Bruce Bawer

The Longtime Companion Review at The American Spectator

For several years Bawer also wrote about film. Archon collected his reviews in 1992 as The Screenplay's the Thing: Movie Criticism, 1986-1990. He reviewed movies for The American Spectator, and that job ended over a single paragraph.

The story is told in his 1993 book A Place at the Table, and David Link summarized it in his review for Reason in April 1994. The editors had usually printed Bawer's reviews with only routine edits. When he reviewed Longtime Companion, they objected to a paragraph about the common humanity that Craig Lucas's characters shared with the audience. Bawer refused to cut it, the editors insisted, and he quit. Link noted that some critics asked why he had written for the magazine at all, and quoted Lee Dembart in the Los Angeles Times: "What did he think was going to happen?"

A Place at the Table, 1993

A Place at the Table: The Gay Individual in American Society came out from Poseidon in 1993. Bawer, a political conservative and a practicing Episcopalian by the Gale entry's account, argued for full social acceptance of gay people and called the book "a meditation, not a manifesto." He also took aim at what he saw as the gay subculture of his own city, opening one section with a float at New York's Gay Pride parade that carried the sign "Greetings from Planet Gay!"

Recognition of same-sex couples was his answer to both the churches and that subculture, and it drew the most argument. Reviewing the book for The New York Times, Margaret O'Brien Steinfels replied that "society has a legitimate interest in privileging those heterosexual unions that are oriented toward the generation and rearing of children." Link, in Reason, described Bawer as religious and "monogamous with his partner, Chris." In 1996 Bawer edited Beyond Queer: Challenging Gay Left Orthodoxy for the Free Press, an anthology of writers who shared his position.

Stealing Jesus and the Move to Amsterdam

Stealing Jesus: How Fundamentalism Betrays Christianity was published by Crown in 1997. Bawer split Christians into "legalistic" and "nonlegalistic" camps and put conservative evangelicals and fundamentalists in the first group. PBS summed up his case as a charge that American fundamentalism had replaced Jesus' message of love with "a prejudiced legalism." He later told Bill Moyers: "Jesus' message is the strongest thing that gay people have going for us, I think, in terms of asserting our right to be ourselves."

Soon after the book appeared he left the United States. The year depends on the source. His contributor biography at the Gatestone Institute says he has lived in Europe since 1998, while the PBS page for Bill Moyers Journal says that in 1999 he and his partner moved to Amsterdam and later to Oslo. J. Peder Zane, writing for the National Book Critics Circle in February 2007, said Bawer, who is gay, went to Europe "because of its enlightened social policies, especially its embrace of same-sex marriage," and counted eight years in the Netherlands and Norway.

While Europe Slept and the 2006 Criticism Shortlist

What he saw in those years became While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West from Within, published by Doubleday in 2006. In it he wrote that he had been glad to leave America mainly because of Protestant fundamentalism, and that Europe was "falling prey to an even more alarming fundamentalism." The Gatestone biography calls it a New York Times bestseller.

The National Book Critics Circle named it a finalist for its 2006 prize in criticism, announced early in 2007, and the shortlisting caused a row inside the organization. Eliot Weinberger, a former finalist, announced the criticism nominees and said Bawer had engaged in "racism as criticism," as The New York Times reported in a review excerpted by PBS. Zane wrote on the NBCC's own blog that no book had "stirred more controversy at the NBCC this year." Bawer answered on his blog that many Western intellectuals "who pride themselves on being liberals" had aligned themselves with an "outrageously illiberal movement."

The book had a quieter life in Norway. In a May 2009 column for Dagbladet, Marte Michelet wrote that it had not been translated into Norwegian and was little discussed there, and criticized Aftenposten culture editor Knut Olav Åmås for recommending Bawer's work. Her column is an opinion piece and treats Bawer harshly.

Oslo, Surrender and The Alhambra

Bawer settled in Oslo, where Lapham's Quarterly lists him as living. On 11 June 2008, as the Norwegian parliament debated opening marriage to same-sex couples, he sent a dispatch that Dale Carpenter posted on The Volokh Conspiracy. "Today Tor André and I have been sitting at home watching online the final debates," he wrote, adding that Norway's existing registered partnership already gave couples "all the rights of marriage except for the word itself, adoption rights, and the right to a marriage in the state church."

He kept writing about Islam and European politics. Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom appeared in 2009 and The Victims' Revolution in 2012. His Gatestone Institute articles, listed from 2011 to December 2019, cover Norway, Sweden, Britain and the European Union. His author page at Post Hill Press credits him with more than twenty books, and the Gatestone biography introduces him as the author of a new novel, The Alhambra, from Swamp Fox Editions.

Sources

• Bawer, (Theodore) Bruce 1956- | Encyclopedia.com
• Notice de personne "Bawer, Bruce (1956-....)" | Accueil | Catalogue général | BnF- Bibliothèque nationale de France
• Authors Bruce Bawer Archive | Post Hill Press
• Unmasked
• Bill Moyers Journal . BRUCE BAWER | PBS
• Bruce Bawer on How and Why Europe Slept - National Book Critics Circle
• Bruce Bawer :: Gatestone Institute
• SSM in Norway: | The Volokh Conspiracy
• Bawer | Lapham's Quarterly
• Åmås anbefaler