There was a little article by self-proclaimed gay conservative would-be pundit James Kirchick in the Globe's "Coupling" column this morning, bemoaning being dumped for his much-trumpeted political allegiances.

I'll say this first. The Globe Magazine's Coupling feature is always a treat. You finish every article thinking, what planet are you on? (Planet Cambridge, more often than not), and gaping at how appallingly pretentious and boring the people who write them are.

It's a guilty pleasure for me, I'll admit. A there-but-for-the-grace-of-god type thing.

Kirchick's article provided another guilty pleasure. The author as martyr. Kirchick is Generation Next's version of Andrew Sullivan, though not as smart, not near as cute* as Sullivan once was (long, long, long ago when he first took the helm at TNR), and certainly not as big a slut. It would be nearly impossible, if P-Town legend is even to be half- to two-thirds-believed, to match Sullivan in that category.

Kirchick is a sort of Britney to Sullivan's Madonna.

Which is to say, it's been done before, girlfriend, and with a British accent. So steal all the Louis Vuitton and Vera Wang you can get your hands on now, because it ain't gonna last.

Still, I always enjoy reading about the right's rampant persecution complex. Poor, downtrodden conservatives. And if you're gay to boot, your status in gay culture as the ultimate pariah is icing on the cake—and Kirchick has been cashing in on it big time.

So there's something a tad disingenuous in his lover's lament. He wants everyone to know that he is gay and conservative. That is, after all, Brand Kirchick. That's what's special about him. Not that he's gay, because that's not special anymore, and not that he's conservative, since roughly half the country is, but that he's gay and conservative.  And if you're gay and conservative, the funny thing is you can't hate on conservatives, but you can hate on gays.

But he also wants to play the victim for it. At Yale, he says he was openly reviled by evil gay campus liberals, and found it hard to get a date with one of them. Well, you want to be special? There's a price.

(But honestly, I, too, made a brief foray into blowhard conservatism back in my campus days and still managed to get laid. Could it be a combination of factors that are undermining Kirchick's attempts at intimacy, and not just his conservatism? As one observer of Log Cabin Republicans has been quoted as saying: "They can’t understand why they can’t get a boyfriend. Well, it has nothing to do with their politics." We'll examine that possibility in a moment.)

Kirchick was so scarred by being referred to as "That [expletive] conservative" all over campus that he chose to label himself a libertarian on his facebook profile. "I hate to use labels," he explains (having used about two dozen of them in his article up to that point), but you have to base your entire career and identity on something.

As prosaic as the idea of a break-up on partisan grounds would be, it is probably only one part of the very boring story.

In the first place, viewing everything through the lens of American politics is boring, regardless of which party you pledge allegiance to, and might account for the strained rapport in a fledgling relationship. After all, when the post-coital chat centers around Bush's budget, or the wisdom of a time-line for withdrawal from Iraq, or how Hillarycare will ruin America, or whether poor people should have children, I wouldn't want to cuddle with you, either.

Compartmentalize, Kirchick.

I'm with the poets, not the politicians, on this one—as Octavio Paz once said (and I have quoted him before): "politics is the great enemy of love."

Having said this, it's not surprising to me that gays have adopted a politically liberal worldview. Abandoned or abominated by the religions they grew up with, banished to the margins of their families and communities, gays were radicalized in the Reagan years—an era Kirchick, who only just recently graduated from Yale, if I'm not mistaken, could hardly remember—by the AIDS epidemic. Conservatives were not particularly concerned with the impact on gays, and the culture of gay-baiting and bashing in National elections has been perfected in recent years by Republicans.

Liberalism has become a secular religion for many gays who could not find a religion religion that would welcome them. It may be Kirchick's youthful naivete, his ambition to make a name for himself by opposing the opposers, that allows him to ignore how conservative politicians have capitalized on homophobia (and I don't use this word in a wishy-washy way here—we're talking straight-up fear of a "Gay Agenda") to win elections.

There are lots of reasons to scorn both parties' orthodox and orthodoxies. There just happen to be many more reasons for gays in particular to scorn the GOP's.

As for Kirchick's startling revelation that liberals aren't always as tolerant as conservatives say they're supposed to be, it's another convenient way of saying: as tolerant as they may be, they're still not willing to sleep with you.

But it really just boils down to knowing your love signs and making the right choices.

Truth is, if you're talking politics in bed, it's because you're both bottoms. And how long do you think that's gonna last?

Kirchick needs to come clean. I mean, it's a well-known fact that hardcore conservatives (whether gay or straight) always claim to be tops, and always end up after an appletini being insatiably needy, gaspy, squeaky bottoms.

There's nothing wrong with being the bottom, mind you, but if you want to have a satisfying sex-life you have to be up front about it, otherwise you're never going to find your Ronny-daddy.

Oh, and by the way, I looked up "I can’t date someone with a different belief system," in my English-to-Gay Dictionary, and here's what it says: "it's just not big enough, I'm going back to Jorge."

Just so you know next time.
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*Kirchick in his tagline photo from The Washington Blade c.2005...

...versus Sullivan back in the day: