As I listened to the latest round of attacks on him earlier in the summer, I was reminded again why he provides such a convenient target. He dares to support institutions whose imprint many of us have spent years trying to erase. He sometimes defends the Republican Party, for instance, which remains alarmingly under the thumb of its fundamentalist wing. And he adheres to the Roman Catholic Church, which, despite an admirable core message of love and peace, teaches children that homosexuals are “disordered” and that expressions of homosexuality are “intrinsically evil.”

What rankles people more than Sullivan’s political or religious views, however (because, after all, statements of belief or policy are designed to be disputed), is his apparent hypocrisy. When it was reported recently that he has sought other HIV-positive partners online to engage in barebacking, gay chatmeisters pounced. How dare a Catholic Tory, they asked, conduct a private life that involves such irresponsibility? How dare this persistent critic of such sexual adventurers as Bill Clinton not recognize the glaring ironies of his own intimate behavior?

While I understand the reason commentators unleashed such attacks and felt the urge to discharge a few myself, I was troubled by how few gay opinion makers pointed out that the sex being sought was apparently consensual, that even as contentious a public figure as Sullivan deserved to be defended for this, and that as long as the sex was consensual and private the details were nobody’s damn business. (He is more vulnerable to the criticism that barebacking may result in the transmission of new, highly resistant strains of HIV.)

With Sullivan, however, there is the question not only of consent but of provocation. Though many lesbians and gay men claim to crave the edgy, the bold, the discomfiting, as Ruthann Robson points out in a challenging Voices column this month, when we are asked to stretch our thinking, many of us respond listlessly. How dare an artist, a writer, a philosopher upset our cozy trudge toward normalcy by posing difficult questions? And when the troublemaker in question admits to being provocative by intention, that seems only to heighten the offense.

More than his hypocrisy or his talent for provocation, however, what really drives indignation over Sullivan is his contradictions. The gay and lesbian movement, he asserts, prizes “victim” status over sexual freedom, yet he himself loves to play the sacrificial lamb fenced in by the community’s supposedly Stalinist rigidity. He disdains many of the movement’s spokespeople, yet without their constant attention his status as the gay man people love to hate would wane, though not disappear, since Sullivan has several mainstream channels for his views.

With each media flare-up, Sullivan might feel justified in repeating a line made famous by this month’s Michael Musto interviewee, Bea Arthur, on The Golden Girls. Each time Arthur’s character, Dorothy, succeeds in bluffing her way through yet another domestic squabble, she remarks, “God, I’m good.” Each time Sullivan’s critics take the bait, this talented, articulate journalist could say the same.