It’s Perfectly Queer

Take that poster down! authorities at the University of Texas at Austin told a professor. The poster promoted condom use, and featured a highly explicit picture of two naked men embracing. The professor took the poster down, but he continued to defend it. He's a proponent of a new concept called "queer theory," which takes its name from a radical homosexual group that calls itself Queer Nation-a group that uses shock tactics like staging public kiss-ins and pelting priests with condoms. Queer theory is radical, too. In the words of one proponent, "We want to break it all down- heterosexuality, the family, the social order." If that sounds like a call for anarchy, that's just what it is. Queer theory has even coined a new term for the things it wants to destroy: It talks about "heteronormativity," the idea that heterosexuality is normative. This is not a reference just to heterosexual sex. It refers to the whole worldview that goes along with it: the primacy of the family and the biblical sexual norms that undergird it. As one homosexual student explains, queer theory pits itself against "the whole version of truth" on which heterosexual society is based. The rise of queer theory is described in an article by Lloyd Billingsley in a publication called Heterodoxy. Billingsley confirms what many Christians have been saying all along: that gay rights groups are not just working for basic human rights for homosexuals. They are challenging the whole idea that heterosexual family and social life is the norm for society. As one homosexual professor puts it, queer theory offers is a critique of "normalcy"-the very idea that only certain behavior is normal. Another professor uses more militant language: "The normal, the natural, the conventional will be overturned." Learning how to overturn the normal and the natural is enough to earn you a degree at some universities. The City University of New York offers graduate degrees, research grants, awards, and even endowed chairs in queer theory. The San Francisco City College offers a scholarship to promising students of queer theory in their Gay and Lesbian Studies Department. Courses that teach queer theory are called, you guessed it, "queer studies." And even universities that don't offer courses still manage to give their students some exposure to queer studies through conferences and workshops. In fact, on some campuses, workshops like these are mandatory. One university requires all first-year students to attend what it calls "homophobia and biphobia workshops" (biphobia apparently means fear of bisexuals). Students sometimes say the workshops make them think of the re-education camps Communist countries used to run, where dissidents were supposed to learn politically correct attitudes. It's an apt analogy. Like Marxism, queer theory is an aggressive ideology that aims to tear down existing society. Its special hostility is reserved for the Judeo-Christian social order, based on the Genesis truth that society is founded on a man and a woman united in marriage. If anyone still believes homosexuality is just a benign alternative to the straight lifestyle, think again. With queer theory, homosexuals are putting on their gloves and coming out swinging. The cultural battle has come out into the open.

09/17/93