The Trouble With Normal
Michael Warner
 Chapter One, "The Ethics of Sexual Shame", criticizes the idea that there is some morally compelling aspect to "normality", arguing that the normal range is simply a statistical category to which there is no ethical obligation to correspond: "If normal just means within a common statistical range, there is no reason to be normal or not" (see also Hume's Guillotine). Warner uses the example of former US president Bill Clinton's impeachment after a sexual scandal to argue that public and political discourse uses shame disingenuously, to portray certain kinds of sexual behaviour as intolerable, when private morality generally recognises the compatibility of sex with dignity. The second chapter, titled "What's Wrong with Normal?", argues that as well as being a limited goal, less urgent than the elimination of violence and discrimination against queer people, same-sex marriage actively causes negative consequences both for queer and straight people, because in validating a single, prescribed type of relationship it devalues and makes more difficult other kinds of interpersonal relationship. Warner argues that the campaign for gay marriage threatens to turn the gay rights movement, previously a powerful force against the stigmatization of sex, into a tool for the normalization of queer life. In Chapter Three, "Beyond Gay Marriage", Warner proposes that by restricting its campaigning to demands for same-sex marriage, the gay rights movement has marginalized and ignored queer counterpublics that it would have served better by presenting a broad range of sexual lives as moral. In the fourth chapter, "Zoning Out Sex", Warner examines the history of zoning regulation changes in 1990s New York City. He argues that stricter regulation of the city's sex-related businesses represents a trend toward the repression of sex and the "erosion of queer publics." By removing problematic, visible, queer sex from public spaces, Warner argues, these policies relegated sexuality to a private sphere of presumed heterosexuality. The net effect was to heighten hypocrisy over the conduct of sexual relationships, supporting the impression that the best any sexuality campaigner can aspire to is admission to a limited sphere of normality that is politically sanctioned, but also deliberately placed outside the sphere of the politically debatable. In the final chapter, "The Politics of Shame and HIV Prevention", Warner challenges the assertion, made by gay authors like Larry Kramer, that sexual recklessness is to blame for continuing cases of HIV infection. Warner argues that, on the contrary, the political use of shame to stigmatize certain kinds of sexual activity actually puts more people at risk of contracting HIV and developing AIDS, by marginalizing those in at-risk communities and restricting access to condoms and safer sex advice. He also criticizes abstinence-only sex education as "an appalling insult to gay men and lesbians among others" and an inadequate response to the problems of public sexual health, asserting that "shame and stigma are often among the most intractable dimensions of risk."