Susie on the pinklisting of Roy Cohn

From: skc@sas.upenn.edu (Susan K Cook)
Subject: Pinklisting of Roy Cohn
To: skc@sas.upenn.edu
Date: Sat, 27 Jan 2001 15:34:11 -0500 (EST)
Cc: whseminar@dept.english.upenn.edu


On the "pinklisting" of Roy Cohn per Michael Cadden's essay, "Strange Angel"
Susie Cook


	Naming names, listing the names of well-known figures in hall-of-fame 
fashion, identifying these certain people as members of a single 
community: this is the "pinklisting" Michael Cadden speaks of in his essay, 
"Strange Angel: The Pinklisting of Roy Cohn." Cadden's notion of pinklisting 
is most-succinctly defined in the subtitle 
of Martin Greif's "The Gay Book of Days": *An Evocative Illustrated Who's 
Who of Who Is, Was, May Have Been, Probably Was, and Almost Certainly 
Seems to Have Been Gay during the Past 5,000 Years*. For the gay 
community, pinklisting is celebratory, strengthening, and hope-filled 
(might sheer numbers of people end centuries of heterosexist lies?): the 
pinklisting of the Lavender and Lesbian Lists is a source of pride. And 
yet pinklisting is too, Cadden explains, speculative and dangerous: how 
to pinklist, how to regard, embrace, and appropriate the demonic likes of 
Ray Cohn? 
	Cadden explains that when Roy Cohn is subjected to the 
pinklisting phenomenon, it is not by gay writers of community pride, but 
"in what passes for the liberal press in the United States"(79). 
Homophobic and heterosexist, the liberal press blurs pinklisting with 
blacklisting.  It is a homophobic discourse "parading itself as political 
analysis"(80). Cohn's liver-cancer denial and its ties with 
patient-doctor and governmental confidentiality, and his illness in 
general, was not the main interest of 60 Minutes or the New York Times: 
rather, says Cadden, the press was interested in what AIDs might allow 
liberal and gossip-mongering journalists to say about the sexuality Cohn 
had chosen to keep hidden. "The [New York Times'] obituary goes on to 
sketch what the Times obviously means to be the profile of an archetypal 
gay man but one whose sexuality their own house ethics enjoined them from 
disclosing"(81). Tony Kushner saw one Nation article as equating "Cohn's 
corrupt political life with his sleazy sex life"(83). The illness gave 
the liberal press license to speak of Cohn's conservative and gay life 
without fear of contamination by it. 
	Like the liberal press, Cadden considers Cohn "evil incarnate." Unlike 
the liberal press, the author's regard stems from Cohn's politics, not 
his sexual identity. Kushner too recognizes that Cohn's death pushed the 
limits of pinklisting, and pinklisting as blacklisting, in that it 
sparked both homophobic commentary and introspection by the gay 
community. The gay community wonders: how to appropriate Ray Cohn? Tony 
Kushner asks: "How broad, how embracing was our sense of community? Did 
it encompass an implacable foe like Roy? Was he one of us?" Cadden says 
Kushner answers yes, uncomfortably; and that Angels in America pinklists 
Roy Cohn in a didactic sort of way. Cohn resists movement and progress 
(Hold!), hails Darwin, and resists his 
homosexuality because he will lose clout. The four individuals at the end 
of the play resist the Cohnian worldview--Prior refuses to be a prophet of 
stagnation--and become a community working for change, a collection of 
individuals who have "not bought into the individualistic ethos of Cohn" 
but still have learned from it (87). 
	Roy Cohn's experience took place in the center of American politics and 
moved AIDs from the fate of the gay community to the fate of the country. 
This shift, says Cadden, deservedly pinklists the strange angel of Roy 
Cohn: pinklisting not as homophobically blacklisting, not even as 
celebrating; but rather regarding and remembering as crucial: embracing 
however difficult Kushner's implacable foe.