If I had been born a half-century earlier I suppose I could have been Perry Deane Young: born on a farm in North Carolina in 1941, one of 13 children, ashamed of his southern accent when he left home to eventually become a journalist in the liberal media, where he, too, covered evangelicals and, decidedly unlike anything I ever did, completed Army basic training and arrived in Saigon the night before the Tet Offensive to cover it for United Press International. I can certainly relate to this: “I was caught between the mind-crippling force of fundamentalism and the promise of freedom and life through learning on the other. If that conflict has often been painfully frustrating and confusing, it has never been dull.”

Off Christopher Street

The Messy, Sordid Spectacle of Right-Wing Gays

Renewed Cold War tensions. A miniature reprise of the Lavender Scare. Stories on the news about a ring of congressmen who had sex with teenage male pages and gay escort service that was a front for Soviet spying. All fabricated…

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9 days ago · 5 likes · David Sessions, Blake Smith, and Daniel Lefferts

Young relates some of his personal connections to the world of reactionary evangelicalism in his 1982 book God’s Bullies, an excerpt of which Blake and I talk about with Daniel Lefferts on the latest episode of Off Christopher Street. This is presumably why it originally bore the odd subtitle, Native Reflections on Preachers and Politics (later changed to the more fitting Power, Politics and Religious Tyranny).1 That notion of “native reflections” can’t help but pique my interest; apparently hayseed southern gay boys were using their religious background as a brand even before I was born.

God’s Bullies is an odd book: part memoir, part investigative report, part potted religious history, part discursive polemic. Young frames it as a reckoning with his own family history—his biological grandfather was sentenced to a chain gang for fornicating with a pastor’s daughter, and his adoptive one was an abusive Biblical literalist—and as a sort of broad argument against religious intolerance. There is a critique of bad Christianity in the name of good Christianity, namely, his mother’s racial tolerance and acceptance of his homosexuality and his siblings’ liberal Protestantism. Young suggests that by rejecting Christianity and looking back at his origins from the outside, he was able to appreciate it more rightly than those who claim to speak for it—that classic posture of “I, the apostate, am a more authentic Christian than you are”:

By facing up to and overcoming the very real hatred I felt for my preacher ‘granddaddy’ and his kind, I was finally able to understand and love those people, my people. It was necessary to hate the man in order to love him, necessary to become a non-Christian in order to understand and appreciate the enduring truth and beauty of the teachings of Christ himself.

The polemical thrust of the book is that the New Right is a dangerous, theocratic assault on American ideals, but also one that is riddled with contradictions and which does not have anything like broad public support. One picks up traces, as Blake suggested on the podcast, that no one is quite sure how seriously to take these people yet. Who is screwing whom in the New Right hodgepodge? The barely closeted Terry Dolan appears to be a social libertarian despite collaborating with Falwell, and many Republicans see Reagan as caring about taxes and foreign policy, not abortion and homosexuality. What Young seems to be suggesting in this scattershot, unfocused book, is that it doesn’t matter; despite the disclaimers and qualifications, everyone in the New Right is collaborating with the religious nutjobs, they know they are doing it, and it’s bad.

We spent most of our time on the podcast talking about Young’s confrontation with Dolan about his homosexuality, which he builds up as a dramatic scene (“I was nervous, sweating, in my discomfort over what to say and how to say it.”) Young couldn’t resist psychologizing some of his subjects, but it’s noteworthy that most of his scene with Dolan is about the latter’s political doublespeak. Dolan had, to the annoyance of Paul Weyrich, an actual social conservative, given repeated, all-over-the-place interviews to gay journalists, including one with Larry Bush in The Advocate in which he said he favored federal discrimination protections for homosexuals and that “sexual preference is irrelevant to political philosophy.” This was trumpeted in the mainstream press as a major development: the Washington Post noted that “this clearly sets Dolan apart from a host of his allies on the political right who have vigorously campaigned against gay rights,” at which point Dolan denied the quotes and re-emphasized his intimacy with Falwell.

We might say that Young gets carried away with the story of Dolan and includes the not-that-salacious details of his sex life because of some dark gay fascination with the self-hating homosexual. (Will Dolan kill himself if I confront him? Will he kill me?!) But the surely legitimate journalistic mission he sets out to accomplish is to pin down a powerful political figure who is constantly blathering out of both sides of his mouth and thereby to establish how seriously to take New Right fundamentalism, indeed how seriously its leaders take it. Young doesn’t quite deliver this—Dolan continues prevaricating—but he does establish that this person is a liar who is used to shaping reality however he pleases, and whatever he tells any gay journalist, he is at best a cynical collaborator in the anti-gay project. Though maybe that should have been obvious to begin with?

The reported chapters of God’s Bullies overflow with detailed facts about the origins, networks, and funding structures of conservative organizations, like the outline of an early draft of Reaganland. (Young even says all of this is Jimmy Carter’s fault!) But he does like his out-of-pocket (in the Gen Z sense) psychologizing, visited in much more amusing ways on targets like Anita Bryant, who he describes as so lonely and sexually repressed that she clamors for personal attention from any journalist who writes about her. The journalistic fascination with repressed, contradictory subjects apparently isn’t only for gays:

Ken Kelly, whose interview with Bryant in Playboy exposed her to further ridicule for her naive musings about sex2, came away with even stronger feelings for and about Bryant. He had despised her husband and what both of them were doing and saying, but at close range he could only feel pity for the woman herself. For weeks after Kelly did the interview, he would get phone calls from Bryant. There was no reason for them—she just wanted to talk to somebody.

It finally dawned on me and others that the woman was lonely. She was starved for affection and had serious sexual problems of her own. Hers was the shrill voice of sexual repression. She was a far worse victim of oppression than most of us homosexuals are. We all have suspicions of such motivations every time we hear somebody raging on about other people’s sex lives, but rarely has anyone defined and explained them as bluntly as Bryant has.

That is certainly a take. Howard Phillips, the former Nixon man and co-founder of the Moral Majority, is profiled in a chapter called “The Gauleiter Jew”:

In the company he keeps, Howard Phillips is often the only Jew on the speakers’ platform, and more often than not the only Jew in the whole auditorium. Any suggestion that there is anti-Semitism in the new right is invariably met with the statement, “Howard Phillips is a Jew.” … Thus it is understandable that while Howard Phillips’ religious background is not a difference he tries to hide, neither is it one he chooses to emphasize. One is led to the inescapable conclusion that along with his hatred of homosexuals and denigration of women, he also shares this other hatred of Jews, his own kind, himself. Phillips was the only new-right leader I interviewed who was evasive and reluctant to talk about his childhood.

Young’s speculation about how Dolan and Phillips manage having identities to which the New Right is hostile is probably best understood as attempts to support his overall thesis, which is something like that all of these people are hypocrites. Dolan the anti-gay homosexual, Phillips the anti-Semitic Jew, Falwell the opportunist, Weyrich the “congenial” theocrat who reporters all love because he’s nice but then talks in private about how he wants as few people as possible to vote. And poor Anita Bryant, who is, in her words, “just a woman.”3 Charges of hypocrisy have long been one of liberals’ favorite ways to deal with the religious right, but it doesn’t work today and arguably never has. So much of the great foulness of our time goes back to the fact that these people have always cared about nothing but crushing their enemies.

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But I also thought I’d take the opportunity to tell you a bit more properly what it’s about.

Christopher Street was originally published from 1976 to 1995. It’s often referred to as the “gay New Yorker” and nourished the careers of giants like Edmund White and Andrew Holleran, as well as criminally forgotten figures like George Stambolian. One of its editors, Michael Denneny, is well remembered as a gay publisher but not well enough as a student of Hannah Arendt and political theorist of gay male identity. I got interested in the magazine partly through On Christopher Street, an anthology of Denneny’s writing published in 2023, just before his death. I had been looking for a way to think about the gay world I was a part of, which seemed to exist in practice but not in thought, strangely orthogonal to the discourses on social media and the surviving husks of queer media. Reading Denneny from the 70s and 80s often felt like someone describing the gay world of today, which one now finds truly represented only in memes, tweets, and the occasional trend story in a straight magazine.

Last year I started digitizing the archives of the magazine. Partly because I was itching to design a website again, something I hadn’t done in almost 20 years. But mostly because Christopher Street, despite the prominence of its contributors, is very difficult to find. Unlike when you’re doing research on French history, when you’re interested in gay history, you often find that the foundational humanities work that is crucial to historical preservation and transmission, arguably the main thing the humanities should be for, lies untouched. When I was a “regular” historian, anytime I thought, It’s impossible no one has written about X, I was usually right: the article or the monograph was out there, I just hadn’t found it yet. With gay stuff, the opposite is true: if you think, Surely someone has written that, chances are they haven’t. Somehow, despite the humanities supposedly being nothing but woke gender ideology.

Christopher Street is historically important, sure. But more important than the stuff of the original magazine is what it was trying to do: to create a space for gay men to be fully who they are, to enter their own kind of public sphere, and to talk to, write for, and argue with each other. This is what we hope to do on Off Christopher Street: in each episode, we start from an article from the magazine that opens onto themes that still resonate in our lives today, from the fun stuff like being hot and going out to gender presentation and what gay identity politics might still mean in the twenty-first century. I hope it’s a version of the conversations I have with friends over drinks; it is quite literally an edited, longer-form version of mine and Blake’s voice notes to each other.

I’ve always thought the best projects feel like a somewhat inchoate but urgent impulse that pushes you to jump into them without fully knowing what you’re doing. (I’m certainly glad I didn’t know I was going to barely sleep for a few weeks as I learned the basics of audio production.) It’s exciting to try a new medium with different rules than writing, and to explore building an audience for thinking in this Wild West era of fragmentation and slop, which is nonetheless also a golden age of making things and finding one’s people.

Off Christopher Street is extremely gay, so I understand if you’re not the target audience, though I also hope that our thinking about life, culture, and politics at least somewhat transcends the narrowness of its immediate sociological focus. If it interests you in any way, I hope you will subscribe so we can reach you. (You can also subscribe on Spotify and Apple if you listen to podcasts there, or add the RSS feed to any other app. If you are feeling especially generous, giving us a rating or a review on those apps is also a huge help.)

Our first three episodes are below, and more on the way: pretty soon we’ll be hosting our first guests and talking about the gay Republicans in the Reagan-era New Right and the controversy over William Friedkin’s 1980 film Cruising.

Christopher Street

Gay Masculinity and Its Discontents

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22 days ago · 6 likes · 3 comments · David Sessions and Blake Smith

Christopher Street

Going Out and the Pleasures of Impersonal Intimacy

In the late 1970s, gay writers often treated New York’s bar and club scene as both a magical realm where a new type of gay life was being invented, and also as an alluring trap. Andrew Holleran’s novel Dancer from the Dance portrayed a world of gay men devoting themselves to going out every night as devotees of…

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a month ago · 7 likes · 1 comment · David Sessions and Blake Smith

Christopher Street

Gay Men and the Politics of Hotness

You may have noticed that hotness is in the news, so we decided it would be a good moment to drop the first episode of our new podcast, which is about exactly that…

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2 months ago · 8 likes · 1 comment · Off Christopher Street Podcast, David Sessions, and Blake Smith

Wired’s latest cover story, “Inside the Gay Tech Mafia,” makes last year’s celebrated but journalistically undercooked Harper’s story about gooning look like an FBI investigation. (Maybe the kind of ginned-up FBI investigation that once got thousands of gay men fired from their jobs, but one that at least went through the motions.) In this case, the story can be summed up with only the slightest exaggeration: Rumors, anonymous tweets, and off-the-record phone calls suggest gay men run Silicon Valley.

What’s especially funny is that the story is haunted almost from beginning to end by the possibility that it is perpetuating a non-story, or perhaps even a homophobic conspiracy:

On its face, a gay tech mafia seemed too dumb to warrant actual investigative inquiry. Sure, there were gay men in high places: Peter Thiel, Tim Cook, Sam Altman, Keith Rabois, the list went on. But the idea that they were operating some kind of shadowy cabal seemed born entirely of homophobia, the indulgence of which might play into the hands of conspiracy-minded conservatives like Laura Loomer, who, in 2024, tweeted that the “high tech VC world just seems to be one big, exploitative gay mafia.”

The problem is that people just won’t stop talking about it.

Journalism is a cyclical business, and Wired has resurrected a twenty-first century version of the Homintern conspiracy. “The Homintern theory,” Gore Vidal wrote in 1970, “is a constant obsession of certain journalists and crops up from time-to-time not only in the popular press but in the pages of otherwise respectable literary journals.” Homintern was a play on the Comintern or Communist International, founded by Lenin in 1919 and widely seen as a front for Soviet subversion in interwar Europe. Possibly coined by W.H. Auden, it was initially an inside joke about a group of European gay writers who knew each other in the 1920s and 1930s, but one that turned deadly serious, particularly in the Cold War United States.

The Homintern conspiracy played on gay male artists’ self-aggrandizement as a cultural elite and served as a screen onto which to project anxieties about subversion, both of national security and of moral order. It came down to the idea, the main component of the conspiracy still present in the Wired story, that gay men are so tightly networked with each other that they subvert normal divides between nation, class, age, etc, and are therefore more likely of being political subversives. As the historian Gregory Woods writes:

The salient feature of the widespread, paranoid association of homosexuality with espionage is the suspicion that homosexuals may form stronger allegiances to others of their own kind, across national boundaries, as well as across other social subdivisions such as classes, than to their own fellow nationals. In this respect, the cosmopolitanism of homosexual people was thought similar to, and congruent with, that of the Jews.

At the same time the U.S. government was systematically investigating alleged homosexual subversion in the government, the Homintern provided an update to the classic artists’ conspiracy that blames elite cliques for “gatekeeping” and blocking honest outsiders from success. In both the U.S. and Europe, journalists and other cultural commentators complained about the gay mafias secretly running cultural fields and perpetuating subtle contempt for straight society. These connected gay men all knew and (presumably) slept with one another, despised women, kept honest straight men from success, and, as Time put it in 1969, were waging a “vengeful counterattack” on “things that normal men take seriously.”

Some of these articles are worth quoting for the flavor—how silly and amusing they sound in retrospect.

New York Times theater critic Howard Taubman, 1961:

‘Tis time to speak openly and candidly of the increasing incidence and influence of homosexuality on New York’s stage—and, indeed, in the other arts as well. The subject is too important to be left forever to the sly whisperers and malicious gossips. Criticism, like playwriting, is crippled by a resort to evasions. The public is deluded and misled if polite pretenses are accepted at face value. The infiltration of homosexual attitudes occurs in the theatre at many levels.

Robert Doty, in the front-page 1963 Times story that bore the now-infamous headline “Growth of Overt Homosexuality in City Provokes Widespread Concern”:

Their presence in creative activity is not, as an old myth fostered by homosexuals would have it, because inverts tend to have superior intellect and talent. Most students of the subject agree that the significant factor in homosexual colonization of some of the arts is that men who would find difficulty in winning acceptance from fellow workers in more prosaic activities naturally gravitate toward solitary, introspective endeavor. The list of homosexuals in the theater is long, distinguished and international. It is also self-perpetuating. There is a cliquishness about gay individuals that often leads one who achieves influential position in the theater-as many of them do-to choose for employment another homosexual candidate over a straight applicant.

Erick Foster, “How the Homos Are Ruining TV” (1964), dispensed with the Times’ respectable reserve:

Nobody knows for sure how many pansies there are in TV. But things have gotten so out of hand in this new Sodom...that you can’t tell the he-men from the she-men without a scorecard. Right now the twisted twerps not only are in a position to tell you what you can see as entertainment, they are recruiting others of the lavender set to give it to you!

Time, “The Homosexual in America” (1969):

On Broadway, it would be difficult to find a production without homosexuals playing important parts, either onstage or off. And in Hollywood, says Broadway Producer David Merrick, “you have to scrape them off the ceiling.” The notion that the arts are dominated by a kind of homosexual mafia—or “Homintern,” as it has been called—is sometimes exaggerated, particularly by spiteful failures looking for scapegoats. But in the theater, dance and music world, deviates are so widespread that they sometimes seem to be running a kind of closed shop. Art Critic Harold Rosenberg reports a “banding together of homosexual painters and their nonpainting auxiliaries.”

The gay mafia of the mid-century cultural sphere was said to be infiltrating, cliquish, self-perpetuating, recruiting, running a closed shop—exactly what the gay mafia is now alleged to be doing in Silicon Valley.

Obviously it’s 2026, so the gay mafia allegations don’t have quite the homophobic edge they did even in the 1990s, when magazines were obsessed with a “Velvet Mafia” in entertainment. The Wired story is, as mentioned, aware that it runs the risk of perpetuating a conspiracy theory suggested by right-wing figures; it even packages itself in an overarching skepticism. But it’s remarkable—almost comical—how it continues to insist on the gay mafia despite repeatedly coming up with either banal facts or vague rumor. The number of times we are told that, despite the lack of evidence, people can’t stop talking about it!

And yet, similar rumors persisted and compounded, originating as often from outsiders (sometimes with dubious political motivations) as from insiders. When I call up my longtime industry sources to get their thoughts on the gay tech mafia, not only have they heard of it—they have highly specific notions of how it works. These are credible people who believe seemingly incredible things. One San Francisco investor tells me that he believes the Thiel Fellowship is a training ground for gay industry leaders. (When I run this notion past a couple of former Thiel Fellows, they tell me they met Thiel one time at a dinner, where he appeared “slightly bored,” says one of the fellows, a straight man. “I mean, I wish Peter tried to groom me.”) Meanwhile, people’s gaydars are practically overheating. I hear, more than once, that anyone in Silicon Valley who has achieved outsize success is probably gay.

We have the classic straight guy claiming discrimination at the hands of the Homintern:

Last spring, at a venture capitalist’s party in Southern California, a middle-aged investor complained to me at length about how he was struggling to raise his new fund. The problem, he explained, boiled down to discrimination. … He looked exactly like the sort of man Silicon Valley has been built to reward. ⁠⁠And yet here he was, insisting that the system was rigged against him. “If I were gay, I wouldn’t be having any trouble,” he said. “That’s the whole thing with Silicon Valley these days. The only way to catch a break,” he claimed, “is if you’re gay.”

Among the other scandalous facts we learn:

• Wealthy men in the same industry who have things in common know and sometimes do deals with each other.

• Wealthy men in the same industry who have things in common are sometimes in group chats with each other.

• Gay men have Halloween parties for gay men where no women are invited.

• Barry’s Bootcamp in the Castro, a gym in one of the gayest neighborhoods in America, is full of gay men with abs.

• The lines between friendship, professional network, romance, and sex tend to be blurrier for gay men than for straight people.

• Gay men gossip about and accuse each other of sleeping with each other for favors, whether they actually do or not.

I cannot stress enough the degree to which the story constantly debunks itself:

None of this is necessarily unfamiliar in the clubby world of Silicon Valley, where the smart, successful, and wildly rich have always formed in-groups. There’s the so-called OpenAI mafia and the Airbnb mafia, and before those the PayPal mafia—alumni of moonshot companies who bankroll the next wave of startups. So some of what reads as advantage is, on closer inspection, structural and unremarkable. San Francisco combines two things in unusual density: one of the country’s largest gay populations and a tech industry that has reshaped global power.

What makes this a truly twenty-first century Homintern story is the degree to which gay men are happy to play up the idea that they are a special, influential elite—even though, as the reporter wistfully tells us, they kept their juiciest gossip off the record.

The only real air of scandal here comes from the fact that Silicon Valley power, and its growing association with the MAGA right, is increasingly in the cultural crosshairs. We get the weakest gesture that there’s an untold MeToo story the reporter couldn’t deliver. It turns out the Homintern myth can also serve skepticism of Silicon Valley elites and the AI cult, giving us visions of a cabal that plays by its own rules and has contempt for normal society. But none of that really needs revealing; we already know this about Silicon Valley, and it’s unfortunately far too endemic to be a gay thing.

Like I said, I don’t think the story is deliberately homophobic or anything to be terribly exercised about. But, you know, people just won’t stop talking about it.

It is perhaps not very sportsmanlike to respond to a mere note with a full-on essay, because who among us hasn’t dashed off a despairing, splenetic, or otherwise insane note that we later found embarrassing. But this one condenses, too exquisitely to resist, a strange, thoughtless kind of opposition to caring about one’s appearance and resisting aging. So I’m going to examine this note line by line as a way of putting some long-gestating thoughts into words. But I assure you I am not trying to dunk on one person in particular; there is a whole Substack sub-universe of this stuff.

I would rather not live at all than live like this.

I’m going to assume this is rhetorical exaggeration because the alternatives to doing so are bleak.

not only is it an unfathomable waste of one’s limited time and resources on this earth, it is an absolute and decadent enslavement to the gaze of others.

I will admit that the maxxing routine described in the Laura Reilly post that Kate was responding to here is rather cartoonishly extreme! It at least seems like a lot. But I also recognize that I don’t know what her time and resources are like, and my impression may be inaccurate. Getting Botox only takes half an hour every few months. Skincare is no big deal when it’s routine, no matter how many steps. Who am I to say this woman I don’t know is wasting her limited time and resources? (And a lot of this is just like, normal medical stuff she happened to do all in the same month?)

Let’s first turn to something that will come up several times: a moralistic presumption that scarce resources are being squandered on health and beauty, as if all resources should be going to an urgent, pious activity or cause instead. This is not so different from self-hating gay Stephen Adubato’s “you shouldn’t have time to work out” shtick, demonstrating, to wit, the lockstep agreement of slop feminism and slop Catholic reaction in the opinion, If you’re living as God intended, i.e. not as a vapid neoliberal bimbo or a decadent faggot, you should not have time to be hot.

This sentence also introduces a blinkered understanding of what it means to care or not care what other people think. It suggests that being concerned with how one appears socially, and thus one’s aesthetic being in the world, is “enslavement” rather than a core feature of human sociality and a marker of civilization. It harbors an implicit antisocial individualism, as if one is “supposed to” be—as if it is somehow morally superior to be—indifferent to other people’s thoughts and tastes rather than performing for and provoking them. (We were put on this earth to serve in the gay sense as well as the Christian one.)

what is most insulting about it is the fact that we (which is to say we women) will all grow old anyway, which, one must clearly be reminded, is a privilege rather than some kind of moral failing or gross misallocation of resources — in neoliberal parlance, a bad investment.

The fact that we will all grow old and die someday has precisely nothing to do with the choices we make about how we look while we’re alive. OK, in the most general sense, it’s always good to remember you’re going to die. But again, appreciation of life does not have to be a scarce resource or a pole in a zero-sum game. One can be grateful to live a long life, fully aware that most things have little existential weight, and still zestily pursue pleasure, health, and ongoing aesthetic improvement.3

that a whole industry has developed around the lie that entropy can be reversed is one of the great delusions of contemporary fascism which maps itself onto the body in languages of hygiene, optimization and superiority.

No one would deny that there are resonances between Trumpism and the “languages of hygiene, optimization and superiority” teeming on social media, or that some purveyors of those languages have explicitly aligned themselves with MAGA.4 But maps itself onto the body is the kind of language academics use to remain deliberately vague about the causality or the precise nature of the relation. Discourses of strength, health, hygiene, status, etc, are present in all modern ideologies, not just “fascism.” It is probably more accurate to say that these concerns are irreducible features of human nature and society; they re-emerge in different forms in moments of uncertainty and crisis.

The “industry” here is not specified—GLP manufacturers? Med spas? Content creation?—but whatever it is, we can be assured that it does not make this sentence make any more sense. To equate all of these things—Trumpism, scientific research that has discovered something that is transformative to human health and medicine, and looksmaxxing discourse—as somehow rooted in a common “lie that entropy can be reversed” is to generalize so recklessly as to make the entire thing nonsensical. So Trumpism has a stupid narrative about reversing American decline, and some hacking/maxxing people take it to an off-putting extreme. Does that make any of these “entropy-reversing” impulses—to manage American decline, to use the latest technology to improve one’s health or slow aging, or to get excited about improving your appearance if you’re ugly and lonely—inherently suspect? Inherently fascist?

One of the great humiliations of being a woman in contemporary life is the constant reinforcement of the idea that our bodies are both objects and commodities…

Sigh. I cannot express how dismaying it is that no one can come up with a better language for talking about bodies and social-sexual relations than this.

Objectification generally refers to surface assessments of someone’s value, generally their sexual attractiveness, at the supposed expense of their personhood. It is said to be “good” to treat someone as a whole human/person and “bad” to do the opposite, i.e., to treat them as an object/body. Objectification is a particularly bad thing that men do to women and, if they’re gay, to each other.

I understand how this notion could have arisen from situations where women were fighting for respect and inclusion, where they are trying to be taken seriously in a profession and continue to be treated as exoskeletons of hot body parts that lack personhood. But this is generally not what is meant by objectification today, where it is divorced from any concrete political meaning and used as a generalized swear word for any sort of assessment of physical appearance whatsoever. Which puts everyone in the bad-faith situation where assessing other people’s appearance or sexual attractiveness is officially “bad” or verboten and yet we all do it relentlessly in our heads, in our group chats, or wherever. There has to be a better way.

My off-the-cuff proposal would be to reject the imagined binary between person and object altogether. We are quite literally objects, embodied physical things in the world. An enormous amount of our sociality, virtually every aspect of our interactions with other people, implicates our objectness, our flesh. “Person” and “object” are not opposites, we are always both at once, and both of those can be lenses through which we view other people at different times, from different angles of concern. Or even at the same time.

And why must “object” signify inferior, misrecognized, abused, as opposed to things like fashioned, created, given? When I look at my body in the mirror, I see an object, yes, but an object that incarnates my personhood. A thing, but a thing I have made, a physical monument to a much more expansive work of self-fashioning. A thing that I continually remake for the sheer pleasure of doing so and, secondarily, for the enjoyment of anyone else who wants to do so. There’s a line in the gay writer Mark Merlis’ novel An Arrow’s Flight that expresses this:

He remembered when he would look at his body and see: a gift to men. Not with narcissistic self-regard, with joy that he had it to give, that it was built, every contour and concavity, for pleasure.5

Don’t we all secretly want to be treated as objects, to feel the joy of having something to give in that particular sense—far from the only one, far from the most important one, but an important one?

and beyond that, that the commodification of the female form grows ever more specified and the pressure to concede to this commodification grows greater still.

I realize that the stance I just articulated may feel alien to some people for any number of reasons, including simply not caring that much about, or wanting to put that much effort into, how they look. The good news is that the actual number of people who are getting plastic surgery and biohacking—even the number of people getting a non-invasive, inexpensive yet miraculous treatment like Botox—is still pretty small. It’s a vanishing minority! The great, vast majority of people put a normal, that is to say quite minimal, effort into their appearance. Informality and the utilitarian bare minimum reign comfortably supreme as the stylistic ethos of mass-democratic culture.

Which means that this commodification of the female form growing ever more specified, if it even exists, is just…discourse. It’s just what a few people are doing, a few people are talking about, a few people are hawking and influencing and marketing. Most people don’t participate in it, and certainly not to an extreme degree, and you don’t have to, either. We might note that a few sentences back, caring about what other people think looks good was a baleful indicator of “enslavement”; now it’s somehow unfair to have to go against the “pressure” of the supposed herd.

Faced with the choice, I would rather be ugly. Not only that, if this is the way beauty is to be sustained, then ugliness itself should be reclaimed as a morally superior way of being.

The petulance of this final bit is revealing, but the first-person framing also is what makes it a respectable sentiment: If this is what it takes, *I* would rather be ugly. That’s a statement of personal value and choice. But people do not want their own rejection of what it currently takes, or their discourse-based fantasy of what it currently takes, to be only a personal choice; they want to politicize it so that the people who make a different one can be comfortingly labeled avatars of commodification or sexism or neoliberalism or even fascism.

It’s one of the greatest achievements of advanced industrial civilization that it makes socially unnecessary luxuries available on a mass scale for our personal pleasure, self-creation, and social presentation; that it gives us the means to simultaneously remake ourselves and beautify society. I think the reasons we should not want those things to become associated with fascism are self-evident, but that’s just me.

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Entering 2025 on a “vibe shift,” it could be difficult to tell if the shadows that fell over gay world this year were alarming or a little ridiculous. Busily working toward the Führer in the first half of the year, American corporations withdrew their support for Pride events across the country, which correspondingly shrank or were canceled altogether. At World Pride in D.C., headline sponsor Marriott insisted that already-produced signage for the event be reprinted without the term “presented by,” even as they maintained their financial support. Across the information economy, DEI commitments disappeared from corporate websites even as, in some cases, they were forcefully reiterated internally. The Supreme Court unnervingly heard another case by the gay-rights anti-hero Kim Davis, but everyone agreed it had no chance of going anywhere in the first place.

Even the standout moments in gay discourse blurred the silly and the sinister. In mid-summer, the New York culture magazines took a sudden interest in gay sex. The New Yorker led the way in July with a profile of the cruising app Sniffies. The Cut followed in August with a report on “peak gay sluttiness,” which framed the current renaissance of gay promiscuity—Sniffies, again, was front and center, along with the major and minor drugs that enhance sluttiness—as a FOMO-inducing cultural trend. “Everyone is doing drugs. Everyone is getting laid more than you,” declared the author, a gay man at least adjacent to the scene. “It’s no longer gay culture that has captured the zeitgeist, but gay sex.”

“Peak gay sluttiness” was polarizing across a number of incommensurable axes. Many of my text correspondents reported a mixture of amusement and embarrassment at what we take for granted being treated as a trend story. (“I hate everything about this article,” one said. “Or maybe I hate our lives.”) Some thought it exaggerated the dangers of GHB, while others thought it was too flippant about them. Some had quibbles that sounded, to my ear, like internecine squabbles over which drugs and parties—and by extension, which type of gays—were better. Nearly everyone found the rah-rah tone a little disconcerting. To the article’s credit, it did reveal a thirst for this type of debate, and only highly fragmented ways to have it.

Thus saith The Cut: “In a year of wild partying … it is easy enough to ignore the country’s swing to conservatism and mute the feed quickly filling with tradwives.” But less than a month after the culture mags uncovered the gay sex zeitgeist, the American moment showed the other side of its face: Amtrak police in New York launched a 1950s-style entrapment scheme and began mass-arresting gay men for cruising in the restrooms at Penn Station. Many had their trumped-up charges expunged, while others were handed over to ICE for deportation. It is impossible, of course, to establish any direct correlation, but that didn’t stop people from speculating; we’d taken the bait on straight magazines airing our degenerate proclivities only for the baiting to turn a bit too literal.

Especially after that grim turn of events, the claim that gay sex had “captured the zeitgeist” seemed wishful at best. But now, in December, there is, to put it mildly, new evidence to be admitted. Over the past couple of months, Heated Rivalry, a TV series based on a series of steamy “M/M romance” novels, rode a groundswell of online enthusiasm to a pickup by HBO and a siege of the digital public sphere. It follows Shane Hollander (Hudson Williams) and Ilya Rozanov (Connor Storrie) young hockey stars who, before they’re even signed into the NHL, become obsessed with each other and begin secretly fucking every time they’re in the same city even as league marketing paints them as implacable enemies. There are three sex scenes in the first episode and almost as many in each subsequent one. To say that Heated Rivalry is an engagement juggernaut would be an understatement: in addition to the rivers of fan art and edits and reaction TikToks, every major American publication has cashed in by dissecting its cultural appeal (Harper’s Bazaar, NPR, everybody); fawning over its stars’ sexual chemistry (Vanity Fair, GQ, everybody), ass workouts (Vogue) and skin care routines (The Cut again); reviewing its sex scenes (Slate, Vulture, Out); or making fun of the whole thing (The Onion).

I discovered the show the same way everyone else did: via the sweaty, steamy clips that started circulating on Twitter shortly before the premiere. I was previously in the dark despite loving a boy who reads M/M sports romances, had read this particular M/M sports romance years ago, and had also long known the show was in the works. (“Why didn’t you tell me there was a gay sex hockey show coming out?” I asked. “I did,” he said, “but you never listen to anything I say.”) We watched the first episode with hands spontaneously wandering into sweatpants, which I soon learned was a widespread practice and on the tamer end of the spectrum; I’m told that the irrepressible New York gays circulated an event on Sniffies bearing the title “Heated Rivalry Watch Party + Orgy.”

Early adoption may be a gay specialty, but we’re relative latecomers to the Heated Rivalry phenomenon. Director Jacob Tierney even seems to have counted on the particular affinity of our kind for bandwagons and cultural moments. “I always said,” he told Teen Vogue, “Once you film this, gay men will watch it, but we’ll watch anything with gay men in it. We’re not wildly discerning in that way.” Tierney is gay, but his source material is steeped in the horny female internet; written by a Canadian author named Rachel Reid, Heated Rivalry originated as smutty Marvel fanfiction before it evolved into a “spicy hockey romance.”

Hockey romance is a sub-subgenre of “sports romance,” a subgenre of “M/M” romance, or gay romances predominantly written by women for other women. The sub-subgenre has, the New York Times informs us, boosted the historically low popularity of hockey in Australia and led to real-world clashes between the NHL and its readers, who have applied the modern fandom repertoires of “stanning” and “shipping” to real NHL players. A frankly uncountable number of women on Twitter, or people who claim to be women, or bots, admit to screaming “KISS EACH OTHER!” at hockey games. When the wife of Seattle Kraken player Alex Wennberg complained on Instagram about this fan behavior—which included the admittedly brilliant chant “KRAK MY BACK”—her account was flooded with harassment. Updated Rule 34: if it can be imagined, there are insane stans of it.

This origin story sheds a lot of light on the absolute explosion of gay sex discourse in which gay men are kind of a sideshow. A great deal of that is devoted to dissecting, as Cosmopolitan’s headline helpfully summarizes, “Why Every Woman You Know is Frothing-At-the-Mouth-Feral for Heated Rivalry.” (The Carrie Bradshaw voiceover writes itself: “What I had to find out was why the hottest women in New York were all suddenly obsessed with gay sex!”) No gay journalist has thus far rivaled Cosmo’s cultural sociology, which, surveying a range of women, chalks up the fascination with hockey players fucking to a fantasy escape from the structures and disappointments of hetero sex—in other words, to something like heteropessimism. Gays are left to once again talk to each other via the pages of New York, from whence the gay comedian and I Love LA actor Jordan Firstman launched his attack on Heated Rivalry. “I’m sorry, I watched those first two episodes and it’s just not gay,” he complained. “It’s not how gay people fuck.​ … I go to art to be confronted and to think, but a lot of people just want entertainment or to see two straight hockey players pretending to be gay and fucking.”

Firstman is far from the only gay man to react with indifference, but the skeptics seem to be in the distinct minority. Scattered across the broader zeitgeist there are distinctively gay responses to Heated Rivalry. First and most importantly is the gut level: it’s competent, entertaining smut. I’m typically not a reader of romance novels of any sort unless you count Jane Austen or Sally Rooney (which, why not?), and I was charmed by the book’s formal similarity to online gay erotica. The first half is organized around snappy, no-frills sex scenes that keep characterization and plot to a minimum and lean into the classic gay fantasy of team sports and locker rooms. Before I thought about it much, I also instinctively related to a relationship that builds from repeat hookups. As David Mack wrote in Slate, “For many gay men, it’s fucking first that can later turn into feelings, not the other way around.”

There’s another reaction promoted by Tierney and widely echoed in the social media discourse. “I’m thrilled, as a queer person, to be putting out a romance into the world that is not punishing and that is not full of dead, miserable gay characters,” he said. “This is a gay story where no one dies of AIDS, and no one goes back to their wives.” That’s probably a reference to Fellow Travelers, but it’s been quite a while since that description fit gay TV in general; Heated Rivalry is nowhere near the first show to feature nuanced depictions of gay men or tragedy-free gay romance. But if we put Tierney’s comments in the context of the fujo stanning of the book and show, which at its most extreme equates romance representation with political activism, it becomes clear what he’s suggesting: that “positive representation” equals uncomplicated happy endings, equal opportunity fulfillment of romance-novel tropes. These, naturally, don’t have much to do with a story being authentically gay in the sense of being informed by the lives most contemporary gay men live, or the stories they’ve told about themselves in their own literature. What’s celebrated as a great leap forward here is actually just gay trappings used to re-energize timeless romance tropes of hidden, thwarted passion.

But the NHL is super homophobic! There’s still never been an out gay hockey player! These widespread defenses of the show’s authenticity are correct in a narrowly factual sense. But one possible reading of Heated Rivalry’s NHL setting is as a deliberate choice of anachronistically homophobic terrain for the purpose of retelling one narrow, extremely familiar part of gay experience: the path from isolation to coming out. As Jim Downs argued in a thoughtful Slate essay, this is gay storytelling stuck in the past, arriving over and over at square one. “Gay narratives still tend to treat confession as the plot—the moment when life supposedly begins. But for most people, coming out isn’t an ending or a climax. It’s the threshold.”

If there’s an identitarian critique of Heated Rivalry, it’s not the skin-deep cultural appropriation lens that tediously obsesses over who is allowed to tell which stories. Rachel Reid is perfectly capable of writing fun, competent gay smut; her hockey romances are better than some of the ones written by gay men. But surrendering gay sex to a general cultural zeitgeist—content for female fandoms, an escape from heteropessimism, a trend story for straight magazines—has its ambivalences. It may mean gay stories never advance much beyond their most familiar and culturally legible dimensions, even if they have happy endings instead of deaths from AIDS. The discourse they inspire raises lots of questions, but not necessarily our questions. That’s nobody’s fault, exactly; no individual gay writer or producer can single-handedly change the structural conditions that have attenuated the cultural spaces for those questions. But it’s worth asking: do we want to explore our lives in conversation with each other, or are we content with the tropes of the zeitgeist?

My working hypothesis is that neo-atomization discourses have formed a knot of moral panic about technology that is being used as a Trojan horse for social conservatism. In some quarters, like the drafters of Project 2025 or Michigan’s outrageous proposed ban on porn and VPNs—that revived social conservatism is simply the usual Christian-right suspects doing their thing. But even among Christian social conservatives, explicit appeals to God and natural order have been replaced by a pseudo-public health language of “epidemics,” “addiction,” and social breakdown. What’s perhaps even worse is the extent to which essentially the same ideas have conquered liberal discourse in places like the New York Times op-ed page; a liminal figure like Christine Emba stands as something of a bridge between the two.

Emba’s book Rethinking Sex is a perfect example of this: you don’t even have to say that porn is immoral and casual sex is damaging (though she does that, too); you can say technology is alienating; apps are disrupting our natural, healthy forms of relation and association, harming women and children; our sex and relationships are dehumanizing and socially corrosive because we basically treat them like ordering DoorDash. You can even throw in some superficial anti-capitalism to give it a progressive spin. I’m not sure people even realize how dominant these views have become among liberals and how, in the absence of true ethnographic curiosity about the forms of life the social web has created, authoritarian policy responses are starting to sound like bipartisan common sense. Uncritical, monocausal discourses about technology-driven alienation are the core of the knot, what makes it all sound reasonable, socially conscious, and even progressive. We poor, helpless automatons need to be saved from what technology is doing to us.

Obviously I’m not automatically endorsing a polar opposite position that everything about contemporary technological mediation is good and healthy, that we’re living in a golden age of sociality, etc. I’m not saying there’s no contemporary alienation or pathological forms of socialization—far from it. But we should at the very least be aware that these are old tropes in American history that have arisen several times in very similar forms, and that those theories had serious political and policy implications. The 1950s, in particular, were host to a very widespread alienation panic that colonized media discourse and liberal social science but was more an index of contemporary political anxieties than a description of social reality. (This was the origin of the theories of atomization that Dylan Riley and John Ganz recently discussed in their conversation about fascism and civil society, which informed “mass society” books like Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism and social-science bestsellers like David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd and C. Wright Mills’ White Collar.) Theories of the masses as alienated, manipulated automatons infused liberalism with a heavy dose of German mandarin pessimism and technophobia, which in some cases blinkered its perception of what American society was actually like.

Here are just a few reasons contemporary tech panic needs to be pressed further than it often is: social scientific research about the “loneliness epidemic” is in fact highly contested, as are linkages of depression and poor mental health to phones and social media. “Porn addiction” is a made-up, faux-medical rebrand of classic right-wing evangelical ideology, and the evidence that porn is all somehow “increasingly” violent and misogynistic is flimsy enough to basically constitute a folk myth, no matter how many times it’s repeated in the New York Times.

Whenever the clouds of consensus gather, it’s worth at least asking: what is this causing us to miss that we should be seeing? Are we stuffing reality into recycled tropes instead of taking a genuine interest in what it’s like? Why—and what is that creating a permission structure for?

I have never been especially invested in whether or not we call Trumpism fascism, but one of the benefits of this type of conceptual debate is that it provides a framework for discussion and for sharpening one’s analysis. What I’m going to say here is not about who is “right” in the fascism debate (it’s mostly summary, anyhow), but what feels like productive new emphases that are emerging. In particular, Ganz and Riley’s recent conversation focuses on the state of “civil society,” which in retrospect I think has been an overlooked or taken-for-granted point of Riley’s past analyses; I had also personally failed to assimilate some of Ganz’s arguments about civil society that seem pertinent to where my own thinking had felt “stuck.” That is: what do we make of American civil society? Is it caught up in social media-addled expressive individualism and therefore completely passive in the world of real politics, or is it taking on a new, unfamiliar form of political agency?

A certain strain of contemporary left analysis may put too much emphasis on the virtuality of American political activity. We might call that the “view from the New Left Review,” because not only has the NLR long taken a withering view of democratic agency in the West, but the doctrine of a hopelessly disorganized and addled American masses in the age of Trump has often been expounded by its contributors—notably Anton Jäger and Dylan Riley. They have tended to interpret all of the sound and fury of American politics since 2008 as ultimately signifying little besides more of the elite-managed status quo. That is the upshot of Jäger’s Baudrillard-inflected writings on “hyperpolitics,” which acknowledge a recent upsurge in mobilization but paint a bleak portrait of America’s “vitiated social landscape” and the predominance of a politics that is “low-cost, low-entry, low-duration, and all too often, low-value.” Looking for signs of a revival of golden-age socialist mass politics, Jäger tends to dismiss America’s recent political agitation as mostly a virtual spectacle. “Hyperpolitics comes and goes, like a neutron bomb that shakes the people in the frame but leaves all the infrastructure intact.”

Until recently, Riley was even more summarily dismissive. In his introduction to the 2019 Verso edition of The Civic Foundations of Fascism, he drew a sharp contrast between the highly mobilized civil societies that produced classical fascism and the depoliticized, atomized American present. “‘Trumpism’ and its various European correlates have arisen…in the context of a fragmented and depoliticized civil society: the product of the long historical ebbing of the socialist project, and of basically pacific relations in the capitalist core.” And: “While fascism was a product of intense civil society and associational development, Trumpism is an expression of the etiolation and weakening of civil society.”

Especially in view of Trump 2.0, I have wondered if this type of claim is too historically rigid or too wedded to a left schematics that treats anything that doesn’t look like “classical” mass politics as somehow not counting—to wit, if the masses aren’t organized in a way that looks like the socialist politics we believe in, then whatever they’re doing is somehow merely performative, virtual, or otherwise not “real.” Ganz, however, has drawn on the original text of Riley’s book, which was an intervention in theories of fascism in sociology and political science written before fascism was in the headlines every day. With a somewhat looser interpretive touch, Ganz argues, Civic Foundations can be read against Riley’s previous analysis of Trumpism.

Civic Foundations was aimed against one of the dominant theories of “totalitarianism” in social science, namely that it emerged in countries with “weak” civil societies, where the masses were “atomized” and thus susceptible to authoritarian movements. Drawing on Tocqueville, liberal social scientists argued—or probably more accurately, assumed—that a strong civil society (voluntary associations, clubs, etc) automatically went with liberal democracy and served as a defense against totalitarianism. Riley blew a hole in that notion by showing empirically that, on the contrary, fascism emerged from highly developed and intensely mobilized civil societies whose demands the state was unable to integrate into the existing order. He drew on the Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci to theorize this situation as a “crisis of hegemony”: that is, the social legitimacy of the ruling classes and the existing order collapses in the face of an “overdevelopment” of civil society that it is unable to contain. Fascism arises as a response that positions against the ruling order and against politics itself, but, crucially, in the name of a deeper, truer representation of the people: Riley’s most controversial—but in my opinion brilliant—move was to refer to fascism as a “democratic authoritarianism.”

Ganz picks up on these political crisis terms of Riley’s analysis and wonders why they aren’t applicable to the present: an agitated civil society that rejects the existing order, a crisis of hegemony, an authoritarian movement that claims only itself can restore true democracy, etc. This bit from his conversation with Riley caught my eye:

As for civil society, many argued that Americans were increasingly atomized, citing Robert D. Putnam’s Bowling Alone. But I thought the internet had perhaps created a new form of civil society, an excess of associative activity and democratic demands beyond the traditional party and state’s representative institutions’ capacity to contain them—similar to what you described in Europe.

This is clarifying thought, because it suggests we should take online politics seriously as more than mere performative virtuality rooted in atomization (Jäger) or a means of top-down manipulation through conspiracy and “disinformation,” arguably the dominant liberal view. What has become a general moral panic in the American media about social media, phones, fragmentation, and the “loneliness epidemic” perhaps leads us to overlook the real associative power of those technologies, the way they have created public spheres that extend beyond the internet and produce their own forms of organization. Just because their outbursts seem ephemeral and haven’t given rise to new political parties doesn’t mean we can take their weakness for granted. Personally, and only semi-jokingly, I would call armies of citizens getting people fired for kissing at a Coldplay concert an overdevelopment of civil society.

In the conversation with Ganz, Riley seems to concede the point:

The online component has become clearer to me in the second term. At first, I saw it mainly as a Twitter spectacle. Now it’s obvious how these infrastructures can rally allies and discipline opponents. It’s analogous to classic fascist mobilization, though the form is different. Instead of party cards and dues—not everyone is going to join the MAGA party—it’s online threats and employer pressure, sometimes promoted from the White House. That is the organizational form emerging now. If you listen carefully to J.D. Vance when he took over Charlie Kirk’s podcast immediately following the assassination, he calls for people to get involved. He even uses the terminology of civil society. He is essentially exhorting people to attack their opponents online and flag posts that express inappropriate views about Kirk.

This all seems more productive to me than thought-terminating clichés about “atomization.” What if the sense of alienation provoked by the internet is not an indication of isolation or “loneliness,” but rather a pessimism or even nihilism resulting from the fact that civil society’s excess of political consciousness has “nowhere to go” in the existing structures of politics?

Listening Sessions

Reflections of a Semi-Political Man

On n’arrête pas une guerre avec des mots; mais la parole ne prétend pas forcément changer l’histoire: c’est aussi une certaine manière de la vivre…

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a year ago · 25 likes · 2 comments · David Sessions

The latest is this conversation with and on Dan’s podcast, (which is great and you should subscribe to! He just interviewed , one of my favorites, about which more soon.) I lucked out and got on a free episode, which you can listen to here:

Eminent Americans

Left Behind

This episode of the podcast, with Sam Kahn and David Sessions, was recorded after Sam, David, and I happened to have all written essays about our divorce from, or ongoing issues with, the American left…

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7 months ago · 7 likes · Daniel Oppenheimer, Sam Kahn, and David Sessions

This came about after I wrote the piece below in response to Sam’s kiss-off to the left, and we talk about our respective arguments and differences. I remain as unconvinced as before that there is some deep philosophical difference between liberalism and the left that has any relevance to the present, but we nevertheless end of up much of the same place. I express, hopefully not too indulgently, some of my hopelessness about the media environment that conditions politics now and what that means for the prospect of anything besides muddling through.

Listening Sessions

The Left Will Be Statist Or Will Not Be At All

I’ve been thinking for a while about articulating my defense of left statism, and Sam Kahn’s recent post, entitled “The Left Should Off Itself,” is as good an opportunity as any. I think I share the basic frustration behind Kahn’s piece—that the left can seem more concerned with moralism than with power and governing effectively—while also thinking his characterization of the left is too schematic and historically inaccurate to be very useful…

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a year ago · 32 likes · 3 comments · David Sessions

This followed yet another dialogue, a three-part (written) discussion with , which focused more specifically on the recent history of the left as opposed to the deeper philosophical and historical themes we touch on in the podcast. You can find that here:

The Point’s Substack

Jon Baskin and David Sessions on the Millennial Left

This dialogue took place over the past six weeks in response to a series of Substack posts looking back at left intellectual life in the late 2010s. It has been divided into three separate posts for the sake of readability. The first is below. Click for the…

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a year ago · 24 likes · 2 comments · Jon Baskin and David Sessions

Douthat and Keeperman passed relatively quickly and unsatisfactorily over the question of what makes good political art, but Douthat pursued the inquiry in a later conversation with Andor showrunner Tony Gilroy, who strongly protested the idea that Andor is a left-wing show. He insists it’s about characters on all sides, about human experience and morality.

Douthat: So this is a show — it’s a story — where you are rooting for revolutionaries against a fascist regime, right?

Gilroy: OK. All right, all right.

Douthat: As you said, you’re not rooting for the Empire in the end, right?

Gilroy: No, no, no.

Douthat: That to me is the political foundation of the work. And that’s why I use the term “left wing” — not because you have a 10-point list of revolutionary demands that you, Tony Gilroy, support, but you’re telling a story in which basically you’re on the side of the radicals and the revolutionaries.

At the same time — and this is why I think it is effective art — what I think you’ve been able to do, maybe coming out of all of this autodidactic reading, is give people a window into why the radicals, even if you’re rooting for them, you can see how things can go wrong. But that is what I really like about the show’s approach to politics, is that it’s ——

Gilroy: But what’s fascinating is, particularly in the second season, I was really eager to get into the idea of using Stellan Skarsgard’s character, Luthen, and Forest Whitaker’s character as the original gangsters, and the difficulty of integrating the inceptors of radicalism into a coalition.

But there’s never anybody, I don’t think, whoever espouses an actual ideology of what they want to achieve at the end, other than: Please leave us alone. Stop killing us. Stop destroying our communities. Don’t build the Death Star and kill us.

I never have a character, I don’t think, stand up and say: This is the galaxy that I am trying to build, and this is what I want to see.

Douthat: That’s fair. That is, in fact, literally the argument that some of my more libertarian friends who love the show have made to me, saying: This is ultimately a show about localism and leaving us alone against the depredations of tyranny.

Gilroy initially rejects the question outright, but ultimately gets around to articulating what I think is the correct response to Douthat. Douthat is the one who is trying to impose rather shallow political classifications on art—a reminder that conservatives have also long been energetic progenitors of skin-deep political readings of pop culture—along the lines of: if revolutionaries are the good guys, it’s left-wing, and if an “African American lesbian professor” is the villain, it’s right-wing.

Perhaps it’s worth digressing into the actual history that inspired Andor and how Hollywood uses history for popular entertainment. Considering Andor through the lens of the specifics of the histories and tropes with which it paints its canvas shows Gilroy made an excellent show that, while certainly open to a left reading, captured some deep truths about politics in general without exactly being left-wing art.

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Kahn sets up a binary between Hamiltonians and Jeffersonians, or liberals and the left, where the former in each pair is in favor of pragmatic, efficient centralized power and the latter is attached to a romantic ideal of “perfect collectivity and egalitarianism.” The latter will always be a fantasy because it is simply impracticable: “The state ‘withering away’ really isn’t very high level political science.” According to Kahn, the contemporary left is not just the more-radical conscience of liberals, it is their opposite: a force that is simply against the constructive project of governing or exercising power.

Kahn seems to think that the entire left has always believed simplistically in the “withering away of the state,” while in reality that notion has been the source of over a century of bitter theoretical debates and nasty factional splits. It is not the case historically that the left was attached to some romantic, Rousseauist notion of the “general will” that will produce a perfectly unified, perfectly equal collectivity with some kind of benevolent bare-minimum state. To be sure, there have always been currents, (or roughly speaking one “side”) of the left tradition that believes something like this, which goes by varied names like anarchism, syndicalism, or libertarian socialism.1 But the whole twentieth century was a struggle between this side of the left and what became its (much) more dominant side: statist or government socialism, exemplified first by European socialist parties, and then by the Soviet Union and European communist parties and communist-socialist electoral formations.2

When people today think of “Leninism” or Bolshevism they think, rather incorrectly, of a minoritarian revolutionary cadre that stirs up popular revolution and then installs itself as dictators. This ignores what is most fascinating and historically instructive about the Russian Revolution: the practical challenge of building a state in a backward, falling-apart country being invaded by the world’s mightiest militaries and by its own elites and expert class. Lenin and Trotsky very much believed in Marxist theory, but Marxist theory to them was something alive and being elaborated in practice. They were not voluntarist romantics; they had systematically studied types of states and government institutions, and did not in any way, ever for a moment doubt that the USSR needed the sort of well-structured state required to govern a modern industrial society. Even though their vision “lost” by the late 1920s, they are exemplary figures in the left tradition for the way that they thought about the pragmatics of power and distinctly modern governance, in a way that romantic lefts of all eras have repeatedly failed to do.

By and large, this was also true of European communist leaders, though they were kept in a somewhat infantile position by the Cold War divide and their varying degrees of servility to the now-Stalinized USSR. European socialism always had its anti-statist strongholds, particularly in trade unions whose syndicalist ideology harkened back to the nineteenth century, when socialism was entirely outside the political system. There were always dissident left groups and intellectuals who maintained fanciful notions of decentralized communitarian socialism without a state, or with the kind of self-contradictory mechanism Kahn describes, somehow centralizing and completely egalitarian at the same time. But government socialism was overwhelmingly dominant; communist and socialist leaders were politicians (and, increasingly, technical experts) who envisioned running a modern state, not watching it “wither away.” A regrettably large amount of oxygen in left discourse was consumed by tactical battles over the Cold War, but a significant part also went to technical details that are no less important for seeming “boring” or for being forgotten today: What exactly does a socialist state do? How does it handle geopolitics and war? Does property have to be nationalized or not? If so, how much? What does an egalitarian political system look like when a certain amount of leadership by technical elites is necessary and inevitable? Which kinds of equality matter and which ones don’t? What is an appropriate amount of workers’ control? Etc etc.

The New Lefts of the 1960s were a challenge to government socialism, one we might see as opening the era of the left in the shadow of which we still live today. Kahn writes that the New Left “isn’t necessarily wedded to Marxism, but it is tied to collective action—to these myths of moments of glorious revolution and solidarity, of the people all united together.” A more instructive way to put it is that the New Left was a revival of the anti-statist strain of socialism that had grown marginal in the first half of the twentieth century, a socialisme libertaire that really did come close to wanting to destroy—or in its favored-but-ill-appropriated Leninist term, smash—the state as opposed to take it over and run it. To be fair to the New Left, in their time the USSR was the unfortunate personification of government socialism; to them “states” were all the same: nuclear weapons, colonialist domination, labor discipline, enforced social traditionalism, and the like. They were also mostly very young people, and childishly associated all hierarchy—even the sort necessary for effective political action or governance—with authoritarianism.

The New Left also strongly revived the romantic themes of early socialism, something like what Kahn attributes to leftism in general: pure, unmediated community; the idealization of the local, the pastoral, the non-rationalized, the ungoverned. Tactically, this was expressed in its valorization of communal uprising, protest and occupation, “new forms of living,” etc. I’m oversimplifying radically, but the New Left was an anti-modern turn in the left3, away from the political and technical project of building mass democratic legitimacy, exercising power, and governing. It only seemed confirmation of their position that as the government socialist left eventually gained power in Europe, it became basically indistinguishable from the governing parties of the center-right, and eventually from neoliberalism. By the 1990s and early 2000s, the left was either the sort of clear-eyed but resigned critique-without-a-movement of people like Perry Anderson and the New Left Review4, identitarian and single-issue radical groups, or scattered romantic protest movements with no strategy but refusal and disruption.

To my mind, the arc of the left in the Long 2010s was a one-two reckoning with the legacy of the New Left, a partial reconsideration of the weakness engendered by that model of being “beautiful losers,” of being morally correct but powerless.5 First came Occupy Wall Street, which was textbook post-New Left in its strategy of affective, communitarian mass protest, of situational theatrics and refusal of structure or program. Occupy was understandable in a situation of a long defeat and attrition of left institutions, in a moment where one simply didn’t know what else to do. Its inevitable failure brought a more interesting second moment: an attempted revival of government socialism, a renewed interest in the labor movement and the “old” left, and a more structure- and power-focused strategy. This was partial and contentious, of course: the DSA was riven with bitter disputes between all factions of the historical left, but principally between government socialists and anarchists, the latter of whom referred to themselves as “communists” and used terms like “electoralism” and “government socialism” as derogatory epithets. The socialism of the 2010s was an admixture of the two: an effort to revive the left as an organized institutional movement that aimed to build democratic legitimacy and run the state, and a radical protest politics attached to revolutionary theatrics and a fantasy of state-smashing that was already thoroughly discredited by the late 1970s.6

Here I will pause this chronological narrative to address what Kahn writes about liberals, who he makes into the government-minded, pragmatic foil to the moralistic romanticism of the left. Again, Kahn is not wrong that a kind of resigned, holier-than-thou self-satisfaction with its powerless moral correctness has a marked presence in the late-twentieth-century left. A politics of mourning a lost cause. But if that posture accomplished anything, it was indeed to serve as the conscience of liberals who were celebrating the bleak, bland end of history. Which Kahn denies; instead, he argues that it was a performative position that basically just obstructed and prevented liberals from governing effectively. Here, the left becomes the naysaying Jefferson to the liberals’ pragmatic, state-building Hamiltonianism. But that, too, is historically wrong.7 Twentieth-century liberals obstructed their own power with no help from, and even against the wishes of, the left. The statist midcentury liberals that Kahn admires had many of the right impulses; they even served as the model for most of postwar European government socialism. But they backed away all on their own from wielding state power as countervailing force to private interests; it was liberals that guzzled down totalitarianism theory in the 1950s, began to associate the strong, managerial state with authoritarianism, and dressed their reticence in appeals to—you guessed it—Jeffersonian decentralization.8

In defense of the big, bureaucratic state and its experts

The current moment has certain echoes, for me, of the late Obama era: the disappointment of a failed idealism; a stagnant, immobilized political system incapable of pursuing any common purpose or vision of the future; and a resignation about democratic agency altogether. Except of course that it’s much darker: because it follows a decade of efforts to revive democratic agency, the resignation and cynicism seems to have metastasized, opening the door for a regime that is simultaneously wielding state power in lawless, violent ways and destroying it from within.

The Trump assault on the administrative state—on every aspect of its role as a guardian of the people against the exploitations and distortions of private interest—highlights what the central political battleground is, what the left has to think about if it is even to exist at all.9 The 2010s left began to do that; it saw budding shoots of what we might call “left technocracy” or a left expert class: political organizers and operatives, policy wonks, and people who generally were thinking not about how to play-act revolution, but things like how a Bernie Sanders administration would run the United States military. It was a tough thing to do out in the open of a populist moment where expert rule was so associated with the out-of-touch Democratic Party. But if we learned anything from that moment, and from the bumblings of the first Trump administration, it was that even populism needs technocrats; indeed, they are what determines whether it succeeds or fails. Even if any successful politics in the hyperpolitical era will have to be nominally populist, the real battle line of power in our time is between an elite still committed to an ideal of serving the state on behalf of the people and a new onagocracy that sees the state as a vehicle for megalomaniacal fantasies and science-fiction dystopias.

The middle decades of the twentieth century were a curiously double-sided period in political thought, one in which the massive expansion of the administrative state was taken to be an inevitable structural development of “industrial society” at the same time it became a source of widespread intellectual anxiety and romantic dissent. The association of bureaucracy with totalitarianism became commonplace in liberal and dissident-left thought by the late 1950s and reached a crescendo in the anti-bureaucratic politics of the New Left. (It’s no accident that the most dramatic spike in left discourse on bureaucracy took place in the 1970s.) For a brief moment, young leftist theorists—the New Left wasn’t all bad—began to think somewhat positively about the social role of the “professional-managerial class” (technicians, engineers and knowledge workers), though they still largely fitted that into a Marxist class critique and simply turned white-collar workers into the new revolutionary vanguard, the nouvelle classe ouvrière. But generally speaking anti-bureaucracy dominated, democratic in intent but always susceptible to romantic anti-modernism: a recurring feedback loop of age-old tropes (“mechanization rationalization big dangerous centralized alienating”) unable to look forward to different possible futures. It turns out that the maligned administrative body of the state was not the gravedigger of democracy, but its last line of defense.10

Even if I disagree with Kahn that what remains of the left is nothing more than just obstructionist romantics, he’s correct in spirit that it should be primarily concerned with elaborating a vision of power grounded in technical mastery and public-spirited idealism. Generations of leftists return with clockwork predictability to the scholastic texts, to Marx and Engels, to the tactical treatises of Lenin and Trotsky, and especially to the literary, aestheticized canon of leftist thought known as Western Marxism. But the more relevant canon is one still too hidden in archives and dull histories of government, that of the people tasked with developing policies, running bureaucracies, and facing all the technical challenges of actually wielding power.

The wager of government socialism was always that the state could be more than the organizer of capitalist interests, that it could, finally, live up to its full Hegelian promise. I don’t know if “socialism” has any meaning today, or if it could ever be delivered by a mass upheaval of democratic agency. But it’s pretty clear that the leadership of the state—big, powerful, imaginative, vigorous, and efficient—is the only thing that could possibly produce a non-dystopian response to things like America’s imperial decline, the chaotic worldwide unleashing of artificial intelligence, and the looming threat of climate change. I don’t consider the construction of a left force capable of delivering that very likely, but that’s the job—it’s either that or the abyss.

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That the left half of the American political spectrum has higher “human capital”—smarter, more educated, more competent personnel—than the right half has been a structural fact of American politics for my entire lifetime, if not for most of the twentieth century. That is not to say that there aren’t smart conservatives or brilliant intellectuals with right-wing politics, but that the American conservative movement has been defined by a long history of constructing an “alternative” ecosystem where ideological purity and partisan loyalty trumped evidence and expertise.

I used to try to explain this to conservative family members back home as I was explaining it to myself in my early 20s, when I moved abruptly from one of the bastions of far-right evangelical movement conservatism into working in the mainstream media in DC and New York. As a still barely ex-conservative, it was obvious that all of my media colleagues had liberal politics, and that in some cases those amounted to partisanship for the Democratic Party. It was also obvious that they were first of all committed to journalism and truth, including when it was awkward for Democrats or complicated their own worldview. They thought it was interesting when the facts didn’t line up with what they thought, or an issue didn’t break down neatly along partisan lines.

I tried to articulate it many times before I got it right: the conservative critique of the liberal media, so central to the political worldview I grew up with and partly responsible for my interest in media in the first place, was right about the basic fact that most of the media was liberal-leaning, even “biased” in some sense. But that right-wing obsession missed the forest for the trees. I would say things like, “Of course the media is liberal, but liberal things are not ideological in the same way conservative things are. Ideology is in the background of liberal institutions, but it is the only thing in conservative institutions.” In the era of 2000s neoliberalism, liberal spaces were much more heterodox and open to dialogue with conservative arguments than the right-wing world I was familiar with, which for all its intellectual trappings still primarily groomed one to recite dogmatic mantras, misdirect, own and discredit. I saw it firsthand in the way very young conservatives were whisked into prominent positions in right-wing media and politics simply because they had the right beliefs; conservative institutions had to take anyone who hadn’t defected from the project by age 22. When people accused me of abandoning my beliefs, I would say, “It’s not even about the beliefs! It’s about the style.” In the broadest sense, it seemed clear that one side in the political discourse cared about learning, accurate information, and rational debate—all of the things my conservative education had ostensibly trained me for—and one side didn’t.1

I’ve been thinking back to that time the past few months as I reacted in disgust to a seemingly ascendent sentiment that the second Trump era—or the “vibe shift,” or the end of wokeness, whatever you want to call it—marks the entry into some glorious new era of free speech and cultural vitality. I thought about it as I started spending more time on Substack and picked up on a puerile anti-elite, anti-institutional animus, vastly disproportionate to the failings of its targets, that seems more prominent here than elsewhere. I thought about it again over the past few weeks as the headlines were dominated by the mass, indiscriminate firings of federal workers at the behest of a billionaire madman with no legitimate democratic authority or mandate.

And I especially thought about it when I realized how much I had been reading Richard Hanania.

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Happy end of January! The times are dark, but we read on.

This was supposed to be more of a list of what I read over the past month, but turned into a loosely-interconnected manifesto—the sort of thing I find useful for forcing myself to clarify half-conscious thoughts, but is probably an interminable slog to most everyone else. Hence this table of contents for people who might want to skip to what they’re interested in:

• How I approach thinking about the present

• The gay reasons I wanted to read Foucault’s History of Sexuality, and other stuff I’ve been reading in connection with that

• Straight people problems (sort of)! Featuring Foucault, Plato, and the TikTok relationship guru Jillian Turecki

• Novels by Tony Tulathimutte, ARX-Han, and A. Natasha Joukovsky

• Links to articles, essays, and podcasts I recommend this month

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This is Part 2 of my series on Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality. Part 1 is here. For an overview The History of Sexuality as a whole and its place in Foucault’s work, start with my introduction.

In the last post, we covered the introductory section of The Use of Pleasure. Part I is called “The Moral Problematization of Pleasures,” and is about the logic with which the ancient Greeks approached pleasures as a moral problem. This post is about aphrodisia (“the works of Aphrodite”), the Greek equivalent—but as we will see, it is not equivalent!—of our concept of “sexuality.” The next will cover what Foucault argues were the concepts they used to talk about the right ways to enjoy sexual pleasures: proper use (chrēsis), self-mastery (enkrateia) and moderation (sophrosynē). These terms set up how Greek moral thought is recognizable to us in some ways, and very strange in others.

A note on Foucault’s ancient sources

I didn’t say much up front about the kinds of sources Foucault is using to make his argument, but they are important for evaluating his “reading” of ancient sexuality and moral thought. He uses a wide variety of sources, but so far he is principally drawing on philosophical texts from classical Athens (roughly the 500-300s BC), especially Plato, Aristotle and Xenophon.

Athenian philosophy articulated a particular view of sexuality that did not encompass Greek behavior in general, nor even all of the minority of Athenians who were interested in philosophy. Plato himself was not necessarily representative of Athenian philosophy: as K.J. Dover notes, “Plato differed from most Athenians of his time in possession of wealth and leisure, in boundless zeal for the study of philosophy and mathematics, in a suspicious and censorious attitude to the arts, and in contempt for democracy.”1 Philosophy was modest and circumspect, whereas other literary genres, like poetry—Aristophanes’ plays, for example—presented sexuality in a much more graphic, bawdy fashion. But Foucault’s choice of sources makes sense, because unlike Dover’s Greek Homosexuality, which makes much of legal texts and vase paintings, he is not primarily interested in what Greeks did in bed, but their moral reflection about it. The important thing to keep in mind—important for Foucault’s later arguments about Romans and Christians—is that there were competing schools of thought even in Athens, and especially in “Greece” over time.

Aphrodisia, or the works of Aphrodite

The Greeks did not have a concept of “sexuality” that corresponded to all of the things people today group under that category, nor did they have a concept of the “flesh” in the Christian sense, an inherently “fallen” part of the whole. Foucault makes constant comparisons between Greek thought and those later concepts, warning against conflating them and refuting the “clichés” he himself operated with earlier in his work.2

What the Greeks did have was the goddess Aphrodite.

One of the twelve Olympians, Aphrodite was allegedly born from the sea foam near Crete. (Aphros means “foam” and, according to the poet Hesiod, Aphrodite emerged from the white foam of Uranus’ severed genitals. Don’t forget that part.) Aphrodite was the goddess of love, desire, passion and beauty; she played a central role in starting the Trojan War, in which she supported the Trojan prince Paris, whom she had promised Helen of Sparta in exchange for voting her the most beautiful goddess. She also famously destroyed Hippolytus for being chastely devoted to her rival, the hunting goddess Artemis (a tragedy told differently in Euripides’ Hippolytus, Seneca’s Phaedra, and in the early modern French poet Jean Racine’s Phèdre.)

In place of a concept of sexuality, the Greeks spoke of the aphrodisia, which they defined—very specifically and helpfully!—as “the works, the acts of Aphrodite.” (This catégorie d’ensemble, “blanket category,” Foucault says, could be translated as “pleasures of love,” “sexual relations,” “carnal acts,” “sensual pleasures,” but since no precise translation is possible he decides to leave aphrodisia untranslated.) Here we immediately get a sense of the ride we’re in for; we are not used to concepts being personified by goddesses! Ancient Greek language and thinking are strange to us, and so is the “logic” that holds together their thinking about acts, desires, and pleasures.

Foucault notes that while Christian moral thinking will (eventually) be full of precise descriptions of which sexual acts are acceptable, Greek moralists said almost nothing about specific positions or sex acts. This might have been due to “modesty,” as the Greek “representation of sexual acts they suggest in their written works…seems to have been characterized by a good deal of reserve, despite the impression one gets from the entertainments they staged and from certain iconographic representations that have been discovered.”3 But a better explanation, he says, is because of the way they understood the aphrodisia. While Aristotle’s zoology treatise History of Animals goes into detail about animal copulation, the Greeks did not see the need to do the same for humans, because sex acts were not the core of the issue.

The unit of analysis relevant to Greek ethical thinking was a whole made up of three parts: “In the experience of the aphrodisia…act, desire and pleasure formed an ensemble whose elements were distinguishable, certainly, but closely bound to one another.” (42) These elements had a kind of circular relationship: an act produces a certain kind of pleasure, which then produces desire to repeat the pleasurable act, since, according to Aristotle, we are naturally driven by “desire for the agreeable thing.” But the Greeks were not concerned with any of the three elements by themselves. Foucault: “The ethical question that was raised was not: which desires? Which acts? Which pleasures? But rather: with what force is one transported ‘by the pleasures and desires’?” (43) In other words, they were more interested in the animating movement of pleasures and desire than the precise physical form that was taken to satisfy them.

Foucault says that there were two variables according to which Greek ethics conducted moral inquiry into the aphrodisia. The first was quantitative: “not so much the type of objects toward which [men] are oriented, nor the mode of sexual practice they prefer,” but the “intensity of that practice. The division is between lesser and greater: moderation or excess” (44). In Plato’s Laws, what goes “against nature” is not a specific type of act but “a lack of restraint with regard to pleasure” (akrateia hēdonēs). In Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, “immorality in the pleasures of sex is always connected with exaggeration, surplus and excess” (45).

The second variable was active and passive sexual roles. Here’s where we get back to “foam.” Foucault introduces the verb form of aphrodisia—aphrodisiazein—which meant more narrowly, to have sex or even to come. (Here’s where we get back to aphros meaning “foam”: according to the Loeb Classical Library’s glossary, the Greek poet Hesiod related aphrodisiazein to “foam” in the sense of semen.) If to aphrodisiazein meant to fuck, then its passive form, aphrodisiathēnai, meant to receive the action of the active partner, to be fucked, which, of course, free male citizens were not supposed to like. The point of this terminology is to demonstrate that, unlike Christians, Greeks did not have a general sexual morality that applied to both males and females; immorality had to do with roles, not genders. The two ways to commit sexual immorality were thus 1) by being excessive, and 2) by abandoning one’s proper role—which, for the free adult men these texts address, meant the role of the active partner.

There is one final point to make about the aphrodisia before moving on to the Greek ethic of struggling against them. The reason the Greeks considered the aphrodisia to be potentially dangerous was not because they were evil or unnatural, but because they were so natural that they had an exceptional power. Sexual pleasure was an inferior kind of pleasure because it was shared by humans and animals. Because it was so important for the propagation of the species, nature made it an especially intense pleasure, as Plato says in his Laws. It was for that reason, Foucault says, “people were induced to overturn the hierarchy, placing these appetites and their satisfaction uppermost, and giving them absolute power over the soul” (49). The Greeks frequently related sexual pleasure to the pleasure of food and wine: all of these bodily pleasures were so intense that they naturally tend toward excess—and thus called for a particular kind of struggle for self-mastery and moderation.

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Read the previous entry in this series:

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This is Part I of my series on Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality. It covers the introduction to the second volume, The Use of Pleasure. For an overview The History of Sexuality as a whole and its place in Foucault’s work, start with my introduction to the series.

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The introduction to The Use of Pleasure (L’usage des plaisirs—“pleasures” more accurately plural in the French) is a brief 32 pages in the English translation. While not easy reading for anyone it is exceptionally clear, and you can follow the argument without any background in classics, theology, or philosophy—though those certainly help. I hadn’t heard of most of the figures he mentions besides big names like Socrates, Plato and Seneca. But it doesn’t matter; they only appear here to set up the questions he is going to ask.

Foucault does three things in the introduction, each of which are neatly contained in their own short chapter:

1. First, he explains his shift in perspective and approach from Volume 1, which I outlined in the introduction. (I’m skipping Volume 1 because it is the one that is most familiar, and more in the style of the “earlier” Foucault.)

2. Second, he notes an initial curiosity that led him to his approach: many of the notions we might assume to be typical of Christian sexual morality—a worry about masturbation as a threat to physical and social health; an ideal of moderate, controlled sexual activity and marital fidelity; a dim view of male effeminacy; and a link between sexual abstinence and special access to wisdom—were in fact common in the texts of classical antiquity. In short, there were four recurring areas of concern: the body, the wife, boys and truth. If such concerns were in fact continuous across antiquity and Christianity, what was the difference between the two? What kind of method would help us get at the “break” between them?

3. Third, Foucault defines what he means by the “morality” whose history the book will examine. “Morality” is a general term with many meanings. He boils those down to two “types” of morality: code morality (codified systems of rules and prohibitions) versus ethical or ascetic morality (models of living rightly on an individual level). One type is not classical and the other Christian; both types exist within each, and there was no hard break between them. Foucault’s approach will be to examine changes in the relationship between these two types of morality over time. Which type predominates, and which of the four “concerns” receive emphasis? Here he hints at an overall thesis: classical morality was more ethical than codified, and Greek moral ideals had nothing to do with certain sexual behaviors and pleasures being prohibited.

From power to ethics

Foucault begins by saying he had set out to write “a history of the experience of sexuality” that is not a story about repression, one that assumes “sexuality” is a constant that is more or less repressed at different points in time. (Remember: anti-Freud.) The notion of “sexuality” itself is a very modern idea, so he aims to “stand back from it, bracketing its familiarity, in order to analyze the theoretical and practical content with which it has been associated” (3). Here we have classic Foucault, seeing things we take to be obvious natural facts to be, rather, created by knowledge: something begins to “exist” in the Foucault paradigm when humans make it a problem and create knowledge about it.

Foucault says that he initially planned to study sexuality along three “axes”:

1. The formation of the sciences of sexuality (medical/social sciences)

2. Systems of power that regulate sexual practices (legal/political systems)

3. “The forms within which individuals are able, are obliged, to recognized themselves as subjects of this sexuality” (4)

The first two are clear enough and are directly continuous with the style of Foucault’s earlier work on madness and criminality, which he also held to be brought into being by scientific study and governmental techniques.

The third is kind of obscure but is the most important, because Foucault says it is what will now shift his emphasis toward. He tries again to define it as “the practices through which individuals were led to focus their attention on themselves” and “how individuals were led to practice, on themselves and on others, a hermeneutics1 of desire” (5).

I put the emphasis on individuals there because looking at this process from the perspective of the individual—as opposed to systems of knowledge—is indeed a shift. Foucault is not rejecting or denying the way that systems shape us as sexual “subjects,” but he is stating a new emphasis on how individuals relate to those systems from their own perspective.2 On the systemic scale: Why are people given rules and models according which to evaluate their own desires and behavior? Why is sexuality always such a prominent focus of those rules, as opposed to other areas of social life? On the individual scale: What do people actually do with those rules?

Foucault thinks that this question leads to an even broader one, one that will shed a different light on the history of sexuality than a focus on the repression of libidinal drives. How did the “problematization” of sexuality emerge from the ancient ethics or “techniques of the self” or “arts of existence”? I love his definition of these ars existentia:

those intentional and voluntary actions by which men not only set themselves rules of conduct, but also seek to transform themselves, to change themselves in their singular being, and to make their life into an oeuvre3 that carries certain aesthetic values and meets certain stylistic criteria.

Four problem areas: body, wife, boys and truth

In Chapter 2, Foucault plays a “guess who said it” game, giving a quotation that sounds as if it were written by a Victorian-era European doctor. According to this source, masturbation is a “disease in itself,” and is “dangerous in that it leads to stagnation; harmful to society in that it goes against the propagation of the species; and because in all respects it is a source of countless ills, it requires prompt treatment” (16). But the author, it turns out, was not a Victorian Christian, but a first-century Greek physician.

We might imagine today that Greeks were sexual hedonists while Christians were obsessed with sin and opposed to pleasure. But such an idea is immediately contradicted by the sources. Almost all of the concerns about sexuality we now associate with Christianity “were already present at the core of Greek and Greco-Roman thought” (15). Foucault identifies four areas of concern—a “thematic complex” or “a quadri-thematics of sexual austerity”—that were continuous across the two:

1. Fear of masturbation (body): We’ve covered that one, but basically a concern about masturbation as a threat to both physical and social health.

2. An ideal of sexual moderation (wife). Foucault mentions a parable about elephant sex that Saint Francis de Sales (16th century) used to model proper sexual behavior to Christians. Elephants mate in secret, only mate with one partner, then hide out for six days and wash themselves before returning to the herd. But this was not just a Christian thing. (Animal sex turns out to be a surprisingly big part of ancient moral philosophy!4) The elephant story was actually handed down nearly word for word from the Roman philosopher Pliny (1st century). As this and many other examples show, Foucault says, some classical schools of thought extolled sexual moderation and marital fidelity as “a manifestation of inner strength, virtue, and self-mastery” (17).5

3. Disapproval of male effeminacy (boys). Nineteenth-century European literature was full of mocking depictions of “inverts,” or men who who cross-dressed, wore makeup and physically comported themselves like women. But so was classical literature. In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates disapproves of loving “soft boys” who are “made up with rouge and decked out in ornaments”; centuries later, the Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca inveighed against men who were “competing in bodily softness with women, beautifying themselves with filthy fineries.” (Seneca was, somewhat problematically for his Roman context, attracted to adult male athletes.) None of these derogatory comments meant that Greeks or Romans disapproved of homosexual activity in general, but that they made “strongly negative judgments concerning some possible aspects of relations between men, as well as a definite aversion to anything that might denote a deliberate renunciation of the signs and privileges of the masculine role.” (19)

4. An ideal of sexual abstinence (truth). Foucault: “The virtuous hero who is able to turn aside from pleasure, as if from a temptation into which he knows not to fall, is a familiar figure in Christianity—as common as the idea that this renunciation can give access to a spiritual experience of truth and love that sexual activity excludes. But equally well known in pagan antiquity was the figure of those athletes of self-restraint who were sufficiently masters of themselves and their cravings to be able to renounce sexual pleasure.” Already in Greek thought, “the thematics of a relationship between sexual abstinence and truth was quite prominent” (20).

Foucault is not saying that Greeks and Christians were the same, but that comparing the “thematics” of their reflections on sexuality will not tell us much about how they were different. We have to look not just at their official beliefs, but at how they were used, at what they understood these moral ideas to be for.

How do you solve a problem like morality?

“Anyone who wishes to study the history of a ‘morality’ has to take into account the different realities that are covered by the term,” Foucault writes in Chapter 3 (29). “Morality” can mean many things, including:

• A moral code, or system of rules and regulations codified in moral teaching or law

• Behavioral morality, or how individuals personally relate to a moral code, whether they “believe” in it or choose to follow it

• The “ethical substance” of morality. I confess I’m not entirely sure what Foucault means by this, but I think he means the practical way you understand acting out your morality—by fighting temptation, by being faithful to another person, etc

• The “mode of subjection,” or why you submit to morality—because it expressing belonging to a group, or because you see yourself as part of a tradition, or because you want to be a brilliant example to others

• Ethical work on yourself, i.e., or the efforts you undertake to make yourself “moral” in your own eyes and “live your best life.” There is a connotation of self-discipline or taking responsibility for yourself, as when people talk about “working on themselves.” (A lot of modern people see going to therapy as a form of ethical work on themselves, “dealing with their shit.”) But there is also the grander connotation of aesthetics here: of transforming your life into a “work,” something fully realized and beautiful. (A lot of people on Substack see reading and writing this way, as a kind of discipline in the service of a higher vision of life they set for themselves.)

The details of these are not all super important; what Foucault is getting at is that there are different types or “styles” of morality, and that if a historian wants to follow how “morality” changes over time, they need to be aware of which one they’re talking about. A history of moral codes would be quite different than a history of how everyday people think about morality and “work on” their behavior. And, he suggests, different cultures have different styles of morality, or emphasize them differently in different periods: sometimes moral codes and their prohibitions are super important and have real force, and other times they are quite minimal and take a backseat to other modes of thinking about morality.

Now for the payoff. Foucault says that, as he traces ideas about sexuality, within the “package” of broader conceptions of morality, he is going to examine both moral codes and ethical ideals—that is, moral ideas that are encoded in systems and enforced with prohibitions as well as moral ideas that are more like models for living a good life or self-help advice. The latter type he associates with askesis (the Greek root of ascetic, which we associate with the extreme self-denial of monks, mystics, or religious cults, but here means discipline in the sense of exercise, training, or practice).

And, finally, at the end of Chapter 3, he offers an introductory hypothesis:

Now, it seems clear, from a first approach at least, that moral conceptions in Greek and Greco-Roman antiquity were much more oriented toward practices of the self and the question of askesis than toward codifications of conducts and the strict definition of what is permitted and what is forbidden. … The accent was placed on the relationship with the self that enabled a person to keep from being carried away by the appetites and pleasures, to maintain a mastery and superiority over them, to keep his senses in a state of tranquility, to remain free from interior bondage to the passions, and to achieve a mode of being that could be defined by the full enjoyment of oneself, the perfect supremacy of oneself over oneself. (30-31)

If it is not clear by now, Foucault is proposing to study the experience of sexuality through the study of styles of morality. That makes The History of Sexuality not just a work about sex, but about the fundamental questions of how to live well and the different ways people approach rules for living well. But I promise there’s plenty of sex to come.

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5

Foucault notes how peculiar it is that classical moral thought was not addressed to the people who lived under the heaviest social and moral constraints in classical society: women. One might imagine women would receive elaborate moral instruction in which their roles and rules were spelled out. But, on the contrary, classical moral reflection “was an ethics for men: an ethics thought, written, and taught by men, and addressed to men. … A male ethics, consequently, in which women figured only as objects or, at most, as partners that one had best train, educate, and watch over when one had them under one’s power, but stay away from when they were under the power of someone else” (22). As we’ll see later, Christianity brings women into the picture in a much different way.

Unsurprisingly, Foucault’s use of “high literary” Greek sources produced by free male citizens has been criticized by feminist scholars. There is surely more to be said, but one such critique I consulted seemed to consider it a blindness or “mistake” in Foucault’s analysis, when in fact, as the quote above shows, he is quite explicit about what the sources he is using are unable to tell us.

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Michel Foucault holds a curious and fascinating position in contemporary ideas: he is often said to be the most cited author in the humanities and social sciences, and he has been at the heart of the culture wars of the American public sphere for over three decades. Potted overviews of his thought have been injected into culture war debates in major intellectual journals past and present, as well as on YouTube, Reddit, Substack, and in popular bestsellers. At the moment, no single thinker figures more centrally in battles over “wokeness” and identity politics; Foucault has been attacked by today’s Marxist left and increasingly been adopted by dissident liberals and even the right. Ever since the 1980s, Foucault has been the patron saint of certain gay intellectuals—though even prominent gay writers both get him wildly wrong and ignore the parts of his work most relevant to their concerns.

Despite being a historian of modern French ideas, I was never a “Foucault person” (his influence was so omnipresent you barely had to read him), but this sort of broad, controversy-inducing influence of a thinker far beyond their original context was what first drew me to intellectual history. As an early graduate student I was obsessed with “getting it right,” that is, opposing a rigorous reading of a thinker to the simplistic deformations of our generally illiterate, uncultured public discourse. But later I came to see that it was just as interesting to study the ways someone like Foucault is used—what the celebrations, the demonizations, the stylizations, the fantasies, the misreadings say about the people who are using him and the debates they are engaged in.

But to do that, you have to begin with a solid foundation—to get the thinker right. And it turns out that two of my different strands of work—two aims of this Substack—now intersect at Foucault. The first is my aim of using my training as an intellectual historian to contextualize and criticize those culture wars that turn thinkers into weapons, to improve debate by writing clearly and accessibly about ideas for the general public. The second is my interest in the history of homosexuality, which, as Foucault’s work shows, is inseparable from the general history of sexuality, which is in turn inseparable from even broader and deeper human questions. To accomplish both of those things, I need to do the basic reading of Foucault that I’ve never really done.

One of the practices French students learn, even today, is the explication de texte: an exercise in giving clear, logical summaries of complex arguments. So one project I’d like to attempt here is a gradual working through, in that spirit, of Foucault’s four-volume History of Sexuality, a monumental study of how people have “problematized” sexuality from Ancient Greece to modernity. The History of Sexuality is the part of Foucault I and the public are least familiar with, and the part most relevant to my current interests.

I can’t say how fast or slow it will emerge, but that it will serve as an ongoing project I can pick up and put down as I am able. Hopefully it will be one where my own intellectual interests and those of my readers converge: a project designed both to discipline myself and to be followed along with, one that will invite—but not require—your own reading of Foucault. (I’ve linked to full texts of the books throughout.) To that end, I will try to aim for the general takeaway rather than getting caught up on technical points; I will assume no prior knowledge of anything Foucault is talking about, explain confusing quotations, define unfamiliar terms, and provide background. In my experience, that style of explication is immensely helpful, to both writer and reader, no matter one’s level of expertise.

What is The History of Sexuality?

Like almost all famous French thinkers, Foucault was trained in the extremely classical style of French philosophy, which required knowledge of Greek, Latin, and German, knowing the philosophical canon inside and out, and producing intensely rigorous readings of canonical texts. He is most famous—especially in popular discourse—for his early studies that used empirical history to pose philosophical questions about the relationship between knowledge and power in modern society: Madness and Civilization (1961), The Birth of the Clinic (1963) and Discipline and Punish (1975). Those studies focused on law, medicine, and prisons, and produced Foucault the theorist of power—or, in the popular imagination, “language as power.” Beginning with The Will to Knowledge (1976), Foucault turned his innovative method onto sexuality, or rather, modern knowledge and discourse about sexuality.

There was a delay of almost a decade until the next volume of the History of Sexuality, during which Foucault reconfigured the entire project and began to write in a style that is much clearer and reads more like conventional scholarship. The second and third volumes, on Greek and Roman sexuality and practices for the “arts of existence”—titled The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self—were published in 1984, just months before Foucault’s death from AIDS. The final volume, The Confessions of the Flesh, about the problematization of sexuality in early Christianity, was only published in 2018 due to Foucault’s objection to posthumous publications.

What is The History of Sexuality about?

One thing to keep in mind at all times is that the History of Sexuality is an anti-Freudian project. Though Freud had been used in American psychoanalysis as a conservative force for reinforcing normative sexuality, Freud—perhaps in close second to Marx, often combined in “Freudian Marxism”—was at the heart of the movement for sexual liberation in the 1960s and 1970s. Liberationist movements used Freud to claim that modern social problems were rooted in the repression of sexuality through cultural puritanism, gender norms, homophobia, etc, inherited from Christianity, and saw overthrowing a long history of the repression of sexuality as central to to a new and more humane society. Sexuality, in the Freudian story, was a set of drives at the deep core of the individual, and their repression amounted to violence against the inner truth of the self. (Not surprisingly, the 1960s is when we got the notion of the “closet,” that a gay person has an innate, “true” homosexual self they are forced to hide; only later would this innate self be held to be rooted in biology.)

Foucault was skeptical of psychoanalysis and of the idea that people even have “deep selves.” His previous work had been about how structural forces—legal regimes, medical knowledge, surveillance tactics, forms of incarceration and punishment—create their “subjects”; in other word, these forces fashion the kind of individual they aim to study, organize, and rule. Individuals are not the autonomous, rational agents imagined by liberalism, they are created by power and its efforts to subject them. (Far prior to the current backlash against wokeism, this was the source of the virulent liberal hostility to Foucault that continues to this day, the endlessly reiterated claim that he was a “determinist” or a “nihilist.”)

The first volume of The History of Sexuality examined sexuality through that same lens. The best way to understand it is as a critique of the Freudian liberationist story about sexuality and the evils of the Victorian era that imposed its increasingly “scientific” form of repression. Yes, Victorian society of the late 19th century was increasingly prohibitive and draconian about sexual practices. But, Foucault argued, that same society unleashed an unprecedented amount of talking about and analyzing sexuality, to the point sex was a veritable obsession. Even as it repressed sex itself, Victorian society liberated sexual discourse. The result was that through that unleashing and its increasing medicalization, sexuality moved to the inner core of the individual in a way it never had been before—sexual desire came to be seen as the ultimate “truth” of a person’s interiority, which then had to be confessed and blathered about in psychotherapy in order to diagnose, medicalize, and control it.

Foucault pointed out that 1970s liberationism, with its unleashing of desire, had strange parallels with the Victorian sex obsession, and threw cold water on the idea that merely derepressing and talking about desire as revelatory of deep inner truth of our selves would automatically equal “liberation” or a society more open to “deviant” sexual practices. In the broad sense, and despite the fact that he endorsed some radical causes and was excited by gay liberation, the upshot of Foucault’s program can be construed as anti-liberationist, emphasizing that modern society was always subjecting in creative and insidious new ways, even when we think we are liberating ourselves. (This is the origin of the virulent hostility of Marxists to his thought, from the 1970s to the 1990s to the present, an interesting topic unfortunately too big go into here.)

Foucault’s shift to “techniques of the self”

In the almost ten years between Volume 1 and Volumes 2 and 3, Foucault not only vastly expanded the scope of his sexuality project but changed the angle from which he came at it. There is much biographical speculation about why, including his participation in the American and French gay scenes of the 1970s and 1980s, which he possibly saw as a new kind of politics that contrasted with the bureaucratic authoritarianism of Communism and the French left. (His personal political impulses were first of all anti-authoritarian.) He was part of a French current of left “anti-totalitarianism” in the late 1970s1 which, along with his later lectures on neoliberalism and Hayek, has led to a massive and impassioned literature on whether he converted to “neoliberalism.”

But in terms of his History of Sexuality, Foucault, in Volumes 2-4, became less interested in “power” and more interested in the long history, from classical antiquity, of how people understand sexuality through a broader set of “techniques of the self”—in other words, what Greeks, Romans, and Christians though the self was and the techniques they developed for understanding it and, in the broadest sense, for creating rules and ethics of the good life. This was not necessarily a repudiation of his earlier work, but more of a broadening of it, taking it back further in time when the discourse of sexuality was less directly connected to modern science and styles of government. In his own terms, he reorganized the study “around the slow formation, in antiquity, of a hermeneutics of the self,” and aimed to write “the history of desiring man.”2

I think it is fairly well established that Foucault saw political promise in thinking about “techniques of the self”—styles of self-fashioning—that were about creating new ways of “living well,” not just burrowing into psychology or unleashing some obvious “truth” of the libido.3 In the introduction to Volume 2, Foucault explains his own shift as trying to push beyond even his own settled notions, to find the surprising trajectories in the deep history of how we came to see ourselves as “subjects” of our own sexual desire. “The object,” he wrote, “was to learn to what extent the effort to think one’s own history can free thought from what it silently thinks, and so enable it to think differently.”4

Where that project ended up and what to think of it is, for me, a question completely open to the excitement of reading and discovery. The best way to do intellectual history, I think, is with subjects one has neither a fierce preexisting attachment to nor a particular distaste for. I’m going to begin with Volume 2, where Foucault announces his shift, because the first volume is by far the best known and the most consonant with the “familiar” Foucault of knowledge, discourse, and power. He also wrote many other lectures and essays concurrently to clarify his arguments, which perhaps we’ll pick up along the way. I hope you enjoy reading along, and welcome your questions and comments—and of course, correction.

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Last year, at something of a personal nadir, I haltingly told my doctor I was desperate, that sometimes I simply could not make myself do basic adult things I needed to do, sometimes with serious and embarrassing consequences. I said I had struggled with focus and completing tasks my entire life, that everyone I had ever been close to had told me I should get evaluated for ADHD. (I was careful to add that this was long before it turned into a TikTok trend.) I expected that would be an initial conversation that would lead to more evaluations, but to my surprise, he asked me a few questions and prescribed me a low dose of a stimulant. When I was outside the office I found myself, also to my surprise, sobbing with relief.

Months later, I picked up a book called ADHD 2.0 from the wall of my local bookstore’s most popular titles. I had planned to read more about ADHD but hadn’t gotten around to researching books, so I decided I’d make it easy and start there. Normally I would be skeptical of a pop-psychology book on a bestseller wall that one might assume proffers just-so stories about brains or evangelizes a trendy narrative on top of what is probably inconclusive and contested research.1 I think part of my resistance to seeking treatment came from being a historian of social science and knowing how strongly such narratives are shaped by cultural and political ideology—the psychology discipline being both one of the worst historical offenders and currently one of the most popular bases for flimsy, Thought Leadery theories of everything.2 In addition to an inchoate, irrational fear of medication and a moralizing self-critique, I had a reflexively social constructionist view of ADHD: it had to be that I grew up in a chaotic, unstructured environment, or was addicted to screens, or didn’t sleep enough, etc etc.3

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Well, it’s time for yet another end-of-year reading post.

Instead of an exhaustive inventory, I’ve chosen a thematic selection from the novels I read this year. I read fiction in part to answer my own questions, and this year’s list circled around a loose set of them: What is desire? How do we know what we want, when it can be so fluid and protean? What does it mean to try to live by one’s desires—what does it do to us as individuals, to our social relationships, in society as a whole? How do we reconcile desire—so unruly, so wild and shattering—with the limits of what other people can give us, with our responsibility to be good? How do we stand living only once in a world that will never be enough?

This selection also conveniently serves as something of a mission statement for next year, of themes I will probably explore further in later readings and writings. If you want to pressure me to do so—or, to be honest, afford me the time—I will not complain at all if you become a paid subscriber.

The gay canon and its héritiers

Gay novels have made up most of my organized “reading program” the past few years; developing a connecting to something like a canon of “my people” has been a source of solace and inspiration.

I’ve returned the last few summers to Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance (1978, re-released this year with an introduction by Garth Greenwell)—for me the cornerstone of post-Stonewall gay literature, the aesthetic and philosophical bar against which I measure everything else. Many have noted its double-sidedness: it is simultaneously a silvery, romantic celebration of the 1970s “circuit,” with its dancing, drugs, and promiscuity, and a moralist critique of its fantasies. (“You know, we queens loathed rain at the beach, small cocks, and reality.”) The more I read it, the more its “argument” appears to be that gay men need to “grow up,” to recognize the unreality and emptiness of their collective adolescent romanticism and find a way to integrate the values of commitment, domesticity, and family. The rest of Holleran’s books, which are all closely autobiographical, feature a version of himself who takes that path by moving to Florida and caring for his paraplegic mother. But as beautifully and poignantly rendered as the story is, Holleran seems to remain stuck in a binary where homosexuality stays cordoned off from life, shadowed in shame. (He never comes out to his parents, and his character lives an increasingly insular, etiolated existence.)

His most recent novel, The Kingdom of Sand (2023) is the climax of that project: the narrator, now in his 70s, living alone in an all but preserved-in-amber version of his family home, tending a shrine to his dead parents and watching his only friend die of old age. I found it astonishing, at first, that Holleran retells the story of the previous novels, often in exactly the same words. But The Kingdom of Sand has its own kind of understated majesty: the least sentimental of Holleran’s books, it acknowledges that there were other possible lives his character could have lived, but that he chose the bounded rootedness, however lonely, of this one—the pitiless beauty of inexorable change, registered in the slow advance of aging, the shifts in the sociology of his neighborhood, the changing climate-ravaged Florida landscape, and the growing dilapidation of his family home. From one angle it is relentlessly bleak, a stoic anticipation of death. But there is something liberated, almost worshipful about it, a celebration of how perception expands when the last of the self is given up, when all hope and expectations are surrendered: the face of Time itself. (It’s capitalized in the book.)

Though Holleran’s novels are a well of still-unresolved gay questions, his project is so narrow that it’s hard to accept him as anything like an interpreter of “gay life” in general. It was revelatory to read these two alongside Robert Ferro’s The Family of Max Desir (1983), an elegantly written family novel about a character who comes out to his wealthy Italian-American parents, integrates his partner into their family life, challenges his father’s homophobia, and cares for his dying mother. It is, in other words, about a character who does what Holleran exhorted gay men—and one imagines, himself—to do in the final pages of Dancer. Love only appears as stylized fantasy in Holleran, whose novels are all but devoid of depictions of gay relationships or sex that is not shadowed and sordid; Ferro shows that a more socially integrated gay life was possible even then.

Though I’m constitutionally and aesthetically seduced by Holleran’s mournful romanticism, one appreciates the comparatively well-adjusted counterpoints of Ferro and, in a different vein, Edmund White. I’ve been finishing out the year with White’s The Farewell Symphony (1997), a fictionalized memoir that covers the 1960s through the AIDS crisis across New York, Rome, and Paris. It’s easily the best of White’s books I’ve read so far; his chirpy confessionalism can sometimes grate, but his autofiction is also a genuinely vulnerable, self-probing project. Where Dancer is an almost ethereal transfiguration of a moment, The Farewell Symphony benefits from hindsight. As opposed to Holleran’s transfiguration, which features few actual characters, White is relentlessly concrete, accreting layers of detail, stories, relationship dynamics, and voices. Holleran can handle at most one other character besides himself at a time, usually a subject of distant fixation; White is avidly curious and relational, handing over his narrative even to minor characters for pages at a time. If Holleran writes the gay soul, White writes the gay body, the gay collective body, and the latter’s openness to experience gives The Farewell Symphony more widely relevant things to say about the possibilities and limits of homosexual life.

I tend to be less impressed with younger contemporary gay writers, and even question whether they are writing gay fiction at all—a subject for the future. There were several new ones I didn’t get to, but I enjoyed a couple of attempts released this year. Allen Bratton’s Henry Henry (2024), a loose modernization of Shakespeare’s Henriad, is a wickedly funny book whose main character is the gay failson of a down-on-their-luck family of British nobles. The voice is distinctive and assured, even if I did feel the narrative dissolved into something of a weak-tea trauma plot and left a light imprint on my mind. The real revelation was Daniel Lefferts’ Ways and Means (2024), about a boy from a Rust-Belt town who majors in finance at NYU, determined to make his widowed mother a fortune. He ends up the third in the ailing relationship of an artsy, 30-something gay couple and embroiled in an elaborate financial scam that is (spoiler alert) connected to a fascist plot. It’s a deep inquiry into the nature of value (financial, artistic, relational, existential), a family-drama-cum-political thriller that “queers” Jonathan Franzen’s inventories of relational dynamics with reflections on topping and bottoming, couples and threesomes, all with a humor that belies its philosophical—religious?—seriousness. In parallel with its depiction of right-wing politics, Ways and Means approaches the politics-of-desire questions that so dog gay men and concludes, “In fucking there is only ever unfairness.” If the basic criterion of the gay novel is an intellectual curiosity about homosexuality itself, Lefferts may prove a worthy heir to Holleran, Ferro, and White.

The politics of desire

The politics of desire are taken up even more bracingly in ’s The Default World (2024), a fierce page-turner about a trans woman named Jhanvi who comes up with a scheme to scam a group of ultra-woke, polyamorous San Francisco tech employees into paying for her transition surgeries. The Default World asks: what if the rules of alternative sexual spaces—the utopianism of honesty and boundaries—were extended to everyone? What if beautiful people were forced to admit their disgust for the ugly, to acknowledge their investment in social hierarchy? What if we even said there’s nothing wrong with those feelings as long as we’re honest about them? The Default World is a sharp political novel that sees both sides of everything, including how progressive ideas can serve as a cover for the privileged and, at the same time, also nudge them toward greater openness and sympathy.

Lillian Fishman’s Acts of Service (2022) might be the book one of The Default World’s hot girls would write after taking up its challenge of radical honesty. It’s a thrilling, boldly intellectual novel that unwinds every contemporary sexual piety: that sex should be carefully bounded and “safe,” that it should always be equal and transparent, that it should never involve “power differences.” Fishman’s narrator starts as a queer feminist with a commitment to “political lesbianism,” but watches her cherished principles unwind as she discovers an unsettling sexual sublime with a dominant man. “It was as if all the questions I care most about, and inside which I felt most alone—desire, sex, gender, attention, intimacy, and power—were placed for display on a table…I could study them like fruit in a bowl.” Acts of Service sees sex as a path to a kind of enlightenment “beyond good and evil,” whose power cannot be separated from compulsion, abjection and exclusivity. Desire defies politics. But it’s worth noting that Fishman’s experiment still depends on a carefully concocted scenario in which, even if “comfortable doesn’t have anything to do with sex,” no one is truly harmed. The bigger political question is: What if everyone did this? What kind of container does this vision of life have to be put in to be practicable? As Jhanvi puts it in The Default World: “You can have excitement or security but not both…community comes with rules.”

A detour back to the 2010s

Out of both a waft of nostalgia and a sense of forgetting everything I read, I revisited two novels I loved from the last decade. In Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom (2010), fantasies come to grief on Midwestern suburban streets and in the Middle East. College basketball star Patty marries Walter because he sees herself how she wants to be seen—dutiful, giving, good, rather than willful and horny for Walter’s self-absorbed rock-star roommate; Walter marries her because she’s out of his league. Unequal desire unravels them, but they piece it back together at the end of their illusions. Freedom has one of Franzen’s elaborate, farcical political overlays, which felt more indulgent this time than it did when I was young and amazed all that could be in a novel, but the way he satirizes his own progressive politics is still hilarious and admirable.1 He’s one of the great psychologists of American fiction, and Freedom gives a masterful archaeology of self-delusion—unavoidable, the most understandable thing in the world, but deadly enough to ruin your life.

Adelle Waldman’s The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. (2013) was one of the buzziest literary novels of the 2010s, so if its moment that I wondered whether it would hold up a decade later. It does: it endures by being more like a 19^th-century novel than one typically written by the Brooklyn literati that populate it. Its funny, scathing-but-sympathetic account of Nate Piven, a rising star who thinks he’s nice to women but can’t seem to stop hurting them, was praised for getting inside the mind of the millennial male intellectual. Waldman is interested in whether men truly, as many of them claim, want relationships with strong intellectual peers or whether they actually prefer sexy subordinates.2 After a whirlwind romance with Hannah, a writer whose mind equals his own, Nate gets cold feet and opts for Greer, a “girlish and high-maintenance” sex memoirist who openly disdains his intellect. Though Waldman doesn’t spare Nate’s emotional immaturity, she also doesn’t make him a villain. The final section on his relationship with Greer touchingly suggests only she had the strength to demand more of him, that he needed the frisson of friction and difference to pull himself out of self-absorption. Nathaniel P. holds all the interpretations open: that sexism shapes what men want from women, and that maybe men and women have always wanted different things out of love.

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This is probably it from me for this year, so I will conclude with a word of gratitude to all of you have read and engaged with my work the past few months as I’ve geared up to take this more seriously next year. Thank you, especially, to my paid subscribers; while I don’t necessarily do this for money, your support does make it possible to write here as opposed to doing other kinds of side work. I wish you all a wonderful holiday season and look forward to sharing more work with you next year.

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Emily Witt’s new memoir, Health and Safety: A Breakdown, opens with her lying on the beach in Fire Island, wondering about the future. It is July 2016 and she is single. “Maybe I would be invited to a party. Maybe a relative would die. ... Maybe something would happen that would indicate the arrival of a new historical epoch, a sign that we were living in an era of meaning and purpose that would be remembered for many decades to come.”

Witt’s first memoir, Future Sex, would appear a few months later. That book, written in first-person but too full of reporting to precisely call a memoir, also begins with Witt alone, wondering about the future. At the time she saw her sexual experience culminating in an ideal future of monogamous love and nuclear family, “like a monorail gliding to a stop at the Epcot Center.” Her friends see love as “an eschatological event, messianic in its totality.” But she has turned 30 and is beginning to doubt: “As I got older, I began to worry that it would not arrive for me.”

And so Witt decamps from Brooklyn to San Francisco in search of a different story about the progression of sex and relationships over the course of a life, one that might better describe her own experience. One can sense a certain reticence to write in first-person; she has said that her editor encouraged her to insert herself into the story. Her reflexivity can be withering: “I would not be the first person to use California as an excuse.” As she embeds herself with porn producers, polyamorists, and evangelists of “orgasmic meditation,” Witt portrays herself as a perpetual outsider peering into the glow of other people’s certainty and happiness, yearning for something like what they have but riddled with anxity and skepticism. Even after of months of participating in orgasmic meditation, whose proponents see it brightly as “the secret to a better life,” Witt confesses that she “felt more comfortable in situations where I had the right to remain maladjusted, to leave some feelings undisclosed, to acknowledge and enjoy the prospect of my own mortality.”

But Witt’s editor was right: her presence as a participant-observer, her blend of openness and reluctance, made Future Sex more than the sum of its parts. Witt combines her training as an investigative reporter with the erudition of a critic in a distinctive method for seeking the historical outlines of the present: submerge herself in subcultures that believe they have found the answer to contemporary life and open herself to the possibility they could be right while also placing them in a wider context. Though driven by the dramas of individual life—what it feels like to live right now—Witt sketches the scaffolding of collective experience: cultural and media narratives, rapidly-evolving technologies, transformations of neighborhoods, who has money and who doesn’t and where the money comes from.

That approach enables her to see through superficial descriptions of the present—for example, that it can be adequately characterized as a porn-saturated era of sexual libertinism. Witt argues that despite the ubiquity of internet pornography, the prevalence of casual “non-relationships” and the apparent explosion of polyamory, the old narrative of a proper and fulfilling life culminating in monogamous marriage has lost little of its cultural dominance. Like the social conservatives they ostensibly opposed, progressive millennials like Witt took it for granted that past experiments with different sexual and relational arrangements had “failed” or “gone too far.” They quietly reverted to pre-1960s ideals without perceiving that they were “ersatz…like the reconstruction of a baroque national monument that had been destroyed by a bomb.”

But though Witt develops genuine appreciation for their appeal, contemporary alternatives to the dominant blueprint of monogamous marriage also feel ersatz—attempts to rediscover roads not taken that are possible only in ephemeral bubbles, especially bubbles created by wealth. She sympathetically observes a trio of young Google employees negotiating their unconventional relationship, taking mushrooms and MDMA to push through difficult conversations and into more rawly honest connections with each other. They go to Burning Man and electronic music festivals and organize sex parties, building a community around themselves defined by experiment and care. “I envied their community of friends, the openness with which they shared their attractions,” Witt writes. But she can’t help but notice its conditions of possibility, the mark it leaves on the city around them. The “hyperbolic optimism” of the polyamorous techies was “totally ungrounded in any wider reality.” It made sense only “in the highly specific time and place of San Francisco, in the first half of the second decade of the new millennium, among a group of young, educated people with high standards of living.”

Future Sex ends on an unsettled note, with Witt wondering if she has witnessed the future but ambivalent about what she has seen. “I had wanted to seek out a higher principle of life than the search for mere contentment, to pursue emotional experiences that could not be immediately transposed to a party of young people in a cell phone ad.” Witt had once hoped for a culturally authorized happy ever after, and then had attempted to follow her body into an alternative story. But “the future was a discomfiting cultural story, and difficult to discern.”

When Future Sex enters the narrative of Health and Safety, Witt has discarded her Wellbutrin and begun to experiment with psychedelics, and also fallen for a younger computer programmer and music producer named Andrew. He watches with pride as she reads from the book at McNally Jackson in New York, but promoting it makes her feel like a “fraud.” After attempting to open herself to a brave new sexual world, she discovers she still wanted most of all to be in love and have a boyfriend. “Now I was settling into convention and finding that it fit like a glove.”

Witt views her increasingly abject love for Andrew as something of a regression in her newfound values even though they agree to a loosely defined open relationship and she resists daydreaming about the future. When she refers throughout the book to “losing herself,” it is not to drugs or to partying but to her boyfriend. She flies to Berlin alone, parties at Berghain, and sleeps with other men to regain her “solitude,” but returns with a “sense of surrender”; she has “no choice but to lose myself to the person I loved.” She adopts Andrew’s world and friends as her own, distancing herself from the “gloominess” of her literary social circle, where she senses judgmental skepticism toward what her friends see as a different kind of “regression”: an adult having too much fun for her age.

As she did with cultural narratives about sexuality, Witt notices a structural American hypocrisy that tolerates drugs to fuel breakneck productivity or to take the edge off suburban malaise, but not to expand one’s mind or to generate social interconnectedness. (In 2002, Joe Biden introduced the RAVE Act, a carceral attack on MDMA that helped kill the underground rave scene; at the same time, the American state was opening the floodgates to the deadly and highly profitable mass abuse of opioids.) Witt approaches drugs in a characteristic way: bookish and intellectual, but also with a desire to “be around people who were world-building,” who were “in confrontation with the forces of contemporary triteness.”

Witt is elated to find in psychedelics and the Brooklyn rave scene a world she had always been looking for, one not as obviously compromised by New Age woo-woo or Silicon Valley wealth. The party scenes in Health and Safety are lyrical but not indulgent, painting the specificity of the experience in appealing hues: the sense of liberation from the dreary strictures of the mind, of a total freedom of the body unavailable almost anywhere else in contemporary society. The sense of melding with other humans and the hazy, multicolored blurring of social determination; the intimation that after a grim life of seeing only in parts, you now have access to glimpses of the whole. In substances like LSD and the sound of techno, Witt finds a respite from the ambient cultural demand to surrender oneself to narratives:

The music did not say what to feel or when to feel it. Instead it followed a process of defamiliarization and destabilization. … What techno offered was not meaning but space, and the possibility of evoking the complexity of the world through discontinuities and breaks, interruptions and hybridizations.

Next to her on the dancefloor, Witt finds people who resist commercialism and costumes, who scoff at social media and take social communion seriously. Much has been made of the link between rave culture and deindustrialization. In the minds of some left-wing thinkers, the two can be grimly collapsed in a move of guilt by association, with images of frivolous hedonists dancing on the ruins of the working class. Some of the Brooklyn parties Witt attends, like the queer rave UNTER, were packaged in a semi-ironic radical politics. Witt sees the overlapping geographies of raving and gentrification, but rejects cynical conflation:

What we did in these spaces was closer to a kind of scavenging, landing on a carcass to pick at the bones until the apex predators swatted us away. We accompanied the property developers, flapping around them. We hung out in the same places they did their killing but we could not claim to be their prey. Yet the hedonism was a resistance to something. … We might not have believed in the higher authority of religion, but neither were we frolicking around in a decadent cult of the self—if in the world we were atomized, at the rave, for a few hours, we could model a collective ideal with its own manners and ethics.

Even so, Witt had landed in one of the ephemeral bubbles of social innovation she chronicled in Future Sex: spaces that bear the promise of a world remade even as they are sharply constrained by the real one outside. As the first Trump administration dawns, she begins to see rave culture in something like these terms: a space that, though politically powerless in itself, preserves something being systematically repressed. American society’s manipulative character is just as visible in the “belabored attempts to generate enthusiasm about Hillary Clinton’s ‘poise’ and ‘intellect’” as they are in a president-elect whose “entire identity was branding and advertising.” Raving, Witt writes, “did not constitute a politics of resistance, but it moved our entire frame of reference in its direction. I could hold those rooms in my mind and measure them against the counterfeit promises of meaning and belonging offered everywhere for sale.”

That claim appears at the halfway mark of Health and Safety, and is soon challenged by actual politics. As a trial assignment before she is hired by The New Yorker, Witt is sent to cover the aftermath of the school massacre in Parkland, Florida in 2019. She observes with disgust as the teen survivors are chewed up by media spectacle. She knows she has to strike “the right rhetorical tone, between resolve and hope” to be hired and to represent The New Yorker, even though the requisite note of hope rings false. Witt’s partying drops off as she crisscrosses the country, covering anti-gun protests, right-wing militia rallies, and anti-police riots.

Earlier in Health and Safety, Witt observes that she liked reporting because, “like drugs, it caused a temporary defamiliarization that could reveal my own insularity and myopia.” But as the Trump presidency unfolds, she begins to wonder whether it is possibly any longer to grasp political reality at all—whether American politics is a fantasy-producing machine the humble fact-finding creed of journalism is unsuited to challenge. “It was very difficult to determine what people believed versus their performance. To describe it, which was my job, only seemed to perpetuate it.” There is little solace to be found in the upheavals that convulse her own side of the political spectrum. The decay of American politics into frenzied paralysis was not a right-wing plot, but the bitter fruit of the Democratic Party’s failures and a cultural left that “floundered in relativism” and superficial obsessions with language. In this bleak landscape, Witt finds it difficult to imagine any form of authentic, effective resistance. “I think all the moral posturing online during those years had something to do with this sense of utter helplessness.”

Witt’s personal reality begins to collapse at the same time she struggles to identify a discernable political reality around her. For his centrality to the plot, Andrew remains for most of the book a spectral presence whose appeal never quite becomes concrete. They have sex on the first date, and after the second, Witt writes that she “started to cry, because I knew I could not live without him.” They move in together and she begins to daydream about having a child together. But after Andrew is beaten and arrested at a protest, he becomes a visceral character. He suddenly turns angry and cruel, verbally harassing Witt while they are trapped together in isolation from COVID. He weaponizes radical politics against her, demeaning her use of her press pass to stay safe at violent protests and her pretense of “journalistic objectivity.” He tells their friends she is beating him and accuses her of “gaslighting” for suggesting he might be unwell. When she finally accepts that he is having a mental breakdown and flees the apartment, he stalks her online and slanders her on social media.

The third and final act of Health and Safety spirals forward with escalating desperation. Witt’s even critical voice gives way to tones of brokenness and survival. She has lost everything: her faith in her work, her hope for political change, her community of living experimentally. She finally abandons the hope of marriage and family, the countercurrent that had coursed in the opposite direction of her search for the future, but was part all along of her hope for a meaningful life. She stares again into the abyss of the future and finds it still featureless: “My life took on its own character once again. The rest of it now stretched before me. It was an empty plain.”

Health and Safety surpasses its predecessor in both ambition and grace. It is a study of contradictions, of “interruptions and hybridizations.” It is, above all, a book about historical overdetermination: a view from inside a time that refuses all hope of firm ground, that withholds authorization for the conviction that one has discovered the right way to live.

Everyone who pontificates on the future these days inevitably does so through retrospection, whether the longing look backward is toward a simpler time of duty and family or of the sturdy political supports of the union and the party. Witt’s journeys through the beautiful and berserk fragments of the end of history might be said to be guided by another light from the past: the romantic politics of the 1960s, which were, in a longer historical view, a costumed revival even when they appeared.1 As a San Francisco psychiatrist told Joan Didion of the Haight Street flower children in 1967, it is a kind of politics “that recurs in times of real social crisis. The themes are always the same. A return to innocence. The invocation of an earlier authority and control. The mysteries of the blood. An itch for the transcendental, for purification.”2

The San Francisco psychiatrist suggests that all of our contemporary historical restagings are tinged with the romanticism of nostalgia regardless of where they fall on the political spectrum. Witt is an observer, not a theorist, but her struggle to see through the haze of the present makes her more aware of the pitfalls of her enterprise than most. She moves against a current of priggish analysis on both right and left that attempts to damn the romantic social innovations of the 1960s and 1970s by reducing them to a hedonistic “cult of the self” or to an incipient “neoliberalism.” Instead, she follows the thread backward through its twists and deformations, seeking what was purest in the promise of opened minds, liberated bodies, and authentic community.3 She finds it still persisting in fragments of the present, but sees too much to declare it the future.

In her final pages, Witt returns to Detroit, where American techno was born as a once-proud city became an industrial wasteland. “On that warehouse floor,” she writes, “I came to terms with my denatured self and the despoiled world, for this was music that also came from the wreckage.” She believes, in the end, the entities that appeared to her during her trips, telling her she would be “rewarded for breaking down formalities with richer and truer friendships relationships,” and that her mission in life was to “observe and report.” She does not believe that raves or journalism are revolutionary praxis, or will reveal the meaning of history, but finds them meaningful just the same. “The point, for me,” she said in a recent interview, “has been just putting it down on paper and hoping somebody can figure out what was actually going on later.”

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SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR

I filed my last political essay on March 11, 2020—a week after Super Tuesday, and the day before the university where I taught would suspend in-person classes due to the pandemic.

It was a takedown of Joe Biden’s political career that I had been rushing to finish before that crucial turn in the Democratic primary, combing over primary sources day and night as if America’s political future depended on it. Of course I doubted that my writing had any impact on politics, but the frenzy of activity I’d undertaken the previous four years had made some part of me to believe this essay was necessary, that the world was waiting for it. But I fell behind as the research sprawled, and the essay’s intent was rendered moot by the sudden consolidation of the Democratic primary field before Super Tuesday. My friends praised it mournfully; part of me knew even then that it was an elegy for something. Lockdown began the next day, and my personal life fell apart not long after.

In the years since, I’ve puzzled over what happened to my relationship with politics, for so long so intense and consuming that it invaded my every thought, energized my work, and expanded my knowledge. Politics coursed through my aching body by day and my sleepless anxiety by night. But in a few years of personal and global upheaval, it seemed for a while to have vaporized, leaving only a curious absence. During that time I sometimes said—a bit gleefully, a bit ruefully—that I was a enjoying being a low-information voter.

To ever write about politics again, maybe to write again at all, I felt I would have to go back to the beginning, to discover how politics became so inextricable from my vocation as a writer and identity as a person. That is surely in part an accident of personal history, which is why the majority of this essay takes the form of intellectual-political autobiography. But I hope to use that story to reflect on two contrasting stances toward politics. I call them political romanticism, which approaches politics through the lens of aesthetics, values, and identity; and political rationalism, which approaches it through research, reasoning, and analysis. (Or to make it simpler, prophecy and science.) And my own political biography is just as surely a product of its time: the crumbling of the apparent post-political consensus of the 1990s and the apparent upsurge of populist energy in the 2010s. So I also try to sketch my own story against the rise of “hyperpolitics,” the systemic background of all of our engagement with and discourse about politics.

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Note: I’m currently looking through my Substack drafts, trying to decide if I like any of them enough to publish belatedly. I wrote this one a long time ago; at first I thought it was too inconclusive, then too late to the party. But it does contain some basic points about the way I approach historical periodization and the “theory of the present.” I’m going to say what the hell and publish it now, even though it missed the conversation it was originally intended to be part of.

That was the the question addressed on a now months-old episode (I’m behind) of , his (excellent) podcast on the state of American intellectuals and contemporary discourse. Oppenheimer, joined by and , catalogues signs of a romantic revival in contemporary culture: the escalating backlash to the domination of tech; the widespread alienation from the large, rational systems represented by politics and science/medicine; the flowering of weird online spiritualisms; the total absence of a vocal atheist and/or rationalist current on the contemporary intellectual scene; and the recent fetishism of previously dead physical mediums. (They don’t mention these, but I’d point particularly to Gen Z’s revival of vinyl records and cassettes.) Pistelli and Barkan, who are both vaguely religious and gently anti-rationalist, have cautiously positive takes on these developments, though the general tone is neutral and observational.

The group begins by defining historical romanticism. Oppenheimer asks what the politics of romanticism were, and Pistelli gives it a shot. He walks right up to it—the failure of the French Revolution, the defeat of Napoleon, the reassertion of a reactionary order—but stops shy of the correct answer: nationalism.1 The most characteristic political expression of European romanticism was nationalism, the defense of particular (not universal) identity, of local specificity, of irreducible complexity against the (supposed) Enlightenment project of flattening, homogenizing, universalizing. This is not essential to the discussion, but it is worth noting, as it potentially gives the concept of romanticism more purchase on our own moment. Nationalism is famously slippery, a force both of bottom-up emancipation and top-down authoritarianism. It could be helpful to analogize the present to an earlier period in which rapid, universalizing technological change produces a bitterly fracturing, potentially violent and deadly, obsession with particularity.2

Fortunately, this group doesn’t fall too far into the “Enlightenment vs. Romanticism” trap. Romanticism indeed understood itself as a backlash to the culture of the Enlightenment, but as a matter of historical reality, the two cannot be reduced to “rationalism vs. irrationalism” or “science vs. mysticism.” The Enlightenment was riven with weird spiritualisms and esoteric rationalities, and Romantics were often hyper-modern technology enthusiasts. This is why I think that, while we could find it useful to identify “romantic” currents in the present, romanticism probably fails as a general descriptor. In my dissertation, for example, I used the modernist vs. romantic binary to characterize the flavors of 20th-century sociologists. Certain camps in social science branded themselves, militantly, as “modernists” and castigated their opponents as “romantics,” but there was not really any such thing: all of the camps were some admixture of the two. So was Durkheim, so was Marx.

After referencing my own dissertation, let me get one notch more indulgent and illustrate the point by reference to my own intellectual development, as Oppenheimer and his guests do. I’ve always felt my tendencies to be a contradictory assemblage of rationalism and romanticism, which can probably be located quite directly in my fundamentalist Christian upbringing. Fundamentalist evangelicalism is romantic in certain respects, for example in its belief in awesome supernatural forces and its insistence on the smallness and weakness of “fallen” human beings. But it is also a profoundly rationalist style of religion, a mirror of the Gilded Age progressive scientism against which it originally arose as a backlash. The Bible is not a historical document, it is an inerrant scientific text which contains unassailable rational arguments against every secular claim. As a young-adult Christian nationalist, I had impressed upon me not only the awesome, unknowable power of God, but also that we were going to defeat his enemies with facts and logic that did not, as the saying goes, care about your feelings. In this case, a fundamentally irrationalist faith takes on a rationalist packaging, it behaves like a rationalism—just like the counter-Enlightenment behaved like the Enlightenment.

I would go on to alternate in emphasis between the two: I had a liberal rationalist phase, a Heideggerian mystic phase, then a Marxist rationalist phase. But while they were indeed distinct phases in their moment, they have all remained, blended together or stacked on top of one another. The practical place I’ve ended up is probably that of a basic old European bourgeois: too rational to believe in God or anything metaphysical, but too sentimental—too human—not to long for some kind of greater, more dramatic and awe-inspiring source of meaning. And like the basic old European bourgeois, I bracket the metaphysical in philosophy and politics and redirect those impulses into art and love. I eventually realized those two tendencies are in tension but are not true opposites; they are in more of a dialectical relationship, they turn ceaselessly back into each other. (Thus, rationalisms can also take on irrationalist packaging: the New Atheism ended up being a dogmatic cult, and the apparently rationalist ideology of the AI titans in Silicon Valley is ultimately a neo-spiritualist worship of “intelligence” beyond the human, turning computers into a new God.) At the risk of self-justification, I think a healthy political perspective is probably found in never quite giving in to either of these tendencies. We should try to balance a healthy respect for human finitude, for our smallness and weakness before the terrible powers of nature, with a respect for the miraculous results of our agency. In other words: we should believe in progress, but we should recognize that it’s also kind of a miracle.

The ultimate point of this personal digression was that our contemporary historical era seems to be kind of like that: an assemblage of contradictory replays of the past, recycling of shards from earlier eras that (may have?) had more distinctive, coherent vibes. This is what gives the present its frustrating, decadent, immobile feel, its flavor of frenetic, anxious paralysis: the fact that it doesn’t have a clear character, it’s just everything everywhere all at once, puriteens and marriage boosterism and sex-negative feminism and, at the same time, OnlyFans and polyamory. It’s locked into this tail-swallowing dialectic that can’t seem to move forward or ever get anywhere. It’s hard to characterize that as clearly “romantic,” even if certain recognizable styles are once again manifesting themselves. Maybe “romanticism” can give us some kind of grip on what seems like an extreme degree of fractured inwardness, suspicion of and resistance to any universal project of a common humanity. Or maybe it’s just one of the those modern styles that comes in and out fashion, ultimately not telling us much.