Sleeping with the Moral Majority

David and I have a new podcast episode out, discussing, with guest Daniel Lefferts, a 1982 article “Sleeping with the Moral Majority” in which a conservative activist who could be a ringer for Nick Fuentes got outed. It includes some factual errors made in serene confidence by me! Can you spot them?

Already in 1982 it was an open question whether outing such people works as a political tactic (conservative elites and electors don’t necessarily care that someone is a self-hating faggot—as long as he’s effective at hating their enemies, including gays), and whether it’s ethical (the author of the article worried that the outed conservative might kill himself—which, unfortunately, he didn’t!). And the media remains fascinated by ‘MAGA gays,’ ‘Trump’s A-list gays,’ the ‘gay tech mafia’ etc., as if it’s surprising, as if it’s in fact fascinating, that some homos are rich, right-wing, and terrible.

I’m more interested in the fact that all this can somehow be a subject of perennial interest. The evil ‘perverse’ gay living a double life, reveling in or ignoring his ‘contradictions,’ seems to a lot of gay and straight people the emblem of a kind of dark but gleaming freedom (the freedom to be awful, transgressive, compartmentalized, hypocritical, double, multiple, unbound by the laws one imposes on others) that these fascinated-horrified observers must feel that they have, as ostensibly self-coherent moral agents and members of the good team, renounced.

These spectators, I suppose, want to confront the evil gays (How can you support ____, you’re gay?) out of a wish to punish/destroy and/or fix/recuperate them. But the good gays have their own kind of dirty joy in seeing, say, Fuentes or Thiel or Milo or Santos etc keep getting away with it—as if contemplating such a vile person were a kind of relief from the burden of one’s own buttoned-up bourgeois strictures.

Which all just goes to show, I think, how played-out the whole pose of transgression—whether it’s through trying to revive cruising via Tiktok or insisting MAGA is the new punk rock, and whether one is enacting the pose or observing it—has become. It doesn’t make for good art or good politics.

Which isn’t to say we ought to give up the pleasures of what Kristeva (whose politics/aesthetics of the 1970s I sort of endorsed in one of my last Tablet essays) called ‘intimate rebellion,’ or being a little bit naughty and kooky without becoming a fascist—indeed I argue towards the end of the podcast episode that gays need to stop outsourcing their naughtiness to, well, their favorite podcasts or (un-)fascinating fascists.

But one of the challenges for gay culture, and perhaps for culture generally, is to come to terms with fact that The Transgressor, whether as punk, avant-garde artist, sexual revolutionary, satanic outcast, etc., is a boring, worn-out and needs to be struck from our repertory of personae.

In 1968, Ashbery, speaking of himself as artist but also surely thinking of himself as homosexual, gave a talk to some students at Yale that outlines the appeal of positioning yourself as a rebel.

Things were very different twenty years ago when I was a student and was beginning to experiment with poetry… in 1950 there was no sure proof of the existence of the avant-garde. To experiment was to have the feeling that one was poised on some outermost brink. In other words if one wanted to depart, even moderately, from the norm, one was taking one’s life – one’s life as an artist – into one’s hands. A painter like Pollock for instance was gambling everything on the fact that he was the greatest painter in America, for if he wasn’t, he was nothing, and the drips would turn out to be random splashes from the brush of a careless housepainter. It must often have occurred to Pollock that there was just a possibility that he wasn’t an artist at all, that he had spent his life “toiling up the wrong road to art” as Flaubert said of Zola. But this very real possibility is paradoxically just what makes the tremendous excitement in his work. It is a gamble against terrific odds. Most reckless things are beautiful in some way, and recklessness is what makes experimental art beautiful, just as religions are beautiful because of the strong possibility that they are founded on nothing. We would all believe in God if we knew He existed, but would this be much fun?

Ashbery, after all, when he was “beginning to experiment” as a student at Harvard faced the continual threat of exposure and expulsion—a number of his friends were kicked out for being homos, and while he was a student F.O. Matthiessen killed himself during the red/pink scare. He really did “take his life in his hands” and risked going “up the wrong road” (that is, the butt).

He goes on, however, to suggest that there are just as many, if not more, dangerous thrills to be found in understanding oneself as a practitioner of a tradition—not just believing in God, as it were, but being a member of a church:

It might be argued that traditional art is even riskier than experimental art; that it can offer no very real assurances to its acolytes, and since traditions are always going out of fashion it is more dangerous and therefore more worthwhile than experimental art… Therefore it is a question of distinguishing bad traditional art and bad avant-garde art from good traditional art and good avant-garde art. But after one has done this, one still has a problem with good traditional art... good traditional art may disappear at any moment when the tradition founders. It is a perilous business.

In a series of essays on Richard Howard, Tim Dlugos, Alan Ansen, Larry Kramer, and so on and so on, I’ve tried to make the case for post-war American gay literature—and post-war American gay identity—as a “traditional art” that might be a “perilous business” and therefore good, risky fun to inherit. Whether this will cure anyone from listening to Red Scare or writing another essay about MAGA gays, however, seems unlikely—but as the poet suggests, things are only beautiful insofar as they might be futile nonsense.