Yes, there was a time when I liked Camille Paglia. It was the early 1990s. P.c.-ideologues had usurped university faculties from coast-to-coast. Many of them had studied precious little outside their narrow areas of specialization. Instead of educating students in primary source materials, many took up class time parroting the cant of their various Marxist, feminist, and/or post-modernist camps. In their fiefdoms and classrooms, they brooked no dissent. Given that status quo, I feasted on the writings of Camille Paglia, a sanguinary lesbian dominatrix in academe, who torpedoed these pseudo-radicals’ every piety, inveighing against their lack of scholarship and suppression of independent voices. Although I found her literary and art criticism hard to follow, she introduced me to a canon of great authors that I would have never found without her. And her writing was as explosive, original and exhilarating as Side One of Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited.

Years later, though, when the drug of her writing wore off, her weaknesses became all too apparent to me. Frequently invoking her past as a Sixties leftist, she nevertheless often served as an apologist for the right wing. She once even called George W. Bush “an honest man with simple tastes” and Rush Limbaugh “a principled thinker.” If she disagreed with a liberal position, she’d jump at its proponents’ throats like a rottweiler. Yet, if she disagreed with a conservative position, she would put on kid gloves and give the briefest, most genteel explanation for her disagreement. Then, Paglia would do her trademark aboutface and affirm that she was militantly pro-sex, pro-choice, pro-porn, pro-drag queen, pro-homosexuality, pro-NMBLA, pro-legalization of drugs. This was her stock response to anyone who accused her of being a reactionary.

Although she is an atheist, she reveres religion as an aesthete and scholar. In her essay “Gay Stalinism,” she argued that anti-gay Christian fundamentalists weren’t bigots because their position was based on the Bible and therefore “based on principle.” In a lecture that I attended at University of Chicago in 1994, she said that gay activists should acknowledge that “the Bible is one of the most beautiful books” and that we should take the high road and tell our right-wing adversaries that we respect their position.

Well, sorry, Camille, but I don’t regard any book that sanctions slavery (Exodus 21:7; Leviticus 25:44) and says that people like me should be killed (Leviticus 20:13) as a beautiful book. (Besides which, people often take little two-or-three line passages out of the Bible and make them out to be as epic as The Odyssey or The Aeneid.) And I don’t respect the views of Fred Phelps, the late Jerry Falwell, and Pat Buchanan (although I do agree with him that our government is hubristical and has no business being in Iraq), to name but three bigots. Do they have the right to free speech? Absolutely, yes. Do I see any value in what they have to say about people like me? Absolutely not.

Paglia rightly lambasted gay activists who threw condoms at a priest during the Elevation of the Host at a 1991 Mass for the AIDS Dead in Philadelphia. I agree with her that this was a puerile stunt and that all places of worship should be respected. But why didn’t we hear a peep out of her when Fred Phelps and company stood outside Matthew Shepherd’s funeral, hurling abuse and carrying placards with slogans like “God Hates Fags” and “Matthew is in Hell”? I have long suspected that Camille Paglia had always been engaged in a titanic struggle to syncretize her own sexuality and sexual orientation with the injunctions of her Catholic upbringing. Out of this conflict came a slew of treatises that smack of the author’s own self-hatred. Is she a great thinker? Well, I’ll admit she’s way smarter than I am. But, as her buddy Sigmund Freud observed, “Intelligence will be used in the service of the neurosis.”

Now, we haven’t heard a lot from Camille Paglia in a while. A little over a decade ago, she met her partner, Alison Maddex, and now they’re raising a child together. I’m happy for them all. Maybe finding love and being an adoptive parent has siphoned off a lot of Paglia’s old venom and spleen. Maybe it’s made her a happier person.

But a friend recently sent me the following interview with her from 1996, where she addresses gay teens:

http://www.oasisjournals.com/Issues/9606/oasis-coverstory.html

What can I say, it struck a nerve. She castigates gay teens who have the temerity to try to be happy with themselves as young gay people. “People who are happy are slugs,” she says, “This is my message to gay teens, okay? People who are happy and adjusted are inert. They do not move the human race forward.” To underscore her point, she brings up tortured masters like Dante, Michelangelo, Keats, and Blake. But is it true that it’s only unhappy people who move history, or even the arts, forward? For every unhappy Michelangelo, chiseling away at another Pieta, how many melancholics were there, wasting away in bed or resenting the drudgery of their days? Would a little happiness have given them the boost they needed to make greater contributions with their time on earth?

After citing the indisputable truism that, “[t]he people who were misfits in the long run have this impulse to achieve,” she goes on to build a case against counseling or support services offered to gay teens - and she disapproves of therapy in general. It’s a normalizing experience in her view and she insinuates that, for gays, it’s one of the unfortunate side effects of the great Stonewall Revolution in Greenwich Village, 1969. She romanticizes that period of oppression as one in which gays showed more character and strength. We can make being gay legal, but why make it normal? If we continue to treat it as an abnormality, who knows what great art can come out of our culture!

But what about people who aren’t gifted with genius? Who aren’t Michelangelo or Oscar Wilde or Tennessee Williams? What about suicidal outcasts, gay or straight? Should we just tell them that, if they can’t deal with being freaks and being bullied, they’re nothing but weaklings? The effects of that hard-ass hard line do far more harm than good to a person’s character.

The same friend who sent me that link, sent me the link to another article, one which Paglia published in Salon in 2001:

http://archive.salon.com/people/col/pagl/2001/03/21/spring/index1.html

Among many other things, she contends that, rather than being allowed to massacre their classmates, kids who don’t want to be in school should be allowed to drop out at age 14 to pursue a trade. Maybe they’d be better off working with their hands outside the hormonal dungeons that are today’s high schools. If they’d like to return to school later, so much the better. She argues that younger students would benefit from having adult students in class with them.

I have yet to take an official position on her intriguing argument. I will agree that classroom learning is not for everybody, but let’s recall that many of the same hands-on trades and apprenticeships that were available to teenagers before World II are defunct today. She laudably mentions landscaping, which still stands as a trade, as an alternative, but how do we revalorize those trades that no longer exist? Anyhow, I just thought I’d share my $0.02 with more people than just the one who sent these links to me. Feel free to share yours.