I'll have the first one, please

Gay conservative writer Andrew Sullivan takes on conservative approval of Ann Coulter's use of the word "faggot" to slur John Edwards. His response is powerful and insightful, until the last paragraph or two. Sullivan offers two possible responses to the bullying tactic shared by Coulter and insecure, juvenile boys.

The first is that there is nothing wrong with effeminacy or effeminate gay men - and certainly nothing weak about many of them. In the plague years, I saw countless nelly sissies face HIV and AIDS with as much courage and steel as any warrior on earth. You want to meet someone with balls? Find a drag queen. The courage of many gay men every day in facing down hatred and scorn and derision to live lives of dignity and integrity is not a sign of being a wuss or somehow weak. We have as much and maybe more courage than many - because we have had to acquire it to survive. And that is especially true of gay men whose effeminacy may not make them able to pass as straight - the very people Coulter seeks to demonize. The conflation of effeminacy with weakness, and of gayness with weakness, is what Coulter calculatedly asserted. This was not a joke. It was an attack.

As a straight man whose effeminacy may or may not make me able to pass as straight, I can sympathize. I have been a victim of this slur many times, myself. This response is the better of the two. Effeminacy--that is, lack of masculinity--is not a vice or a negative trait. Indeed, the fact that many women possess it while remaining otherwise exemplary human beings is a sure sign of that. It certainly ought not to be conflated with weakness. My only qualm about Sullivan's way of putting things here is that I am not sure that it is this conflation that generates the slur. Rather, for many, masculinity itself is a virtue (not exactly identical with strength) and femininity a vice (not exactly identical with weakness).

Sullivan's second response, though, is absolutely awful.

Secondly, gay men are not all effeminate. In the last couple of weeks, we have seen a leading NBA player and a Marine come out to tell their stories. I'd like to hear Coulter tell Amaechi and Alva that they are sissies and wusses. A man in uniform who just lost a leg for his country is a sissy? The first American serviceman to be wounded in Iraq is a wuss? What Coulter did, in her callow, empty way, was to accuse John Edwards of not being a real man. To do so, she asserted that gay men are not real men either. The emasculation of men in minority groups is an ancient trope of the vilest bigotry. Why was it wrong, after all, for white men to call African-American men "boys"? Because it robbed them of the dignity of their masculinity. And that's what Coulter did last Friday to gays. She said - and conservatives applauded - that I and so many others are not men. We are men, Ann.

As members of other minorities have been forced to say in the past: I am not a faggot. I am a man.

In this response, which (judging only on its placement and emphasis in this one blog post) Sullivan seems to prefer, the conflation of femininity and weakness, or at least the idea that femininity is an evil, is left intact. Instead, Sullivan insists on pointing out that the set of gay men is not a subset of the set of effeminate men. This saves Amaechi and Alva, and perhaps Sullivan, from the smear, but many others are left behind. What about those of us who are either queer but not men, or neither queer nor men?

(Indeed, if we allow the word "man" to carry all the connotations of masculinity that it seems to in his final, proud pronouncement, it is not a pronouncement I could proudly make, despite my biological sex.)