Katrina Fox catches up with radical independent thinker, Camille Paglia.

When she burst onto the scene with the publication of her first book, Sexual Personae, in 1990 at the age of 43, Gloria Steinem labelled her anti-feminist and compared her with Hitler. Sixteen years on, her predictions about the decline of old-school feminism and the rise of sex-positive queer culture are plain to see. "I belonged to a wing of feminism that was ostracised and silenced, and we suffered for decades during the hegemony of the puritanical anti-sex wing typified by Andrea Dworkin, Catharine MacKinnon and so forth," Camille Paglia says during a telephone interview from her office at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia where she is Professor of Humanities and Media Studies. "So when I suddenly seemed to appear like a Jack-in-the box in the early '90s, with a book it had taken me 20 years to write, people were determined to say I was anti-feminist. I said 'no I'm not, I'm anti you, I'm anti the feminist establishment'."

It's obviously a sore point and Paglia becomes more animated as she continues on the subject of feminism, which she argues is currently at a low ebb in the US. "Gloria Steinem was out there, never having read a word of what I'd written, comparing me to Hitler, comparing Sexual Personae to Mein Kampf," she says, indignantly. "This is a level of ineptitude and evil - and I'm not kidding, evil - from these women who lie, lie, lie. In America, organised women's groups finally undermined themselves and lost credibility. Feminists are demoralised right now; they've suffered a total collapse of prestige - there are no leading figures in feminism."

What about Ariel Levy whose book Female Chauvinist Pigs discusses the negative effects on women of the rise of raunch culture? "That book is a mess, an outrage" Paglia snaps. "The woman does not do research. She goes out and talks to a few young women. It's all anecdotal, fuelled by her particular neurosis - she set feminism back in terms of journalism. On the other hand, I've been saying in public for five years, as someone who's endorsed prostitutes and strippers and that whole extreme of sex-positive experience, that I'm concerned about the effect on young people growing up in a climate where it's gone to the opposite direction. We have got to a point of meaningless exhibitionism without real eroticism and I'm for eroticism."

Love her or hate her, but you certainly can't ignore her. With the publication of Sexual Personae and subsequent works such as Vamps and Tramps in 1994, Paglia was vilified not only by the feminist movement, but also by many in the gay and lesbian community who took offence to what they called her 'politically incorrect' viewpoints (gay men are decadent, lesbians are miserable) and labelled her among other things 'neo-conservative'. But it's all water off a duck's back for the fast-talking 59-year-old Italian-American who's been in a relationship with her partner Alison Maddex for 13 years and is now co-parent to Maddex's three-year-old son, Lucien, and she remains as outspoken as ever about GLBTI activism, in particular the push for same-sex marriage. "This has caused the biggest backlash in this country - it really angers me how we've gone backward," she says. "There's tremendous anti-gay animosity that's built up because of this push for gay marriage. I'm a lapsed Catholic but I respect religion [and] I think there's something really wrong trying to argue that religion needs to accommodate itself to people's expectations and desire. Gays should not be asking for marriage but for some new sort of contract that we could induce dissenting heterosexuals into also."

And although she approves of the 'rainbow baby' or 'gaybe' trend and is enjoying being a parent, she takes issue with the notion of a child having two mothers or two fathers. "[Being a parent] has come at the right time in my life," she says. "There's no way a woman with a child could have written Sexual Personae, because it required fanatical devotion. I objected early on to what I felt was a sickeningly saccharin propaganda book Heather Has Two Mommies. It wasn't that I was speaking against lesbians becoming co-parents, but it was a politicised distortion that was not in the best interest of the children. I do not believe there should be two mommies in any family, I believe there should be one mommy and one co-parent."

In addition to her love of art, Paglia is renowned for her embrace of popular culture, so with three seasons of a show featuring the lives of lesbians having screened in the US, what does she think of The L Word? "The first year, I despised it - I thought it was the stupidest thing," she recalls. "I hated the way it showed lesbians as unprofessional. If the women had professional responsibility, they were always undermining it by doing something idiotic and I felt it gave lesbians the reputation of being self-consumed in an eternal lesbian drama. But I got back into it in the third year and overall I'm delighted. I think The L Word is changing people's ideas of what lesbians look like. There's been nothing so powerful in a long while.

"There was period in lipstick lesbian chic in the early '90s where they had kd lang on the cover of New York magazine in a mannish stylish shoot. New York magazine had asked me to write that cover story and I said 'What does lesbian chic mean? If it means chic lesbians, I don't know any' - this was before I met my partner. So kd lang was being marketed as somehow this cutting edge but she couldn't sustain that, it's not her. They had her pose with Cindy Crawford on the cover of Vanity Fair, and I thought this is embarrassing, kd is a bashful, rather awkward person who was basically a folk singer once. They were dressing her butcher than she was - she's just like this big, soft-hearted creature, she's like a big puddle of honey and molasses."

For years Paglia, a self-confessed "idolator of Elizabeth Taylor, pagan Goddess" since the age of 13, has called for a model of bisexuality whereby people can feel free to explore sexual experiences and identities without being forced to take on a label such as 'gay', especially at a young age . "My experience has been bisexual but my love life has been entirely lesbian - that is, I've never fallen in love with a man, but I am equally attracted to men and women, always have been," she says. "We need to promote a model where it's free to move back and forth between borderlines."

To this end, she's "very concerned" about the trend for young lesbians to self-administer testosterone and undergo surgery such as a double mastectomy as they experiment with 'trans' identities. "[This] may have serious physical and psychological consequences in later life," she warns. "I identify strongly with the transgendered. Throughout my childhood and adolescence, I felt as if I were the wrong sex. If the current trend had been operative when I was in high school or college, I would certainly have been experimenting with male hormones. But I think that would have been a terrible mistake. Instead of modifying my body to conform to my male spirit, I put all my bottled-up energy into ambition and creativity. I worry that too many young lesbians believe that infusions of male hormones will remedy their sense of isolation and alienation. But perhaps those are psychological issues that demand psychological responses - new tracks of spiritual self-development and achievement. Many transgendered individuals do 'pass' in general society, but many others, after their surgical modifications, may be confining themselves forever to the margins, to the supportive burrow of a ghettoed world from which they fear to stray."

It's this kind of ghettoisation that Paglia is on a mission to stop. "I have questioned the movement about young people coming out in high school," she says. "If you can produce a situation where non-conforming individuals of all kinds are protected from harassment, that's for the good, but when you have people being encouraged by adult gay activists to declare themselves as being gay early on in a period which should be more fluidly experimental, I think it's wrong. There is no gay gene - that is the biggest crock out there at the moment. I'm making a call to other gay writers, to say the period of identity politics is over. I'm saying to everyone, use your talents - if you're gay, black, Asian, whatever - use them to address universal human questions. Stop trying to push young gays back into the ghetto: let them out, let them think of addressing and speaking to a general audience - that's the true mission of the gay intellectuals of the 21st century - yes they're gay, but they're intellectuals first."

Camille Paglia's latest book Break, Blow, Burn, in which she analyses 43 of 'the world's best poems' from Shakespeare to Joni Mitchell is published by Vintage (paperback).

DIVA is the UK's national lesbian magazine. For more information visit the magazine's website at www.divamag.co.uk
Lesbians on the Loose (LOTL) is Australia's national lesbian magazine. For more information visit the magazine's website at www.lotl.com