EDUCATION OF A GAY SOUL

A journalist’s manifesto on how homosexuality has been a titanic force for human progress.

Benton, the gay founder of the Falls Church News-Press newspaper in Virginia, contends that being gay is not only a sexual orientation, but also a unique sensibility comprised of “heightened empathy and compassion,” an “alternative sensual perspective,” and “constructive nonconformity.” This mindset has a cosmic significance, he suggests, arguing that it’s “built into the very fabric of the unfolding of the universe” in order to advance “the pursuit of beauty, justice, knowledge and truth.” In particular, he says, he says that homosexuality had a profound influence on the American Revolution, and on the nation’s development under politicians who had gay sensibilities, such as Alexander Hamilton and Abraham Lincoln. However, the post-Stonewall gay lifestyle has been blighted, Benton asserts, by its “descent into a wanton, unbridled, obsessive drug induced unending orgy of impersonal and extreme sex,” which he blames on “anarcho-hedonist counterculture values” implanted as part of a CIA conspiracy. Benton writes in ardent, sometimes-fulsome prose (“Such a noble and heroic breed are homosexuals!”), subsuming everything virtuous under his book’s umbrella (“virtue,” he says, is “the invention of homosexuals”); he also discusses numerous other well-known figures, from William Shakespeare to Jesus Christ. It’s a wide-ranging and sometimes-stimulating thesis that calls on everything from Greek mythology to subatomic physics, and Benton also provides illuminating appreciations of gay literary lions, such as Tennessee Williams and Larry Kramer. Historians and others, though, will take issue with many of Benton’s pronouncements, which often lack citations, and his penchant for stereotyping will strike many readers as crude and reductionist: “When a straight brute walks into a room, he orients immediately, in his constant urge to reproduce, to any attractive women there,” he writes. “When a gay person walks into the same room, he or she orients instead toward whether the drapes and the carpet match.”

An ambitious but overreaching treatise.