Gay Today | Gay News, current events, entertainment, stories and features

Andrew Sullivan is Mercilessly Critiqued in The Nation

Eric Alterman Responds to Sullivan's Initial Attack on Him

Says Sullivan Crushes Hints of Democratic Debate on War

By Jack Nichols

Andrew Sullivan: Attcked by The Nation's Eric Alterman

Washington, D.C.-In the current issue of The Nation www.thenation.com columnist and author Eric Alterman has critiqued openly-gay conservative pundit Andrew Sullivan in an essay titled "Sullivan's Travails". Alterman's essay has been described as "merciless," by GayToday staff.

Educated at Cornell, Yale and Stanford universities, Alterman presently writes columns not only for The Nation but for Worth Magazine, MSNBC.com and Intellectualcapital.com. He is a senior fellow of the World Policy Institute at New School University and the author of Sound & Fury: The Making of the Punditocracy (HarperCollins, 1992 and Cornell University Press, 2000), winner of the 1992 Orwell Award, Who Speaks for America?

About Sullivan's Roman Catholicism and his strongly pro-Republican stance , Alterman writes that the gay writer's "political views have led him to attach himself to a party, a movement and a church that believe him to be practicing an abomination� his church offers a warmer embrace for pedophile priests than for honest homosexuals."

A conservative lesbian writer hosted by Sullivan during "his stormy editorship of The New Republic" was Camille Paglia. Pundit Paglia is described in the Nation as one known for her "lunatic ravings."

Sullivan's antics have turned him into "a kind of all-purpose controversy magnet," a fact duly noted by Eric Alterman who says: "Give the man credit for audacity, if nothing else."

HIV-positive Sullivan's on-line self-description as a willing practitioner of unprotected sex remains perhaps the most memorable of his widely-publicized doings in recent times.

Alterman's critical fury as it is directed at Andrew Sullivan had its source in Sullivan's own initial assault on him. Sullivan had tarred Alterman as one of four contemporary writers "more concerned with what they see as the evil of American power than the evil of terrorism, that their first response was to blame America."

Related Stories from the GayToday Archive:
Andrew Sullivan: An Unconscious Collaborator?

Love Undetectable

Andrew Sullivan's Sex Life

Camille Paglia: Bigotry's Trojan Horse

Related Sites:
The Nation

Andrew Sullivan

GayToday does not endorse related sites.

Not so, says Alterman, who replies to Sullivan's trashing of his patriotism by insisting that he has "supported the war and much of the patriotic reaction the (September 11) attacks inspired."

Alterman explains how Sullivan presently is launching "a career in the brave new world of 'blogging' or vanity websites." But a number of the topics about which he writes on his web site, Alterman seems to think, are banal, if not weird. Alterman writes:

"Readers are informed, for instance, that Andy's toilet recently overflowed; that he had a rollicking dinner chez Hitchens; that he might have seen Tina Brown across a hotel lobby, but he's not sure; and that, in separate, apparently unrelated incidents, he had a nightmare and ate a bad tuna-fish sandwich that upset his tummy, requiring many 'stomach evacuations.' "

"Beyond the confines of his bathroom, Sullivan's singular obsession appears to be the crushing of any hint of democratic debate about the war," writes Alterman.

'Sullivan's Travails' by Eric Alterman in The Nation: http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20020408&s=alterman