Love this. NLOG-ing should become a neologism that goes viral on queer tik-tok.
More sadly, I suspect that if you found yourself transported back to the 70s and 80s (maybe something AI will let us do someday!), you may have been very unwelcome in many of the exclusively gay male spaces of the time. NLOG-ing was a typical response to the stifling conformity. Dennis became a prime representative of the strategy. A better, but more difficult response was (and still is) to create new spaces altogether (and to be fair, Dennis did that, too). The problem is that any newly created space quickly became a place where you only belonged if you were also NLOG-ing in the right way. A performative coterie of conforming non-conformists. Quite the dilemma...
Well, I wouldn't be surprised if I were as popular and content in any time and place as I've been in the times and places I've actually inhabited, which is to say, not inordinately much.
It's not as though now I'm being invited to the A-list masc-for-masc fuck-parties or getting pushed out of the really cool windows by Peter Thiel (who seems to have murdered a second side-piece recently!)...so I probably wouldn't have gotten to kiki on Fire Island in 1975 with the really cool gays. But it's not that my desire to insist on the legitimacy of gay life/culture, disconnected from the intellectual-political matrix of LGBTQ+ sludge means a wholehearted endorsement of gay garbage, or that I am yearning for a world in which I can be a wholly non-complaining member of any group (a desire that seems as tragically naive as wanting to have a body in alignment with one's 'gender' 'identity')...
I want to stress that I'm not just celebrating the half-century-ago clone culture, which after all I wasn't alive for and which notably collapsed anyway in the disaster of AIDS... rather I've been interested both in what seem like some of its more exciting participants/spectators/products--Denneny of course, and Foucault, and one could also mention say Thom Gunn, Philip Gefter, etc... and also in the ways that that 'scene' and its supposed alternatives form rather a single complicated network, with Cooper actually quite close to Violet Quill guys for many years before he, like Gluck, turned on them... the significant differences between Cooper and Holleran, for instance, for me are much more about talent than about content (Holleran is also quite antinomian and wild and transgressive--he's more importantly just a much better writer)...
I think part of the problem is that people are imagining that identities like 'gay'--or identities like their 'natal sex'--somehow are quite restrictive sets of prescribed behaviors and norms rather than the factical platforms, the resources, for fashioning their own unique lives. Like you don't have to insist, "I'm not like other gays/girls/etc, I'm a cool/queer/non-binary/anti-establishment ____"... it's after all only by being a particular type of human being, always-already enrolled, without one's having chosen so, in certain categories that link one with some but not all other people, that one can participate in activities with other that allow one to 'become oneself'...
Cooper can become a queer edgelord for example because he's actually participating in more 'mainstream' literary networks with White and Picano (and writing for the straight press in LA and the art world etc), he can be performatively 'queer' about his gay identity only because gay publishing already existed and was able to launch his career. If he feels he's outgrown that and now should be free to write post-gayly about cutting up heroin-addicted teens or whatever, sure, but the point for me is that, this sort of denunciation of the categories and networks by which one becomes oneself is symptomatic of something wrong about our whole contemporary conception of identity. In the same way that being a fag doesn't mean I stop being male, and indeed it's only because I'm a man that I can be gay, so too being a contrarian edgelord doesn't mean Cooper stops being gay, or a gay writer...
I think people might be able to have a bit more ease, irony and generosity around categories, and less hysterical/psychotic insistence that they not be seen to be what they obviously are, if we could accept that the challenge of identity is not so much to find ourselves included, accepted, belonging etc in the just-right community (even such as Cooper's imaginary pantheon of queer rebels), much less to be perceived in the just-right way, but rather to have clarity about the ways we are already connected through our heritages, desires, practices, etc to groups about which we necessarily feel ambivalent (our families are the model for all the others--and no wonder 'mainstream gay culture' elicits such Oedipal rage from queers) but which make us who we are and which offer us the only means by which we can become who we want to be.
Well, yes—much is this would be words coming out of my own mouth, if I only had your passion and eloquence. Identity is a way in which we form a constellation around the social histories in which we come to understand our always conflicting bodies, behaviors, and desires. And those histories are not up to us—though we can add to them and reimagine what they were and are. We are ‘ourselves’ only in relationship to other people’s lives, and our rejection of how we might be seen is not counteracted simply by pounding our fists on the table against mommy and daddy. I suspect that identity is much less something one has than something one becomes, in fits and starts, and the only liberation (if such a word even makes sense) may be in sometimes attaching oneself to things one is not, in order to attain some clarity. Ease, irony, and generosity around all these issues is indeed in short supply nowadays.
(In your last installment, you promised to write more about what you liked as opposed to exposing the hypocrisy of what you don’t. I look forward to that!)
Love this. NLOG-ing should become a neologism that goes viral on queer tik-tok.
More sadly, I suspect that if you found yourself transported back to the 70s and 80s (maybe something AI will let us do someday!), you may have been very unwelcome in many of the exclusively gay male spaces of the time. NLOG-ing was a typical response to the stifling conformity. Dennis became a prime representative of the strategy. A better, but more difficult response was (and still is) to create new spaces altogether (and to be fair, Dennis did that, too). The problem is that any newly created space quickly became a place where you only belonged if you were also NLOG-ing in the right way. A performative coterie of conforming non-conformists. Quite the dilemma...
Well, I wouldn't be surprised if I were as popular and content in any time and place as I've been in the times and places I've actually inhabited, which is to say, not inordinately much.
It's not as though now I'm being invited to the A-list masc-for-masc fuck-parties or getting pushed out of the really cool windows by Peter Thiel (who seems to have murdered a second side-piece recently!)...so I probably wouldn't have gotten to kiki on Fire Island in 1975 with the really cool gays. But it's not that my desire to insist on the legitimacy of gay life/culture, disconnected from the intellectual-political matrix of LGBTQ+ sludge means a wholehearted endorsement of gay garbage, or that I am yearning for a world in which I can be a wholly non-complaining member of any group (a desire that seems as tragically naive as wanting to have a body in alignment with one's 'gender' 'identity')...
I want to stress that I'm not just celebrating the half-century-ago clone culture, which after all I wasn't alive for and which notably collapsed anyway in the disaster of AIDS... rather I've been interested both in what seem like some of its more exciting participants/spectators/products--Denneny of course, and Foucault, and one could also mention say Thom Gunn, Philip Gefter, etc... and also in the ways that that 'scene' and its supposed alternatives form rather a single complicated network, with Cooper actually quite close to Violet Quill guys for many years before he, like Gluck, turned on them... the significant differences between Cooper and Holleran, for instance, for me are much more about talent than about content (Holleran is also quite antinomian and wild and transgressive--he's more importantly just a much better writer)...
I think part of the problem is that people are imagining that identities like 'gay'--or identities like their 'natal sex'--somehow are quite restrictive sets of prescribed behaviors and norms rather than the factical platforms, the resources, for fashioning their own unique lives. Like you don't have to insist, "I'm not like other gays/girls/etc, I'm a cool/queer/non-binary/anti-establishment ____"... it's after all only by being a particular type of human being, always-already enrolled, without one's having chosen so, in certain categories that link one with some but not all other people, that one can participate in activities with other that allow one to 'become oneself'...
Cooper can become a queer edgelord for example because he's actually participating in more 'mainstream' literary networks with White and Picano (and writing for the straight press in LA and the art world etc), he can be performatively 'queer' about his gay identity only because gay publishing already existed and was able to launch his career. If he feels he's outgrown that and now should be free to write post-gayly about cutting up heroin-addicted teens or whatever, sure, but the point for me is that, this sort of denunciation of the categories and networks by which one becomes oneself is symptomatic of something wrong about our whole contemporary conception of identity. In the same way that being a fag doesn't mean I stop being male, and indeed it's only because I'm a man that I can be gay, so too being a contrarian edgelord doesn't mean Cooper stops being gay, or a gay writer...
I think people might be able to have a bit more ease, irony and generosity around categories, and less hysterical/psychotic insistence that they not be seen to be what they obviously are, if we could accept that the challenge of identity is not so much to find ourselves included, accepted, belonging etc in the just-right community (even such as Cooper's imaginary pantheon of queer rebels), much less to be perceived in the just-right way, but rather to have clarity about the ways we are already connected through our heritages, desires, practices, etc to groups about which we necessarily feel ambivalent (our families are the model for all the others--and no wonder 'mainstream gay culture' elicits such Oedipal rage from queers) but which make us who we are and which offer us the only means by which we can become who we want to be.
Well, yes—much is this would be words coming out of my own mouth, if I only had your passion and eloquence. Identity is a way in which we form a constellation around the social histories in which we come to understand our always conflicting bodies, behaviors, and desires. And those histories are not up to us—though we can add to them and reimagine what they were and are. We are ‘ourselves’ only in relationship to other people’s lives, and our rejection of how we might be seen is not counteracted simply by pounding our fists on the table against mommy and daddy. I suspect that identity is much less something one has than something one becomes, in fits and starts, and the only liberation (if such a word even makes sense) may be in sometimes attaching oneself to things one is not, in order to attain some clarity. Ease, irony, and generosity around all these issues is indeed in short supply nowadays.
(In your last installment, you promised to write more about what you liked as opposed to exposing the hypocrisy of what you don’t. I look forward to that!)