People Who Look Like Me - Or Not

After I griped last week about the present state of LGBTQ+ fiction, it occurred to me that I should write about books that I enjoyed.  My point was not that there's nothing good out there.  I was criticizing people who complain that there's nothing out there and we need some books about People Who Look Like Us.  As far as I can tell, there is plenty out there, including books about People Who Look Like You.  But I decided to look through my reading log to remind myself of books that keep me reading gay fiction.

Not too surprisingly, authors I've read before and who are still working turned up.  Alan Hollinghurst has a new novel, Our Evenings, that I bought but haven't read yet, I'm saving it for later.  I don't even know what it's about, but I've been reading his novels since The Swimming Pool Library (1988) and while they don't feature the positive role models that many gay readers want, they are beautifully written and treat something like the real lives of certain, mostly British, gay men.  They're also sexually explicit enough to satisfy those gay men who demand hot man 2 man action.  While some of the characters are conflicted about being gay, they grow out of it, and in general, self-acceptance is not the main issue Hollinghurst writes about.

Another established writer whose new work I watch for is Patrick Gale, whose first novels, Ease and The Aerodynamics of Pork, appeared in 1985.  He's a fine writer, though not the virtuoso Hollinghurst is.  Like Armistead Maupin (whose biography Gale published in 1999), he likes to write about gay characters who interact more or less openly with heterosexuals, another selling point for me.  He also wrote a BBC drama, Man in an Orange Shirt (2017), set at the end of World War II and in the present day.

Speaking of Maupin, I reread his Tales of the City series (1978-2024) every decade. They were a breakthrough in gay fiction, in showing openly queer characters (including a transsexual) who coexist with heterosexuals and happily take swipes at bigots.  That last feature is less common even in more recent gay fiction, for reasons that escape me: it's not like bigots aren't still a worthy and significant target.  I have to confess that the Tales don't stand up as well to intensive rereading as I could wish; I don't know if it's me, or him, or both.  But I still get more pleasure from them than from many other books, gay or straight.  The surprise new installment, Mona of the Manor, published early last year, felt a bit forced to me.  It's a flashback to the early 1990s, which wasn't surprising since by now many of the core original characters would be dead or in nursing homes.

Recently I discovered the novels of Michael Carson, as some of them were reissued as ebooks.  For of them follow the life of Martin Benson, a conflicted English Catholic, from adolescence in the 1960s to the age of 60 so far.  Benson can be a bit of a drag; even at 60 he's deficient in self-esteem, but he's found a partner who's a good match,  Carson seems to be smarter and more together than his creation, and all his novels reflect his profession in English as a second language.  They're mostly out of print, so I'm tracking them down second-hand on the Internet.  Again, Benson's not a role model, but Carson makes him and his world worth visiting.

Last year I read The Secret Life of Albert Entwistle (2022), by Matt Cain, another Brit (yes, there seems to be a pattern here).  It's about a closeted 65-year-old mail carrier facing retirement, and learning that England has changed since his youth.  He gradually adjusts to new possibilities of openness.  It's not my favorite read of the past few decades, but at least about a gay man who's not an adolescent getting over himself.

Back in the USA, the screenwriter, playwright and novelist Paul Rudnick published a semi-autobiographical novel, Farrell Covington and the Limits of Style, in 2023.  Rudnick is a smooth, witty writer, and though I don't find his work entirely satisfying I always watch for what he'll do next.

There's also Christopher Bram, whose work I've read since Surprising Myself was published in 1987.  He's solid and intelligent without being brilliant, but he hasn't published a novel since Exiles in America in 2007.  I like his nonfiction, but wish for another novel.

It feels strange to say this, but I've finally begun reading Jean Genet's novels; these go back to the 1940s.  I've also reread his plays and Edmund White's biography of him.  I probably wouldn't have gotten much from them in my 20s: they are about petty criminals, full of fetishistic details that don't stroke my kinks, and the English translations are hampered by the need to render French jail and street slang into English.  This probably couldn't be fixed by new translations.  But in my old age I found Our Lady of the Flowers and Miracle of the Rose fascinating, as a glimpse of a life and experiences that many gay men fantasize about, including Genet himself.  I learned from White's biography that Genet was an outsider even among jailbirds, wanting to be a tough guy and mostly failing.  I still have three novels and his memoir Prisoner of Love to go.

So much for the old guys, for now anyway.  I recently happened on Passing Strange by Ellen Klages, published in 2017.  It's a sort of mystery/fantasy set mostly in 1950s San Francisco, involving a group of women, mostly lesbian, struggling in a city that's not as free as it's fabled to be.  Nicely done.

Also set in 1950s San Francisco is Frank W. Butterfield's The Unexpected Heiress (2016), the first in a series of murder mysteries featuring a gay private investigator with an independent income so he feels free to slap around (verbally) an antigay bigot who stumbles into his office in this book's first chapter.  That's a good start, but I haven't decided whether to continue the series.  Butterfield is one of a number of gay writers taking advantage of the ease of self-publishing these days, and he's one of the better ones I've sampled.

Then there's Lev AC Rosen's Lavender House (2022), about a secret LGBTQ mutual-support society in early 1950s San Francisco.  I haven't yet read Malinda Lo's Last Night at the Telegraph Club (2021), set in San Francisco in 1954, but hope to get to it soon.  Lo has mostly written YA fantasy fiction with lesbian content; I've only read her Ash but I hear great things about this one.

One more area I've found very fruitful to explore is graphic fiction and nonfiction.  The success of Alison Bechdel's Fun Home, which I loved, opened the door to a lot of more queer content.  The only American example I've read so far is Bloom (2019) by Kevin Panetta and Savanna Ganucheau.  It's a story of barely post-high school young gay love, nicely done but what has really gotten my attention is Japanese shonen ai manga, a well-established genre with multiple subgenres and a welter of role categories.  Just a few years ago few of these books were available in English, usually on the Internet, but that has changed.

Three that stand out for me include My Brother's Husband by Gengoroh Tagame, an artist mostly known for his, um, erotica.  I was pointed to it by a gay Arab friend I was visiting in San Francisco.  My Brother's Husband is about a single straight Japanese dad who is visited by the widowed Canadian husband of his estranged twin brother.  Lots of tension and stress there, but common humanity mostly wins out even in Japan.  It's very moving and the story is well-developed; I'd seen some of Gengoroh's erotic work, and it did not prepare me for the character development and sensitivity of My Brother's Husband.

My Brother's Husband is intended for a gay male readership, though it's accessible to straights.  Shonen ai manga are mostly for and by heterosexual women, and my next examples come from that genre.  Restart After Coming Back Home by cocomi is about a troubled 25-year-old who reluctantly moves back home to his rural village after losing his latest job in the big city.  He doesn't know what to do next, and his parents don't know either; they have no reason to expect direction or stability from him.  He's taken in hand by another fellow, a boisterously friendly guy who's not fazed by his sulkiness and for some reason remembers him fondly from their younger days.  He's an orphan, living with his adoptive grandfather, and the two gradually get closer until (as the blurbs have it) they Develop Deeper Feelings for each other.  The second book, Restart After Growing Hungry, follows the progress of their couplehood.  The characterization is beautifully done, and I've already read these books twice.

The third interesting example is I'm Kinda Chubby and I'm Your Hero by Nore, in two volumes.  The main character is a big-boned young actor in a small theater company, insecure and unsure of his chances of success.  A young apprentice baker becomes his fan and they work toward a mutually supportive friendship.  Unlike Restart, no erotic / sexual component is declared in their relationship, but it is loving and important to them.  Neither one is shown to have any heterosexual interest.  Are they going to be boyfriends?  You can decide for yourself.  For me it doesn't matter; I've also read this diptych twice.  I'm bemused by people who want cartoon characters to whip out their cartoon genitalia.  For me what fiction and comics can do is show the progress of relationships, and many manga do this very well.  I could mention others I've liked in the genre, ambiguous or overtly erotic,  but I've run on long enough for now.  The notable thing for me about these books is that even when they're working familiar tropes of young men discovering that they love other men, I often find them much more moving than their US counterparts.

Since most Americans don't read much anyway, I don't believe that they've exhausted all the books that exist.  Probably they don't know about them, which raises the question of how people find about books they might like.  Reading reviews has always helped me, and browsing independent bookstores whose proprietors knew me did too.  Nowadays the Amazon algorithms point me to a wide range of books; they're not perfect, of course, but nothing is.  I also find recommendations on social media, by people I either know personally or follow closely enough to take what they mention seriously.  

And if all else fails there are always public libraries.  If you're under eighteen, librarians nowadays might well prefer not to recommend gay books to you lest they be accused of "grooming," but that won't hurt adults, and there's nothing to stop younger patrons from looking at what's on the shelves.  (Yet.  I expect that bigots, emboldened by Trump in the White House, will try harder to purge library collections.  They can be and have been resisted successfully, and had better continue to be.)

What I wanted to show here is that there is a lot of LGBTQ fiction that works for me, whether the characters look like me or not.  I can't take very seriously those people who say there isn't.  What works for me may not work for you, and vice versa.  But there are simply too many books out there to pretend that there aren't.

Raised by Americans

Ah, Scott Simon, he's such a model of how NPR helps me wake up each day.

This morning he interviewed the author of an epic new biography of the early Hollywood moguls Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg.  Little details jumped out at me. First I thought he referred to the hero of Ben-Hur, a recurring Hollywood blockbuster, as "Ben."  But when I checked the transcript I found he'd said "Ben-Hur" after all, though his voice dropped almost to inaudibility on the "Hur."  

Then he referred to Tarzan of the Apes as a "British novel," though its author, Edgar Rice Burroughs, was an all-American writer.  A little later he said that Irving Thalberg died young, "... At the age of 67."  Well, he was only thirty years off.

Overall, Simon was at his smug, smarmy worst this morning, chuckling over private jokes that I doubt would be funny even to his inner circle and which he carefully explained for those unfortunate enough to be outside it: "Tarzan the ape man, played by Johnny Weissmuller, who will forever be the best-known graduate of Senn High School in Chicago ... I say that as a Senn grad myself."  He's mastered the art of sounding insincere even when he may really be sincere, as in his references to young Judy Garland being molested by Louis B. Mayer.

But like the rest of the NPR personalities, he drives me out of bed in the morning, if only to turn off the radio.

Whole Lotta ... Somethin'

I've been watching some of Elizabeth Zharoff's reaction / analysis channel "Charismatic Voice" on YouTube, and she's fun, partly because of her technical knowledge and partly because of her enthusiasm for the music she's listening to.

 

I hadn't seen this version of Led Zeppelin's "Whole Lotta Love" before, and it is pretty cool, but it made me think about the sociology of live performance and the psychology of audiences.  Zharoff's right that the song is about, well, call it "making love" to keep this PG.  But notice that much of the audience is male, and there's not the teen-girl shrieking that you hear in Beatles concerts from just a few years before this one.  Despite the band's undoubted sex appeal, Zep was a boys' band.  So Plant is "making love" not only to the girls in the audience but to (maybe unawares) the boys as well, and (probably unawares) the boys are into it: those are male voices singing "Bay-bay" back to him toward the end.

Some will promptly argue that they're identifying with him not wanting him, but there's not a clear line between the two.  It's okay, boys, you're not gay, just swept away by every inch of Robert's love!  I was a conflicted 18-year-old gay boy when "Whole Lotta Love" was first released in 1969, and though I didn't name it, I certainly felt it. As for straight boys, as I've said before, everybody talks about sexual fluidity and claims that we're all a little bit gay until it comes to cases. Being in a mass audience makes it safer: people feel free to let loose in a way they wouldn't do face-to-face, one-on-one, with their idol.  And singing back "Bay-bay!" doesn't mean you'd put out - neither would all or most of the girls.  Nor, I think, would I have done so if given the opportunity at the time or after I'd come out: Plant was not really my type. What I responded to was the voice, the sound, the propulsive beat of the band, but all that did stir me erotically.  It still does. The beauty of being in a crowd like this one is that you can feel it without thinking about what it means or what you'd like to do about it; most of the time you don't want to do anything about it. The point is that boys aren't officially supposed to feel ravished by a male performer -- it violates the masculine code -- but they are anyway.

Scribble Scribble Scribble!

I couldn't catch up with gay male literature even in the 1970s.  This was partly because it was harder to find the older works, which were often out of print, published by small houses, or allowed to slip down the Memory Hole because of their scandalous nature. There were no sections of gay books in bookstores aside from the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop in New York City, founded in 1967, which felt too far away to be useful to me.  (Other people my age traveled freely around the country, but I was too unadventurous and frankly unimaginative to do that.)  A few gay writers wrote about the books that they'd read before Stonewall, which they could cover in one chapter; Roger Austen's Playing the Game: The Homosexual Novel in America (Bobbs-Merrill) didn't appear until 1977, and I didn't read it until years later. But such proliferating resources, including friends in the field, pointed me to more works than I could read.  Much as I was interested, there were other areas I wanted to explore.

By now, LGBTQ+ books are a sizable market niche, and can be found even in small public libraries despite the efforts of bigots to remove them. I've become skeptical of complaints that we aren't represented, though I still see plenty of them. I don't mean to indulge in the old "You kids think you have it bad? Hah! In my day..." line. Mainstream publishers are putting out books in every imaginable category, to the point of self-parody: you want stories about disabled transgender Afro-Asian shapeshifters living in small US towns with their gay-sorcerer dads and their telepathic flying cats?  They're out there, and probably in your public library. They can also be found on TV and the Internet.  Sure, some kids are being held prisoner by their knuckle-dragging fundamentalist parents, and that's a real problem, but it's not because there aren't books about People Who Look Like You.  There are even books about People Who Look Like You Being Held Prisoner by Their Knuckle-dragging Fundamentalist Parents.  The problem is about finding ways to get access to them.

But back to me.  I'm a seventy-four-year old white American gay man.  I don't have any difficulty getting access to books or other media about people who look like me.  Nor am I interested in reading only about people who look like me; that hasn't been my goal, at least since I first read lives of George Washington Carver and Clara Barton in fifth grade.  My problem, insofar as it is one, is finding books that I consider worth reading. Self-publishing, including the self-publishing of ebooks, has produced a flood of works of varying quality ranging from the sublime to the dire. The conglomeratization of publishing has produced almost as many books that can't be faulted for bad writing, only for a boring mediocre professionalism and a focus on catering to market niches.  I see this not only in gay writing but in genres such as mysteries and fantasy/sf, which now (happily?) overlap with gay writing.

The strange thing is that this is not really anything new.  There have always been too many damned thick square books.  Sturgeon's Law has always applied.  It's the flip side of the complaint that there aren't enough damned thick square books about people who look like me.  I should make it clear that there are plenty of books that I do enjoy reading, far more than I can ever hope to read.  I'm just musing on the irony that my (and others') wish for more has been granted.  What we hoped for were more good books, and they're out there, lost in the crowd, but it has ever been thus.

What provoked me to write about this is Swimming in the Dark, the first novel by the Polish-German writer Tomasz Jedrowski, published by Morrow in 2020.  (He's reportedly working on another, but it's not done yet.)  It's a love story about two young Poles in 1980, when Poland was still behind the Iron Curtain, and the upheavals by Solidarność were still to come.  The narrator, Ludwik, addresses his lost love Janusz in retrospect from the United States where he now lives.  They came together at a summer work camp after graduating from university, Ludwik unsure what to do next, Janusz ready to work for the government; after an idyllic month camping out in the countryside they must figure out how, if at all, to go on loving each other.  If you've read your share of gay fiction over the past few years, you should be able to predict the obstacles they face.  For me there were no surprises, but it might well be different for a younger, less experienced reader, so I hesitate to criticize too much.

What did surprise me is that Jedrowski, born in Germany to Polish parents, wrote the book in English: it's not a translation.  The reviews quoted on Amazon overpraise his writing, but he still did quite a good job.  As I say, though, I found the story familiar and predictable, except for its setting, which Jedrowski constructed as a historical novel; at most it reflects the world of his parents, not his own experience.  Even there, I had problems.  Jedrowski's characters must contend with life in a repressive two-tiered society suffering from economic austerity -- long lines for food, inadequate medical care, censorship of media both artistic and journalistic, police crackdowns on dissent -- though an elite few enjoyed luxury.  

Ludwik remembers furtively listening to Radio Free Europe as a child with his mother and grandmother, for example.  I immediately thought of something the left-wing British historian E. P. Thompson wrote in the 1980s, I think in Beyond the Cold War (Pantheon, 1982), about his interaction with Soviet dissidents: they were properly scornful and skeptical of official propaganda, but completely credulous of the Western propaganda they heard on Radio Free Europe.*  I felt the same way about Jedrowski's two-tiered society.  Americans have rarely had to wait in lines for groceries except in wartime before the lifetimes of most of us, but poverty and hunger were serious problems here, and exacerbated by the contemporary Reagan and Thatcher regimes, which wanted to eliminate the social safety nets that alleviated them, how ever inadequately. Those programs, come to think of it, also involved waiting for hours in lines or in grim office waiting rooms, trying to appease grim bureaucrats. As for health care in the US, I don't really need to detail that, do I?  Or police crackdowns on dissent in the land of the free?  Young Ludwik couldn't have known about all this in 1980, but older Ludwik doesn't seem aware of it either.

Nor could young Ludwik have known about the long history of antigay repression in the West, though a major prop in Swimming in the Dark is the illicit copy he acquires of James Baldwin's gloom-and-doom gay classic of 1956, Giovanni's Room, over which he and Janusz bond.  He's also aware of US racism; the Soviet bloc made sure its citizens were well-educated about it, much to our government's indignation.  Older Ludwik doesn't seem to have learned much, and I wonder about Jedrowski himself.  Yes, it's difficult to balance all these things in a work of art, and Swimming in the Dark is his first try.  Still, the over-familiar features of its love story left me paying more attention to the background, which I think needed work.

And you know, I feel the same way about books by more experienced gay writers, including some of the most acclaimed.  I haven't been reporting here on my reading as I should, so let me mention quickly a couple.  Andrew Sean Greer's Less (2017) was praised to the skies, but I found it a slog: it relies on a type of protagonist who I believe was introduced by Stephen McCauley but picked up by others, the uncloseted but socially awkward gay nerd, with a close straight woman friend and even some gay male friends. He can't get a date, but he wants a boyfriend, and eventually he stumbles across one -- sometimes literally.  Then there was Andrew Holleran's latest, The Kingdom of Sand (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2022).  It features another Holleran doppelganger, enduring gay old age and not enduring it very well.  The main thing I got from it was the urgency of finally getting the shingles vaccine, after reading the book's lengthy account of another elderly gay character's suffering from the disease. So that's taken care of. The novel is Holleran's unrelentingly downbeat (but yes, very well-written, as his books always are) take on aging as a single gay man with no evident support network, and he's entitled to it.  

It's worth comparing the prolific Edmund White's experience as he recounts it in his brand-new The Loves of My Life (Bloomsbury, 2025), which I read just last week. White has plenty of health problems, but he doesn't wallow in self-pity, and though as always his curmudgeon routine can be annoying, he's good company on the page.  It's a matter of temperament, I guess: Holleran's temperament is one of what "the Jesuits call 'morose delectation' -- an addiction to melancholy", as he once put it with perverse pride. But we must be tolerant of others' kinks.

I could also mention Thomas Mallon's Fellow Travelers (Vintage, 2007), a historical novel about the relationship between two gay men in McCarthy-era Washington DC, recently adapted as a Showtime miniseries.  It has some points of comparison with Swimming in the Dark, come to think of it.  It too received higher praise than I would give it, but it was worth reading and I intend to try some of Mallon's other work; again, it's not fair to compare this experienced writer's work to a first-timer's.  It's foully depressing, given the situation, but that's okay - I don't demand happy endings.  Also there's Colm Tóibín's novel about Thomas Mann, The Magician (Scribner, 2021); it's brilliantly done, but I didn't get the point of doing it. (Though it does show that one can write interestingly about homosexual life in the past and in other countries.)  I've liked some of his other writing, including his essays, though, and I mean to read more.

To return to my original point, though, I'm not as impressed as I feel I should be by some of the prestigious gay (or straight) fiction being produced in our supposedly more enlightened times. Maybe it's just me, a consequence of having read too many other books. I'm not sure, in fact, what I'm looking for - but I'll know it if and when I find it.

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* I think this is the passage: "I have spoken in East Europe with courageous men and women, whose persistent integrity in their daily tense confrontation with a brutal security service humbled me; and yet they had constructed in their minds a whole illusory view of 'the other world', made up from 'Radio Free Europe' and a habit (indeed, a dogma) of believing always the opposite of whatever official Communist propaganda stated to be so."  [Beyond the Cold War (Pantheon Books, 1982), 87-8]

Atheists Still Say the Darnedest Things!

Hemant Mehta, who goes by the alias "Friendly Atheist," has a YouTube channel on which he reports on religious overreach in the US, mostly by Christian reactionaries, which he deplores with the kind of scandalized relish that I associate with Christian reactionaries, though liberals love it too.  I've been aware of him for a long time, but only started noticing his videos in the past couple of months.

A day ago he posted this video about a 26-year-old Christian youth pastor who decided that God wanted him joined in marriage to a fourteen-year-old girl.  This was in the mid-1990s.  His church and the girl's parents accepted his claim, though they insisted on its being only a "betrothal" until she was older.  He then initiated sexual contact with her.  In 1998 he fled to Australia before he could be charged, but last year Interpol blocked him from entering the Philippines and he was returned to the US and to jail in Pennsylvania, where he was held without bail as a flight risk.  He's now 55.  This month he accepted a deal to plead guilty to felony charges; he will serve six to twelve years in prison, followed by several more years of probation, and he will be registered for life as a sex offender.

It's hard to call this outcome good, because of the original situation and the long delay in catching the man.  The victim, who's been in touch with Mehta, is more or less satisfied, though of course she wishes her abuser had been caught sooner, but thanks to the plea deal she was spared having to confront him in court.  She points out there have been changes in American society, including in organized Christianity, regarding abuse of power by authority figures in and out of the churches.  Their expectation of protection and immunity has been eroded considerably, but new cases continue to emerge, so we have a long way to go still.  It surprises me that churches should have any prestige or authority anymore, given their exposure as institutions that enabled and protected the mistreatment of their own members for so long.

I read the comments on the video with interest.  Certain themes and slogans recurred, such as that people should not get their morality from books but rather from their inner feelings and hearts.  I asked where they thought the "books" got their contents?  So far I haven't gotten an answer, though a few people liked my comments.  This is the familiar belief that religion is something external to human beings, rather than something we invented.  If bad stuff is in the Bible, it's because people put it there.  This should be obvious, a truism, in an atheist forum, but once again it seems not to be.  It's certain that the oppression of women predates the Bible, and existed outside the cultures that produced it.  I keep having to point out that most religions have not relied on sacred writings; yet their treatment of women wasn't better than what the Bible prescribes.

I noticed a number of comments on the video that consisted of one word, gross, sometimes in all-caps.  I suppose they were sincerely looking into their hearts, but although gross isn't a moral principle but an aesthetic one, Mehta and his liberal fans wouldn't want to rely on it much.  Many actions and practices have been judged immoral because they're gross: anal sex, for one; vaginal sex, for another.  Bodies are gross, especially female ones with their monthly bleeding.  Heart surgery is gross.  Childbirth is gross, as shown by the number of people (not all of them men) who have run gagging from films or the reality of birth.  Nudity is gross, especially male nudity. "Interracial" sex has been judged gross.  Abortion is gross, as is all non-reproductive sexual activity.  And so on; the list could continue forever.  I think there are better reasons to object to the youth pastor's actions than their grossness.

If you don't want to admit that the sexual morality of the Bible (to keep it simple I'll leave out the rest of the world) is the result of people looking into their hearts, very well.  (I should have said "moralities," because the Bible isn't consistent in its moral teachings, including those on sexuality.)  You still have to explain the tenacity with which many people today cling to male supremacy; as I've argued before, that includes male scientists and secular philosophers.  And if you want to have a set of moral principles that apply to everyone, as opposed to individuals' personal likes and dislikes, you have to be able to discuss them, to argue with people who disagree with you.  Morality isn't just a question of what feels right to you, it's about what happens when people come into conflict. That hasn't occurred to Hemant Mehta's commenters, from what I see, nor to many atheists or other unbelievers.

One commenter tried to answer me by concocting a little story about two cavemen who, after bashing each other on the head, realized that it was in their best interest to stop bashing each other on the head, and voila! there's morality that didn't come from a book.  What he had to offer was a myth (in the sense of a just-so story that purports to explain the way things are), not an argument; nor was it about morality.  Modern religious reactionaries accept religious toleration on the same prudential grounds, but they still consider competing sects to be immoral, and they would suppress them if they could.  Nice try, but no cigar.

The public library in the nearest, mid-sized city asked for input on its Facebook page last fall on what sorts of public programs it might organize and sponsor.  I wrote that I would like a group that would discuss morality and ethics from an atheist viewpoint, reading and discussing serious writing on the subject.  The comments I got were interesting.  Someone told me about an atheists' advocacy and educational organization that covers northern Indiana. I looked it up on the web and it looked worthwhile (unfortunately I don't own a car and couldn't go to their meetings), but it doesn't seem to include exploratory programs about unsettled questions like morality and ethics.  When I said so, several people mocked the idea that such questions even need to be asked: everybody knows what's right and wrong!

Well, no, everybody doesn't know.  When I was much younger, I looked for and found books about non-religious philosophy and sexuality.  Books published before around 1970 simply assumed that homosexuality was a bad thing - but a sickness that could be treated, not a sin.  There were some dissenters about that, but not many published books saying so.  It was the post-Stonewall gay movement that pushed secular philosophy and medicine away from complacent, unquestioning heterosexual supremacy.  The same was true of second-wave feminism.  Both movements had to grapple with religious bigotry, but secular authorities were also our targets.  We won some victories sooner and more easily than we'd anticipated, but resistance hasn't died out yet.

When other atheists have written about morality on a non-academic level, they tend to fall back on handwaving like "Be good for goodness sake!" which ought to be embarrassing.  Luckily for them, their religious opposite numbers don't do any better.  And it's not like I have the answers.  What I mainly have are questions.   The writings on moral philosophy I've read indicate that even the best thinkers are in the same boat.  I think we'd be better off if more people were aware of the complexity of the questions they brush away so lightly.

If You Don't Know, I'm Certainly Not Going to Tell You!

A goodly number of people on the left, let alone in the Democratic Party, were severely shaken and demoralized by Trump's victory, and I have to admit that I'm one of them.  I find that I have little to say about it, because I don't have any good ideas on how to combat him other than the obvious: support the ACLU and other organizations that have fought him in the past and are ready to fight him now, speak out on specific matters when possible.

Unfortunately, some of the commentators I've looked to before are in disarray, not just from the US version of the center (what is considered "left" in the mainstream and the far right) but to some extent from the actual left. It's no surprise that many people are looking for someone to blame.  I've got a little list myself.  Nor is it a surprise to see a lot of lashing out, almost at random, and as I've seen so many times before, a favored target is The Woke or whatever symbol of infantile leftism is current.  As I've already argued, "woke" is a meaningless epithet, like "politically correct," "CRT," "cancel culture," or "DEI."  All those terms can be defined in meaningful and useful ways, but that's not how they're being used.

I think it's fairly obvious that Kamala Harris didn't lose because she was too "woke."  Supporting horrific Israeli atrocities and dumping on those in her own party who oppose them, cozying up to billionaire donors, and embracing the Cheney crime family don't constitute "wokeness" in any sense the term is being used -- rather the opposite, I would think.  No matter where on the political spectrum you imagine yourself, ignoring or endorsing those tactics is siding with reaction.  That's happening a lot right now, on immigration (where there has never been much daylight between MAGA and the Democratic Party establishment anyway) and birthright citizenship for example. The political scientist Corey Robin has written some very good things on this, but on Facebook rather than on Twitter/X or his own blog; if you use Facebook, I'd recommend following and reading him there. 

But here's a good example of that lashing out.

I don't recall "the left" ever making such a decision.  The only time I heard that line during my half-century working at a Big Ten college campus, it came from upwardly-mobile students of color, who weren't leftists. But yeah, you know, maybe I missed the announcement from Woke / PC Headquarters.

Another possibility is that the "left" (again, not the Kamala Harris campaign or the Democratic establishment) tried to educate people but did it badly.  I've written along those lines for a long time, but there too I was addressing not the left but what I call the Culture of Therapy, which has a lot of power in universities and in the corporate world (also not the left).  Much of the Sixties left went into inventing the culture of therapy, which could mean that there's a deep affinity between radical politics and therapeutic authoritarianism.  That possibility is supported, I think, by a response to the post above, which also has roots in dogmatic left hostility to any political activism outside the labor movement.

This is MAGA-level incoherence and rage, I think.  Shirtless continued:

If "sustained gaslighting campaigns, outright lies," etc. don't work, why has the far right - which relies on those tactics -- gotten as far as it has?  Why did Trump win in November?  I pointed out to Shirtless that pretty much every successful advance in human affairs has been denounced as insane, utopian, bullshit, what have you: the extension of the franchise beyond white property-owning males; the abolition of slavery; religious freedom; allowing various national groups to immigrate to the US; the 40-hour work week and the 8-hour day; social safety-net programs; abortion and contraception; allowing blacks, women, and gays in the military; same sex-marriage, and more.  On the other side, genuinely insane projects like colonizing Mars or planets outside the solar system get a respectful hearing from people hostile to transgenderism.

Shirtless accused me of "survivor bias" in my choice of examples.  That was a clueless or deliberate dodging of the point, which is that his original claim is falsified by many cases, so what made the difference?  I certainly agree that the Culture of Therapy isn't the right approach.  I submit that while top-down measures were sometimes used, several of my examples (such as the 40-hour week and the 8-hour day) were genuinely popular at a grass-roots level and were only considered insane by elites and their toadies.  In other cases, such as increased acceptance of gay people and of same-sex marriage, change occurred because while we are a minority, we are embedded in society at large.  As we became more visible to our friends, families, and co-workers, it became harder to demonize us. The same has been true of "interracial" marriage, and is true of transgender, an even smaller minority but one that is connected to the majority.  Several lefty-liberal commentators argued that GOP candidates below the presidential level played down anti-trans positions in 2024 because their base knew trans people and didn't support the MAGA line.  But I'm critical of trans people and their allies who try to support their claims with misinformation.

(I believe that contrary to much of what I hear, transgender [not necessarily by that name] is intuitively plausible to most people, because most people think of sex/gender in magical terms.  That's apart from [or maybe related to?] the general confusion over sex and gender, which gives us "gender reveal parties" to announce the sex of a fetus, confusing "intersex" with transgender, the historical and transcultural popularity of drag, and so on.  It's no surprise that the Cultural of Therapy got transgender issues wrong: it's a bountiful source of misinformation and sloppy thinking.  But I need to do a separate post about all this.)

Whose job is it to educate you?  There's no single answer.  I was an active educator on sexual orientation at my university for over four decades; I certainly see it as my job to educate others -- not only straights but other gay people. That often put me at odds with Culture of Therapy professionals, but in the long run I think I won against them in important areas, though I had no power to impose my views.  Numerous of our speaker volunteers told me that I'd influenced them on the born-gay question.  At first, they said, they thought I was just being mean (why?) but over time they thought it over and changed their minds.  As a white male, I also consider it my job to educate myself, and I am critical of those who want to put that burden on the Other.  I think that stance is connected to hostility to minorities who do try to educate them.

I'm skeptical of the very claim that the "left" abdicated its role in educating others in the first place.  I think it's an excuse for joining MAGA reaction, which always happens when the right wins an election.  I remember liberals sliding right when Ronald Reagan became president, for example.  I'm not optimistic about the next four years, and one reason is the liberals and leftists who are all too ready to make common cause with Trump.  There are a lot of them.  The rest of us can't rely on them.

Job's Friends; or, Excuses, Excuses!

When this meme came up in my "memories" on Facebook the other day, I clicked through idly to see what kind of reaction the original post got.  At the top of the comments was one from a Christian who asked why an unbeliever would mock someone they don't even believe in??!!  

I've seen this move before.  The first most obvious response would be that Christians and other believers arguably don't believe in other gods either, but that has never stopped them from mocking them and their worshipers.  (Historically, both Jews and Christians have accepted that other gods exist, but they're demons.  Remember that in ordinary usage, "believe in" can mean either "believe in the existence of," "have trust in," or even "agree with.")

The second obvious response is that the meme is making fun less of Jesus or his heavenly father than of the people who believe in them, who do unquestionably exist. While the meme is unkind, it's not an inaccurate representation of popular religion: God needs a million prayer warriors, thousands of Christians rallied in the streets for Christ last weekend, etc.  So what does God do while only half a million prayer warriors are on their knees?  Why doesn't Jesus heal the sick child right away? Does he really need to be informed?  What is the tipping point at which he'll (supposedly) take action?

A few months ago I saw a lot of video clips on Facebook - and no, I didn't have to watch them, but it was very educational for me - from a number of online preachers warning Christians that if they aren't constantly watchful, demons will sneak up on them and drag them down to Hell.  Why, I wondered, did God let that happen?  If a person is saved, how can demons even get near them?  If Satan can undo your salvation, what are the Christian promises worth?  That these preachers put the burden of resistance on the believer is even worse: how can a mere fleshly person fight off supernatural Evil?  One of the most basic premises of Christianity is you can't, which is why people need the intervention and protection of supernatural Good.

It happened that not long before I saw these videos, I'd also read The Case Against Satan by Ray Russell, a 1962 novel about the demonic possession and exorcism of a teenage girl, "a devout girl who attended Mass regularly."  Two Roman Catholic priests take on the job of driving the devil out of her, and much of the book is about their struggles and doubts as they perform the rite of exorcism.  I thought of writing about the book then, but at this remove I'll need to reread it.  For now, I'll just say that I had the same questions: why doesn't the Christian god protect his children against demonic harm, and why does so much depend on the efforts (weak and ineffectual by definition) of the exorcist?  The accounts of exorcism in the New Testament may be abbreviated, but there's no doubt that in that context Jesus and his followers drove out demons by the power of the Holy Spirit, not by theological disputation.  (To anticipate one possible objection, those stories were not merely symbolic.  Christian writers were bragging about the power of exorcism and healing for at least a couple of centuries after Jesus' day.  I should also concede that in one gospel exorcism story, Jesus admits that "prayer and fasting" are needed to drive out especially stubborn devils.)

The larger issue is what's known to philosophers as the Problem of Evil, though it's not just a problem to them: why, if there is a god who is both all-powerful and all-good, is there so much suffering in the world? Nowadays there's an apologetic tendency to distinguish between 'natural evil' like earthquakes and plague, and 'moral evil' committed by human beings, like the Holocaust.  I learned from Susan Neiman's Evil in Modern Thought (Princeton, 2004), that the distinction is a comparatively recent one: "evil" referred to natural disasters, also known as "acts of God," no less than to moral ones.  Sometimes evil might be the work of Satan, but it was always difficult to tell whether a given unpleasantness was Satan's mischief or God's judgment.

Not that this mattered much, because as the biblical book of Job made explicit, Satan couldn't bother a righteous person without God's permission.  In Job's case, which should be even more troublesome for simple faith, God gave that permission not because of any failing of Job's, but as a bet with Satan that Job wouldn't complain if God withdrew his protection.  Some theologians have argued that the opening prologue of the book of Job is a later addition to the main text, but I consider that apologetic invention. It wouldn't change the point of the book very much if at all, and anyway, that exit is closed to less sophisticated believers who work from the text as they find it in their Bibles.

After several decades of examining other interpretations, I still think Walter Kaufmann's discussion (The Faith of a Heretic, Doubleday, 1961) of the Problem of Evil in general, and of Job in particular, is the best.  It's ironic that the usual attempts to escape the problem are exactly those which the book of Job rejects, offered by Job's friends: You must have done something wrong, or God wouldn't have done this to you!  As Kaufmann stressed, it never occurs even to God's self-appointed defenders that God wasn't responsible for Job's misery, nor does God himself protest when he appears from the whirlwind that the Devil made him do it.

I thought of all this when the philosopher Helen De Cruz, who's undergoing treatment for cancer, posted on Twitter/X in December: "As a theist, I not only am angry at my own body and it not responding enough to treatment, I am also very angry at God. So that’s been fun."  She's been posting for months about her case and treatment, and she has quite properly received plenty of support and sympathy.  But Job's 21st- century friends promptly lined up to set her straight.

"I so understand your anger, dear H, but I think your body deserves compassion," wrote one. "It's doing its best to resist the onslaughts of cancer & treatment. As to God, he's, in appearance at least, mostly absent. Moreover, his demands are higher of beautiful souls bc life is an initiation."

And: "What did [you] think about The Essence of Christianity ~Ludwig Feuerbach 'People forget that their lives will end soon. For those who remember, quarrels come to an end.' Seems you are quarreling with your own body and with God. Though Nietzsche suffered terribly and died: belle âme".  Yes, De Cruz is quarreling with God, how astute of this person to figure that out.  She's not forgetting that her life will end soon, though; that's exactly her complaint. What Nietzsche has to do with this exchange isn't clear, but everybody dies.  That's part of the Problem of Evil.

And: "Helen, I'm not a theist, but I'm not an atheist either. I don't think death is the end of our stories. (Still, I hope a longer life for you.)"  So what if death isn't the end of our stories?  As Ludwig Wittgenstein asked rhetorically a century ago, ""[I]s some riddle solved by my surviving for ever? Is not this eternal life itself as much of a riddle as our present life?" (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 6.3412).

A few took this tack: "To be angry is to believe you are entitled to something you did not receive. There are others that didn't receive half of what you have. It would make as much sense to be overjoyed about that. In reality, both responses have no merit."  Think of the starving children in Ethiopia who'd be glad to have your cancer!  I commented elsewhere in the thread that the callousness of Christians toward other people's suffering amazes me; this comment is a good example of that callousness.  Maybe the next time I encounter Christians complaining that infidels mock them and their god, I should respond along the same lines?

Sometimes when I've invoked the Problem of Evil by pointing to the suffering of children with cancer (for example), Christians protest, "Gee, God must have done something to make you mad." Well, yes -- that's what we're talking about right now. Such people couldn't seem to grasp that someone might object to the suffering of the innocent (but we are all miserable sinners, none is innocent) as a matter of principle. It's an interesting inability.

De Cruz had posted about the Problem of Evil in an earlier post I can't find now, and I was struck by people who tried to solve it by denying another of its premises, namely that the God of Christianity could stop the evils we see.  These people suggested that he'd like to but he just can't.  That may be, though 1) it's difficult for me to understand how a being who could create the unthinkably vast universe we inhabit is powerless to stop suffering and other evils, especially since 2) it is a pillar of Christian faith that he will do so when he establishes his kingdom on earth, which means he can do it but for some reason won't.  And to some extent this argument requires me to accept 3) that he can't prevent any of the evils infesting the world now.  Maybe Jesus' miracles (in one small region of the planet) used up all his strength, and he's resting until he gets it back?

Those who consider C. S. Lewis an authority should remember that when he engaged with, as he called it, the Problem of Pain, he took for granted that suffering comes from his god, who kneecaps the righteous in order to keep them from becoming too full of themselves.  Even after his wife died of cancer and he was in turmoil with grief, he never denied his god's responsibility for her agony or his misery: he simply assumed it.  Maybe he was wrong, but not according to traditional or biblical doctrine.  After all, if Yahweh can't prevent suffering, how can believers hope that someday he will end it altogether?

I've seen some posts and videos from a recent theology Ph.D., whom I won't name yet because I want to go into his work in some detail later; but one is relevant here.  He declares that the Bible never says that its god is omnipotent, which in a narrow sense may be true; but I think he's hair-splitting. The biblical authors weren't professional philosophers or theology Ph.D.'s, but they regarded Yahweh as almighty and expected him to conquer Evil in the end.  If this guy is right, he's cut the Gordian knot of the Problem of Evil, but he's still saying that God is impotent to stop any of the suffering in the world, in which case the entire edifice of historical Christianity comes crashing down, and there is no hope for believers or anyone else. (Samson among the Philistines might be a better analogy than Alexander the Great.)  In which case, why believe in him?

I'm not sure that abandoning belief in Yahweh's power or his goodness would faze all believers, since they so often deny either or both as they find it useful to do so.  I think they know that openly admitting that they do so would hinder their missionary efforts, which depend on big promises they don't have to keep.  I also want to bear down heavily on their callousness to human suffering in the crunch.  "Oh, you're dying of cancer? Big whoop" is bad PR, and all their works of charity don't make it look any better. If suffering is no big deal, if it's your god's own action, then why ameliorate it in this life?