Against Ho-Moser-Sexuality

I was recently followed on here by Benjamin Moser (hi!). I looked at his Substack and found an essay, originally published in The Nation, in which he meditates, or rather sulks, about the state of gay identity.

It’s a topic I’ve been thinking about a lot lately (and have some more writing—actual writing, not Substack writing—forthcoming), circling back to some of the frustrations I initially felt listening to college-era debates about ‘assimilation,’ ‘normativity,’ around the fight for gay marriage, military service, etc.

In the following I put down some thoughts about the ways I find the framings of these issues at work in Moser’s piece and more generally to be frustratingly misguided.

It’s a many-sectioned ramble, doubtless full of skips!

1.

I was primed to be annoyed by any sighing over how normal and boring gays are, in part, because I recently read—as a counter to Greenwell’s drippy tales of pitiful sex in the Balkans—Bruce Benderson’s The Romanian, an autobiographical account of falling for a Balkan prostitute which Greenwell seems to have ripped-off in his own first novella, Mitko (or maybe these guys just can’t find anything better to do in-country—go to a museum!).

But although the stories are similar, the author-narrators are annoying in different ways: Greenwell for his dreary Eeyore routine (whatever happened to jolly fat guys?), Benderson for being a pilled-out old freak who gets his rocks off on misery tourism. In the 80s he wrote about having sex with crack-addicted Puerto Rican and black male prostitutes in Times Square, but ever since what he takes to be the inter-connected disasters of the gentrification of New York and the mainstreaming of gays in America he has to go abroad to find the kind of deprived and dangerous rough trade he enjoys being mistreated by (Edmund White spent the first years of the AIDS crisis writing about doing this in Crete, albeit with a touch of elegance—in what exotic locale made affordable by the inequities of global capitalism will my middle-aged break with normativity find me gaga over a straight-identified whore?).

Periodically Benderson thinks to himself that it’s rather a shame Balkan people fucked by history also have to fuck disgusting American johns (he also goes on about having sagging tits and liverspots—at least the Ottomans and the Communists had some self-respect!), but he’s mostly too busy complaining how even Eastern Europe is getting too Americanized—that is, too bourgeois, comfortable, assimilated into what he sees as the putrid sterile monoculture issuing from the country he’s fleeing (like White fleeing AIDS to the Mediterranean and bringing it with him, Benderson of course is the bearer of what he ostensibly hates)—his rough trade is as eager for name-brand crap as the gays back in post-Giuliani NYC.  

New York isn’t punk rock anymore; being gay is boring (and, worse, Benderson is pretty far from his youth)—so he has to go where buying contact with abjection can still, for a fleeting and mistaken moment, feel like a plausible substitute for being interesting himself.

In a way, it’s a version of the journey of the Western left in the last generations… giving up on the prospect of Revolution at home, in the advanced countries, and then looking by way of compensation for a brief stupid excited moment at various foreign models (the Soviet Union, Cuba, Algeria, Mao’s China, the Zapatistas, the Arab Spring, I guess for some losers even the Kurdish anarchists and who knows what now—to jacking themselves off about how burning down a Wendy’s will overturn carceral whiteness?) which one by one disappoint not so much by ‘betraying’ revolutionary ideals but by becoming normal—that is, repressive, unequal, nationalist, belligerent, incompetent, you know, normal (which of course is what the local revolutionaries had mostly wanted for themselves—not a Total Beginning [except for some head-cases] but the chance to have for themselves what other countries had: a country, a place to have normal problems).

Actually, this was always the internal dynamic of the left, in as much as Marx, giving up on the possibility of his own social class ever organizing a decent society, transferred his hopes to the proletariat, on the grounds, critically, that they were so oppressed and alienated that their revolt would overthrow the whole system and allow for a collective transition to something radically new.

I have the right ideas, but I can’t act on them. I don’t know what to do, to do with myself, how to translate desires and visions into a strategy for making myself and the world better. So I magically transfer to some supposedly revolutionary subject—the working class, the Third World, the schizophrenic, the transfemme BIPOC who threw the first brick at Stonewall—the role of being the engine of history, of fulfilling my aspirations.

Which is only the manic inversion of Benderson’s post-revolutionary and a-political depressive mode of imagining that there is someone out there at the social and geographical frontier of immiseration whose fascinating abjection I can enjoy, someone whose suffering is so real and interesting. I fantasize, ‘if only I could be like them!’ while being so glad I’m not—a sadomasochistic dynamic black writers have long picked up on in white progressives’ displays of sympathy.

How little different—but how much worse—to turn that sort of gaze back to the past, and indeed to one’s own past, to imagine that gays had it somehow better before, to have a sadomasochistic nostalgia for oneself!

Someone, past or present, needs to suffer interestingly on my behalf, because I haven’t figured out how to come to terms with the basic adult problems, with being the ‘hero of my own life’ and accepting that I can be both normal, boring, basic, assimilated, etc., from some imagined outside perspective, and still the center of a unique, pleasurable, agentic life that is both my own and part of communities and traditions worth defending regardless of their supposed location in ideologized schemes of history that assign roles of progressive and reactionary, oppressor and oppressed, assimilated and radical, etc.

2.

Being gay isn’t queer anymore. Gay men are more or less sidelined in queer studies and queer spaces—seen as politically reactionary, outmoded, boring, narcissistic, capitalist, nationalist, etc. by dumb-dumbs from Jasbir Puar to Intersectional Twitter. Part of Moser’s nostalgia is for when being gay was still queer in its multiple and unfortunately conflated senses (which I unpack a bit here. Moser, by the way, expresses in passing some quiet distaste for the contemporary meanings of queer—are people still saying ‘Welcome to the Intellectual Dark Web’? ), having to do with the antinormative force of sexuality, with the formation of new communities and with political avant-gardism. As these have come undone from each other and from gay identity, many gays feel and express, in different ways—from Moser to Benderson—regret, something lost, that we’ve become sadly normal.

I want to contest this by going through the different moments of this now collapsing conflation. First, the sexual.

Moser says of his adolescent discovery of his homosexuality: The perversion was that the secrecy turned me on. This was distinct from being turned on by men. I enjoyed being part of a minority that nobody knew I belonged to. Knowing that nobody knew made me naughty.

Now this is something that comes up a lot in the generation-old strain of ‘anti-relational’ queer theory (Leo Bersani, Lee Edelman, Tim Dean)—that sexuality is queer insofar as it disrupts our relations with others and with ourselves. Homosexuality, in our society, has often been made to bear what Edelman calls the figural burden of this queerness which, however, is inherent to sexuality as such, from the psychoanalytic perspective these queer theory queens share.

Moser is suggesting that what’s interesting or capacitating about being ‘gay’ is having a particular—excitingly forbidden—access to the sexual, which detaches us from social norms. Now one of the wrinkles here is that Moser immediately takes up this supposedly queer, disruptive dimension of sexuality as if it were something that could adhere to his personality, something that makes him interesting—an ethical fantasy that is of course, relying on a trans-personal world of cultural scripts he might draw on.

It is as though he conceives the rupture between himself and other people that sexuality generates as an occasion to begin styling himself as a distinct kind of person, the artist of his own life, in an interiority created for him by the interjection of oppressive social forces, but then filled and enchanted by him in a move of counter-power.

This, however, just what being a horny teenager is like for anyone. Everyone feels naughty and private about sex. Sex is naughty and private. And everyone imagines that their desires, body, thoughts, insofar as they are in friction with society, are the stuff from which they have made a fascinatingly secret and intense self. This is just what being normal is—this way of thinking you are interesting. Teenagers go through it, and they mostly get over it.

No straight person can understand the thrill of a gay boy’s first encounter with a magazine made for boys like him.

Honey! You did not invent the erection.

But what this quote gets at is that it’s not just sexuality, in the private, queer sense of sex I described above, the opportunity for a singular ascesis into perversion, that is at issue. In looking at gay porn, the young ho-Moser-sexual is encountering a mediatized world of other men with shared tastes, into which he can imaginatively project himself—and in which he can actually participate, if only at first by going into a gay bookstore and buying a porn mag, then eventually by having sex, friends, partners, a life (if he makes it out of the goon-cave).

Here sexuality is not only anti-relational, secret, private—in a way that is universal for all subjects—but relational, shared, world-building, in a particular communitarian-identitarian way.

That is, homosexuality is both queer and gay—it is the site of encounter, or of shuttling between, what Moser identifies as a perversion, a personal living out of the universal truth of human sexuality in its anti-social, anti-normative, ‘private’ disruptive enjoyments, on the one hand, and on the other of the shared fantasies that circulate across a society and change over time.

Homosexuality, having both of those dimensions, becomes the site for a self-fashioning by which one becomes at once, like everyone else, the bearer of an incommunicable privacy, as well as—in order to make that ‘secret’ bearable—a member of a particular group whose members share and elaborate with each other cultural forms for expressing, mediating, and transforming that unshareable content (of, as it were, sublimating)—in a dialectic of withdrawal and connection, closetedness and kinship, anti-normativity and the elaboration of new norms.

This is why Moser is one the one hand deluded and on the other hand onto something in saying:

If I were to try, I would start by saying that gay porn is entirely different from straight porn. It’s not even a close cousin. To use the same word implies an equation, implies that they were the same. They were not the same. There should have been another word for it.

(By the way, if we want to complain about gay assimilation to the mainstream, let’s complain that such thoughts can be expressed in The Nation without an editor laughing them out of his office. Were there no straight men in the building? Privileged white gay men may not be cool and queer anymore but some of them sure do get prime real estate in the discourse for their weird musings!)

Gay porn is not different from straight porn insofar as both are porn and therefore sexual and therefore queer. Straight people may not know that they’re queer—and gay people may forget it too—but that’s ok; doesn’t change the facts. Gay porn is different insofar as it’s also circulating specific cultural fantasies—placing readers within a discursive matrix of images, texts, readers, desires, and possible futures. But the antinormative force—the shame and danger—of libido is just what sexuality is.

It would be retarded—but it is commonplace—for gays or any group to identify straightforwardly with queerness, with that antinormative force, to imagine we have more of it, or have it otherwise, than anyone else. For one thing, our being identified with it, our being made abject, was the reason for our oppression—and it is what the elaboration of gay male forms of life, including gay porn and gay bookstores, let alone gay politics, was meant to overcome.

For another, it’s incoherent and impossible, to conflate oneself with the queerness of sexuality, to be a self-conscious anti-social pervert. To do so is only a private, autistic version of the fantasies in pornography. It is the dream of being a radical outsider, whose radicality and outsiderness were supposedly thrust upon him by a combination of involuntary ‘inner’ desires and evil external oppression. It’s perhaps what Andrea Long Chu does in her essays. But of course, we can make such an apparently personal fantasy only out of the resources culturally available to us, and in performance directed towards others.

Rather than fantastically taking oneself for Ms. Abjection, the point is to integrate and discipline the disruptive potency of sexual desire into a life, not least through shared fantasies, codes, practices and relationships while using its antinormative dimension, what it shows about the intolerableness of existing codes, as an energy for remaking one’s life and the world.

And Moser indeed writes rather movingly about how gay porn was an appeal to join and make a gay world:

Here, at last, were men who didn’t want me to look away; who, instead, had done everything possible to get me to look. They had put incredible effort into making themselves as attractive as possible. They had spent years working out. Some had left the hair on their faces or bodies; some had removed it. Great care had gone into lighting them, dressing them, styling them, photographing them, so we could see everything they had to show. These were not men for women. These, finally, were men for us. Their appeal was not akin to pictures of women for straight boys, merely sexual. It was existential.

These men’s appeal was their invitation to look. Check us out. Take all the time you want, they said, knowing this was what we wanted most. They were looking at us, daring us to look back; and though their bodies were undeniably attractive, the real appeal was their eyes. In almost every one of the gay sex stories I devoured as a teenager, the plot hinged on the eyes. Two men were walking past each other; a glance gave something away. “What are you looking at?” an unattainable jock said to a boy caught peeping. I knew about wanting to look a slight split second longer—and forcing myself to look away. I knew what it was like to wonder about every guy I met: friend or foe? In gay porn, there was always a happy ending.

Now of course I don’t know what crack Moser is smoking with these comments about women whose sexuality—paging Simone de Beauvoir!—is always, like everyone’s, existential. Everyone’s sexuality is existential insofar, on the one hand, it is a ‘factical’ phenomenon about which we have to make choices that shape our life, and, on the other, it is itself a revelation of who we are and what we value, something determined and determinable, unfree and free. Sexuality risks—this is a central Freudian insight—undoing who we are, but it also the material out of which we are constituted.

But gay pornography is not only sexual but also a cultural message, as Moser describes in his second paragraph—an invitation to particular ways of living, and in that sense a purveyor of the sort of ‘myths’ or scripts for self-stylization Beauvoir outlines in Second Sex.

3.

Gays have a special way of seeing, apparently—one that links sex, community, and politics, or at least used to.

Eyes could betray us, endanger us.

(How do you recognize gay men? To this day, I can spot them by their eyes.)…

The older I got, the more compatible homosexuality was with a career at Morgan Stanley or the State Department. It was a kind of progress, I suppose. And the only sacrifice it demanded was our special way of looking: our eyes.

Now, if our eyes just means being horny, I assure readers that the much-maligned white-collar PMC gays are also horny, and perhaps hornier than me. They after all can afford to go to Fire Island.

But I take it our eyes is also supposed to name a gay cultural ‘gaze,’ a sensibility, something at play when we look at porn, or look at each other not only as assemblages of body parts but as human types, potential tricks, friends, lovers, etc. We learn to spot available guys, learn to look for tops and bottoms, learn to flirt with glances, learn to be looked at.

Men look at each other sexually, queerly—but, also, through our shared cultural fantasies, gayly, identifying (with) each other and enjoying shared images—out of those patterns of looking and imagining we also make ways of looking at things that aren’t even men, like, say, Kylie deep-cuts.

But then there are so many gay sensibilities! And it’s hard to be essentialist about such things when it was after all straight guy Roger Ebert who wrote Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. There are, to be sure, a lot of tastes and ways of talking in which gay men of particular sorts participate in—historically contingent sort-of overlapping networks of pleasures—styles. Which some gay men find very alienating! There is not one way we look.

Ok, anyway, however multiple and fragmented, this gay eye is

1) perverse—private—antisocial—queer-in-a-lonely-but-universal-psychoanalytic-sense

2) pornographic—shared—identitarian/communal

3) the platform for the elaboration of a network of tastes tethered to but distinct from our common tastes in men

—is it also

4.

political? Moser says it used to seem so:

But to be gay was to understand that certain people had decided that to look at other men was to subvert the state. Looking at men was incompatible with the culture I was being groomed to inherit. To do so openly meant to relinquish whatever role I had been assigned by birth and education. The empire may not yet have realized that I was a subversive, but it knew about my kind. It knew that we were dangerous, and its stewards harassed people like me. There were so many reasons to distrust that state, and the list grew longer the more I learned about it. But for me, the most basic reason was that it wanted me dead.

This is a funny expression of a disappointed adolescent leftism, and I relate to the fantasy. I wrote a while ago:

Inside there is a secret—a desire, an insight, a wound—that parents, neighbors, friends, colleagues, all the regiments of the social order, seem to work together to keep hidden. Bringing it out of oneself and into speech, risking the consequences of its revelation, is an act that could transform both oneself and the world.

Now, nothing seems less liberatory, and more routine, than to avow oneself. At an interview for a job, or on the first day of orientation, someone in a position of authority asks us to say something “personal,” something from the darkness of our private life. We are invited to make ourselves visible, told we can and should admit our “whole selves” here, and we might imagine that we are being granted the satisfaction of our long-held wish to speak the risky truth—but under a compulsion that makes what we utter seem false and what we desired futile.

The important thing to keep in mind, however, is that—again as I wrote elsewhere—the very idea that sexuality is a powerful inner essence that can be typed, and that its types should be revealed by and to power, either to uproot deviance or to celebrate diversity (and uproot intolerance, another powerful inner essence) is a ruse. It is not any particular content of typologized sexuality itself that is so powerful, but its having been conceptualized as something to be surveilled (this is, of course, a Foucauldian point).

It is natural for people who had been oppressed on the basis of their sexuality-type—who had been told that it was so dangerous that it could overturn the whole of society if let out—to be confused and deflated that now their ‘sexuality’ can be celebrated by the very powers that had oppressed them. There is thus it turns out nothing that opposes homosexuality and empire—but also (a point reactionary retards of the right and left should be beaten over the head with every day) nothing that essentially connects them.

To repeat Beauvoir again—think of her stunned sullenness in Second Sex, published in 1949. After thousands of years of patriarchal oppression, women were now, in the West and the Communist world, legally and, increasingly, materially equal to men. Through very little effort on women’s own part, she argued.

It would be pretty crazy to attribute to the actions of first-wave feminist groups the tremendous historical changes—mostly having to do with industrialization—that liberated women. And I’d say the same of gays. Of course gay activism mattered, it was important, etc., but the conditions for its possibility and eventual success were not of gays’ own making.

And it’s doubly disappointing to discover that, first, it doesn’t really matter to these oppressive systems whether they oppress you or celebrate you (as long as you are available as a symbol), and second, the decision to switch from oppression to celebration wasn’t made by you or people like you, but by an impersonal logic of history.

On the other hand, we might say, this means that at last we can begin to be adults.

Homosexuality is not, anymore, a privileged site for society’s figuring the queerness of sexuality as such, a particularly intense kind of sexual anti-relationality and abjection.

Nor are we anymore in that heroic era of building, for the first time, a gay identity—we are inheriting what was done two generations before (more on this in a second).

Nor, again, are gays given an extraneous—false—political charge by being imagined as an engine of historical change that will remake society for better or worse.

We are free to see how gay life might matter on its own terms. Which I guess, like getting a life strikes some people as an impossible or undesirable task—they’d rather, Benderson-style, pursue other people’s misery, or Moser-style, lament the lost importance that was once mistakenly attributed to us—instead of inventing a justification for our own existence.

5.

Yet I felt the ambivalence of a radical artist unexpectedly showered with prizes, Moser begins his concluding paragraph.

Homosexuality risks being misunderstood as an antisocial perversion—as an appanage of the universalist radical left—and here, doubly, as either an authentic aesthetic vocation or as an artist coopted by the culture-industry: welcomed back into a bland everyone, a marketing niche with certain shared tastes. 

But homosexuality is not—or is always more than, or is precisely the motion among—the merely sexual, political or aesthetic.

The comparison between being gay and being a radical artist is commonplace and troubling, and will take some digressions for me to address.

In a number of places in his writing from the 70s and 80s, the novelist and essayist Edmund White, echoing Foucault, talked about how every gay man (he wouldn’t have known to say: every gay man of that historical moment) is forced to be an existentialist philosopher, confronting with particular intensity the question of how to create a life, in the absence, in the deliberate rejection of, conventional models of the good life. If you no longer can copy your parents or neighbors—and if you realize that they are not only poor guides for your own life, but have been, like the moral traditions behind them, utterly, cruelly wrong about desires like yours—how should you live?

It’s no coincidence that Foucault’s turn to what he called ethics (creating a life) arose in his late work through his discovery of the urban gay culture emerging in New York and San Francisco. Men who took up their homosexuality as a historically novel and personally chosen ‘gay’ identity were elaborating for themselves individually and collectively norms, rites, practices, and pleasures in a way that, for White and Foucault, was emblematic of the human situation—our creating our selves anew with the resources available in our culture.[1]

Both Foucault and White, in a sense, understood gays at that moment the way Baudelaire (a figure important to Foucault’s theorizing) understood the dandy or avant-garde artist—as the emblematic figures of modernity, the ones who most directly confront the problem of having to make their own life owning up to the problem of the dissolution of traditions that had provided ready-made pseudo-meanings and conventional forms for disguising our freedoms.

Other groups had already served this function of standing in for, or bearing symbolically, the general modern problem in Western cultures—the ‘New Woman’ of the early 20^th century (and then again the ‘Newly Born Woman’ of French feminism a half-century later), the poète maudit, the Jew; being understood in this way, of course, was often quite bad for those thus understood! If group X stands in the public mind for the problems of modern life, one might be tempted to solve the latter by doing away with them.

For contingent historical reasons, certain groups at certain moments can plausibly imagine themselves as ‘human but more so,’ as taking on the emblematic status that modern artists often aspire to. Gay intellectuals could imagine, for a few years, that gays—that is those homosexuals who joined the new gay form of life—were as it were forced to be free, compelled to occupy the position of an avant-garde artist revealing the human situation.

This is a terrible way of looking at things for a number of reasons.

First, I don’t think this is even a good way of thinking about art. There has not been an avant-garde in a long time, and in fact it was buried at the very moment gays were thinking of themselves as each, by virtue of their particular combination of on-going social and legal discrimination and abjection on the one hand with on the other a growing cultural and political confidence, as something like radical artists just by virtue of having a lot of anonymous sex and installing indirect lighting in their condos.  

I’ve been thinking about this point lately as I’ve been working on Kristeva here in Bulgaria (I promise this will circle back to gay stuff!) tracking her passage from a self-understood political and aesthetic radicality in the years from her mid-60s arrival in Paris to her late 70s abandonment of Marxism, revolution, the left, politics, feminism, to elaborate what became, ultimately, an idiosyncratic form of liberal cosmopolitan humanism.

I’m interested in this shift, in her thought and more broadly in French and Western intellectual culture of that era, because it seems as much inspiring (we do indeed need to re-elaborate liberalism, and I have written a lot about what I’ve taken from fellow travelers of Kristeva in this late 70s turn from politics to something like ‘the personal,’ especially Barthes and Foucault) as abhorrent (these people abandoned ‘politics’ at the precisely the moment of the neoliberal economic turn, by which the working and middle classes of France, the United States, etc., were sacrificed for the interests of a globalizing elite—generating the conditions for our current political and identitarian morass, as I say in my essays for Foreign Affairs critiquing the work of Paul Ricoeur and Bernard-Henri Lévy for replacing politics with tepid humanist symbol-mongering).

In the 60s and 70s Kristeva and her circle at the journal Tel Quel represented what would turn out to be the last important expression of the French avant-garde—that is, of the hope that there could be a distinct little group of radical intellectuals whose experiments in art and politics would move the culture after them, and of the assumption that aesthetic experimentation had a clear or at least conceptualizable link to political revolution, a program for remaking society.

Thus, as Kristeva said then, Poetic Revolution. The authors she championed—Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Joyce, Céline—were however already not only old and dead, but thoroughly integrated into a literary tradition, the canon of modernism. Kristeva’s reading interestingly re-activate aspects of their texts, but it is clear that we are already less modern, more classical or Alexandrian, even Byzantine than these pioneers (Tel Quel promoted also American writers like Ashbery, who similarly ran the course in those years from the incomprehensible post-Dada of Tennis Court Oath to the intimately, worldly-wise humanist comforts of Houseboat Days); we are inheritors, merely, of the modern.

Her politics—Marxist-Leninist first in a Moscow-approved flavor, then in a Maoist one—were similarly only superficially radical. What was more stable, familiar, and inherited by the late twentieth century than Marxism? Not that I think politics and art ought to be new—I like Marx and Ashbery!—but at the time, Kristeva did, and, more generally, French intellectuals, at least the ones at Tel Quel, still held to the already generations-old notion of an avant-garde.

Once we accept that aesthetic experimentation within a given scene has little power or right to move the whole cultural field out of some supposedly ossified normativity and into a new one—for the scene’s wildness to be the lever of a revolution of language as Kristeva had it—and once we realize that the experiments of modernism, now over a hundred years old, have often aged poorly, or needed to be carefully reactivated through proper criticism and appreciation, and anyway can’t be dismissed the way the modernists dismissed their pasts—once we accept that trying to be avant-garde is the most childish imitation of our own past, and that for us being truly contemporary means taking up a complex relationship of ambivalent inheritance towards our modern predecessors—then the whole paradigm of radical artist and sell-out to consumer culture appears useless.

The avant-garde wanted to avoid being prematurely co-opted by the system, so that its autonomous scene could develop the ideas, forms and practices by which the system might be remade. The sell-out argues that he can change the system from within, and is hated by the avant-garde because his success exposes the myth that what an avant-garde does can possibly affect the system (conversely, the system needs the avant-garde to keep generating at its supposed fringe the same kind of charge of marginality, radicality, dangerousness, etc. that Benderson used to find in Times Square crackheads and now finds in Romanians—a false, contained, virtual threat, a riskless thrill, a haunted house).

Already in the early 60s, in an essay on men’s fashion, Barthes warned that the era in which aesthetic innovation could seem like a mode of authentic self-fashioning, by which every man could be an artist and aristocrat-of-spirit, if it ever existed, is long since passed. The culture industry now makes available objects to satisfy our tastes with such a profusion that, on the one hand, there is no singular norm to be resisted through the cultivation of autonomy, and, on the other, our possible desires for self-creation find themselves anticipated, answered in advance by the infinitude for choices available in the market. There is no self we can fashion, no aesthetics we can develop, that will be radical in the sense that the political-artistic avant-garde had imagined—and indeed not even one that can be radical in the more modest sense of being uniquely our own.

Gays, Moser laments, now find we wouldn’t have to invent a new way to live after all, since we have been assimilated into consumer capitalism, which tries to do our living—to represent and satisfy, or rather to colonize and simulate the fulfilment of, the desires out of which we make a life—for us. But this imperative to make it new was already old when gays took it in the 70s from the poets, revolutionaries and dandies—it was already “wrong from the start,” to quote the make it new guy.

If there is—and I think there is—an aesthetics and ethics of self-fashioning, one that has, as Foucault better than anyone worked out in texts like his interviews in Christopher Street and Gai-Pied, much to do with the double-faced, anti-normative and communitarian-cultural dimensions of sexuality—then the radical artist, and his secret sharer the sell-out, are not good models. They are misapplied here as pathetic thoughts one hears from other quarters about how, say, Dimes Square or 4-Chan are the new avant-garde…

6.

Almost (!) finally, I ought to have put this at the start but, one clue things are going off the rails almost immediately in Moser’s essay—and what I take to be the culturally widespread thinking from which its sentiments emanate—is this early line about not being out until his late teen years: For most of the first two decades of my life, I had not, therefore, been seen as a member of a minority.

Except, hello, you’re Jewish!

Moser’s sister’s Wikipedia says their “grandfather arrived in Houston in 1942 as a refugee from Nazi Germany.” But, forgetting for a second the Holocaust and the long ongoing history of anti-Jewish violence, and the prospect that even the US, let alone Western Europe, may not be safe for Jews forever, let’s imagine that Jews are, ‘here,’ in America, so perfectly assimilated that a Jewish intellectual can as it were forget that he was “seen as a member of a minority.”

Still—that’s weird! Minority, by the way, doesn’t have to mean powerless, oppressed, or even in a position of having to think often about what one’s identity ‘means,’—it’s just a statistical-demographic fact. Jews are a minority in America, as are many other sorts of groups.

It’s possible that for Moser Jewishness is so unremarkable that it doesn’t occur to him even now that is minoritarian—although of course not only are Jews a minority in America but secular Jewish intellectuals are a minority of Jews—most people are not like you, and most of ‘your own’ people are not like you, is, I take it, not only something true of such a person, but indeed of any person, qua person (we are all ‘permanent minorities,’ I’ve said elsewhere).

Moser doesn’t talk about his Jewishness in the essay, and of course it may be a misreading on my part to interpret the silence as I do, but it strikes me that if he doesn’t bring it up—doesn’t see himself as a minority—it’s because he imagines that minority means somehow being at the margins of society and the frontier of history, in a position of being interestingly oppressed and having to creatively resist it, the way he might imagine Jews in America, having been moved on up into whiteness, no longer have to. Now, he laments, he is as a gay man—and I assume as a Jew—just a demographic to be marketed to.

I’m perhaps transposing onto Moser something that I’m working through in an essay on the avant-garde writer Robert Glück, who is also gay and Jewish but twice as old. Glück talks about Jewishness as totally boring, assimilated, a domestic blandness he was eager to escape into the literary avant-garde of the 70s, which for him was entangled with the radicalism of the new gay culture in San Francisco. Now he’s very critical of the latter, which has become assimilated, boring, middle-class—like the Jewish-American world he wanted to get beyond.

Not only is that, however, what the ‘success’ of a cultural movement looks like, but it’s also only the beginning rather than the end of the adventure of culture—what will we make for ourselves when we’re no longer dying of AIDS or getting raped by Cossacks? What a pathetic answer to the ancestors if all we can show them for their having made us safer than they were is to sit around either lamenting our assimilation into the boring mass culture sludge or forgetting even that we are minorities! Surely it is possible to be both a self-conscious member of a group, enjoying its relative success and comfort, while using its cultural forms to create new kinds of freedom and pleasure? That’s what being an artist of one’s life would really mean!

7.

After a couple of years of writing often critically about woke ‘identity politics’ for Tablet—but also critically about liberal humanist refusals to take ‘identity’ seriously—I want end here (which is to say, to begin something else, to start from this post) by insisting on how the end of an imputed radicality and queerness to gay life, which is mistakenly called assimilation, is really the opportunity, at last, for radicality, that is, for a rootedness and originality, for a thinking about the inheritance of gay culture from the past half-century and the possibilities for preserving and inventing forms of life out of it, that at last isn’t dependent on—assimilated to—extraneous discourses of a universalist left or a homophobic right, that doesn’t imitate the exploded model of a political-aesthetic ‘avant-garde’ (no one is following us; we are not the edge of society, or a practice round for the Revolution), nor delight in socially imposed abjection, nor conflate the existential challenge of making a life with the antiquated modernism of the poet-pariah, nor suggest we know in advance what a gay (or a Jewish, or a fill-in-the-blank) ‘normalcy’ would look like.

The possibility of such a not-yet-known ‘normal,’ a life-of-our-own not defined ahead of time by ‘the empire’ or its enemies, and their mirror galleries of false binaries and mis-identifications, is what a real radicalism would foster.

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[1] Foucault, by the way, is often made out to have rejected ‘identity,’ personal or collective, as a kind of illusion or mistake forced on us by the social forces that dominate us—or taken up, for instance in Judith Butler’s reading of him, as arguing that our identification, for instance as homosexual, is a creative resistance, a counter-power, to the power that identifies us in the first place on the terms we then re-work. Medical and legal discourses created the category homosexual in the nineteenth century, and then some people took up the category, inhabited it, in a form of what Butler would call parodic or re-iterative resignification of that interpellation. But this, while it accounts for something, misses the way that Foucault in the late 70s and early 80s was excited by the rise of gay identity and culture as a “form of life,” as an experiment in self-stylization different from the mere reworking of the terms of the dominant discourse. In this sense, too, Foucault ought to be read more often in dialogue with Arendt—as I suggested in my essay on Michael Denneny, who was in conversation with both of them—for his late emphasis on the “ethics,” the sort of “conduct,” that can create new ways of life: what Arendt working, like Foucault, with and against Heidegger) called “natality,” the capacity for generating new forms of life that she saw at work in the American and French Revolutions, in Zionism, and in politics as such.