I was part of the ostensible target audience of XY magazine, a ‘gay youth’ publication that was fairly successful in the early 2000s then revived at the beginning of the Trump era. I was a teen myself, although not out, photogenic, or fun. The qualities that chickenhawks, and our soft-chickenhawkish culture generally, prize in teens—their fresh innocence or on-the-edge-of-culture cool—were not among my attributes.
Chickenhawks were, I suspect, the main consumers of the magazines (and the reason they’re relatively expensive collectors’ items today) and, as we’ll see, were definitely most of the editors and writers.Now far be it from me to say pedos from Plato to Larry Clark (of course I mean not actual pedo-pedos, but guys who are into say, middle and high schoolers—a distinction of course that really only matters to pedos!) can’t make interesting art and literature. XY in its day certainly had some horny fun photo shoots, nearly all of which played around with high-school fantasy:
Don’t bully me, I’ll cum!
For those complaining that this hasn’t been very diverse:
(I admit I googled to see what had become of Robert Vo—no clue!)
Besides the adolescent or playing-adolescent softcore there was also some light reportage that makes for a funny time capsule:
Much of the written content however, is either profiles of ‘real-life’ teens with accompanying shirtless pedo-bait pics, or the three-column-per-page tiny-type Dr. Bronner’s prose ‘political’ ramblings of the editors. Much of them are concerned with uh not beating the pedo allegations:
Or making sort of amusingly bonkers psycho-sexual claims, like how lobbying to end Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell is like sub-bottoming for the state (hot!):
The magazine disappeared for a decade or so, with some of its staff briefly reviving it as the basically identical B. It returned in 2016 with more of the same but crazier. Here’s the first issue of the new series:
The combo of boys making out, asking is America over, and honoring the victims of the Orlando shooting is wonderfully, heartbreakingly funny—the kind of humor from the juxtapositions in 80s gay magazines where bathhouse and anal bleaching ads still appear next to features on AIDS and celebrity piffle. In a sense, that weirdness is what’s great about a magazine—it captures just the strange dumb obscene shifts in topic that make up a day, a life, a culture. Like we surely would not want to be mildly horny while also thinking about the metaphorical death of America or literal death of those guys at Pulse, but nous ne goutons jamais rien de pur.
The issue runs a fuming editorial about the cruelty being the point, a lament for how cruising and sex have been ruined by Grindr (lol—maybe you just got unfuckable, Mary!), and spotlights the moderator of r/basicincome doing his shtick—all stories that anyone in the Discourse would have heard a thousand times:
More interestingly, it asks whether some internet hooker will be the new Glenn Greenwald, as he shifts from porn to “political-cultural commentary”:
Now, one, it’s funny to think that at the time people still said “next Glenn Greenwald” as a compliment, and, two, no this guy isn’t (he’s now an Insta-thot). A future post I’ve dreamed of is highlighting some of the people that these magazines thought might go somewhere (Honor Levy is the voice of her generation!).
Well at least there are still barely-legal (hopefully) boys being boys—and still bleach-blond!
But as the subsequent issues appear, the quality of the photo shoots gets lower (albeit no less high-school or horny), and the political commentary gets more and more deranged, arguably culminating in this several page rant-fantasy about how we are being bottom-shamed and bullied by liberal elites as well as rich WASP conservative jocks (again, hot!).
I’ll just post some excerpts, which, in their own way, are a more insightful—or anyway, revelatory—commentary than a lot of what you could read on Substack. Normally I’d say, let’s get the horny existential drama out of politics—let’s make politics boring again—but I can’t help it, the locker-room horseplay-gone-too-far plus Coldplay plus Acemoglu makes this an irresistible thesis. And of course he gets some “let’s do away with the age of consent” stuff in there too!
Whew! And that’s only a small portion…
Well, pedo shit aside, he does have a point! There is in fact a generalized ‘liberal elite’ disgust with abject populations understood to have ‘failed’—flyover whites—who deserve no sympathy, who vote ‘against their own interests’, etc—a disgust that could be compared and connected to homophobia. There’s a way in which, uh, as I said in 2021, such supposedly reactionary economic-cultural failures are ‘the new queers’ (it’s not a compliment!), via a neoliberal logic that unites conservative and progressive politicians in which some groups through their debased living have proven unworthy of rights/voice/life.
To quote myself:
COVID is not AIDS, no more than Biden or Trump are Reagan (although the three have in common, as presidents, a certain smilingly senescent distance from the suffering of ordinary citizens). But through both epidemics, we can trace a common set of rhetorical poses by which, as Sontag put it, individuals took the crisis as “an invitation to self-righteousness.” We all participate in the stupidest, rawest, and most obvious form of such moralism, which suffuses our private lives. Our holidays, for instance, are planned through charged conversations about who among the possible guests is or is not vaccinated. In every case some potential guest’s body not only might pose—to COVID-anxious or vaccine-wary relatives—the danger of contamination, but also an opportunity to whisper and judge how such-and-such a person has made an ethical mess of themselves, opening their body to foreign substances and their mind to the lies of Big Pharma or conservative media. Susceptibility to infection or influence appears as a moral failing, an inability to have sustained oneself as the right kind of subject.
In the imagination, both those skeptical of vaccines and of those who hold the former in obloquy, this proper sort of subject seems, through a careful management of their social ties and media consumption, to keep body and mind impervious to undesirable external forces. Falling ill, or into false belief, is a breach in the circuit of self-regulation, of critical thinking, or of deference to the correct authorities.
For all their disagreement, interlocutors seem certain that something essential about a person’s goodness or badness is revealed in the disclosure of such information as their vaccination status, most recent test, and eagerness to receive a booster shot. The moral person, who resists sickness and credulity, is also a member of one’s own side, ranged with oneself against those others whose poor choices and foolish ideas endanger our collective well-being. Questions of health, belief, morality, and identity appear inextricably bound together, as if it were impossible to imagine a person physically healthy but not morally good, or a person who believes “the right” things without being genuinely virtuous, or a person who is virtuous but not on “our side.” The good things in life go harmoniously together, we agree—or at least they would, were it not for the interference of grotesquely imbecilic enemies. This inescapable everyday moralism confuses our thinking, but helps us maintain our standing in our communities as solid, respectable individuals with a core of ethical agency through which we resist bodily weakness, misinformation, and the nefarious out-group.
Such quotidian, confidently doltish self-righteousness, sure that bad things happen to bad people (and that we are not among them) is the glue that helps hold society together; it is perhaps impervious to any critique except that which, from the heavens, God issued to Job.
Hell, I could have written for XY! (I can’t believe, in retrospect, I said “obloquy”). Well, enough thinking for today.