[Lit] Sontag Wrap-Up

University Diaries has a nice appreciation of Sontag, praising her for her "openness to travel, exoticism, languages, and all sorts of cultural movements" but finding her politics "pretty absurd." Red State (dot) Org praises her for her contributions to conservatism — her denunciation of communism in the 1980s — all the while deploring her political positions of the 60s, 70s and 90s. Writing in the LA Times, Patrick Moore takes much of the liberal media for task for not acknowledging Sontag's lesbianism and her relationships with some of the most important artists of her time — Maria Irene Fornes, Lucinda Childs, and Annie Leibovitz — but admits that Sontag herself was pretty reticent on the subject. Moore provides what I think is a very revealing quote from Sarah Schulman: "[Sontag] never applied her massive intellectual gifts toward understanding her own condition as a lesbian, because to do so publicly would have subjected her to marginalization and dismissal." Moore writes: "She may well have felt that her true sexuality would limit her impact in the male-dominated intellectual elite." Sontag was too much the P.T. Barnum to abide that.