For those of you who read German and want to spend 35 euro, my friend and co-author Tae-ho Kim and I have an essay on Michael Denneny, Arendt and Foucault out in the latest Jahrbuch Sexualitäten. Since I don’t know why anyone would want to read me in German, I’m posting the English below.
If you’ve read my other essays on Denneny and Arendt, some of it will be familiar, but there’s new perspective thinking them in relation to Foucault, offering an alternative intellectual genealogy of gay cultural politics.
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Building a Gay World: Michael Denneny between Arendt and Foucault
Michael Denneny (1943-2023), co-founder and co-editor of the pioneering gay magazine Christopher Street (1976-1995), gay newspaper New York Native (1980-1997), and gay publishing line at St. Martin’s Press, Stonewall Inn Editions, began his recently published collection of essays On Christopher Street (2023) with a quotation from his mentor, Hannah Arendt (1906-1975):
Only in our speaking with one another does the world, as that about which we speak, emerge in its objectivity and visibility from all sides. Living in a real world and speaking with one another about it are basically one and the same.
It is no exaggeration to say that Denneny’s career as a gay cultural activist was a way of putting into practice Arendt’s thought as condensed in this citation. Across the writings collected in On Christopher Street, which range in date from the beginnings of the magazine to just before Denneny’s death, he frequently referenced Arendt, and consistently grounded his view of gay politics in her work.
Perhaps more than anyone in the critical decades of the 1970s and 80s, Denneny helped to build a gay literary and intellectual “world” against a homophobic mainstream and amid the catastrophe of the AIDS crisis. He was inspired throughout by his interpretation of Arendt’s philosophical writings alongside her earlier activism in Jewish relief organizations amid the disasters of the 1930s and 40s. His vision—so crucial to the creation of modern gay identity in the United States—owed much to her unique understanding of Zionism as a struggle to build a new “world” for modern Jewish life in its diversity. He read her later theoretical work through the prism of her earlier political engagement, and translated both for the needs of American gay men. Yet the importance of Arendt’s example, as interpreted by Denneny, for the emergence of gay culture, remains almost totally ignored in the field of gay history and in the ever-growing number of academic and popular reappraisals of Arendt.
Denneny’s understanding of his mentor’s legacy informed the sensibility of Christopher Street. In turn, the magazine itself, along with the New York and increasingly national gay culture it documented, inspired Michel Foucault as that philosopher began to consider how a distinctly gay male—rather than merely homosexual—culture could be a beacon of freedom amid an increasingly routinized modern society. Foucault, in fact, analyzed the latter in terms quite similar to those of Arendt and Denneny in their own critiques of modernity. Like them, he came to argue that the best hope for the survival of human freedom lay not in traditional norms of abstract, universal human rights enshrined in texts and protected by official institutions (that is, in the historical mode of political liberalism), but rather in specific communities devoted to creating new practices, pleasures and identities, in a spirit of political engagement that could serve as a model for other groups. Of these, he took the new gay culture of America, of which Denneny’s publications were a key site, to be one of the most inspiring. In that sense, gay liberation—as an exemplary model of collective freedom to forge new ways of being together—mattered deeply to straight people, whether they knew it yet or not.
While Denneny’s intellectual achievements, and Arendt’s importance for gay liberation, have been rather ignored by academics, Foucault’s thought, in contrast, has been systematically misunderstood. His work on sexuality has often been interpreted both within and outside the academy as evincing a total skepticism about the very idea of gay identity, and thus (from the perspective both of certain queer theorists and of gay commentators wary of postmodern ‘Theory’) as intellectually undermining the legitimacy of specifically gay male culture and politics. This long-standing misunderstanding evaporates on closer inspection of Foucault’s relationship with Denneny and Christopher Street, and reveals how his positions—widely perceived as radically anti-identitarian—shared common ground with the particular form of ‘identity politics’ theorized and practiced by Arendt and Denneny. The latter, indeed, not only deserves to be better appreciated as a key figure of modern American gay life for his editorial work, but as one of its most important thinkers, whose writings can lead us to re-evaluate the intellectual genealogy of the present.
From this vantage we can see afresh what modern gay male identity as it arose in the United States from the 1970s on owes to unsuspected thinkers like Arendt, how it influenced Foucault in ways still largely unrecognized, and why commonplace distinctions between ‘radical’ and ‘assimilationist’ or ‘moderate’ fail to clarify what, in fact, was so wildly radical—that is, unprecedented, open-ended, and enfranchising—about gay life as mirrored and created in Denneny’s publications.
Denneny discovered Arendt—or vice versa—while an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, where she taught (as a member of the Committee on Social Thought) from 1963 to 1967. The working-class son of a New Jersey Irish-American family, Denneny worked in the faculty dining room as a busboy to cover his expenses. As Keith Kahla, Denneny’s former assistant at St. Martin’s press, told Blake Smith over email:
Michael always was a friendly, chatty person and when she was there and he was cleaning the table, they'd talk. When she showed up at the end of the dining hours, and he was about to finish his shift, sometimes he'd sit down and they'd talk at greater length. He started to notice that she was always coming in at the end of his shifts and those conversations became regular, wide-ranging and extensive - becoming the basis of their relationship.
Arendt convinced Denneny—who was planning to join the newly-founded Peace Corps—to stay on at Chicago for a PhD, which she supervised before her departure in 1967 for New York. While he remained at Chicago after her departure until 1971, working notably with art critic Harold Rosenberg (later serving as his literary executor) and taking a prominent role in the student unrest of 1968 (for which the arch-conservative novelist and member of the Committee on Social Thought Saul Bellow tried to have his graduate funding removed) Denneny eventually quit the program without finishing his dissertation. He followed Arendt to New York, and continued to attend her seminars (now at the New School for Social Research) as he began work in publishing at St. Martin’s Press.
Denneny’s nearly-completed PhD dissertation was on the concept of ‘taste’ in early modern Europe, a subject apparently unrelated to politics of any kind, let alone the politics of gay culture. But this historical-philosophical investigation was close to Arendt’s own concerns in the last years of her life, as she developed the idea that aesthetic judgment, as theorized by Kant, was vitally relevant to our modern political situation.
As Denneny described it in a letter to Arendt in 1971, the idea of taste concerns not just how we form aesthetic preferences, but also how we talk with other people about them in the absence of fixed, certain rules or canons of value. When we disagree with other people over matters of taste (asking questions of each other like, “Is this a good movie? Is this a beautiful man?”), we are, on the one hand, unwilling to simply declare our liking and disliking to be purely subjective and thus without meaning for others. But we are also unable to point to some universally agreed-upon standard. Thus we are in a tricky kind of middle position, neither dismissing the whole topic as a matter of strictly personal preferences that need no justification because they cannot matter to other people, nor imagining that some arbiter, an enlightened third party or established rule, can settle the argument for us.
We are obliged—if we mean to keep on talking to each other at all—to appeal to each through rhetoric strategies that Kant, as Arendt reminded Denneny, called “wooing,” with deliberate resonances of romantic-erotic seduction. We fall in love—or go to bed—with someone, after all, neither because they meet universally valid criteria for loveableness, nor prompted by an entirely unreasoning drive, but because in their particularity that person is somehow a convincing exemplar of qualities we may not even have suspected were so desirable prior to meeting them. We are in someway convinced by them.[1]
Taste, Denneny wrote to Arendt, is what we need in situations where neither pure whim nor logical rules can operate. Such situations are not uncommon, and indeed, he argued, we can see them as characteristic of our modern world-situation in which traditional standards have disappeared not only from our aesthetic life (no one now judges a play based on its adherence to the Aristotelian unities) but also from morality and politics. Seen in this light, taste assumes a far greater importance as the new faculty that allows one to orient himself without fixed points of support in a world where traditional modes of valuation have collapsed and one is confronted constantly with movement, novelty, and the possibility of deception and the necessity of choice.[2]
A few months later, after he abandoned his dissertation to move to New York and pursue a career in publishing, Denneny wrote to Arendt, quoting from this earlier letter: I shall get a dose of my own thesis and “learn to orient myself in the world without fixed points of support.” [3] The description, of course, fit his own personal position of being nearly thirty and jobless in a new city, and the general predicament of our modern era as he had described it, with its characteristic decline of traditional values, but also, as a middle layer between these individual and world-historical levels, the socially specific problem of gay men discovering themselves as they build a community in post-Stonewall New York. At all three levels of analysis—individual, universal, and mediating them, the communitarian—taste named for Denneny the means to orient oneself, through the use of pleasure, in the world, and thus to remake it.
After Arendt’s death four years later, Denneny arranged for the publishing house that by then had hired him, St. Martin’s Press, to publish The Recovery of the Public World, a volume of essays by scholars dedicated to what he took to be the major theme of his mentor’s work. He emphasized the role of taste, or what Arendt more often called “judgment,” the exchange of ideas about aesthetic, ethical, and political values, in making a “world,” a community grounded in both objective reality and our debates about our different perspectives on it. Denneny’s contribution, “The Privilege of Ourselves: Hannah Arendt on Judgment,” his only academic publication, is frequently cited by scholars of Arendt for the invaluable light it throws on her late work.[4] But it should read in terms, first, of Denneny’s dissertation (and its own possible influence on Arendt’s final, posthumously published work), and secondly, of his decision in the mid-70s to ‘out’ himself as a gay publisher. Indeed, the essay and dissertation together can be interpreted as a way of implicitly theorizing the purpose and stakes of the new form of gay cultural politics Denneny was helping to invent.
While there were doubtless many closeted gay men within the mainstream New York publishing houses of the 1970s, and a handful of openly gay publishers (such as Felice Picano and Winston Leyland) at small independent presses throughout the country, there was, before Denneny, nothing like a publicly gay man at one of the major publishing houses—let alone one developing a line of fiction and non-fiction written by gay men for gay audiences, chiefly about the burgeoning gay culture. Outing himself and creating the Stonewall Inn Editions line at St. Martin’s opened new doors for dozens of gay writers over the following two decades.
Even more momentous was Denneny’s participation in the founding of Christopher Street in 1976. Along with collaborators like Charles Ortleb and the writer Edmund White, Denneny created a space where gay men could speak to each other about a range of concerns—from literature to politics to sexuality—in a publication aimed at reproducing the mainstream, intellectually sophisticated tenor of that era’s The New Yorker for a specifically gay male audience. Its role in promoting writers like Andrew Holleran and George Stambolian, whose work laid the foundation for ‘gay literature’ in the modern sense, can hardly be overstated—nor can its role in solidifying the aesthetic and habitus of urban gay men of that era.
While other gay magazines featuring fiction, serious essays and what we might call ‘lifestyle pieces’ existed, like the slightly earlier San Francisco-based Vector, Christopher Street soon became the most widely-circulating and highest-profile among them. Notably, unlike many other North American gay publications such as The Gay Alternative and Fag Rag, Christopher Street was, although hardly apolitical, not programmatically aligned with socialism or feminism. Rather it represented a commitment to nurture a gay public sphere in which ideas could be exchanged among gay men of different viewpoints (in the early years, however, quite a number of letters to the editor did complain that one set of gay perspectives was consistently excluded: that of pedophiles. The editors’ insistence on a magazine for gay men was directed in large part against this group).
Understood in this context, the title of Denneny’s volume in tribute to Arendt—The Recovery of the Public World—is revelatory. A “public world,” the discursive possibility of speaking to a multitude of other people about what each of us perceives, understands and takes to matter—about topics of taste or judgment in the most extended sense—was first of all invaluable, and second, endangered. As Denneny elaborated in his essay, “The Privilege of Ourselves,” this was a warning that resounded throughout Arendt’s work, in response to the catastrophes of the early and mid-twentieth century. She had argued that totalitarianism—a political system founded on the utter impossibility of freely speaking out about issues of common concern, the systematic imposition of falsehoods and ideological pseudo-realities—was the most radical expression of the disappearance of a “world” in modern societies, but by no means the only one. In the apparently triumphant post-war liberal democracies, Arendt—and Denneny echoing her—feared that conditions for the true exchange of perspectives were increasingly insecure, eroded by the rise of mass media, social atomization, and stifling pressures for conformity.
In her classic work The Human Condition (1958), completed shortly before Denneny began studying with her, Arendt outlined a grim vision of modern life in which politics—the possibility of people self-consciously undertaking activities in common that matter, and creating something new in the process—was disappearing. As she defined it, the essence of politics was not, primarily, the distribution of goods throughout a community; she rather saw this, and indeed dismissed it, as social rather than political. Her contempt for what she saw as the merely social was rooted in the sense that it entailed practical problem-solving that could be reduced to rules and routines, leaving little room for the meaningful exercise of unpredictable judgment. In principle, society—understood as the domain in which our material needs are to find their satisfaction—can be administered by an artificial intelligence or a bureaucracy in which no agents enjoy the ability to make their own novel decisions.
The inhabitants of such a society might be reasonably comfortable, and enjoy a personal freedom of what Arendt called “closed inwardness and introspection,” free to think their own thoughts and pursue relationships in a space of “intimacy.” Everyone would tolerate everyone else’s differences insofar as these did not affect the administration of society. But they would not have the ability to propose new collective projects to their fellow citizens, and, if their proposals found support, undertake them together. Life would be divided between, on the one hand, a sphere of rational decision-making that was ever-more automated and over which individuals had increasingly less influence, and on the other, a sphere of personal whims that were permitted to individuals as long as they had no impact on the sphere of technocratic planning.
“Appetites and desire, the senseless urges” of the body could be tolerated in such a society, but only on the condition that they be understood to have nothing to do with “reason,” that is, with making claims to other people about what is inherently good and desirable. Each person’s tastes or judgments, his sense of what is desirable or not, would have no weight, since they would apply only in his own intimate sphere, but could not take on specifically political significance as an appeal to the lives (and judgments) of others. Existence would be essentially masturbatory, as if “the highest experience” possible would be only each individual mind’s own “play with itself.” The members of such a society would, in a sense, all be closeted.[5]
Arendt thought that such a society was, or would soon be, our own. But in the early 60s, in an essay, “The Crisis in Culture,” which Denneny argued was the heart of her later work, she suggested that the “world” of “politics” in her special sense could be recovered by minorities willing to risk the public expression of their “taste,” that is, of their particular modes of shared appreciations, above all for physical, beauty.[6] Recovering the possibility of debating about taste, in a way that made our pleasures not only subjectively enjoyable but meaningful claims about the world that appeal to the intelligence of others, was of course important for everyone, Arendt argued.
All of us need to preserve that distinct, and for her distinctly political domain, in which we can tell other people about how we see the world, what we value in it, and appeal to each other about how to enlarge or correct our perspectives in order to undertake new kinds of action together. But the faculty of doing so is, she suggested, specially linked with discovering oneself as the member of a minority defined by its own peculiar mode of appreciating beauty. She observed that: to classify taste… among man’s political abilities sounds so strange that I may add another more familiar but theoretically little regarded fact… we all know very well how quickly people recognize each other, when they discover a kinship in questions of what pleases… taste decides not only how the world is to look, but also who belongs together in it. And concluded her essay that “culture”—the deliberate cultivation of taste—means above all that each of us should know “how to choose his company,” how to become the right kind of minority.
Although Denneny did not draw the connection explicitly, it is in retrospect easy to see why “The Crisis in Culture” would have special appeal to him, and why, at the very moment he was becoming a central actor in the new gay culture of New York, he would identify that essay as the heart of Arendt’s mature thought. In its call for members of a minority defined by their particular way of appreciating beauty to recognize each other not only as bearing common traits or sharing the same interests, but as constituting, in their minoritarian pleasures and, critically, in their discourse about them, a “world” in which interlocutors have different perspectives on common objects—and as they came to share an awareness of this world to rediscover “politics” in Arendt’s special sense of proposing novel collective projects to each other, inventing new forms of freedom together.
“The Crisis in Culture” could inspire the kind of specifically gay male cultural politics embodied in Christopher Street as Denneny developed it in the very years when he was preparing his volume and essay reflecting on what Arendt had taught him. Forty-four years later, just a week before his death, one of us (Blake Smith) contacted Denneny with questions about the place of that essay in his thinking and activism. He responded:
I was particularly intrigued that you had read the essay… it led me to look again at that essay of mine, which I don’t think I’ve read since it was published in l979. This was very useful for my current project, which is working my way through the first volume of the Gesamtausgabe (Vol 6: The Modern Challenge to Tradition: Fragmente einis [sic] Buchs). I’d been struggling through the fifty pages of the various version of and notes to “Understanding and Politics” which seemed awfully muddy to me…I’ve often thought that On Christopher Street could be seen as an example of Arendtian praxis, putting many of her ideas into practice in a concrete way. I just never thought anybody else would see that. But on that score your email really cheered me up, so thanks!
If Arendtian philosophy helped Dennney articulate a new vision of gay politics, the American gay male world that he helped create left a lasting influence on the philosophy of the French historian Michel Foucault. While often remembered by the vulgarized version of his thought, condensed in the contrarian sentence “homosexuality did not exist prior to the nineteenth century,” Foucault made a radical revision of his philosophy during the eight-year gap between the first and the second volumes of History of Sexuality (1976 and 1984 respectively). During this hiatus, he frequently crossed the Atlantic to teach and give lectures at universities on topics like “The Culture of the Self,” launching what some academics call his “ethical turn.” If his earlier studies portrayed a pessimistic view of the subject, which cannot disentangle itself from the power of discourse, he now became interested in countercultural subjectivity, which may initially become determined by power yet retains a potential for self-constitution.
While severely underdiscussed among academics, his witnessing of American gay male culture played a significant role in this transformation. In a 1989 essay on AIDS crisis, for example, Denneny corrects the common misconception that Foucault was a cultural nihilist by pointing out the “gusto [Foucault] displayed in late night discussions about the issue of primary discourse in our time, specifically the emergence of the possibility of such a thing as gay culture and its corollary, gay literature.”[7] That is, from Denneny’s perspective, Foucault was not merely interested in resisting how homosexuals have been categorized by medical, psychiatric and legal regimes, and how the category of homosexuality has both oppressed and offered opportunities for resistance to those thus identified. He was also, and in his last years increasingly, interested in the ways that a new gay identity, culture, and literature was being invented from ‘below’ rather than imposed from ‘above.’
In his 1983 lecture at the Collège de France, Foucault went so far as to coming up with an original reading of Kant’s enlightenment philosophy in quasi-Arendtian terms of world-building: “The critical ontology of ourselves has to be considered not, certainly, as a theory, a doctrine, nor even as a permanent body of knowledge that is accumulating; it has to be conceived as an attitude, an ethos, a philosophical life in which the critique of what we are is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them.”[8] Here, he regards his philosophy no longer as a theoretical ‘toolbox,’ with which one deconstructs reality within the ivory tower of academia, but as a collective ethos, inseparable from life, through which one may bring forth a new world.
Foucault was inspired by the gay New York scene Denneny was helping to create, and Denneny was inspired by Foucault. In his essay “Archaeologist of the Present: Michel Foucault in New York City,” Denneny described the electrifying effects of Foucault’s fall and winter fellowship at The New York University Institute of Humanities from 1980 to 1981 on the city’s intellectual culture. Nor was he the only gay journalist paying attention. As he observed, the noted left-wing reporter Douglas Ireland was also covering Foucault’s American visit, and reviewing the newly translated book of interviews with Foucault, Power/Knowledge, for the Soho Weekly Press. Foucault’s public talk with fellow gay academic Richard Sennett, “Sexuality and Solitude,” while not directly addressing contemporary gay life, Foucault’s notion of the “monosexual” provided the theory for what Christopher Street was already doing in practice.
In his introduction to the Christopher Street Reader (1982), which celebrated the magazine’s first half-decade—just as the AIDS crisis was beginning, Denneny reflected on the importance of a “separate gay culture” capable of working with other identity-based groups informed by progressive politics, precisely because it remained, in its members’ self-conception, distinct from them.[9] For the first few issues of the magazine, he recalled, he and other editors had tried to give equal weight to both gay men and lesbians in terms of authorship and content. Their intention, initially, was not to promote a separate gay male publication but a broader gay one, following the traditions of activism that had been developed earlier in the gay- and sexual-liberation movements of the 1960s and 70s, in which gay men and lesbians—along with other oppressed groups—were often imagined not only as joined in common struggles, but as sharing essentially the same problems and even the same identity as opponents of heterosexism and patriarchy.
But although their oppression might stem from the same homophobic sources, Denneny found that in practice gay men and lesbians were hardly in similar positions. Lesbians already had a network of serious publications, such as Lesbian Connection and Conditions, to compete for readership and talented writers—gay men had local magazines and newspapers (as well as pornography) but nothing comparable to Christopher Street. Lesbians, moreover, had a complicated and sometimes vexed relationship to the women’s movement and feminism, but could often address their writing to a wider audience of women who, without identifying as lesbians, might support their efforts and share activist spaces with them. Gay men had neither the wider audience nor the robust networks already enjoyed by lesbians, who, in the sense, could be described as privileged, even if in their analysis gay men often seemed to embody the same problems they saw among heterosexual men: an obsession with sex, and indeed, from the mid-1970s on, a growing interest (remarked upon positively by Foucault) in a virile, masculinist style of dress and comportment.
After a brief moment of co-operation lasting only a few issues, Christopher Street soon became a gay male magazine, albeit one that feature occasional essays by or on women seen as having something to say to the gay male community (ranging in those years from Andrea Dworkin to Joan Baez). Denneny put the issue in typically Arendtian terms: “the connection between gay men and women was only ideological; we did not really share a world in common.” That is to say, although gays and lesbians ought to work together on political issues related to homophobia and their shared critiques of heterosexism, they did not need, in order for such work to succeed, to imagine themselves as sharing the spaces of cultural production and enjoyment that Arendt called “a world.”[10]
In fact, Denneny continued, co-operating politically required an appreciation of the differences between gay men and lesbians (or between gay men and any other minority or oppressed groups), and the need to protect gay male specificity by preserving distinct spaces for intellectual exchange. “We can be good allies,” he said, “with anyone who is on our side, but we cannot be good allies, or even good friends, if we confuse ourselves with each other.” Having a sense of what Foucault was then naming “the monosexual,” and of its legitimacy in the face of demands for inclusivity, was crucial both to gay culture and to a successful progressive politics.[11]
Unfortunately, the philosophical and political framework that Denneny adopted from Arendt had a catastrophic flaw. Arendt’s conception of the political as opposed to the social lead her, throughout her later work, to devalue the importance—and the political, world-making dimension—of campaigns to remedy material inequalities, from racial integration to welfare. Many feminist scholars have rightly argued that Arendt ignored the very issue of women’s rights, in part because her framework tended to relegate to the domain of rule-bound, technocratic administration efforts to lift particular groups out of socio-economic oppression. The aesthetic affirmation of a minority’s specificity was excitingly political in Arendt’s vision; the solving of pragmatic problems such as access to healthcare and jobs was not. In her worldview there was was—although there arguably could well have been, with only a small shift in emphasis—no room to see something like the women’s movement or the New Deal as political in her own sense of the term, as a collective adventure.
Denneny, disastrously, shared Arendt’s blindspot. In a manifesto published in Christopher Street just as the AIDS crisis was about to begin in early 1981, “Gay Politics and Its Premises: 16 Propositions,” Denneny cogently articulated many of the invaluable insights he had drawn from his interpretations of his mentor’s work. He insisted that being gay—voluntarily participating in a world-making project with other men who love men—is fundamentally different than being homosexual (labelled as pathological according to nineteenth-century scientific and criminological categories), and that gay life was not a matter only of sex but a way of seeing and talking with others, not a matter of mere object choice, but of perspective, point-of-view. A gay culture is vital because, as he put it, quoting Arendt’s 1944 essay “The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition,” only within the framework of a people can a man live as a man without exhausting himself. Overcoming the homophobic past was not something individuals could do on their own—nor could straight society simply, if it chose, grant us through a boon of tolerance that dignity of living as men in the fullest sense. Gay emancipation, although it of course included both personal and society-wide change, was above all a question of “the construction of a world” by and for gay men through “networks of friendship, love relationships, public places and institutions, neighborhoods, art and literature.” [12]
Tragically, however, Denneny also followed Arendt in rejecting out of hand any consideration of what she would have called the social. He insisted that “[f]or us there is no ‘social question’… our demands will not cost the body politic one cent.”[13] This was already not quite true at the start of 1981—gay men, despite a homophobic myth that cast them as privileged agents of capitalism, still faced massive discrimination in jobs, housing, healthcare, etc., and had legitimate grievances that might require positive action by the welfare state to redress. It was at best foolhardy to dismiss any connection between gay politics and the ‘social question.’ With AIDS, this error became disastrously obvious.
For some today, this may in itself seem to be grounds for rejecting Denneny’s Arendtian vision. Yet, properly tempered with an awareness of the social, and indeed, of the ways that campaigns like address ‘social questions’ like AIDS can be deeply political in Arendt’s own sense of making a world and recovering the possibilities of collective choice from the machinery of bureaucracy, his legacy remains a vital resource. Not only because through his work as an editor Denneny gave voice to so many gay men, helping to create the gay culture of the 1970s and 1980s—and to survive through the AIDS crisis—but because the intellectual foundations of that work can inspire us to think afresh gay male identity and culture, in their specificity, in their particular minoritarian relation to beauty that links aesthetics and politics—to recover, as Denneny might put it, a gay world.
[1] Hannah Arendt to Michael Denneny, January 31, 1971 (Library of Congress).
[2] Michael Denneny to Hannah Arendt, August 28, 1971 (Library of Congress).
[3] Michael Denneny to Hannah Arendt, September 29, 1971 (Library of Congress).
[4] Michael Denneny, “The Privilege of Ourselves: Hannah Arendt on Judgment,” in Hannah Arendt, the Recovery of the Public World, eds. Michael Denneny and Melvyn A. Hill (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979), p. 245-274.
[5] Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, [1958] 1998), p. 320.
[6] Hannah Arendt, “The Crisis in Culture,” in Between Past and Future: Six Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Viking Press, 1961), p. 197-225.
[7] Michael Denneny, On Christopher Street (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023), 236.
[8] Michel Foucault, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: The New Press, 1997) 319.
[9] Christopher Street Reader, ed. Michael Denneny and Charles Ortleb, (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1982). On Christopher Street, p. 10.
[10] On Christopher Street, 12.
[11] On Christopher Street, 13.
[12] On Christopher Street, 92; Hannah Arendt, The Jewish Writings (New York: Knopf, 2007), 29.
[13] On Christopher Street, 93.