complex and variant relationship between sexual behavior and personal or social identity. Walters extends this work by exposing the ethical failure and political danger of these claims, as they depict gayness as a “mystery that must be solved,” create a more sexist society, and limit our ability to assert the right to choose in matters of sexuality. At the same time the tolerance strategy depends on claims to gay immutability (“you have to put up with us, because we can’t help who we are”), it is also undermined by them, particularly when linked with conservative religious discourse that frames gayness as a kind of biological mistake that God wants queers to overcome.
For Walters, “born gay” arguments are the yellow brick road to marriage, the “Oz of queer liberation.” As the quintessential tolerance project, the case for marriage depends on depicting gays and lesbians as similar to their straight neighbors. More nefariously, Walters sees marriage as the “Trojan horse of the tolerance trap”: offered up as a gift for all gays and lesbians, it contains within it the real potential to stifle goals of sexual freedom and erode structural support for alternative forms of kinship and intimacy. Marriage is special because, like military inclusion, it is an icon of full citizenship; but, as The Tolerance Trap aptly points out, citizenship is fundamentally about equal rights to housing, employment, health care, education, political participation, and a “deeper sense of belonging.” While marriage and the military are important gateways to these rights, they are ones predicated on normalization. Thus, Walters prompts readers to think about how marriage is presented as a fundamental right when food, a home, and health care are not.
In addition to the military and marriage, Walters looks to media representations of gays and lesbians as an index of this “deeper sense of belonging” essential to the experience of full citizenship. She engages the taken-for-granted sense of heightened, positive gay visibility and concludes that most new gay family images are “straight tales in gay drag.” Queer difference is displaced by benign inclusion, and homophobia is depicted as if it is only a problem for adolescents at school, rather than on the street or in the heteronormative family. Similarly, Walters takes the popular “It Gets Better Project” to task by pointing out the racial and class-based privilege undergirding representations of adult gay happiness.
The Tolerance Trap offers an alternative path and destination for gay rights premised on gay positivity and “real integration” rather than gay tolerance and inclusion. And this is an either/or proposition: for Walters, the tolerance strategy is a barrier, not an incremental step toward full inclusion. Moving away from arguments suggesting that gayness is a natural affliction that any rational person would choose to avoid, real integration requires a firm commitment to free gender and sexual expression. It means asserting queerness as something for the benefit of all and allowing sexual and gender differences to improve or transform mainstream institutions and culture.
Like any good work of public importance and accessibility, The Tolerance Trap avoids disciplinary jargon and hackneyed, parochial arguments. In the spirit of the best sociological inquiry, it refuses oversimplification and moves readers to reexamine our taken-for-granted assumptions about equality, belonging, and identity. Among its many potential audiences in gay rights circles, this book is well suited for undergraduate students who will likely find it provocative, persuasive, and difficult to put down.