It’s been a while since I’ve written here, in part because I was trying to get the most out of my last weeks in Chicago. For the next five months I’ll be in Bulgaria on a fellowship, doing some work on Barthes and Kristeva—updating more frequently!—and otherwise living my Garth Greenwell Era.
Not really on the last one: I find his fiction about being a gay sadsack in Sofia—which 5 separate gay and/or New-York-book-world-types recommended to me as ‘good’ and ‘relevant’—vacantly intellectualized grayed-out sludge full of soporific, self-pitying utterly unsexy sex scenes and dragging sentences… I wasn’t surprised to find that he admires Anuk Arudpragasam’s A Passage North*, since both writers seem to have gotten the impression that the authors to imitate are James and Proust and that what’s to imitate about them are the meandering self-involvement and portentous musings about time, selfhood, etc., and not, you know, the humor, the characters (I of course love Basil Ransom and Charlus…), with their own particular ways of talking that make the narrators’ styles and pontifications bearable (this is something Andrew Holleran—also a great admirer of Proust—knows much better; that Greenwell gets to write the preface to the new edition of Dancer from the Dance is almost as a sad statement about the condition of gay writing as the fact that multiple people recommended his work to me!) Greenwell’s vision of life here—or anywhere—is so bleakly, tediously boring that I’m mystified what people like about it. That there’s fucking? Having been raised on nifty.org it doesn’t seem remarkable to me that someone writes about cruising or getting spit on—half the guys on there do it better than he does! Certainly no one is going to be reading Cleanness (what’s with these titles?) one-handed, or even with half a chub…
*Greenwell has offered an online class on this novel and its themes—you can also, for just 300 dollars, learn from the author of Cleanness how to say “yes to life.” Every author these days who wants to make a living must I suppose do some sort of Zoom-school therapy-grift: findom with an Iowa touch.
But this was not, readers, even the gay I meant to be complaining about! In the past few months I’ve accumulated some experiences that have made me reflect a bit more on my discussion with Dan Oppenheimer and Jamie Kirchick—which Dan titled “The Fall of the White American Gay” (to me this seemed to run the risk of just inverting the infamous iceberg of queer resentment, imaging the poor circuit guys clinging drowningly at the bottom and the fat brown femmes dancing on top)[1] and white gay academics’ relationship to wokeness.
First, I read a Twitter-friend’s dissertation, which (without doxing!) was about white men in some corner of American fiction, looking at their masculinity in such a way that not only reveals to anyone in academia that the author must be gay but with such particular angles that, if you know anything more personal about his sexual interests, you can see how horny must have been writing it (I’m more sensitive such things now that I’m dating an Asian; my dissertation was on French Orientalism, which at the time didn’t seem be any kind of sublimation! But you never know how a future version of yourself might make you out to have been unknowingly horny all along). All perfectly normal—except that it was finished a couple years ago, in what everyone is now saying was Peak Wokeness. So the dissertation begins and ends with histrionic declarations about the dangerous, crypto-fascistic evil radiating from white maleness, especially in its homo-eroticism.
Now one way to understand this would be to think of it the way I think of Ben Miller, the Bad Gays guy, who is clearly into Tom of Finland-type leather shit, but also into sniffing the farts of Yasmin Nair and the intersectional queer left (he declares in his book that the gay male project has failed because gay men are too white, too monogamous, and too capitalist)—I take it that the friction between his sexual-identitarian investments in costume machismo and political investments in being a spiritual eunuch of the wokescold seraglio is precisely what he gets off on; he has to imagine being into leather is somehow fraught, bad, problematic, etc. in order for it to be really hot. Or maybe it’s just a contradiction! (I am unfortunately easily tempted by the pleasures of nonsense psychologizing—just like Miller, who once went on a Twitter-spree about how I must be terrified of sex because I think Eve Sedgwick is a dorky fujo).
But I think—and what the friend said—is that he added that this all in at the last minute, panicked, trying to get his committee to accept a dissertation that otherwise examines, with lovingly prurient interest, such a problematic and unfashionable group as white men and such a passe topic as their maybe being gay for each other. Of course, he may have sincerely believed all the nonsense he wrote at the time, and only since been disillusioned and embarrassed (Peak Wokeness!), but either an external or internal censor had to be satisfied in order for the dissertation to be written.
I say had to but no one really knows in such situations what has to be said. I’ve talked with numerous friends (including friends of the substack—hi!) about the punches they’ve pulled in academic writing, whether trying to avoid the perception of being unwoke, or just not wanting to miss a ‘good opportunity to shut up,’ as the French put it, when they could say a truthful but dangerous thing about the quality of another author’s work). You have to sell your soul, but instead of all at once, in the presence of a written contract, it’s piece by piece, never knowing the terms.
Second, I corresponded in the last several weeks with two white gay male academics who have recently written books about some or other white gay men. I’d liked the books, so I emailed the authors, both of whom were, on the one hand, nice enough to respond, and indeed to correspond with me for a few rounds—but both of whom also, having clearly googled me, were at pains to make me understand that they did not share my inappropriate views on XYZ.
One of them, when I mentioned a recent book on the history Fire Island by Jack Parlett (another book on white gays by a white gay), and lamented that it had a chapter on the evils of “body fascism” (putting dead queens on blast for going to the gym! How exclusionary to live for male beauty—or even just to enjoy the privilege of being able to take your shirt off at the beach), said that “just between us” he agreed that it was a stupid concession to political correctness, the sort of thing you have to say to get your white-gay-on-white-gay book published (of course, my correspondent had done much the same in his own book!)
If gays want to appear in academic/mainstream presses, as authors and subjects, they better do some self-flagellation—but not the hot Mapplethorpe kind! Maybe this is a more advanced sort of sadomasochism. While idiots like me are still getting their balls punched the old-fashioned way, Parlett and such have moved on to the more cerebral pleasures of feeling bad that the bodies they lust for are incipiently fascist, radiating dark and deadly energies of privilege—oof! I’ve been a bad boy…
Another academic I’d corresponded with, whose monograph began with a searing, brilliant critique of contemporary queer theory’s homophobia—of the way non-gays like Jasbir Puar attack gay men as “homonationalist” embodiments of everything she hates about the West, modernity etc (echoing both the online extremist trads and the old Soviet line), and the way white gays like Lee Edelman, Leo Bersani, Tim Dean, etc., pathetically fail to defend themselves by figuring gayness as an essentially negative force of self-shattering, refusing to think of male homosexuality as organized around a desire for the same let alone for maleness but only ever as a Lacanian exercise in breaking the ego open (thus laying the ground work for Chu, who conceives both femaleness and Asian-American-ness as an absence that desire spirals us into), as some empty ascesis—hurriedly backed away from his polemic in response to my praise, as if horrified that someone like me agreed with him, or recognized the essentially unwoke core of what he’d written.
Ever since these exchanges I’ve had, after the initial glow of self-righteousness I get whenever someone else shows themselves to be an intellectual weenie, a current of regret that I was not smart or self-controlled enough to play this game. After all, if being a white gay man in academia working on white gay male topics requires putting in an intro and conclusion, or a middle chapter, with some transparent ideological bullshit, this isn’t any more burdensome than academics in the Soviet Union having to add some citations of Lenin before getting on to business. Readers know to ignore those bits.
There’s something terribly, sickly sensitive about the sort of person—me!—who can’t hold his nose and write the DEI statement. And then I wonder how many people—surely a minority—are true believers in this nonsense, and how many are just doing the real Straussianism, keeping an alive through a new political-moral dispensation the possibility of doing gay studies through a strategic use of largely external, decorative, harmless ‘queer’ intersectional vogueish rhetoric. By denouncing it/them, by excluding myself from academia with polemics against wokeness, aren’t I just making life harder for the reasonable people trying to perpetuate the thing we both care about?
I’ve heard from a number of people (academics, journalists) that they sympathize with this or that critique of the state of gay studies and writing, or the relation of gay men to wokeness, but can’t speak out about it because they don’t want to be seen to be on the same side as Andrew Sullivan, Ron DeSantis—and maybe me! It’s something of the thought that, if only all the criticism of X were coming from respectable bona fide progressives, then we could criticize X too… but since many of the anti-X-ers are crazy, stupid, etc., we must defend or remain silent about X. Which of course sounds retarded and contemptible thus formulated. But it could just as well be said that someone like me or Sullivan (not a combination I relish!) is just a kind of village atheist, a zealot of unbelief who can’t imagine that wiser people, having likewise seen through simple-minded faith, prudently go along with the beliefs of the multitude in order to protect themselves and, hopefully, to moderate and subtly alter the beliefs of the sincere. Too dumb or intemperate for Strausso-wokeism.
Indeed the person who orders us to “live not by lies” is really telling us to make life unlivable for ourselves and our neighbors, since we can hardly get along with others—or even be a coherent self—without some basic deceptions. A refusal to live in untruth is in this sense just a sort of incontinence, leaking truth (which ought to remain inside us until it can be appropriately deposited) into the diaper of fearless speech.
[1] If you listen, you can hear my discomfort with the framing, by which gays, having had a moment of ascent in the ‘progressive stack’ (that is, in the sympathy of left-liberal media, academia, our national sub-elite common sense), have been pushed back down in recent years, displaced by other groups and by narratives that present cis-gender white gay men as perhaps particularly pernicious vectors of retrograde values and certainly as the worst members of the queer assemblage. (It’s not that this is wrong, exactly, but it participates in what I also don’t like about Richard Hofstader’s analysis of “pseudo-conservative” right-wing maniacs in terms of their “status politics”—I don’t know if Hofstader invented this sort of analysis, but he seems at least like a critical figure in the dissemination of a way of reading political and cultural trends that deals with them in terms of semi-real, semi-imagined “types” and the supposed resentments that drive them to think of politics largely in terms of symbols and fantasies rather than material interests [as he himself was rather doing]… so for him, McCartythism’s supporters are downwardly mobile WASP elites and upwardly mobile ethnic whites united by their need to demonstrate ‘Americanism’ by bashing Washington insiders and the professoriat as Un-American Pinkos. People seem to get a lot out of thinking through types of guy in this way, tracking their relative fortunes in our national imaginary, speculating about their psychological traits—and we seem moreover to enjoy speculating about why other people are so sadly deranged as to be incapable of rational politics organized around material interest, as if this were rather not our general condition. And I’m not sure why resentment, if it really is a kind of universal psychic engine—an equivalent to sex in other mytho-psycho-schemata—should be a bad thing. Which I guess means I should embrace the iceberg)
"...the diaper of free speech." Yep, yep, and yep. Makes me want to write a joke whose punchline is "Well, it Depends."
Would love to know what the book by the second academic you mentioned is