Review of The Tolerance Trap: How God, Genes, and Good Intentions are Sabotaging

Gay Equality, by Suzanna Danuta Walters.

If we think of social movements in terms of trajectory, there is something peculiar about
where the American gay movement seems to have brought us. In 1969, the Gay
Liberation Front announced, "We are a revolutionary group of men and women formed
with the realization that complete sexual liberation for all people cannot come about
unless existing social institutions are abolished. We reject society's attempt to impose
sexual roles and definitions on our nature... We are women and men who, from the time
of our earliest memories, have been in revolt against the sex-role structure and the
nuclear family." Today, the gay rights movement is celebrating victory in its signature
campaign for "marriage equality" with the Supreme Court's recent decision to strike
down the Defense of Marriage Act, thereby granting federal recognition to same-sex
marriages.
Is this progress? Sociologist Suzanna Danuta Walters thinks it sort of is, but not
really. "Rarely have we seen social movements so identified with one single issue and
that issue then become so all encompassing that it becomes synonymous with the struggle
itself...for the vast majority of Americans, two things seem indisputably true; first, most
gays want to be married, and second, most gays believe marriage equality to be the single
most important issue facing gay activists today." In The Tolerance Trap, she explains how
the unprecedented national salience of LGBTQ discourse, and spectacular achievements
of the movement's activism in recent years, come at a cost. We may have won the battles
for gay marriage and military service, and homosexuals are now prominently featured on
TV and among our media celebrities, but Walters believes these victories have done less
to advance the cause than much of the trumpeting would lead us to believe.
Though Walters is an accomplished academic who has written extensively on
sexuality, popular culture and feminism (she's currently Director of Women's, Gender,
and Sexuality at Northeastern University), The Tolerance Trap is written for a general
audience and reads a bit like a series of lectures, including occasional jokes and personal
anecdotes (some of the material has appeared as journal articles as the book developed).
Her thesis, however, is quite serious: Walters argues that the gay movement's tactical shift
in the 1990's toward achieving social "tolerance" for homosexuals in many ways
precludes their "substantive integration" into American society precisely because
heteronormative values and institutions remain the unchallenged--and even revitalized-underpinnings of an increasingly popular narrative of "tolerant" gay acceptance.
Full integration is always a radical and utopian project because it insists that the
human project is made better through that lofty project. How different this is from
the goal of tolerance. Tolerance is dangerously figured as an endpoint in itself
not process or project but a benevolent act of dominance toward its other. With
robust integration, there is no "we" that deigns to integrate the "other," in the way
we imagine heterosexuals bravely becoming more tolerant of sexual minorities.
Integration...can only succeed with a recognition of the absolute gains for
everyone that robust integration brings... [T]olerance is inevitably reluctant
forbearance (262).
Walters describes the recent efforts within the gay community to gain acceptance into
iconic institutions traditionally defined in explicitly heterosexual termsthe military,

popular media, and marriage itselfas tactically expedient, but strategically dubious.
After recounting the meteoric appearance of homosexuals in popular culture and politics
over the last fifteen years, Walters remarks, "Truth be told, this has all happened pretty
damn quickly." Her point is that it has been perhaps a bit too easy. By eschewing
confrontation and instead seeking acceptance into highly symbolic institutions firmly
embedded with core heterosexual norms, the recent gay rights movement has managed to
secure unprecedented social visibility, while our society and its institutions remain
fundamentally unchanged, except that gays are now enthusiastically encouraged to
emulate and aspire to the traditionally heteronormative ideals of marital monogamy and
martial discipline. Traditional sexism and homophobia, meanwhile, remains vigorous, as
any cursory review of assault and homosexual suicide statistics, or of Republican rhetoric
and policy initiatives, reveals.
Walters focuses on three dominant discourses which have inspired and run
through the contemporary, now "mainstream," gay movement. In addition to gays in the
military (broadly thematized as gay citizenship or national belonging) and gay marriage,
she identifies the critical role debates over the "cause" of homosexuality have played in
the development of the gay tolerance narrative and its reception. Walters points out that,
"there is, inarguably, an overwhelming 'born with it' ideology afoot that encompasses gay
marriage, gay genes, and gayness as a 'trait' and that isof courseused by both gay
rights activists and anti-gay activists to make arguments for equality or against it." We are
familiar with this discursive turn as it continues to play out between anti-gay factions
claiming homosexuality is a "choice" which can be "cured," and pro-gay factions
claiming sexual desire is a biologically determined trait inherited at birth. The irony that
this "turn" essentially reverses the polarity of the prevailing political sensibilities of the
gay liberation era (when anti-gay conservatives held that homosexuality was a pathology
and radical gay activists insisted that queer gender was a conscious choice to reject
heteronormativity) is not lost on Walters. Beginning with the Human Genome Project in
1989, however, gay activists turned to the idea that homosexuality could be legitimated as
a genetic "fact." Their opponents quickly turned the other way, now claiming that
homosexuality is an unnatural "choice" which can be influenced (and changed) by the
environment. Walters acknowledges that public consensus clearly favors the notion that
homosexuality is an inborn, quasi-biological trait, largely rejecting anti-gay claims that
homosexuality can be cured through "reparative therapy," but she is highly critical of how
and why public discourse has moved in this direction. The popular narrative supporting
the idea that gays are "born that way," she argues, has emerged as an almost hysterical
dogma, based not on scientific evidence, but on retrograde notions of "gender
essentialism," which assume a binary dichotomy of naturally occurring genders defined
according to sexist, heteronormative criteria.
[A]s sexual orientation comes to be viewed as a core, an unchangeable and
immutable part of the self, so too does gender get depicted as stereotypically pink
and blue, oppositional, dualistic. A whole series of equivalencies are embedded in
mainstream biological narratives: natural = good = immutable = inevitable; male
homosexuality = feminization; sexual acts = desire = identity. I can't help
wondering how this narrative structures social perception and the quest for equal
rights. If tolerance rests on immutability and immutability rests on some

black/white, gay/straight, male/female vision of clear cut difference, then

tolerance becomes the handmaiden to a more sexist society (102).
The promotion of biologically/genetically inherited homosexuality narratives by gay
rights activists, Walters argues, was tactically successful in persuading much of the
American public that gays ought to be toleratedbecause they suffer from the congenital
"problem" of homosexuality. The upshot of this kind of charitable tolerance is that it
establishes a social and moral hierarchy based on traditional, sexist identities: naturally
superior heterosexuals grant congenitally inferior homosexuals a special dispensation to
partake of the propriety of some of their institutions, provided they (the gays) strive to
live up to established conventions--monogamy and familial rectitude within marriage,
manly valor and obedient discipline within the military. Gay tolerance, according to
Walters, requires that gays identify themselves as "gay" in accordance with received
heterosexual norms and values, while concealing the desires and behaviors that might
challenge or offend traditional heterosexual propriety.
Walters fears that in the recent whirlwind of public enthusiasm for gay acceptance
into institutions once reserved for white, middle class heterosexuals, we may loose sight
of where we are going and where we have been. As she points out, a number of
commentators have already begun detailing America's immanent and/or imminent
emergence into a new, "post-gay" era, "such that possessing a gay, lesbian or bisexual
identity [has become] practically meaningless [for teenagers coming of age today]," as
one of them recently wrote (Ritch Savin-Williams, The New Gay Teenager).
The problem with that storyone told by any number of researchers and popular
journalists and one with a kernel of truthis that it neglects the continued reality
of homophobia and heterosexism... To argue, as many people seem to, that "life
for the next wave of gay and lesbian students becomes more like that of their
straight peers" is to radically underestimate the centrality of heterosexual
dominion. The post-gay story fits with the tolerance trap because neither one
requires real examination of continuing and structural homophobia (43).
In other words, Walters warns us that the gift of gay tolerance, which seems to have
miraculously catapulted the gay rights movement from relative obscurity into primetime
almost overnight, may be a Faustian bargain. There are several different endings to the
old Faust story, but Walters ends her book by quoting her illustrious colleague David
Halperin (How to be Gay, 2012):
As he writes, crushingly, "we are witnessing the rise of a new and vehement cult
of gay ordinaryness," which not only denies our own specificity but also denies
our "ability to contribute anything of value to the world we live in."
As long as tolerance is our reigning ethos, these contradictions will
continue to rage unabated. As long as we deny our difference in the service of
misplaced allegiance to gender and sexual norms, we deny "the unique genius in
being queer" (275 ).
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Marcus Aurin, September 2014, Boston