The Elusive Embrace

FROM THE ARCHIVES (Stepping Out book reviews)

Book Review: Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Elusive Embrace: Desire and the Riddle of Identity

Jeremy Patrick jhaeman@hotmail.com

Stepping Out v.1, n. 5 August, 2000

As GLBT individuals increasingly become assimilated into mainstream society, a divisive issue in current queer literature is the meaning of being gay. One position is that held by Andrew Sullivan and others, which argues that there is no real difference between gay identity and straight identity except for the obvious distinction in who the individual is attracted towards. Another view, held by Urvashi Vaid and compatriots, is that being gay is a radical redefinition of identity which includes particular political, cultural, and spiritual beliefs.

One of the most recent contributions to this debate is provided by Daniel Mendelsohn in The Elusive Embrace: Desire and the Riddle of Identity (Knopf, 1999, $12 paperback, $24 hardcover). Mendelsohn, a lecturer in classics ad Princeton, takes the middle-ground, arguing that gay identity is a paradox: "You can, some of us have learned, be ‘queer’ and ‘mainstream’ at the same time, someone equally committed to your family in the suburbs . . . and to the pleasures of random encounters with strange men in the city . . . someone who argues eloquently for equal rights but insists on living in an all-gay, all-male enclave; someone who desires love but also loves desire" (p. 34).

Although marketed as examination of queer identity in the manner of Sullivan and Vaid, The Elusive Embrace is really more of an autobiography that occasionally veers into discussing larger social issues. The author begins by telling what his life was like growing up. Next, he tells of several of his early forays into same-sex relationships, including vivid descriptions of cruising on the streets of Chelsea. Perhaps the most interesting part of the book is where he tells of becoming a pseudo-father to the child of his best friend, a straight woman.

The Elusive Embrace is well written and interesting but doesn’t succeed on the level of a book about queer identity. At most, it is another anecdotal example to add to the ever-burgeoning crop of queer life stories. The reason it doesn’t succeed on a higher level is that Mendelsohn overgeneralizes his own experiences and asserts that they apply everywhere.
For example, in one passage he tells of the frequently random and unemotional sexual encounters among gay men in Chelsea and Fire Island. In Mendelsohn’s view, this is how life is like for gay men everywhere, or at least how it would be if gay men had the freedom to bring it about: "It merely suggests what is obvious about gay men—and, therefore, of men in general, since gay culture is nothing if not a laboratory in which to see what masculinity does without the restraints imposed by women: that sex for men is finally, separable from affect" (p. 82). Thus, to Mendelsohn, gay men are inherently promiscuous and society’s tendency towards monogamy is foisted upon it by women. How this assertion fits with the fact that for centuries many of the world’s cultures had a monogamy norm even when its women were virtually powerless is never explained.

In the end, The Elusive Embrace succeeds as autobiography—it provides a clear, interesting, and often funny look at one gay man’s life and his immediate surroundings, urban gay culture in New York. However, it isn’t rigorous enough to succeed as a thoughtful look about queer identity. Mendelsohn spends too much time on himself and his fascination with Greek and Roman myth to formulate a workable view on what it means to be gay, except for the aforementioned belief that, as men in general, gay men are inherently promiscuous. This leaves too many questions unanswered: why are men this way, how was it limited historically, and what does this say about the gay men who are in monogamous relationships?