Whitney's Review of Bad Gay Writing

I have promised myself that my personal Project 2025 will be to stop writing about stuff I dislike, and if possible to stop reading stuff I know in advance I’ll dislike. Not that I think it’s bad to write about bad work—indeed, it’s important! ‘now more than ever’ to retain a capacity for disliking and expressing dislike of things that don’t meet standards, especially when they circulate in ‘our own’ groups, networks, communities of taste etc. But I’ve felt myself doing rather a lot of it, and I want to move into a different mode. Although, I have also already agreed to review a novel about which I know nothing, so there’s a solid chance I’ll dislike that… All this, however, is only preamble to my last official act of hating for the year: my complaints about the Whitney Review of New Writing. The museum (and cotton gin) people must be seething that their good name has been appropriated for this zooshy broadsheet of art-world-adjacent scenester crap:

It’s by no means all or mostly gay guys writing for this—lots of women, like the always lolsy Olivia Kan-Sperling; and straight men, like the totally-no-longer-autistic Tao Lin (way to go, Tao!). But there are an awful lot of NYC gays, white and Asian, writing in a particular terrible style that I thought worth trying to unpack. Why are we like this?

First up, gaysian artist Oscar Yee Haw! on Simon Wu—whom readers may remember I think is an evil idiot for saying of gay artist dying of AIDS in the 80s Ching Ho Cheng that his late (dying! of AIDS!) work was giving “Body Party.” OYH is best known for semi-erotic art of himself as a sexy cowboy, miner, etc, which according to Simon Wu is somehow a commentary on the murder of Vincent Chen and not just an embarrassing retread of the Village People? It’s giving murder party. Slay.

OYH, for his part, seems to suggest that Wu is a whiny loser who isn’t great at thinking, although he frames this in the nicest possible way, as if loserdom were radical vulnerability, yellow affect, queer something something:

I love the opening paragraph’s lazy, disorganized list. Fuckability and the ISP? All in one consciousness? Amazing. And the metaphors! Desire is a bloody spine clinging in the shadows of negation. The rhetorical questions, the dramatic dashes. And through it all, even when crying about how his white boyfriend likes Asians (frankly, I cry when [hot] Asian guys don’t like white [bottom]s, but to each her own, as the Bible says), the joy.

There’s a mix here of registers that carries across all the other annoying gay guys’ writing—one that I recognize, of course, from my own. The combination of theory-terms (negation, ontological, desire, abjection, bourgeoisie), however mis-used, showing that the writer has some familiarity with academia and a ‘Theory’ blend of Marxism, psychoanalysis, and post-Hegelian philosophy all turned to the purpose of illuminating a particular sort of ‘experience’ that presents the subject as 1) a sex-haver 2) also sad 3) but nevertheless persisting. This experience, thus illuminated, is imagined as bearing back upon on the life of one’s ‘identity’ group/s—although both the Theory-laded reading of oneself and the self-presentation as an emblematic person have to be heavily ironized, wrung through ambivalences and hesitations, in a tone of Carrie Bradshaw meets Kafka (I couldn’t help but wonder, is hope possible, but not for women in their 30s?).

The writer-subject enacts a kind of weak heroism, carrying on despite their inability to access imaginary plenitude, finding fleeting moments of meaning, tarrying in uncertainty (although of course such a person knows exactly who they are and what they are doing) like any liberal doofus (although ofc these people think they have left politics), never getting around to admitting to straightforward, uncomplicated enjoyment. It’s a dumbed-down, democratized version of the self-stylization I described in my critique of Butler’s early work. Those whom the latter doesn’t make gender-monsters it makes this sort of whiny navel-gazing ‘desiring subjects’ who can’t seem to handle having a fuck tossed at them without either crying about it or trying to assess its politico-philosophical significance.

Let’s get one more sad Asian in before we turn to whites:

Mak’s essayist bf Drew Zeiba also has a dumb review in this issue, although Zeiba doesn’t mention Mak in return—trouble in paradise? Anyway, I love that this starts with Mak framing himself (lol so relatable) as totally meaning to learn about Black people, wow, Afro-centrism, so important. Especially now. Centering voices. I'm going to get around to it. I love the ironic distance Mak keeps imposing between himself and the book under review—it’s shit for BCH fans, its aphorisms are so silly as to be repeated to emphasis their ridiculousness (it’s a stream, lol). But also, maybe? it’s worth trying?

This is of course another mode of dithering, tarrying, or whatever else people not smart enough to come around and say something do to fulfill our generalized postmodern imperative to pursue a ‘non-teleological dialectic’, which is philosophy talk for unseriously fumbling around with ideas about having ideas, since actually just thinking and acting on what we think seems impossible or evil or retrograde or cringe. The notion of getting into a self-help book is a joke, which doesn’t mean one isn’t doing it anyway. The joke is told through supposedly embarrassing but possibly false confessions that aren’t taken as embarrassing anyway, through aphorisms to which one maintains an ambivalent relationship, through a logic of ‘not me being a self-help/BCH fan; not me having an actual opinion.’

Girls are like this even about shoes. Witness Max Steele, who has been in my brain ever since I discovered his shitty band on Myspace in high school (their page no longer exists, but here’s them on Youtube):

What I like here are the declarations. We’re all runners now! (A correspondent recently told me we’re all bisexual now, now being since 2022) These claims are meant to be, I guess, provocative? conservation-starters? fun? But, well, we’re clearly not runners or bisexuals all, since I haven’t eaten pussy since 2008 or run from or towards anything ever.

I also like, of course, the nonsense questions, but those are in all the other essays, too. And like those reviews, this one has lots of short little stabby sentences meant to glitter with exciting adjectives or turn paratactically in unexpected directions. Wow, so quirky! You never know what’s going to happen when post-New-Narrative prose is around! All this spinning in place is bound to get us somewhere.

Finally, the co-host of Celebrity Book Club is also a writer and apparently is lonely.

Are freelancers lonely? Is being perceived accurately terrifying? Do lesbians love Timmy? Steven Horst Wessel Lied probably doesn’t actually think so—these opinions make up a little persona behind which he can play. Although maybe he is serious about Instagram captions:

Here I rather wish for the fractured irony and tarrying questions of all the other reviews! I have to generously assume SPH (lol) is doing a bit, working himself up into a froth for our amusement. And I did laugh at “do not feign the revolutionary’s clandestine panache.” If this clumsily indignant seething is the voice of non-ironic gay cultural commentary, I must, with regret, rejoin Steele, Mak, Hou in the Interior Illusions Lounge.

Clearly, all this gets on my nerves because it’s been in my blood (my prose that is) in the first place. The taking up of a stance of outraged grievance against tiny cultural annoyances, the pseudo-transgressive posture of ethical abjection (see what a bad boy I’ve been!), the shuttling (that’s a Whitney Review word) back and forth between the discourses of Theory and gay slang that’s more dated—as Max Steele might say—than poppers left out over a long weekend, I resent what I resemble. Grist for the mill of resolution-making, surely. But, as Janet Jackson said when asked, c. 1990 how she compared to Madonna, I’d say that the difference is “what I do has class to it.” And I don’t do rhetorical questions!