Interview: Andrew Sullivan: Mr Gay Right but definitely not Mr Gay Rights

Andrew Sullivan is homosexual and HIV positive, but his attempt to draw meaning from the 'plague years' of Aids has enraged many gays. He spoke to Andrew Marshall

It was something I just had to get out of my system," says Andrew Sullivan, sipping at a Coke in one of Washington's more fashionable bars. He is talking both about the book that he has just published and the tragic events behind it: Aids, and the death of one of his closest friends. But he is also talking about himself. Andrew was, is, HIV positive. The new drugs mean that it no longer threatens his life, that it is, to all intents and purposes, out of his system for as long he takes his 30 pills a day. But in many respects, and not just in terms of cell-counts and medicine, it will always live with him.

Aids has had a profound and lasting impact on him, as on all gay men and all communities across the world that have been devastated by it and which still suffer. The heart of the book, Love Undetectable, is an attempt to draw meaning from it, from what he calls "the plague years". He wants to find something positive - something life-affirming, rather than just life-threatening - but the message is not one that is widely popular with other gay writers. The book has mostly been well-received, except, he notes wryly, in the gay press, where he has been pilloried. He summarises one review as saying that "If you hate gay men, read this book".

All the more ironic, then, that his central theme is the importance of friendship amongst gay men. He draws on the painful memories of his friend Patrick, a very close friend - but not a lover - who he met in a Washington book shop, and whose last minutes he watched in a hospital room three years ago. His experiences with Patrick, and other friends in those lethal and dark days, changed his view of himself, and of what it meant to be gay. "The duties demanded in a plague, it turned out, were the duties of friends: the kindness of near strangers, the support that asks the quietest of acknowledgements, the fear that can only be shared with someone stronger than a lover."

This is more than just a nice warm feeling, he says. It shows that gay men are, must be, about more than a sexual identity. At its innermost, it means that the gay community can and should escape from the sexual straitjacket imposed on it by society, and by many within the gay sub- culture itself. "The obsession with sexualising gay men - an obsession driven by gay radicals as much as by straight conservatives - is a function of the erotocentrism and decadent Christianity that distorts so much of modern, particularly American life," he writes. "What gay culture is before it is anything else, before it is a culture of desire or a culture of subversion or a culture of pain, is a culture of friendship."

It has not been a popular argument within the gay press, which accuses him of demeaning gay sexuality and attacking gay men, because he rejects many elements of the sub-culture as pathological reflexes in the face of a hostile society. He is also an outspoken advocate of gay marriage, which the right loathes and many on the gay left see as aping straight institutions. If any of this has hurt Sullivan, it doesn't show.

But then he thrives on controversy. He has made a career of it. He is gay, Catholic and Conservative, a seemingly paradoxical identity, and he can argue any of these positions at the drop of a baseball cap with anyone. Like many British writers who come to America, he quickly found and occupied an empty niche, using it to launch provocative ideas to a receptive market. There are few Britons, however, who have moved so quickly up the ladder of American journalism, or become so much a part of American political discourse. Sullivan was editor of The New Republic, one of the country's liveliest magazines of political debate, within a few years of arriving in the country, giving him a high rank in Washington's nomenklatura.

If you want a friend in Washington, the old saying goes, buy a dog. Or to invert another old cliche, you're nobody till somebody hates you - and Andrew Sullivan is definitely somebody. The niche he occupies is an easy target for many different constituencies: indeed, it is hard to see how one could not, at some point or another, find something to disagree with. Consequently, he draws fire from virtually every point of the political spectrum. The left believes he helped to trivialise The New Republic, and take further to the right a magazine that was once a dependable organ of the centre-left. American conservatives are increasingly more focused on "family values" and gay-bashing than on free market economics, so there is little love lost for him there either.

What he calls "the gay establishment" hates him partly because, it believes, he hates them; which he does. He thinks that the gay left has turned being homosexual into something both more and less than what is: more, because it has tried to divide gay life off from straight life, turn it into a separatist creed. But it also demeaned gay men, because by turning sex and sexuality into the be-all and end-all of being gay, it undervalued many other aspects of gays as people. It does not surprise him much that he is under fire. "Anything that raises any internal honesty about gay life is inherently suspect," he says, adding with a grin: "not in front of the heterosexuals."

He has always sought and found the limelight. Sullivan, now 35, was something of an icon at Oxford, where he was President of the Oxford Union, a star of the dramatic world and rarely out of the pages of Cherwell, the university newspaper. "I was nervous how much I loved it," he says with a giggle.

From there he moved to Harvard, where he wrote a doctoral thesis, and he has been in America ever since. He is completely at home, with an accent that has long since lost any cadences that might remind one of East Grinstead, where he grew up. "I'm in love with the country," he says. "I was from the very first time I came here." It was here that he first came to terms with being gay. "It's often easier to come to terms with difficult issues when you're out of context," he says. It is a more positive society, a place where being pushy - something that even Sullivan's friends would regard as a fair description, and which in Britain is regarded as a sin - is seen as a virtue.

He became editor of The New Republic in 1991, adding more features on social and cultural matters that alternately outraged and delighted subscribers, but also seeking the headlines. He modelled for the Gap, epitomising his interest in how tastes, consumption, ideas and politics interact. The magazine ran a cover story on a book called The Bell Curve, which much of America saw as a racist attack on black Americans but conservatives viewed as solid social science. Most magazines would not touch it, but Sullivan put it on the front cover. It did not endear him to many of his staff, nor indeed to much of America, but it was what he wanted: it stoked controversy, it got the magazine talked about and in his view, it was important to let the theory be aired.

Andrew found himself running into more and more battles with the magazine's owner just as he was starting to become very, very ill. He admits that he stopped caring much about the arguments, and that he simply published what he wanted. By 1996, everyone had seemingly had enough. He resigned, and simultaneously announced that he was HIV positive. But this was also the year when, finally, drugs started to be effective against HIV, and for him the nightmare started to fade. It was an overwhelming moment, one which he marked in a lyrical essay for the New York Times, "When Plagues End." After he had written it, he realised that there was more that he wanted to say, and the result was Love Undetectable, a series of three linked essays.

Sullivan admires the form of the essay, speaking warmly of the English tradition that includes many of our greatest writers, especially of George Orwell. There are points of political comparison. Orwell was called a Tory anarchist, because his libertarian socialism was always tempered by a respect and understanding for English habits, English culture and English mores. Sullivan is perhaps an anarchist Tory, his political orientation towards the right always shaded by a distaste for authority. It sets him sharply at odds with America's Republican Party in the 1990s, which has drifted further and further away from the free-market, libertarian orthodoxies of the 1980s towards the Moral Majority, the Christian fundamentalists who stigmatise homosexuality and abortion. "It has in the last 10 years really lost its grip," he says dismissively. He loathes Kenneth Starr and his investigation into Bill Clinton, even though he thinks the President should resign.

Of all Orwell's work what Sullivan admires most is the post-Spanish Civil War work. It was that experience which profoundly changed Orwell's view of the left, making him both more convinced of his own socialism but also more opposed to the Stalinists he saw turning upon their own allies. In some senses, though he does not say so, the Aids years were Sullivan's own Spanish Civil War, a turning point in his life, but also a reference point for his moral compass.

There is more than a hint of his uneasy feelings about what he himself did and said during those years, and of guilt, refracted through a Catholic upbringing. Asked by a friend how many people he slept with, he admits: "Too many, God knows. Too many for meaning and dignity to be given to every one; too many for love to be present at each; too many for sex to be very often more than a temporary but powerful release from debilitating fear and loneliness." There is an almost Augustinian rejection of the flesh when he says that "what I want to do is make the essence of homosexuality about love, not sex," even though he says also that "I love sex". His idea of friendship is also linked to religious faith in a way which he admits can be seen as "a form of erotic sublimation," though he denies that it is. It owes much to EM Forster's impassioned but poignant call of "Only Connect".

The book was an ordeal, he admits. It retraces events that were painful in every way, and forced him to confront himself, his religion and his own religious faith, which has emerged stronger. "The book is a way of freeing myself from a particularly dark period," he says; but freedom does not mean forgetting. "I'm not trying to shed it," he says. "I'm trying to integrate it into my life, to remember it. The book is about returning, remembering, and then moving on."

'Love Undetectable: reflections on friendship, sex and survival' is published by Chatto and Windus, price pounds 12.99.

IN HIS OWN WORDS

On Aids

'The duties demanded in a plague, it turned out, were the duties of friends: the kindness of near strangers, the support that asks the quietest of acknowledgements, the fear that can only be shared with someone stronger than a lover'

On gay culture

'What gay culture is before it is anything else, before it is a culture of desire or a culture of subversion or a culture of pain, is a culture of friendship'

On the reaction of the gay community

'Anything that raises any internal honesty about gay life is inherently suspect'

On America

'I'm in love with this country. It's often easier to come to terms with difficult issues when you're out of context'

On sex and how many partners he's had

'Too many, God knows. Too many for meaning and dignity to be given to every one; too many for love to be present at each; too many for sex to be very often more than a temporary but powerful release from debilitating fear and loneliness'

On his book

'The book is a way of freeing myself from a particularly dark period. I'm not trying to shed it, I'm trying to integrate it into my life, to remember it. The book is about returning, remembering and then moving on'