We’re all doing a kind of drag when we write—wearing a costume, playing a character. ‘The Writer,’ after all, is already a character, a role that has changed over time and continues evolving (tragically, nowadays, to the Substacker with Remarks on the State of Fiction and its Relation to America/Masculinity/etc). We’re certainly not just being ourselves in print, even in the most intimate diaristic self-addresses or least-read blogposts (I’ve been thinking, by the way, about how when Leo Strauss says ‘we’ he means ‘not me; you fools’ and when he says ‘I’ he means ‘me; not you fools’).
This is part of what interests me about people like Shelby Foote and Andrea Long Chu (see my essays on them in Tablet), who in their writing have styled themselves as types (Southern aristocrat, somewhat-Chinese woman) that, to put it nicely, are not exhaustive or even economical self-descriptions.
And, think, of course, of the closet cases! A strangeness of gay life is that homosexuality can be commented on by intellectuals who sign into or out of the category—Richard Sennet (as I mean to write about one of these days) was briefly an ‘out’ gay man in the early 80s (bad time to join the team, Dick!), counseling fellow gays on the right sort of politics (moderate, anti-left, anti-identitarian); Harold Brodkey was busy getting AIDS even as he wrote, as though he weren’t one, about gays in The New Yorker (lamenting that the city was so colorless now that its most flamboyant and talkative inhabitants were dead); and in the late 70s, Paul Robinson—at present an 84-year-old (if living?) respectable old leftist historian emeritus of sexuality at Stanford and author of a book chiding the gay right—was filling the pages of The New Republic with reports alternately disgusted and fascinated by homosexual degeneracy. Many, as the man said, such cases.
We—sorry, I and you—’ll look at three of his essays, 1978-9, in which a man, midway through life’s journey, hesitantly, ambivalently ponders sucking cock.
First an essay on why gays—then lobbying sometimes successfully for anti-discrimination legislation at local levels across the country—and their enemies (sometimes successfully blocking or rolling back such legislation) are both wrong, because they both make Robinson “see penises in mouths and anuses.”
‘I don’t hate gays or want to persecute them, I just want them to disappear, so I can finally stop thinking about buttfucking.’ A notion that recalls—for me—my essay on Quentin Crisp in which I make him out to be, with, I mean it, no irony, a Schmittian hero:
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In 1975, a few days after the airing of a made-for-television film based on his 1968 autobiography The Naked Civil Servant, Quentin Crisp was interviewed by Mavis Nicholson for an afternoon chat-show. One of Nicholson’s first questions concerned the many incidents of homophobic violence to which Crisp had been subject over the years, or rather, the motivations of his assailants: “what is it that makes people want to attack you just for being something you want to be?”
Crisp might have taken the opportunity to play the role of the innocent victim, but he instead began by genuflecting to his attackers’ righteous fury. “Part of it is genuine moral indignation, and for this one has the greatest respect,” he answered. “I see no reason why people shouldn’t morally object. But of course the English answer won’t really do. You can either shoot the homosexuals, the moment you know that they’re homosexual, or you can let them be. You can’t take a middle course.”
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A few months later Robinson reviewed Dancer from the Dance—the immortal gay novel—and loved it! He loved especially, uh, that it had no ‘political consciousness’ and so reveled in homosexual narcissism—we love to see the Other playing happy darky.
He doesn’t get, bless him, the formal brilliance of the novel—either its campy epistolary frame or its blurry narrator, and the way both make what’s going on and how true any of this is supposed to be questionable. And he really miffs the power of the final scene, when the characters go to Gay Pride and realize that their little circle of hedonists—which Holleran has so beautifully evoked and satirized and loved and judged—is such a small part of the gay world:
I think that’s a terribly political conscious—heavy-headed, propagandistic, moralizing!—way to end a novel! Even as the political lesson (how much more gay life there was, how much more there was to it, how much it depended without anyone’s recognizing it on collective action and, pace Robinson, visibility) moves almost immediately, through a high-queeny romantic description of the Florida nature into which the narrator—like Stevens and Bishop and the real Holleran—has taken leave of reality, into a rhapsody on the pleasures of private contemplation and a recommendation to keep dancing, it evokes, momentarily and lightly and thus forcefully, that this sort of enjoyment (whether the rhapsody in the garden or the ecstasy of dancing and fucking or the more moderate and stabler goodness of friendship and writing) has some relation, always, of indebted forgetfulness, to the masses in the street.
Finally it’s no surprise Robinson would have a take on Foucault that make even Mark Lilla’s or Camille Paglia’s look intelligent in comparison:
I wonder how many closet cases raving about gays—and thus shaping public opinion on our politics, literature, philosophy (our as in we as in us gays but also all of us, even you others)—are on similar trips—and how many gays who present themselves now as good left-liberals who know to shit on supposedly right-wing homos are only a few years, drinks, or whatever, removed from similarly self-loathing homophobia?