For the Love of the Gay World: Some Historical and Conceptual Notes

The edited volume on the state of today’s gays, to which I’ve contributed an essay, is now out. Most of the contributors are lamenting, from variously coded political-ideological positions, that homosexuality no longer has transgressive power, is too complicit in whatever The System is, and otherwise bores rather than fascinates. My contribution (pasted below), in contrast, combines my personal, idiosyncratic and correct genealogy of gay culture with a call for thoughtful concern with maintaining the ‘world’ in which the members of the gay ‘we’ that has emerged through the histories I trace can appear to each other. It’s a pitch, of course, for the book I’m working on!

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Gay men, I assume, have some interest and take some pleasure in talking to each other. There’s sex, of course, but you can do that without talking. And—tragically, boringly—there’s politics, in the usual sense of responding to the latest crisis or accumulating indignities. Politics in this usual sense (but don’t worry, there’s another) involves a lot of repetitive, cliché-mongering, unpleasurable talking.

Being gay has some inescapable relationship to sex. The sexed body, sex acts, sexual desire, and sexual pleasure (which the editors asked me to define—but I’m afraid it’s really better just trying it for yourself). Politics too is inescapable; straight majorities still wonder what to do with us.

Much of our shared enjoyment, or at any rate our mutual life, as gay men, however, is not obviously connected to sex or politics. If we posit that somewhere at the back of our banter about constellations of stereotypical interests ranging from furniture collecting to ironically appreciating terrible music is a paradigmatic experience of anality or a call to a better collective future, we may be making an interesting argument, but we’re likely missing something about most obvious features of gay sociability.

First of all, the fact that there is one. And that the talk arising from our wish to be together, turning as if often does to comment on patterns of action and forms of life that we learn from our experience are common to us, is a way of turning them over in discourse, of having their pleasures again and softening their displeasures—and thus a way of perpetuating them, the revelation of a shared wish to keep them in memory, make them bright and enduring.

Part of what the playwright Larry Kramer called, two decades ago, the tragedy of today’s gays is that in order to begin a potentially generative, or productively divisive, conversation about the state of male homosexuality (its culture and politics, its problems and affordances) we must undergo an ordeal of conceptual and historical clarification. Without doing so, we are likely to miss the real objects of our agreement and disagreement, wasting time with opinions expressed in each interlocutor’s jumble of inherited, half-comprehended categories.

It is hard for gays to talk sensibly to each other about where we are and how we got here; the ideas by which we understand that ‘we’ and its emergence in time are so contested and confused. This makes gay thinking peculiarly dizzied, harried and disoriented. It is often in doubt whether there is any gay ‘we’ (or any gay thinking) —or whether ‘we’ do in fact wish for our talk to reach out to such a ‘we’ rather than merely confirm ourselves individually in what we already take ourselves to think and know.

In the following I will try to do two things at the same time. I will try to clarify the routes through history by which certain concepts have come down to us, and to trace their relationships and contradictions. Disentangling homosexual, gay, and queer, and the movements by which these terms were conceived and contested, may allow us to talk more with more clarity about the objects of our dis/agreement. At the same time, as I lay out—in a sketchy, rapid, and admittedly contestable fashion—this history, I will show how there came to be, at a few different times and places, a self-conscious articulation of the interest and pleasure that we take in talking to each other about ourselves, and of the desire to perpetuate ourselves individually and collectively that is adumbrated in this talk.

Our talking together both reflects and forms what Hannah Arendt (whose relevance to gays will become clearer over the course of this essay) called a world. Which is not a physical place. A world, in this sense, is what is communicable to a group of people, what they can hold together in their talk. It is also the set of practices by which that communicability is maintained (the fact, for instance, of our having a shared vocabulary and grammar, but also of our having reasonably similar psychologies and common objects of perception). Worlds can expand and contract, and also collapse. Whether we want to speak to someone about an apparently external object or an apparently internal thought, the possibility of our doing so successfully depends there being already a world that contains us, our intended interlocutor, and the topic we want to address.

We live in multiple worlds, each of us, simultaneously. A gay world is not a physically delimited space for homosexuals, but the possibility of our being able to talk in a certain way, to certain people, about certain things. A world might exist without our being aware of it. But when we do become aware of it, and when we become aware that this world—like any world—is not just there, but only exists insofar as it is actively sustained by its participants, we might begin to feel concern for it, even love. This feeling is distinct from feelings directed towards either other specific members of this world, or even to all of them as an imaginary collective. A care for the gay world is not a love of every particular gay or for a chimerical ‘gay people.’ It’s a wish to keep in being the practices by which gay men can, through their mutual speech, appear to each other and reveal to each other objects, experiences and aims of common import.

That there is a gay male world, and that there can be a love of that world was not obvious or uncontested fifty years ago and is not so now. At other points in history, the notion of such a world would have appeared ridiculous or evil, or simply been unthinkable. It might become so again in the future, and perhaps already is so in segments of the present.

My intention here is not, at least not directly, to defend the proposition that such a world exists, or claim that some particular group of people (homosexuals, gays—whether ‘normal,’ ‘based,’ or otherwise qualified) ought to care for it in their thinking and judging together. I mean more modestly to trace how such a world became, once, a subject of care. That is to say, how this world came to appear not just as a real-and-imagined assemblage of spaces, institutions, feelings, practices, codes, rituals, references, texts, images, or qualities, but as a summons to attend thoughtfully to its present and future possibilities. These possibilities could be understood as vital to the power of the individuals who participated in it to make and remake their own lives with greater freedom and pleasure.

Take the following account of that ‘history,’ which is and is not ‘ours,’ as provisional. It will necessarily be simplistic. It will suspend most of the references to the historiography, as well as the nuances and caveats requisite for academic discussion of the topic. As it tries to account for the conditions of possibility for what I’m calling a love of a gay world, it will recall the importance—and difficulty—of distinguishing among three key terms: homosexuality/homosexual(s), gay/gays, queer/queers. Each of these, and the debates around it, has a crucial bearing on how ‘we’ got ‘here,’ and on the tricky status of that ‘we’ and that ‘here.’

To begin with, homosexuality and homosexuals. These categories were created by doctors, psychiatrists, and jurists in the late nineteenth century. Elites of various sorts hoped to solidify their own status as experts with knowledge of (and power over) society by focusing on individuals/groups figured as deviant, marginal, and otherwise in need of explanation. No such group is simply, straightforwardly ‘real,’ although neither is any human group, or indeed any individual identity, personality, or self. We might be as suspicious of ‘homosexuality’ as we are of the categories offered by astrologists and pollsters—but, notice, those categories, for all their limitations and drawbacks and dependence on dubious intellectual systems, do allow some people to direct themselves through an uncertain present and future.

Some of those who brought ‘homosexuality’ into discourse urged that ‘homosexuals’ be treated with respect and tolerance. Others demanded measures against a supposedly threatening sub-population. Attention to the historical creation of the category ‘homosexual’ and its various uses by people identifying as homosexual or otherwise concerned with (the reform, protection, or elimination of) homosexuality has seemed a useful activity to thinkers from, say, the 1960s on. The French theorist of the history of sexuality and knowledge Michel Foucault is a prime example. Quite what we should do with the information that this attention has yielded, and continues to yield, is debatable. Crucially, thinking about what to do with the history of the concept of ‘homosexuality,’ and all the uses to which it has been put, presupposes that there is a group of addressees concerned: a ‘we’ identified, and perhaps identifying, as homosexuals (or who want to resist such identification), whose members have an interest in the right use (perhaps the abolition, or the reimagining) of the category.

I want, however, to put off a little longer talking about such a homosexually identified ‘we,’ although of course my participation in this volume shows that—like Foucault—I’m in it. And like Foucault in his lectures on parrhesia, or ‘fearless speech,’ I take it that the most important, interesting, and urgent sort of speech is directed towards a community of people with whom we are somehow in relation, with whose welfare we are concerned, and whom we take to be in need of hearing a potentially unwelcome truth that we understand ourselves to know. ‘Free speech’ in the absence of such a real-and/or-imagined addressees, like so much misguided gay talk, merely releases something previously internal to the speaker. It’s more like a fart than what Arendt and Denneny understood as judgment on action in a world. Foucault, as I read him, teaches us how to investigate the history of categories, how to ask questions about what we might choose to do with our findings, and how to talk to ‘our community’ about what we discover in light of what we decide.

But for a moment, before undertaking what Foucault calls the critical ontology of ourselves (that is, the story of how we got here), let alone before getting into any fearless speech, I want to keep for a moment more modestly with the ‘we’ composed just of you, the reader, and me, to remind you that there was before, is alongside, and perhaps one day will be after the category ‘homosexuality’ a widespread, if culturally and historically variable, understanding that (i) some men have sex with each other (ii) some men particularly enjoy it (iii) there is something like a type (or types) of man who enjoys it to a special degree.

This understanding expressed itself differently in the various city-states of ancient Greece than it did in different eras of ancient Rome, and so on across centuries and cultures. The type of man who especially likes sex with men has also, at various points in history, had places that he likes to go to consort with men like himself and/or the men he likes to have sex with. These have often been bars and bathhouses, or parks and streets. Such men, too, have sometimes, but not always, been understood to reveal themselves, deliberately or accidently, by their dress, gait, or speech—although such supposedly tell-tale marks have by no means been stable over time. These characteristics or behaviors sometimes have to do with what we might think of as ‘gender,’ although sometimes not (‘gender’ itself has become a very expansive concept in recent years). Sometimes they have to do with class—men’s particular enjoyment of sex with men can appear, depending on the culture and era, linked with aristocracy, the working class or urban poor, or the middle class.

Quite what accounts for the existence and varying visibility across time and space of men like this—and quite what men like this are like—was a question in the background of the creation of the category ‘homosexual’ some one hundred and fifty years ago. It continues to inspire debate. This question does not much interest me, in this essay or otherwise. What seems more salient to me is that there have been, too, in many times and places, men who risked (and sometimes lost) status, esteem, freedom, and life for the sake not only of a particular sexual pleasure but also for the sake of participation in the friendship, talk, play, memory, and emotions that could be found through the places and people that seemed connected to this pleasure. Whether or not that participation belonged to a distinct sort of world in the sense I outlined above is a question that would require both a historical and a philosophical analysis beyond the scope of this essay.

In the early twentieth century, however, there seems to have arisen with more self-evidence something like a homosexual world in Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany, with sites and venues for the production and spread of scholarship, poetry, and political writing in which the sex, desire, character, or community of the type of man who particularly desires men was represented and named as ‘homosexual’ by people who defined themselves as such. What this term meant, what was right conduct of oneself as a homosexual in this nascent homosexual ‘world,’ and what might be the proper destiny of the latter, were much argued-over among its participants. Positions ranged from pederastic/pedagogical conceptions of homosexuality, to elitist mysticism-tinged visions of homosexuals as a cultural vanguard, to democratic or socialist aspirations towards universal solidarity on a homoerotic basis. This world was crushed by the Nazis and the subsequent post-war conservative West German state.

In the United States, at the time, things were different. Here there are again large bodies of scholarly work the reader might consult, beginning with George Chauncey’s Gay New York. Take the following historical sketch as suggestive and perhaps provocative rather than as authoritative. In big cities, such as New York, sex among men in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and much of the culture associated with it, depended on the idea that more or less normal men (‘trade,’ we might say) desire a special type of male commonly called, at the time, a pansy or fairy, known in the era’s medical literature as an invert (understood to be, in some way, ‘internally’ like a woman rather than a man). Throughout history, and in many societies today, this is how sex between ‘men’ works: by making one participant a non-man, placing him in what is understood to be an inferior social role deprived of male status and privilege. The distinction between this sort of sex, and homosexuality, that is, sex between men understood to be, insofar as they are men, the same, is a crucial one—as crucial, indeed, as the distinction between ancient Greek forms of pederasty, in which sex between males was organized by a difference in age. While the cultural systems that governed sex between a ‘normal man’ and an invert, or an adult and a boy are part of the historical background out of the modern West in which our own homosexuality emerged, those systems had to be undone (or at any rate deprived of their dominant status and moral self-evidence) in order for the latter to be possible.

Over the course of the early and mid-twentieth century, this form of sex came to be displaced by a historically unusual way of organizing sex, desire, and identification—one premised on the idea that, whatever positions or roles they took in the sex act, and whatever their degree of masculinity or femininity, men who had sex with men were all of a common type. This type was sometimes called ‘homosexual,’ although there was indeed much debate during this period in both Europe and the United States about how the category of ‘the homosexual’ related to the category of ‘the invert,’ whether they were totally different, somehow connected, or the same thing.

By the middle of the twentieth century, for a variety of much-debated reasons ranging from changes in scientific, medical, psychiatric, and legal thinking to changes in the behavior and discourse of men who had sex with men, it became increasingly common in the United States for homosexuality to be dissociated from older notions of inversion, and thus from the dichotomy between pansies/fairies/inverts and the men who had sex with them. Instead, men who had sex with men, however effeminate, were increasingly seen to be, like the men they had sex with, as homosexual. With increasing frequency and significance over the decades of the mid-century, men who participated in the institutions associated with such sex—who went to bars, parks, and parties where such things might happen, or purchased magazines, photographs, and novels depicting such sex, desires, relationships, and places, or had friends who talked, wrote, and sang about all this—talked about themselves and what they did as gay.

There were several changes at work here, which we need to keep conceptually distinct even though they were related. First, on both sides of the Atlantic, some men who had sex with men started calling themselves homosexuals, taking up the term from its medico-legal context and incorporating it into the discursive practices by which they sustained the sites and rituals through which they managed their pleasures. In Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany, especially, the spread of the concept of ‘homosexual’—and its complicated relationship with the concept of ‘invert’—marked a period of newly creative, vibrant, and powerful thinking and acting around such self-identification as a man who desires men. This kind of identification was a resource by which individuals transformed themselves and created communities. We are still learning more about this era and its impact on the later development of a homosexual identity in the United States and elsewhere (dealing with the global expansion of this identity would be another essay, not to say a shelf of books), where that identity came to be associated—and then, as we will see, placed in a dialectical tension—with the notion of gay.

At different moments and in different places throughout modern Western history, men who have sex with men, using the ideas available to them at the time, started talking about themselves as a group and began to distinguish their self-conceptions from two alternatives represented by: (i) the medical, juristic, etc., experts who used the concept of homosexuality, along with a suite of related concepts, to police, surveil, and otherwise control them (ii) the model of inversion and the figure of the pansy.

In the first proposition, the ‘homosexual’ is the object of a presumably non-homosexual’s discourse about him, not a subject using the categories available to him to fashion, along with others, a discourse in which he can find more pleasurable possibilities for self-interpretation and self-fashioning. In the second, whatever mutual enjoyments and solidarities may link inverts to the men who have sex with them, they belong to different categories and do not have a basis for a common political, intellectual, and cultural life, even if they frequent, in order to find each other, the same spaces.

It’s not redundant, even if it sounds a little funny, to speak of a gay homosexuality arising in America some seventy-five years ago, distinct both from the historically novel homosexual culture of Germany a generation or two earlier, as well as from a prior American sexual system in which notions of inversion predominated over or were fused with notions of homosexuality. Out of this new ‘gay homosexual’ understanding could emerge not only a set of distinct spaces and practices associated with sex between men but also, at first precariously in the 1940s and 1950s, and then with growing confidence, intensity and numbers, a self-conscious culture, with political and social organizations, magazines, novels, poetry, and jargon.

This culture was exemplified in the work of the Mattachine Society—the organization for homosexual rights founded, among others, by activist Harry Hay, and its associated publications One and Tangents. These Los Angeles-based publications with small, but national and even trans-Atlantic circulation, published what are today almost entirely forgotten short stories, essays and pieces of reportage on the condition of male and female homosexuals, in a double (and sometimes contradictory) aim both to gain the sympathy of heterosexuals and to build homosexuals’ own collective self-confidence in the struggle for the repeal of, for example, laws barring their employment by the federal government.

Their work—earnest, practical and middle-brow in a manner typical of political/moral campaigns—was was distinct from another contemporaneous formation: the set of transatlantic elite cultural practices forming what W.H. Auden called the ‘Homintern,’ in which figures like himself maintained networks of sex, sociability, and artistic exchange that were meant to remain essentially clandestine or semi-clandestine, as well as a-political (Gregory Woods’ recent book Homintern is an excellent guide to the topic). In contrast, while many participants in the distinct culture around One and Tangents were closeted and wrote under pseudonyms, their essays, reportage, fiction, and poetry were intended to connect to a broader political effort on behalf of homosexuals, whom they understood not (as some members of the ‘Homintern’ did) as a cultural elite unconcerned with social problems but rather as an oppressed and misunderstood minority. They meant to be writing towards a future in which the closet would disappear.

As the American historian John D’Emilio explains in Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States, 1940-1970, the members of the One-Tangents network disagreed, throughout the period covered in his book. about what this political effort, to which their cultural work was meant to contribute, was going to do for homosexuals. For some, it was to liberate them from oppressive laws and attitudes so that they could be ‘like everyone else.’ Other members of the group argued that there was a distinct, vital culture among homosexuals (perhaps one that had recently emerged, perhaps one with roots of some sort reaching back into history, even into the very distant pre-Christian past), and that the flourishing of this culture was a political goal to be pursued alongside that of individual rights. We might see here, in these debates—or in the German ones that preceded them in the early twentieth century—the beginnings of a possibility for a love or care for a homosexual or gay world (and some of the arguments against it).

Such an ethic of love or care refers to, and thus depends on, the prior existence of an archipelago or system (or whatever your preferred metaphor) of sexual practices, sites, codes, roles, etc., towards which those bearing that ethic might take any number of attitudes and projects. This culture does not, in contrast, necessarily depend for its own existence on being loved by artists and intellectuals. Many artists and intellectuals we might subsequently identify as ‘gay’ could navigate this system without ever appealing to its members publicly as an audience. For example, in the 50s and 60s a young American poet like John Ashbery could ingratiate himself with Auden, befriend Frank O’Hara, or partner with Pierre Martory in cities on both sides of the Atlantic, in networks of sexual and cultural relation. Having sex with men was not only part of Ashbery’s erotic pleasure, but also a technology of the self by which he entered into many kinds of relationships (friendship, patronage, or literary influence and rivalry) with men by which he was able to become the kind of poet, and person, he sought to be. He did not mention his sexuality in poems intended for the public, or engage in politics. Rather than thinking of this as being ‘in the closet’ and musing about the queer affordances of opacity, I’d like to mark his stance as one of unworldliness or unconcern for the maintainenance and future of a domain of pleasures and relations he did not conceive, or at least did not address, as a world.

What the writers and thinkers aligned with One and Tangents sought to contest was this gap between a real, extensive, and in some ways culturally generative homosexual culture on the one hand, and on the other its lack of representation and consideration in the discourse of its most culturally salient members. The efforts of these One-Tangents intellectuals have not been much appreciated. In part, they were not as brilliant, in terms of aesthetic achievement, as the writings of, say, Auden and Ashbery. Perhaps the most prolific writer among them, the poet, essayist, novelist and pornographer Joseph Hansen (James Colton was his nom de porn), did not write anything that might be considered canon-worthy.

Ironically, and confusingly for purposes of distinguishing concepts, the oblivion into which this group has fallen is also due to the influence of a second generation of self-consciously ‘gay homosexual’ activists in the 1970s and 80s who were likewise concerned with political activism, social visibility, and the creation of a public, serious (or at least middle-brow) culture in which the forms of life particular to men who desire sex with men in the late twentieth-century urban United States could be represented, theorized, defended, recorded, improved, and argued-over. Through their work, gay as a term came to be associated doubly with a greater degree of political militancy as well as with a specific political-cultural agenda linked with concepts like ‘gay literature,’ ‘the gay novel,’ ‘gay criticism,’ ‘gay studies,’ ‘gay poetry,’ and ‘gay history’ (more on this later).

Those who used gay in this sense, clustered around organizations like the New York City-based Gay Academic Union, sometimes distinguished what they were doing from what they could unfairly characterize as the limited demands of the previous generation expressed in what they called the homosexual literature of both the Mattachine society (with its flat-footed requests for tolerance from the heterosexual majority) and the Homintern (with its techniques of indirection, allusion and self-protective vagueness) alike.

A central figure here was Michael Denneny (1943-2023). A student of Hannah Arendt, Denneny was the leading publisher and editor of what he helped position as ‘gay literature’ in the United States during the last quarter of the twentieth-century, through the magazine Christopher Street (1976-1995) and the Stonewall Inn Editions line at St. Martin’s Press. Denneny drew on Arendt’s notion of ‘world’ as the intersubjective space in which members of a community can perform ‘action’ to secure each other’s recognition and pass ‘judgment’ on such performances, and argued, with Arendt, that ‘politics’ meant above all securing the continuity and contributing to the vitalization of such worlds. With his allies, who ranged from Larry Kramer to Edmund White to Michel Foucault, he wrote of a gay world cherished, critiqued, intensified, embellished, remembered and projected into futures.

The attitude of Christopher Street’s editors and readers to figures like Ashbery or his poetic rival James Merrill was complex; reviewers in its pages lamented that the former evaded any public identification with or expression of concern for the quality of the gay world, while celebrating, in a landmark 1977 issue on art and poetry, Merrill’s presentation of his domestic life with his partner David Jackson in his new work (that issue featured Merrill alongside the poet and translator Richard Howard, photographers Peter Hujar and Arthur Tress, and others as distinctly gay artists[1] ). Literary scholars and historians in these ‘gay’ circles, such as the historian of fiction Roger Austen, the poetry critic Robert K. Martin, historian Martin Duberman, and scholar of French literature George Stambolian, criticized members of the Homintern and the One-Tangents scene, but also reached back into them and beyond them for chosen ancestors. To varying degrees, they framed a cohort of implicitly homosexual but not quite ‘gay’ (out, militant, concerned with a gay world) writers like Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams as problematic but nevertheless critical forerunners. More proximate, and still more problematic in some ways, were explicitly homosexual writers Gore Vidal and James Baldwin, whose novels seemed to document aspects of a transatlantic homosexual culture in a tone of gloom, as if homosexuality were an essentially sad and isolating fate and the culture connected to its practices not be a world, let alone a lovable[3] [bs4] one. The bars of The City and the Pillar and Giovanni’s Room are not places of conviviality or the shared enjoyment of common sensibilities, much less of the generation of shared self-consciousness, vibrant debate about the meaning of identity, or calls to cultural and political collective action.[1] The novels appeared (however they might appear to us now, in a far retrospect) at the time as grim reports on a doomed condition, not as sympathetic appeals to fellow members of the authors’ own group.

The efforts of the intellectual network around Denneny and Christopher Street are exemplified in such texts as the series of anthologies of short gay fiction Men on Men, edited by Stambolian; the writers of the ‘Violet Quill’ (most famous among them, Edmund White and Andrew Holleran) along with David Bergman’s literary criticism and scholarship on them; Denneny’s Arendtian 1981 manifesto ‘Gay Politics and its Premises,’ and Mark Blasius’ Foucauldian Gay and Lesbian Politics (1994). How that network was devastated by the AIDS crisis, how its members struggled to preserve what they understood to be the gay world throughout the 80s and early 90s, and what of that era survived, are, like many other topics raised so far, beyond this essay’s scope.

To make the point rapidly, something between one-half and two-thirds of gay men in New York City, the center of the Christopher Street network of writers and readers, died. In a harrowing interview in the April 1998 issue of Arts and Understanding, the leading cultural magazine for people with AIDS, Denneny recounted how many of the writers he published died as he was editing their work, the potential readers of which were also dying. What it meant for gay men, under these circumstances, to keep writing, reading and publishing—continuing precariously in the circuits of their literary pleasures the existence of a gay world that must have seemed about to disappear forever—can hardly be evoked here. But I would like to note in passing that while some of Holleran and White’s early novels have been recently republished, the apparatus of gay criticism by which they and, more crucially, the fiction that addressed AIDS (such as Robert Ferro’s semi-autobiographical novel Second Son, Paul Monette’s cycle of elegies Love Alone, or Mark Merlis’ historical novel An Arrow’s Flight) caught and sustained the serious, thoughtful attention of gay readers has passed out of print.

Denneny and his network, particularly through Stambolian and Bergman, were connected to the field of ‘Gay Studies’ as it was being developed in American academia. Denneny’s intellectual horizon had been shaped, essentially, by Arendt, as well as his friendship with the African-American feminist Ntozake Shange, who, like Arendt, emphasized cultural politics as a means of individual self-making and collective world-building. Stambolian and Bergman, literary scholars, were similarly interested in the emerging gay literature for its power to generate networks among readers within which possibilities for gay living (and the catastrophe of gay death) could be imagined, debated, and clarified. Connected, via Denneny, Edmund White, the poet/translator Richard Howard, and the sociologist Richard Sennent (who was briefly an ‘out’ gay man in the late 70s and early 80s), to the New York intellectual scene around the Institute for the Humanities (then at New York University), the Christopher Street scene maintained a certain dialogue with visitors and correspondents of the Institute such as Roland Barthes and, particularly, Michel Foucault. However, it had little or no connection to what we now call ‘Theory,’ the burgeoning combination of psychoanalytic, deconstructivist, and other Franco-German approaches becoming fashionable, throughout the 80s, in some American universities’ departments of literature—out of which contemporary ideas of ‘gender’ would arise.

Gay Studies, in fact, had a decidedly historical rather than ‘theoretical’ orientation. Even in the midst of the AIDS crisis, conferences and courses were given on the new gay literature of White and Holleran, and its ‘homosexual’ antecedents. At the same time, and to some extent in conversation with that field and the literature and politics it echoed, began what came to be called ‘Queer Theory.’ Queer—a term once linked primarily with same-sex desire—was theorized by academics, largely from departments of English, as a capacious term referring doubly to socially marginal minorities (sexual and otherwise) as well as, via psychoanalytic theory derived from Jacques Lacan and Jean Laplanche, to the disruptive, antinormative force of sexuality. Each of these formulations was intended to place people who might be identified as ‘gay’ or ‘homosexual’ men within a theoretical configuration that, it was thought, might enable to them to find new allies in a time of crises and to evade some of the problematic legacies of those identifications’ conceptual and political histories.

This position was in notable contrast to that sort of specifically gay identity advocated by Denneny, most forcefully in his 1981 manifesto. Far from his intentions had been the making of coalitions through capacious (or to critics, vague and meaningless) new formulations of identity not grounded in sexed bodies and distinct social forms but in appeals to generalized antinormativity. Nor had he conceived sexual identity in terms provided by psychoanalysis—a field widely seen as homophobic by the Christopher Street set; the magazine notably devoted a cover story to an attack on Christopher Lasch’s psychoanalytically-informed Culture of Narcissism, and found in Foucault French-theoretical support for its hostility to Freud.

Thinkers like D.A. Miller, David Halperin, Lee Edelman, Leo Bersani, Tim Dean, and Jose Muñoz (scholars of literature by training) debated how ‘queerness’ thus understood should be conceptualized in relation to the actually existing sexual, affective and institutional circuits of male-male desire, and to the histories of gay/homosexual identity. Their positions ranged from the most apparently ‘anti-identitarian’ (Edelman’s No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive) to the more recuperative and future-oriented (Muñoz’ Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity), but each of these theorists can be read as trying to preserve and augment gay male forms of life by reimagining them through a canon of largely Western European philosophical references. They attended little to the ‘gay’ culture promoted by Denneny and the writers of the Violet Quill, at times dismissing it facilely as a now-retrograde pursuit of ‘assimilation’ or ‘mainstream’ acceptance. Although, as my account has suggested, the network around Christopher Street rejected, sometimes too forcefully, the example of One/Tangents and of the Homintern precisely because it was not radical or anti-assimilationist enough—the history of gay male intellectual life in the United States is regrettably full of such misunderstandings and missed connections.

There is not space in this essay to develop the point, but what Queer Theory has become can be characterized, with a bit of (but not that much) caricature as an intellectual project by which more-or-less straight and/or queer-identified women (for example Eve Sedgwick, Sara Ahmed, Heather Love, or Jasbir Puar, whose work turns, variously queer theory towards broad social issues like imperialism or to supposedly fundamental human qualities like shame—away, that is, from sexuality, let alone homosexuality) draw on the intellectual capital of ‘queer’ to philosophize in ways having at best no relation (and sometimes outright suspicion of, and hostility to) the original agendas of what could be called gay male queer theory, let alone to the ethic of caring for the gay world articulated by Denneny. In the meantime, and in part because of the institutional success of ‘queer’ approaches, Gay Studies all but disappeared.

Today, there continue to be men who have sex with men, and we continue, I suspect, to imagine that such men are somehow ‘typed’ or ‘typable’ such that they can be, in many cases, ‘recognized’ even when not caught in flagrante delicto. How politically correct or intellectually defensible this imagining seems to be must depend on the context in which we are speaking. There continues to be an operative notion of ‘homosexuality,’ even if it too is questioned from many sides (are there sexes? Is believing so, and desiring only one sex—out of how many?—an exclusionary, essentialist violence?). There also continue to be institutions, sites, and practices by which men who might be described as homosexual meet not only to have sex with each other, but to make friends, have fun, talk, dance, etc. There continue to be political organizations and intellectual forums, inheriting elements of the complex heritages of the homosexual, gay, and queer movements, that engage in activism and produce discourse purportedly on behalf of those identified with the categories borne along by those movements (men who have sex with men, homosexual, gay, queer, the LGBTQIAA+ assemblage, etc.).

We might be skeptical about the value of the categories and legacies. We might lament the current state of the institutions through which the pleasures associated with such men are enacted—whether this would be because we think the bars are too commercial, the sex is too easily available (or not available enough), the bookstores too few (or too woke, or too white), and the books and magazines too stupid, tame, or superficially transgressive. We might likewise complain about the political and intellectual venues wherein the meanings and affordances of homosexual/gay/queer/etc. life are debated, arguing—as I have claimed—that the latter have been narrowed and distorted by networks with little interest in the specific problems of gay men or the possibilities of gay male culture. We might, finally, regret the lack of synthesis, or even productive interplay, among the fragments out of which that culture has come to be: the pioneering German experiment; the transatlantic Homintern; the mid-century militants of the Mattachine; Christopher Street and its world; gay male queer theory.

These fragments from history compose, along with our ongoing practices (themselves shaped, however little we know how, by that history), our world—I take it, perhaps wrongly, that we still do have a gay world to talk about, and that we have inherited from the multiple lineages that I’ve traced above not only circuitry of institutions, ideas, and identities by which to participate in and talk about this world, but also, however variously expressed, a wish to keep that world going, to preserve and improve it.

Foucault, a friend of Denneny, Sennett and Blasius, who appeared in Christopher Street and was inspired in his late work by the ideas he found in its milieu, formulated towards the end of his life an ethics and a politics of what he called fearless speech (in the Greek, parrhesia). This is not to be confused with free speech, or the expression of personal opinion permitted to all in a liberal society. Rather, it is a way of talking in which a speaker, at risk to himself, reveals to others a truth that he believes they do not yet know, are likely to find offensive, but of which they need to be convinced. Fearless speech is premised on the speaker and audience having a common fate. He is one of them, such that: their fate is of concern to him; he can be heard effectively by them; and that opinion of him (and possible response to what he says) is of great importance for his own life. Fearless speech, to combine Foucault and Arendt, is only possible where there is a world—and fearless speech might well be directed towards keeping that world in existence. Does gay culture still have forms of life that seem to its more intellectually inclined participants worthy of sustained, serious thinking and of the risks of fearless speech? Is it a world worth keeping?

I’d like to end by observing, in light of the historical and conceptual genealogies I’ve sketched above, how historically contingent and fragile is the idea of a gay world and the attitude of thoughtful concern for it. Its proponents suffered opposition, confusion, false starts, and catastrophes. We are under no obligation to ‘identify’ ourselves with it or with them, or for that matter with each other—although the wager of my appearing in this collection must be that we are already in whatever inchoate way concerned with our being somehow a we, and becoming through our shared talk a better one. A number of participants in this volume, whether under the sign of Foucault or in what they take to be opposition to his legacy, figure themselves as parrhesiasts—tellers of possibly unwelcome truths. In recalling the world that makes such speech possible, and the history by which that world came to be, we might also find in our own critiques of that world—its history, present and possible futures—a care to keep it in being, which one need not be embarrassed to call love.

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[1] The point perhaps is a debatable one. It might be objected that to show the circuit of gay bars, cruising, closetedness and so on in bleak tones was first of all accurate, and second a way to draw attention to a common plight, and thus perhaps to help it, which might be conceived indeed as a loving and word-oriented act. But given the conditions of publication and reception in the middle of the twentieth century, such novels could not be written for and directed towards gay men—that is, to an audience understood to be gay. Although many gay men did read them, and perhaps some were even in whatever way helped by doing so, contemporary reviewers of these books largely took them as signs of homosexuality’s fundamentally and irreparably grim character (which arguably was not far from Gore and Baldwin’s own perceptions at the time). To be able to write to and for a gay audience, supported by networks of gay publications, reviewers, and publishers, had to wait another generation—for the work of people like Denneny. This point is made most cogently in Roger Austen’s Playing the Game: The Homosexual Novel in America (1977), and in Stanton Hoffman’s “The Cities of Night: The American Literature of Homosexuality,” The Chicago Review, 55/56, vol. 17, issue 2/3 (1964), p. 195-206.