Assimilationist//Radical

some notes on a dumb distinction--plus readers & pederasts

My essay on the gay publisher Michael Denneny—who launched the magazine Christopher Street and the careers of many gay writers in the 70s and 80s, the moment when a distinct gay male culture emerged—and his debts to his former PhD advisor Hannah Arendt (and to the peculiar sort of Zionist politics that inspired her perspective on politics and culture as the making of an intersubjectival ‘world’ in which people exchange judgments) didn’t make any great waves in the gay or straight ‘world,’ probably because as the length of this sentence suggests, it was too long and about too many things—and of course full of indignant swipes at various sorts of people I think are idiots!

It’s by far my longest for Tablet, at I think some 7000 words, and it includes in addition to all the above material a typological aside about the two bad kinds of readers of Arendt (another shallow and nasty binarism!), and a few paragraphs on the I imagine totally forgotten (but still living!) former journalist Neil Alan Marks, who wrote some brutal internal critiques of the kind of gay-Arendtian Zionism-of-our-own that I sympathetically describe (I think a good essay—although I’m not saying this was one—ought to have at least one searing moment in which my own line is challenged by ‘another’ voice, or another of my voices, in a counter-chorus saying, ‘no, you’re the idiot!’), and some asides against the earlier 70s radical left homosexual-feminist scene around Fag Rag.

I had spent several weeks reading—and way too much money buying—issues of Christopher Street, Fag Rag, and books Denneny had published or promoted (I had never read gay American literature from this era—the best novels so far have been Robert Fero’s Family of Max Desir, and Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance, and especially his The Beauty of Men, which is almost unreadably poignant), and I guess wanted to give all of that lost too-much-ness to the poor reader.

(What does the reader want? When I first started writing ‘political’ things for Tablet, I ran the first two or three essays by a friend’s Soviet Jewish mother [hi, Dina!] who was gracious enough to look over them. She’s the sort of person who, having come from a vanished country that among all its faults and horrors made the pathetically innocent mistake of thinking ‘culture’ mattered—a mistake even its dissidents shared—reads, thinks, keeps up, etc., in an energetic but skeptical way that seems unavailable to her native-born American counterparts [that is, either the latter are like my parents and don’t read at all, in spite of having advanced degrees—or they follow the NPR, New York Times, Hegemon Review of Books line faithfully, having never learned, somehow, as Soviets did, that they are living in a regime]. But while she’s smart and interested, she’s not an academic—the sort of person I was used to writing for. I wanted to make sure that she and other readers like her would find in any particular essay all the context they needed, without feeling condescended to [in one early essay, in 2020, I wrote something about “seventeenth-century poet John Milton” about which a Twitter mutual busted my balls—now I suppose I wouldn’t tell the reader who Milton is, but, then, why not? How wonderful to be someone’s introduction to Milton!] For all my pretentiousness—or surely because I am in fact in my actual life excruciatingly pretentious—I can take the trouble to dial myself down a bit on the page, where, thankfully, one—one! I have been lectured to, in fact, about the pretentiousness of this way of speaking—can revise… But since then I’ve come to think, actually, fuck the reader [not you, Dina!]—if I knew what other people thought was interesting, or clear, or novel, or whatever, I’d have such a different life I wouldn’t be myself and surely wouldn’t be writing. I only know what I want to write about, or rather what I want to be writing towards, which may well when I get closer be ‘about’ something disappointing, opaque, or, in the case of the Denneny-Arendt essay, unmanageably multitudinous. Cultivating awareness about what the reader wants—and how I appear to her—would surely be good for my career but if I want to think of this in terms of a career then so much is already so wrong I’d hardly get out of bed anymore).

In that already overly long essay I had meant to say something more—and offer as a supplement here—on a point Arendt made, and Denneny echoed, about the frustrating way we use the terms assimilationist and radical.

I don’t know the history of these concepts, but they appear already in the early twentieth century debates about Zionism that Arendt was part of. She noted complainingly that assimilationist is a term of abuse brought by Zionists and Marxists alike against Jews who tried to conform to the cultures of Germany, France, the United States, etc., while radical was a term—sometimes applied abusively to others but often proudly to oneself—for those who wanted the sharpest, most violent break with the current order: Zionists who embraced terrorist tactics, Marxists who wanted the liquidation of all ethnic, national, and religious identities. Now of course Arendt was a self-hating ‘assimilationist’ parvenu but, even-more-of-course, that’s just what made her so sharp about this whole thing.

Why, she asked, as we recognize that there’s something pathetic and cringing about trying to ‘make it’ as a true Frenchman, American, etc., should we see it as any less wretched to be throwing oneself and one’s cause into those other melting pots of universalist anti-identitarian revolution/theory or of existentialist-terrorist-fascist embrace of violence that is just Mussolini, Sorrel etc. for Jews? (This is the question that Fanon would bungle his way through across Black Skin, White Masks and after.)

Isn’t it in fact assimilating one’s specificity by letting it be absorbed into such either openly or hypocritically universalist frameworks (fascism, or whatever sort of conservative nationalism, is after all just the self-hating underside of Enlightenment universalism, not by any means or any more than Marxism a way out of it). What would really be radical is not to discover that one needs one’s own brand of fascism, nationalism, etc. (copying the Gentiles at their worst—while the parvenu at least imitated their summits of bourgeois civility) or that one’s problems will be solved by abolishing oneself through the revolution, but thinking, just where one is, where the roots already are.

For Denneny—and I agree—all this applies to gay life too. In the 70s—and again today—gay men often let themselves be bullied (or made themselves so ‘radically’ retarded as to believe their way) into framing their concerns through the available discourses of Marxism, feminism, and a generalized revolution, sexual and otherwise, that would sweep away all forms of oppression and all those bad old identities gays are hung up on. In Fag Rag there was a sort of continual lament that gay men were not yet the right kind of feminist women (as indeed women themselves still weren’t and aren’t), and today’s queer ‘thinkers’ from Jasbir Puar to Ben Miller (of Bad Gays) still resent that gay men exist (this resentment calls itself critiques of ‘homonationalism’ or ‘white cis gays’ or ‘pathological homosexual narcissism’). These people, then and now, can call themselves radical and other, defective gays—gays attached to their gayness as a specific form of life to be elaborated on its own terms—assimilationist, even though, precisely, what irks them about these gays is that they will not ‘assimilate’ their self-understandings to the political morality of left (or for today’s putrid post-Marxist cultural left, I should say ‘left’) radicalism.

I think it’s a terrible mistake, one people like Andrew Sullivan and Jamie Kirchick make, to accept these terms and say something along the lines of ‘we are moderate, normal gays’ (Andrew Sullivan is definitely not normal—he and Rod Dreher are neck-in-neck in the race to be the most insanely self-revelatory and politically emotive bloggers—and both surely not coincidentally are recent divorcees!) while ‘they are the crazy radicals.’ No! (for one thing it’s not true, for another, how weak-sounding and necessarily-false to be having to make a case for something as wretched as normalcy?)

It is just the project of two adult men—and a community of such couplings—living together on their own terms, without a political/moral alibi granted from the cultural left (saying that our practices—which would otherwise revolt them by being male and sexual, and thus, violent, oppressive, all the rest—can be forgiven because they contribute to shocking the imaginary old bourgeoisie and battering down repression—that we can be permitted into the coalition of the abject and oppressed and thus sanctified) or from anyone else that is radical.

This reversal of the accepted meanings of assimilationist and radical is maybe most striking considered from the vantage of the problem of pedophilia (perhaps I should say ephebophilia, but that’s really a term of art among practitioners! Who don’t include me—although my partner is a decade younger than me, that’s still many years over the legal limit!) or boy-love.

Conservatives these days and I imagine for years attack gay men as ‘groomers’ and have a kind of double imagining whereby, on the one hand, to be a gay man is to be a pederast (and a former victim of a pederast), such that beneath the exterior of the ‘normal’ ‘moderate’ ‘assimilationist’ gay lurks the molester—and, on the other, homosexuality and social acceptance of homosexuality are one moment in a spiral towards utter antinormative degeneracy that extends outwards, downwards, through transness to pedophilia to marrying dogs etc. Both of these framings share the same central conception as the cultural left’s—and Sullivan/Kirchick’s—vision of an assimilatory male homosexuality that displaces, conceals, thwarts, or opens the way for a more ‘radical’ project.

This is just what I’d contest—and what Foucault contested in History of Sexuality, and his 1982 interview in Christopher Street, where he challenged the idea of homosexuality as part of a broader, unified, ‘sexual revolution’ against a singular repression. There are in fact multiple new identities that have been arising out of modern sexual discourses, ‘gayness’ among them—and in their contingent becomings they by no means form a coherent whole, or can be arranged neatly either on a spectrum either from most to least ‘radical’ or on a slippery slope whereby acceptance of one means eventual acceptance of all the rest.

Pedophilia is not the ‘radical’ edge of homosexuality that moderate gays have to disavow, either out of intelligent self-interest or to cynically disguise the extreme reality of their desires. In fact for most of modern history, pedophilia was the acceptable face of homosexuality.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, much of what is retrospectively taken to be homophile apologetics—justifications of same-sex relations—is frankly pederastic. It appeals to the model of the ancient Greeks, and to the social utility (as the Greeks had) of older men initiating adolescents into culture and masculinity. It had democratic and aristocratic framings—Whitmanian and Wilhelmine flavors. It imitated heterosexuality by grounding socially acceptable—socially useful—sex on difference, here of age rather than sex (although of course until recently women were often imagined by men essentially as adult children—and were often quite younger than the men they married).

As Foucault observed, and Halperin reiterated, the idea of two adult men, and a community of adult men, forming romantic bonds breaks with the possibility of these appeals either to the past or to a pedagogical function. It’s not clear what two gay men coupling does for society, or who a pseudo-ethnic ‘people’ composed of such couples could be. Which is just what is exciting about the adventure of making a gay culture (Arendt said that Jews, in the sense of a post-religious, post-ghetto horizon, are not the oldest but the newest of peoples).

The idea of sex relations organized on sameness is historically new—and contingent—and infinitely vulnerable to accusations from the left and right of ‘narcissism,’ ‘(homo)-nationalism,’ and all of forms of loving one’s own (it’s also attacked by right and left as homogenizing, whether in Joseph Massad’s supposedly queer-left formulations or in the right’s attacks on globohomo): which are also, mutatis mutandis, charges that can be made against any group insofar as it doesn’t ‘assimilate’ itself to a political universalism that would give its wish to persist in being an external, ideological justification.

 That’s I suppose the defect or danger of being organized around what’s ostensibly the ‘same’ (although gay life like any other is about the discovery-creation of eroticizable pleasurable-annoying differences within that sameness, ‘I’m like this, you’re like that, we’re like this, they’re like that’). The advantage—and again to quote Foucault from that 1982 interview—is that being in the mode of what he called the monosexual, the adult male homosexual who no longer tries to ‘assimilate’ his sexuality into the program of sexual revolution or the alibi of pedophilia-as-pedagogy is that its adherents can cultivate what he called “indifference” to, in his example, women (that is, gay men are freed from having to take up either hetero male posturing towards women or some feminist project of sexual self-correction [although these days a whole assemblage of queer people of gender would love to remake gay men such that, for example, we are eager to eat out ‘front-holes’] and accept fujos as Real Boys)—but I would say, more generally, indifference to those programs, alibis, grand historical narratives and theories to which all the supposed radicals are always assimilating.

This indifference is maybe also the aspect I mean to have towards an imagined reader when I say ‘fuck them’—an indifference of not thinking, of trying not to know, how what I’m writing fits into some scheme larger than my own life. Against the assimilatory pseudo-radicalism of the programme—of the declaration that one knows what one is about (which is in fact a commitment to remain the same, to live up to and into the foreknown)—an indifference to difference (a refusal to make the abolition of difference-as-inequality or the celebration of difference-as-diversity the slogans of oneself) by which we can become, strangely-truly, different from who we are now, differing into the forms of new freedoms.