The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life

by Michael Warner

Michael Warner, one of our most brilliant social critics, argues that gay marriage and other moves toward normalcy are bad not just for the gays but for everyone. In place of sexual status quo, Warner offers a vision of true sexual autonomy that will forever change the way we think about sex, shame, and identity.

Genres: Queer, Nonfiction, LGBT, Politics, Sexuality, Philosophy, Theory

227 pages, Paperback

First published November 8, 1999

About the author

Michael Warner is Seymour H. Knox Professor of English and American Studies at Yale, and chair of the department of English. His books include Publics and Counterpublics (2002); The Trouble with Normal (1999); and The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990). With Craig Calhoun and Jonathan VanAntwerpen, he has edited Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age (Harvard University Press, 2010). He is also the editor of The Portable Walt Whitman (New York: Penguin, 2003); American Sermons (New York: Library of America, 1999); The English Literatures of America (with Myra Jehlen); and Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory (1993).

Reviews

[ivan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A comprehensive and incisive excoriation of same-sex marriage as a movement for "gay liberation." Warner's investigations of the interactions between gay shame and a push for same-sex marriage (see also Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore and Benjamin Shepard) is a useful lens to explore the millions of dollars and volunteer hours going almost exclusively to same-sex marriage advocacy -- at the expense of issues that arguably have a larger impact on the day-to-day lives of most queer and trans folks, from health care to housing to gentrification.

This latter trend, which pits rich white gays and lesbians -- toward whom the advocacy organizations like the Human Rights Campaign are oriented -- against their less-wealthy queer and trans sisters and brothers, assumes all the more currency when reading "gay assimilationist" author-activists like Michael Signorile, Dan Savage and Larry Kramer who, regardless of their counter-cultural "shock" approaches are nonetheless reinforcing ideas of middle-class normalcy as the long-awaited future for queers. Warner differs, and offers a radical notion of sexual autonomy and sexual ethics in their stead. Though Warner seems somewhat unaware of the liberation theories advanced before him by radical feminists like Judith Butler and John Stoltenberg, trans theorists like Riki Wilchins and race theorists/historians like Robin D.G. Kelley, his critique of and within the queer community is well-deserved.

[Andrew]

Much like when I first read Edward Said or Simone de Beauvoir, when I read The Trouble With Normal, I began to see some of the underlying assumptions I'd made as a straight white male, which made it a rather exhilarating read. And some of his policy arguments about the death of queer space in post-Giuliani New York are quite interesting. His argument against marriage as a cultural norm, gay or straight, isn't quite as powerful, but it still makes for an interesting read.

There is a question of how "academically" valid it is. I would say that as an academic text, it leaves something to be desired. Its arguments could be a bit more precise, a bit more technical. But as a more general text, it's a stunner, one of those rare theory books that makes no attempts to jargonize, that concerns itself more with everyday situations than the "valences" of a word choice. And Warner says all this with a wry, bitchy wit that reminds me more of Fran Lebowitz than any of those giants of high theory that Americans always attempt to imitate.

[J · Rating 4 out of 5]

Even though its almost 15 years old, and even though some of the specific issues he raises are mute (DOMA, don't ask don't tell, anti-sodomy laws, all thankfully consigned to the rubbish heap of history now), the underlying assumption he works with is still incredibly valid; mainstream culture is uncomfortable with queer people because mainstream culture as a whole is simply uncomfortable with sex being discussed or addressed or engaged with in anything approximating general openness.

I think that's essentially correct even if its a very hard generalization to make as a young adult in 2014 at a time when gay/queer culture is becoming much more prevalent in general, and not simply because of the sea change in attitudes on gay marriage, and while Warner makes a compelling case against not simply gay marriage, but against the institution of marriage as a whole (as a ludicrous ritual which allows the state to say that some types of relationships are "proper" and others are not).

I don't buy into his alarmist and, in retrospect, incorrect conclusion that full acceptance of gay marriage will be the death of organic, fully sexualized queer culture in America. You can get married to your gay/lesbian partner in a Presbyterian church in a wide array of states these days, you can also spend your nights in a bathhouse or BDSM dungeon or a glory hole. As long as people are biologically wired for sex, all of those things will exist in an uneasy and at times almost incoherent sort of equilibrium. But where he is still frighteningly right is how larger economic forces can destroy queer (and really any other) culture that gets in the way of economic development, urban renewal, really of gentrification in general. A neo-con senator blasting "degenerate" gays is ultimately infinitely less damaging to gay life than a real estate mogul with a blueprint for "development" and the backing of city hall.

Warner touches on a dizzying array of issues in this book, everything from healthcare, to city planning, to cultural assumptions about sex, to the nature of marriage, to byzantine zoning laws, to the fall out of the Lewinsky scandal. The book really would be better if he could just pick 2-3 filters through which to examine this issue, instead of trying to come at an issue this large from every angle possible at once. This is the odd polemic that would benefit from being more "academic" i.e. a bit more extensively structured, in its general approach.

That being said, it is also the rare book on a central LGBT issue whose basic premises are still valid and worth considering 15 years after it was written.

[Hannah · Rating 1 out of 5]

(1.5 stars)
The main arguments of this book (in my own words because I do not enjoy Warner's):
- Humanization should be achievable without assimilation. In an effort to gain the approval of people with power, some people in the LGBTQ population distance themselves from those who are "less normal," such as the "overly flamboyant" gay man or the transgender person who has no desire to "pass" as cisgender (Warner would never use this example because I'm not sure he knows what a trans person is) or anyone who might confirm stereotypes. "Normal" is a strategy used to shame and marginalize. I guess. Is it the same as saying, "We're all normal because this huge spread of diversity of sexual orientation and gender identity and gender expression and biological sex is normal"?
- The benefits of marriage should be extended to all kinds of households, yet the current battle in the "gay movement" is to simply give same-sex couples access to the institution of marriage. Definitely agree that the focus is misplaced and our society would benefit from reducing the financial power of marriage.
- Warner criticizes the desire of some LGBTQ people to completely "desexualize" the community so they will be deemed worthy of marriage and the vanilla straight life. I agree that this desire is problematic and elitist. However, I also think we can still acknowledge and discuss the harm that the common OVERsexualization of LGBTQ people does.

ANYWAY UGH HERE I GO TO MY MAIN GRIPE. The Trouble With Normal is extremely outdated and, as another reviewer mentioned, not useful for today's queer politics. Everything is framed as exclusively "gay and lesbian," no other identities. Gay culture, gay life, gay activism, straight or gay, gay movement, gay marriage, a conclusion even more exclusive focusing on gay men only, yet the author can still say the book is about the "queer community"? I'm gonna keep screaming "46% of the LGBTQ population is bi" from the mountaintops.
Here's a real winner (strike-throughs added by me):
"Already, the [gay and lesbian] movement has been forced to add 'bisexual' and, occasionally, 'transgendered' to its self-description. These gestures are often rightly perceived, especially by bisexuals and transgendered people, as afterthoughts, half-hearted gestures at being politically correct."
Apparently this is the author's excuse for not including anything about bisexual people and transgender people except for several uncriticized t-slurs. Were things this different in 1999? If so, yeah, this book has historical value. But if you want to actually learn something, just go read a few anti-assimilation (and critiques of) blog posts or something.

[Sharad Pandian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Released two decades ago, this is a strange and wonderful book to return to. This is at least in part because stances and approaches it attacks are now so taken-for-granted that their contingency has been scrubbed clean.

This argued against the push for same-sex marriage in America, which it is now the law of the land there. At least one plank of his argument was that it seemed like a losing fight, and what's happened since shows that his reading was wrong. But there's a tendency to treat that court-victory as part of a linear development, as though the only questions were and are if and how quickly that political telos would come to fruition.

But even deeper than difference in strategy, there's a different political sensibility itself. When Warner off-handedly remarks:

it is worth noting that the subject of same-sex marriage is so thoroughly mediated by public-sphere discourse that few can think about the topic apart from some kind of narrative about long-term social change, usually on the national scale. Mere mention of "gay marriage" triggers a consciousness of national policy dispute. It is as though a pollster and a reporter were in your bedroom, asking you if you wanted a judge or a cop to join the party. (134)

It's striking that this mediation "by public-sphere discourse" is now ubiquitious in social justice movements, both in their public-facing communications and in private. It's not just that there's comfort with using state and institutional mechanisms to impose monolithic meanings on people, it's that this is assumed to be normal and not needing defense.

This isn't some unoriginal cultural hellscape - any community finds ways of channeling creativity. There's certainly been a boom in aesthetics and inward-looking commentary. The need to be "on" all the time means that playfulness in big groups is rare, and replaced instead either with satire of the Right (well-deserved) or "jokes" about the awkwardness of dealing with new norms. There's certainly playfulness possible, but only in small, trusted groups. The "public" has invaded too much. It's against this background that Warner's defense of a "counterpublic" seems outdated and therefore perhaps valuable.

In the face of symbolic and material assault on the sexual spaces and practices of queer life in the 90s, in the form of outrage and zoning laws, Warner defends the autonomous and independent existence and value of alternative ways and networks of living that queer people had (because had to) make for themselves.

At one level, this means not submitting to same-sex marriage since it involves the valuation of a single mode of living over all others that exist: "Buying commodities sustains the culture of commodities whether the buyers like it or not. That is the power of a system. Just so, marrying consolidates and sustains the normativity of marriage. And it does so despite what may be the best intentions of those who marry." (109) While the desire to fit in is understandable, "embracing this standard merely throws shame on those who stand farther down the ladder of respectability." (60)

Instead, queer life consists (consisted?) in quite different lives:

People who think that queer life consists of sex without intimacy are usually seeing only a tiny part of the picture, and seeing it through homophobic stereotype. The most fleeting sexual encounter is, in its way, intimate. And in the way many gay men and lesbians live, quite casual sexual relations can develop into powerful and enduring friendships. Friendships, in turn, can cross into sexual relations and back. Because gay social life is not as ritualized and institutionalized as straight life, each relation is an adventure in nearly uncharted territory—whether it is between two gay men, or two lesbians, or a gay man and a lesbian, or among three or more queers, or between gay men and the straight women whose commitment to queer culture brings them the punishment of the "fag hag" label.

There are almost as many kinds of relationship as there are people in combination. Where there are patterns, we learn them from other queers, not from our parents or schools or the state. Between tricks and lovers and exes and friends and fuckbuddies and bar friends and bar friends' tricks and tricks' bar friends and gal pals and companions "in the life," queers have an astonishing range of intimacies. Most have no labels. Most receive no public recognition. Many of these relations are difficult because the rules have to be invented as we go along. Often desire and unease add to their intensity, and their unpredictability They can be complex and bewildering, in a way that arouses fear among many gay people, and tremendous resistance and resentment from many straight people. Who among us would give them up?

If there is such a thing as a gay way of life, it consists in these relations, a welter of intimacies outside the framework of professions and institutions and ordinary social obligations. Straight culture has much to learn from it, and in many ways has already begun to learn from it. Queers should be insisting on teaching these lessons. Instead, the marriage issue, as currently framed, seems to be a way of denying recognition to these relations, of streamlining queer relations into the much less troubling division of couples from friends. (115-6)

He thinks many of "most of [marriage's] benefits could be extended to other kinds of households and intimate relations" - healthcare and tax equality for single people. Rights associated with property sharing can be extended to "all cohabiting arrangements (ex-lovers, relatives, long-term intimate friends, etcetera)." Rights relating to immigration, parenting rights, rights to bring wrongful death actions, and the prohibition against spousal testimony can be extended to "powerful intimate commitments" including domestic partners, legal concubinage, common- law relations. Child custody can be linked to care-relations. Even in the place of just divorce, different dissolution options might be provided for different relationships. (118-120)

These are important enough, but only occupy three pages. The emphasis is on the variety of forms of living that already exist, and denied by the focus on marriage alone. The central thrust is that there's an actual culture of gay sexuality - not just an unthinking, instinctive innate sexuality - but a culture where information denied by heterosexual life is provided, experimented with, and achieved. Instead of couching defenses in privacy and non-judgement, these life forms have to be regarded as building a fully populated world of on intertwined people, a public culture.

The sexual cultures of gay men and lesbians are, after all, cultures in ways that are often forgotten, especially when they are treated simply as a mass of deviants looking for hormonally driven release. They recognize themselves as cultures, with their own knowledges, places, practices, languages, and learned modes of feeling. The naive belief that sex is simply an inborn instinct still exerts its power, but most gay men and lesbians know that the sex they have was not innate nor entirely of their own making, but learned—learned by participating, in scenes of talk as well as of fucking. One learns both the elaborated codes of a subculture, with its rituals and typologies (top/bottom, butch/femme, and so on), but also simply the improvisational nature of unpredicted situations. As queers we do not always share the same tastes or practices, though often enough we learn new pleasures from others. What we do share is an ability to swap stories and learn from them, to enter new scenes not entirely of our own making, to know that in these contexts it is taken for granted that people are different, that one can surprise oneself, that one's task in the face of unpredicted variations is to recognize the dignity in each person's way of surviving and playing and creating, to recognize that dignity in this context need not be purchased at the high cost of conformity or self-amputation. Within this queer world we recognize, usually tacitly, that the norms of the dominant culture would quash the scene we're participating in. It is therefore best understood as a counterpublic. Its openness, accessibility, and unpredictability are all marks of its publicness. (177-8)

It isn't just discrete pairs of people interacting that creates this world, but objects too. Pornography, particularly in the age before the internet was a valuable source of information, particuarly for the marginalized, and was therefore of value: after all, "Autonomy requires more than civil liberty; it requires the circulation and accessibility of sexual knowledge, along with the public elaboration of a social world that can make less alienated relations possible." (171-2) But these objects and spaces were more than just sources of information:

Pornography and adult businesses jeopardize the amnesias separating sex and public culture in large part because of their physical orientation toward an indefinite public; they are media of acknowledgment. Having been reared in the bosom of Jesus, I never, it happens, saw gay porn until I began graduate school. I had had sex with men for years on the side, but I didn't think I was gay. I thought I was just wicked. The first porn images I saw, in a magazine belonging to a friend, set me suddenly to think, "I could be gay" Why did those pictures trigger my recognition when years of sleeping with men somehow didn't? It's because the men in the pictures were not only doing what I wanted to do, they were doing it with a witness: the camera. Or rather, a world of witnesses, including the infrastructure for producing, distributing, selling, and consuming these texts. This whole world could be concretized in places like Christopher Street or Times Square, but also in the formal language of pornography. In order for the porn to exist, not only did some of its producers have to have gay sex, they and many others had to acknowledge that they were having it. What is traded in pornographic commerce is not just speech, privately consumed; it is publicly certifiable recognition. This is part of the meaning of every piece of porn, and what is difficult to communicate in the dominant culture is that the publicity of porn has profoundly different meanings for nonnormative sex practices. When it comes to resources of recognition, queers do not begin on a level playing field (184-5)

Warner does not preclude criticism of these worlds. Of course, risky behaviour is often irrational and poorly throught through. But those committed to addressing this should begin by taking seriously the reality of this world and its different values and definitions of health. Doing this might even reveal that what might have seemed like problems can sometimes be so much more:

The queerness that is repressed in this view may be finding expression in risk. Sex has long been associated with death, in part because of its sublimity. There is no sublimity without danger, without the scary ability to imagine ourselves and everything we hold dear, at least for a moment, as relatively valueless. In this context, the pursuit of dangerous sex is not as simple as mere thrill seeking or self-destructiveness. In many cases it may represent deep and mostly unconscious thinking, about desire and the conditions that make life a value. (213)

Most poetic is the description of queer life in these spaces, which at their best (emphasis mine) used the awareness of commonly shared sexual-shame to build a space that opposed hierarchies and stood in perpetual openness to learning from those traditionally cast down outside:

In those circles where queerness has been most cultivated, the ground rule is that one doesn't pretend to be above the indignity of sex. And although this usually isn't announced as an ethical vision, that's what it perversely is. In queer circles, you are likely to be teased and abused until you grasp the idea. Sex is understood to be as various as the people who have it. It is not required to be tidy, normal, uniform, or authorized by the government. This kind of culture is often denounced as relativist, self-indulgent, or merely libertine. In fact, it has its own norms, its own way of keeping people in line. I call its way of life an ethic not only because it is understood as a better kind of self-relation, but because it is the premise of the special kind of sociability that holds queer culture together. A relation to others, in these contexts, begins in an acknowledgment of all that is most abject and least reputable in oneself. Shame is bedrock. (35)

You learn that everyone deviates from the norm in some context or other, and that the statistical norm has no moral value. You begin to recognize how stultifying the faith in the norm can be. You learn that the people who look most different from you can be, by virtue of that fact, the very people from whom you have the most to learn. Your lot is cast with them, and you begin to recognize that there are other worlds of interaction that the mass media cannot comprehend, worlds that they can only deform when they project images of ghettos and other deviant scenes. To seek out queer culture, to interact with it and learn from it, is a kind of public activity It is a way of transforming oneself, and at the same time helping to elaborate a commonly accessible world. (70-1)

For this reason, paradoxically the ethic of queer life is actually truer to the core of the modern notion of dignity than the usual use of the word is. Dignity has at least two radically different meanings in our culture. One is ancient, closely related to honor, and fundamentally an ethic of rank. It is historically a value of nobility. It requires soap. (Real estate doesn't hurt, either.) The other is modern and democratic. Dignity in the latter sense is not pomp and distinction; it is inherent in the human. You can't, in a way, not have it. At worst, others can simply fail to recognize your dignity. These two notions of dignity have opposite implications for sex. The most common judgments about sex assign dignity to some kinds (married, heterosexual, private, loving), as long as they are out of sight, while all other kinds of sex are no more dignified than defecating in public, and possibly less so. That kind of dignity we might as well call bourgeois propriety In what I am calling queer culture, however, there is no truck with bourgeois propriety. If sex is a kind of indignity, then we're all in it together. And the paradoxical result is that only when this indignity of sex is spread around the room, leaving no one out, and in fact binding people together, that it begins to resemble the dignity of the human. (36)

[Alex Strohschein · Rating 3 out of 5]

This 25-year old book is one of the most thought-provoking I have read all year.

I took a seminary class a few years ago called "Reordering Desire: St. Augustine, Queer Theory, and Christian Sexual Ethics. In that class, the professor (a "side-B" Christian) mentioned that in the gay movement's early decades there was no passionate drive or desire for marriage - it was too much of a heteronormative institution, one that gay people were trying to resist. The professor said that it was the conservative ("conservative") gay Roman Catholic writer Andrew Sullivan who had issued the clarion call for gays and lesbians to advocate for same-sex marriage because it would essentially help to "normalize" homosexual relationships and make them more acceptable to mainstream culture. Michael Warner's book The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life was mentioned as a book from within the queer subculture that critiqued Sullivan's arguments. Reading it as a Canadian evangelical is fascinating because I disagree with so many of Warner's premises and yet I also appreciate this intra-queer critique of same-sex marriage. The enemy of my enemy is my friend?

The first three chapters are the best. Warner questions the very quest to be "normal." Andrew Sullivan advocates for same-sex marriage because it is a way of normalizing queer people into a familiar, traditional institution - marriage. Warner remarks:

Sullivan's main argument here has had an extremely powerful influence, even on people who otherwise disagree with the often cantankerous and eccentric Sullivan. Nearly everyone, it seems, wants to be normal. And who can blame them, if the alternative is being abnormal, or deviant, or not being one of the rest of us? Put in those terms, there doesn't seem to be a choice at all. Especially not in America, where normal probably outranks all other social aspirations. What immortality was to the Greeks, what virtù was to Machiavelli's prince, what faith was to the martyrs, what honor was to the slave owners, what glamour is to drag queens, normalcy is to the contemporary American. Of course people want individuality as well, but they want their individuality to be the normal kind, and given the choice between the two they will take normal. But what exactly is normal (p. 53)?

We typically base our sense of normal on statistics. But Warner points out that since the early 19th century have we become obsessed with using statistics as an indication of value or to prove an argument. Yet statistics are just quantitative data - statistics alone don't prove or qualify something as “ethical." In the most cringe Christian way possible ("What if I told you there is a greater Carpenter than Sabrina Carpenter?"), one could claim that the Christian ideal of lifelong, monogamous male-female marriage is a kind of "resistance" to the "normal".

The reliance upon statistics to prove normalcy undercuts queer culture because it is clearly in the minority compared to heterosexuality. Warner and I are polar opposites - though he was raised in a pentecostal home he appears to me to advocate complete freedom in terms of sexual expression. Indeed, his impassioned critique of same-sex marriage is that it too narrowly conforms gay when what gay people - and culture at large - should seek is greater acceptance of all sorts of different sexual expressions. He cautions:

Marriage, in short, would make for good gays—the kind who would not challenge the norms of straight culture, who would not flaunt sexuality, and who would not insist on living differently from ordinary folk. These behavioristic arguments for gay marriage are mostly aimed at modifying the sexual culture of gay men. Left and right, advocates of gay marriage assume that marriage as a social institution is, in the words of Bishop John Shelby Spong, "marked by integrity and caring and . . . filled with grace and beauty"; that it will modify "behavior"; and that a culture of "gay bars, pornography, and one-night stands" is desperately in need of virtue.

This idealization of marriage is typical of those who are excluded from it: priests, gays, adolescents. It shows an extraordinarily willful blindness. As one observer notes: "to presume that morality follows on marriage is to ignore centuries of evidence that each is very much possible without the other." Worse, it is predicated on the homophobic equation of "gay bars, pornography, and one night stands" with immorality—the very equation against which the gay movement came into being. If the conservative arguments against gay marriage reduce to almost nothing but homophobia, these arguments in' favor of it are powered by homophobic assumptions as well.

It may be more precise to call these arguments anti-queer rather than homophobic, and as a way of commandeering the resources and agenda of gay politics, that's what they are. Yet the image of the Good Gay is never invoked without its shadow in mind—the Bad Queer, the kind who has sex, who talks about it, and who builds with other queers a way of life that ordinary folk do not understand or control. Marriage could hardly produce in reality the Good Gays who are pictured in this rhetoric: gays who marry will be as likely to divorce, cheat, and abuse each other as anyone else. The more likely effect is much uglier, since any politics that makes full social membership conditional on the proprieties of the marital form is ultimately a way to pave over the collective world that lesbians and gays have made. From the homophile movement until recently, gay activism understood itself as an attempt to stave off the pathologization of gay life—by the police, by the McCarthy inquest, by psychologists and psychiatrists, by politicians, by health and sanitation departments. Now we are faced with activists who see the normalization of queer life precisely as their role (pp. 113-114).

Warner notes that love can exist outside of marriage and that not all marriages are themselves loving; the quest for same-sex marriage is pregnant with sentimentality rather than based on necessity. Gay couples can publicly declare their love for each other through rituals or gestures that are not marriage itself, such as a ceremony or a rapturous love poem at a poetry night (p. 98). Warner asks, “Why does anyone imagine that love is an argument for marriage (p. 103)?

One of the reasons same-sex marriage was sought was because the state privileged heterosexual marriages. For Warner, this is a problem and couples in same-sex marriages would be joining the ranks of the privileged and by doing so, they would be shaming their fellow gays who refuse to marry (pp. 110-111). What Warner advocates is that more leeway should be given by the state to provide benefits and recognitions to alternative households - including the likes of siblings living together.

My disagreements with Warner's laidback attitude towards sex is captured when he writes:

The implication tends to be that those who favor sex, especially casual sex, are opposed by those who favor romantic love. But queer culture is the last place where this opposition should be taken for granted. One of its greatest contributions to modern life is the discovery that you can have both: intimacy and casualness; long-term commitment and sex with strangers; romantic love and perverse pleasure. To cast the conflict as one between sex and love is to deny the best insights and lived experience of queers (p. 73).

As mentioned, this book is a quarter of a century old. The last two chapters, "Zoning Out Sex" (specifically focused on New York City) and "The Politics of Shame and HIV Prevention," while offering some interesting arguments, seem more tied to their times. I imagine that New York is more queer-friendly with the "normalization" of LGBTQ people. As someone who holds to traditional views on sexuality I don't have the same harsh criticisms of abstinence-only sex education that Warner does though I also think limiting sex ed to abstinence is unwise; there is sheer, basic truth to the fact that monogamous relationships are the safest way to avoid contracting HIV/AIDS or any other type of venereal disease but it's also based on a sexual ethic that is out of touch with how the vast majority of people live their lives (still, I don't agree with giving grade 5 kids condoms and flavoured lube - strawberry shortcake - like I got at Hastings Elementary). Warner is critical of regulatory bodies collecting data on those who have HIV/AIDS and yet reading this book this side of COVID-19 I am aware of how invasive the government could be during the pandemic, all in the name of preventing the spread of the virus. I also wondered if some of Warner's own critiques of the quest for same-sex marriage might have softened over time as more gay couples enter their twilight years and might find greater assurance and comfort in more permanent relationships, especially as they become less able-bodied.

In the seminary class I took we discussed how gay Christians in committed, covenantal relationships were assailed by conservative Christians who decried their relationships as well as from a wider gay culture that is largely, openly, non-monogamous (Warner notes that data shows that rarely are gays and lesbians entirely monogamous, p. 131). One wonders if Warner offers a solution for these Christians out of the still often hostile battlefront of same-sex marriage in the culture wars by abstaining from marrying while still publicly proclaiming their affection and fidelity for one another.

With same-sex marriage now the norm, it's fascinating reading a book such as this. I wonder how many same-sex couples today would find its rejection of marriage convincing. It prompts questions about the desirability of marriage and how the state and public can inculcate more inclusivity for those who are troubled by the normal. I can't help but disagree with Michael Warner on a lot of his premises and advocacy but he is a clear and provocative thinker and I am glad (GLAAD?) I read this book.

[L Y N N · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can totally appreciate his assertion that we in the US need to admit that sex is being had by many people in many situations OTHER THAN marriage/a monogamous relationship. Only then can safe sex programs have a chance of working and being effective. This insistence amongst our politicians that abstinence is the only “safe sex” (read: NO SEX) policy to be taught is ridiculous, short-sighted, and a cop-out rather than a solution. PEOPLE HAVE SEX! Especially BEFORE and/or totally outside of a marriage/monogamous relationship! Guess what?!? Some people may not want to ever get married! And they shouldn’t “have” to. There are many ways to live life! Heterosexual and married is NOT the ONLY path/choice! Get over it and deal! Sheesh!!

[DoctorM · Rating 4 out of 5]

In some ways a late polemic in the "Q. vs. R." wars of the 1980s inside the gay community--- an attack on assimilationism ---Warner's "The Trouble With Normal" is also a fine meditation on the costs of the idea of "normal" itself, on how defining some lives as "normal" always excludes and demonizes others. Warner makes the key point that in mass democracies like the US (and especially in the mass-media-saturated US), statistically prevalent is made to equal "normal" and assigned moral value: to be "normal"/moral is to be "just like everyone else". He argues that it's not just a political mistake for the gay community to pin its hopes on same-sex marriage--- "look! we're married, we're just like you!" but a betrayal of all those folk, queer or not, who aren't happily in a married couple. "Normal", Warner argues, keeps us from asking deeper questions about what marriage does, or why long-term monogamy is regarded as the Grail of personal relationships, or why one can only be "moral" or "responsible" if one's behaviours match the statistical mean.

Warner also focuses on the issue of "normal" as a shaming strategy, on how it's used to create sexual shame and both marginalise and privatise sexual identity and sexual communities. Shame is always about social, public, disgrace, and Warner looks at the way "normalisation" not only undermines the gay and queer communities, but makes it impossible to be in American public life and be a sexual person--- or be seen as a supporter of the different.

A book well worth reading, and one that challenges readers to think about the costs of assimilation for the gay community as well as for anyone "queer"--- not part of the exclusive circle of "normal".

[Manik Sukoco · Rating 3 out of 5]

A comprehensive and incisive excoriation of same-sex marriage as a movement for "gay liberation." Warner's investigations of the interactions between gay shame and a push for same-sex marriage (see also Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore and Benjamin Shepard) is a useful lens to explore the millions of dollars and volunteer hours going almost exclusively to same-sex marriage advocacy - at the expense of issues that arguably have a larger impact on the day-to-day lives of most queer and trans folks, from health care to housing to gentrification.
This latter trend, which pits rich white gays and lesbians - toward whom the advocacy organizations like the Human Rights Campaign are oriented - against their less-wealthy queer and trans sisters and brothers, assumes all the more currency when reading "gay assimilationist" author-activists like Michael Signorile, Dan Savage and Larry Kramer who, regardless of their counter-cultural "shock" approaches are nonetheless reinforcing ideas of middle-class normalcy as the long-awaited future for queers. Warner differs, and offers a radical notion of sexual autonomy and sexual ethics in their stead. Though Warner seems somewhat unaware of the liberation theories advanced before him by radical feminists like Judith Butler and John Stoltenberg, trans theorists like Riki Wilchins and race theorists/historians like Robin D.G. Kelley, his critique of and within the queer community is well-deserved.

[Serena · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am SHOOK. This book was a complete flip on my thinking about the queer movement, marriage, politics, the HIV epidemic, and so much more. It just wrecked everything I thought I knew, as a queer woman in 2021, and rewired my way of thinking and expanded my knowledge of the past and gave new perspective for me on the present. It was so well written & argued. It may have been published in 1999, and some things have changed, some of his language and arguments are dated, but it is still just as relevant in even more ways than I could’ve anticipated.

[Anna · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is my first foray into queer theory and it was an intense start. While this book is a bit dated (written in the late 1990's), it certainly gave me a deeper understanding of the LGBTQ movement and the diverse perspectives within the queer community. In some ways, this book felt similar to Why I Am Not a Feminist: A Feminist Manifesto - both authors feel that their movements have become too palatable and mild to create real change. And both author talk about the patriarchal and heteronormative nature of many aspects of our current society - especially marriage. While this was an interesting read and gave me a lot to think about, I don't feel that it made me into a better ally.

[Tommy Zoppa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow, an incredible read. I wish that someone handed this to me right when I came out. It took a decade of evangelical shame to dig out of and when I thought my journey was over it was nearly another decade before I saw how the modern portrayal of queers and the lack of visible queer politics only changed the shape of that shame. The philosophical back flips I did to get me out of those patterns are so beautifully named here and it feels powerful that their were queers feeling similar ways.

[Joel Wall · Rating 4 out of 5]

a truly prescient dive into the trouble with aiming only for gay marriage, and ignoring non-bormative sex practices and the effects of stigma and shame which dominate society's discussions and understandings of sex not just for queerd but for everyone

[Corina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Warners's argument is based in the ethical conviction that sexual autonomy should be a natural right in a sane and just society. Why do our laws and culture require the criminalization and stigmatizing of consensual sex acts that aren't eveyone else's cup of tea? He claims the gay marriage movement is obscuring the hierarchies of sexual shame that still operate within mainstream homophobia, playing into a system that privileges normalcy as a moral value, for some misguided reason (in this country, it's normal to be poorly educated and in bad health, for example).

Speaking of "post-gay" magazine editor James Collard, who wants to de-politicize the gay movement and publicly stereotyped queer culture as "the gay ghetto" in a Newsweek article of 1998, Warner compares Collard's tactics to those of the 1950's normalizing movement, the Mattachine Society:

"Then and now, homosexuals were and still are afraid to be seen as queer...Then and now they bargained and still bargain for a debased pseudo-dignity, the kind that is awarded as a bribe for disavowing the indignity of sex and the double indignity of a politics around sex. The result has been a set of hierarchies. Those whose sex is least threatening, along with those whose gender profiles seem least queer, are put forward as the good and acceptable face of the movement. These, inevitably, are the ones who are staying home, making dinner for their boyfriends, for whom being gay means reading Newsweek. The others, the queers who have sex in public toilets, who don't 'come out' as happily gay, the sex workers, the lesbians who are too vocal about a taste for dildos or S/M, the boys who flaunt it as pansies or as leathermen, the androgynes, the trannies and transgendered whose gender deviance makes them unassimilable to the menu of sexual orientations, the clones in the so-called gay ghetto, the fist-fuckers and popper-snorters, the ones who actually like pornography--all these flaming creatures are told...that their great moment of liberation will come later...when we get to be about 'more than sexuality'--when, say, gay marriage is given the force of law. Free at last!"

I recommend this book highly - well-reasoned defence of sex in its own right, and analysis of how sexual identities are formed in response to public and private realms, scandal, shame, and the consolidation of voice and power that is the result of capitalist systems within media and politics.

[Erdem Tasdelen · Rating 2 out of 5]

Really though, this one. I constantly found myself going back and forth between being convinced and disagreeing. The first major problem with this book is that it seems only to address a leftist intellectual open minded audience, without finding it necessary to justify the assumptions it makes with a conservative reader in mind. I simply can not believe that the subject of religion is not at all discussed within this framework: it's as if we've all moved past the issue of religion. The main counter argument being offered by conservatives is of course going to be based on what religion says about these issues, so I don't think we can afford to discuss the question of marriage or public sex without referring to religion at all. I and many of his readers may agree with Warner, but in that case are we trying to form a pact of leftist liberals? Even so, is it really worth it to segregate an imagined queer community into those who will comply with heterosexist norms (as Warner claims to expose them to be) and those who will fight them? We will of course disagree on many things, but why the hostile tone? Why is it such an outrageous disloyalty to "queer culture" when two gay people want to get married? Can we really manage to imagine ourselves outside of the norms of the societies within which we are situated, without even having been granted the recognition compulsive heterosexuality deprives us of? I definitely agree on the point that there is no such thing as normal and it can never be fully acquired or maintained, but are we really obliged to assert our abnormality when no such abnormality can really be claimed to exist as the binary opposite of normal? I really don't understand this fascination with situating oneself as all that is outside the normativity of society, I find it a very tiresome attempt to have to be different, especially at the expense of others who don't care about being normal or abnormal.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

In The Trouble with Normal (1999), Michael Warner explains how shaming and the stigma around certain sexual acts and desires serves to harm the dignity of queers — this shaming is done both by moralists and the "good homosexuals." By dignity, Warner means that inherent part of ourselves that is the human (36). Warner proposes a politics around shame, understanding that many identities are formed around shame. From Goffman he offers to responses to shame: the stigmaphile, those who learn to value what society shames, and the stimaphobe, those who aspire to normalcy. Normal, of course, wouldn't be bad if it were just a statistical norm, but normal is the value placed around this supposed norm and the attempt to strive for it, and shame those who do not. This is why Warner opposes gay marriage: because it affirms this norm and shames and make more difficult other possibilities for relationship-creating. People understand gay marriage as a private institution, but it is really a public one (107). For Warner, "If there is such a thing as a gay way of life, it consists in these relations, a welter of intimacies outside the framework of professions and institutions and ordinary social obligations" (116). Warner also exposes the loss of public spaces through government intervention and markets, and argues that "the politics of privatization . . . destroys real privacy even as it erodes public activity" (172). He outlines 13 different senses in which the dichotomy of public and private work, as well as three other senses of private that do not have a corresponding sense of public (172-3).

[Joshua · Rating 5 out of 5]

Before reading this book, I was 100% behind the push for equal marriage and saw it as a genuine change in the direction of equality. Michael Warner has completely changed that stance.

While its obvious that members of the queer community should be allowed to marry. The real world effects of focusing all our political efforts on this one front has, in a sense, destroyed the community and spirit of activism that stormed the 60s and 70s. With the horrors of the AIDS crisis and the lack of space for queer memes to be passed down each generation, we find ourselves in a time when we feel like our greatest struggle is that of marriage.

Werner shows, with stunningly bitchy wit, that this is so far removed from the world that our forebears (pun intended) were trying to carve out for us, a world in which our own culture, our own relationships and freedoms would be seen as equal and a genuine alternative to the stifled hetro-normative standard of life long monogamous dating-marriage.

Instead our generation today obsesses over desexualising gay culture and assimilating into that which we've previously rejected, to create some bastardised straight-acting sexless life full of shame and lacking true autonomy.

As relevant today as when it was first printed, a must read for the budding queer or bored housewive.

10/10

xxx

[LARRY · Rating 1 out of 5]

As posted in [http://www.amazon.com]:

*The Trouble with Normal* is Warner's stance against gay marriage. Actually, it's more than that. Warner addresses normalcy and this is where he actually had interesting yet heady things to say. In order to challenge normalcy, Warner takes us through history to show us how shame has been attached to anything queer.

However, after two chapters, I realized that Warner is redundant and basically rants against aspects of the gay life. In addition, he bashes gay contemporaries on the very same issues he addresses.

Amazon.com summarizes that Warner believes that gays in monogamous relationships are actually doing a disservice to those who chose not to be in one. I had to laugh because I was thinking, "and monogamous straight people don't do a disservice to those who aren't?" It is tiresome when one berates the gay community when it is the same in the straight community yet it isn't addressed.

Anyways, I get it that some gays consider gay marriage to be heteronormative. And I was hoping that Warner would elaborate intellectually on that. However, Warner didn't and just bash aspects of the gay life and contemporaries.

[phoebe · Rating 2 out of 5]

Eventually I figured out that this book is a follow-up to Andrew Sullivan's "Virtually Normal," which I haven't yet read. Warner's specific rebuttals were therefore lost on me, but the points were very interesting, if not convincing.

His arguments are smart, unharried, borderline condescending, and occasionally witty.

The book centers around an idea he calls "the politics of shame." They used shame to break down Clinton, gay men who cruise in public restrooms, the list goes on . . .

He argues that gay activist groups (HRC and co) are misguided in fighting for gay marriage rights, that they should be fighting the institution of marriage itself, which sanctions certain kinds of sexuality (monogomous and heterosexual) and in doing so devalues others.

In the final chapter he talks about how the politics of shame play out in HIV prevention.

Confession: The jacket design was and still remains my favorite part of the book.

[Libertine · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this excellent book, Michael Warner explains how gay and lesbian activists are pursuing the wrong goal by advocating and working for the right to be legally married.

Warner points out that, instead, the focus ought to be on separating certain legal benefits and perks that are now only available to those in a legal marriage from one's marital status. Such marriage-linked benefits not only discriminate against gays and lesbians, but also heterosexuals in nontraditional relationships, and singles of all categories. I found quite a bit in this book that was relevant and useful to me as a nonmonogamous heterosexual. Highly recommended.

[Theo · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Trouble with Normal is a book that really challenges the reader to reflect on their own real experiences and marginalization in society to create a more personal understanding of autonomy, identity, liberty, and of course, normalcy. He argues that our current track of LGBT activism will only further stigmatize the queer community, as it is wholly based on a contrived morality within a conservative ideological framework. In a system set up to disadvantage those that are considered "not normal", should we really be reaching to blend into it?

[Michael McCarthy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Michael Warner's impassioned polemic dispels comforting platitudes from the debate surrounding the gay rights movement. Gay marriage and gay people in the military will not mark the end of the the LGBT+ community's decades-long fight for equality, he argues from the historical vantage the year 1999 provided. Rather, it will signal the capitulation of the gay community to the same society that ostracized, persecuted, and estranged them. If the legacy of the early gay civil rights campaigns and Gay Liberation are not to be in vain, mainstream LGBT+ organizations must double down and refocus their activism on those most on the margin: sex workers, porn stars, cruisers, transgender folk, radical queers, those who don't fit within the gender binary, and other Others. In lucid, captivating prose, Warner calls for a revamping of the gay rights campaign that will leave nobody behind. In the wake of the overturn of Roe v. Wade, in which the legal foundation of Obergefell v. Hodges was challenged, Warner's book becomes urgent reading. It envisions a radically different trajectory for queer equality which will ultimately benefit everyone, gay and straight alike. A bracing and foundational work of queer theory, this book will be a worthy addition to any reader looking to queer their bookcase.

[K · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book that took me an entire year just to get through it because whenever I try to read it in one go it was depressing and dry.

Despite only being roughly 230 pages, complete with only four chapters, The book does take a while to get through in order to fully grasp what’s being written. It has a notes section to help you with every piece of evidence, historical footnote, and quote provided.

Since this book was written in the 2000s it’s a little dated but it’s also important to hear about this historical footnote as America fights with equality. I was disappointed as the book would repeat the same thing multiple times and then simply ended on a foot note about HIV. It had a long dull chapter about marriage and the different viewpoints on it but only brushed over the politics of other issues. It could’ve been longer but it also could’ve been shortened significantly.

It had a lot of good input about cultural norms and how society shapes people and beliefs.

—

“Moralism cannot; [Provide autonomy] it can only produce complacent satisfaction in others shame.”

“In the antinomian tradition, love is more than a noble virtue among others, and more than a mass of disorderly and errant desire.”

“-any argument for gay marriage requires an intensified concern for what is thrown into its shadow.”

[Matt Sautman · Rating 4 out of 5]

The third chapter of this book, which is also the longest, is somewhat outdated given the paradigm shifts in American culture since Michael Werner first published The Trouble with Normal in 1999. As a result, what might had been an incredibly engrossing read several years ago has gone on to become somewhat dry and less relevant to ongoing conversations pertaining to queer theory. But the rest of this book is immensely readable, with the first chapter, which centers around the shame surrounding sex, and the fourth chapter, which centers around the act of zoning and creating “geographies of shame,” serving as my favorite parts. This wouldn’t be the first book I would recommend for anyone interested in queer temporality, but Werner’s focus on regulation, shame, and space does add still relevant complexities to discussions about how hegemonic normalization shape the societies we participate within.

[Brady Fish · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book four years ago when I was on the last stretch of my life at the university. To this day, I make reference to this book when talking about sexual identity with an international law lens. Warner's discussion of Christopher Street and the accelerated history of the neighborhood under local police scrutiny is baffling. When investigating how enforcement agencies define "normal" as a means to interrogate, intimidate and prosecute, reality can scare the shit out of a basic citizen who mistakenly believes the police state is mostly good. Warner's discussion of homosexuals combating the concept of "normal" and use of updating marriage laws to exercise that normalcy is uncontested.

If you are looking to learn more about Queer Identity, Michael Warner's perspective is better than any past author I have read in regards to accuracy, honesty and reflection.

[Marsha Altman · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting polemic against the mainstreaming of gay culture. Warner is an activist, and is against groups that have made even the slightest concessions to the middle or the right. He has some interesting theories about the nature of sexual shame, but his particularly wild chapter is the one where he comes out AGAINST gay marriage because he believes marriage is an outdated institution and gay people should have nothing to do with it. He also has some interesting things to say about Giuliani's campaign to get rid of the sex shops in New York City. I can't say all of his ideas are good or make sense, but I can say it's interesting to line up his opinions with other opinions from the time period.

[Juniper · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Get over yourself. Put a wig on before you judge. You stand to learn most from the people you think are beneath you.” I took my time finishing this: its dense intellectual tone can deter. But “The Trouble With Normal,” even twenty years after release, is a book of enduring questions and high stakes. In examining the ties between sex, respectability, queer ethics, the institution of marriage, and private/public space, Warner reveals the spiderweb cracks in society we would do well to address – and in most cases, break wide open. This book speaks to ways of living that slice through “every form of hierarchy you could bring into the room.” It feels adventurous.

[Robert Stutchbury · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gay book!
This book is the reason why I have started complaining about how gay men stopped doing interesting things after we could get married. This book sayes not to do that.
I still think there is a sort of real queer resistance (not just chalk slogans) out there, much shrunk and quite disorganized, but that scene is a little wild even for me. Maybe someday.
Would recommend to anyone who thinks "Queer" just means any LGBT person.

[Jerry · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading this 25 years after it was published is fascinating. So much that was predicted has come to pass and so much has been forgotten. I was mainly interested in the parts focused on same-sex marriage and gay love for context of this debate from when it felt "vital"--and I still think this discussion is unresolved and in need of a reboot

[Daniel C. · Rating 4 out of 5]

One-line review:
An exploration of the various problems with trying to 'normalize' queer sex&sexuality (particularly by trying to shoehorn them into the straightest institution of them all, marriage), the core ideas remain very relevant despite the details being outdated.