You Keep Using This Word, I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means

 

The New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman - or more likely, his subliterate social media team - posted this on Facebook a few days ago.  ("'Deconstructed' out of" is new to me, though I've seen some other people talking about "deconstructing Christianity" online.)  It got plenty of comments along the lines of "The earth is not 6000 years old and Moses didn’t write the Pentateuch", which are fine. I began thinking over my own journey, as they say, on this subject.  It's a bit more complicated, and I bet so are other people's stories.

As I've written before, I've been an atheist since I was about ten years old. This distinguishes me from most of Ehrman's fans, I think, who appear to have had religious upbringings and had to make more dramatic breaks with belief. I was never a fundamentalist, though I grew up in rural northern Indiana in a Christian milieu and I had to start thinking about my relation to religion early on. I didn't begin reading serious biblical scholarship until I was 30, and it was a complicated process as I learned to think historically. But one thing that broke the logjam was Morton Smith's "A Comparison of Early Christian and Early Rabbinic Tradition," Journal of Biblical Literature 1963. It's an article that (like much of Smith's work) has been misrepresented shamefully. It sent me back to compare the resurrection stories in the gospels and 1 Cor 15, and I saw how incompatible they were. I also owe a lot to scholars like Dennis Nineham and James Barr, whom I encountered long before I heard of Ehrman. Almost everything I've read by them was helpful, but Nineham's The Use and Abuse of the Bible and Barr's Fundamentalism stand out, along with Barr's Holy Scripture: Canon Authority Criticism, which I reread a few days ago. These and other scholars seem to me much more thoughtful than Ehrman, but it may be that you need a basic awareness of Bible scholarship to be able to follow them.

In most online discussions about religion, numerous commenters will pipe up sarcastically: "Why would you want to study fairy tales?" There are scholars who study fairy tales, from all cultures, and the problems they deal with are the same that biblical scholars study: oral tradition, turning oral tradition into written forms, where they came from and what they mean. It's questions like these that drive my interest in religious studies. Scholars also study modern religious texts such as Star Wars, Star Trek, and The Matrix.  Many nominally secular people quote those texts as if they were scripture, and many avowed atheists have faith-based theories of morality. (Such as "people should get their morals from their hearts and feelings, not books.")  Thinking is hard: let's go shopping.

I've mentioned before one of the most useful insights I picked up from the philosopher Mary Midgley: that thinking critically or philosophically is not like taking apart a machine, but like disentangling a mass of yarn. You pick at your problem here, then there, and once in a while a big section comes loose; but then you have to return to the detail work.  It described of my own engagement with big issues - not just religion, but US foreign policy, literature, and more, but certainly religion and specifically Christianity.  I'd read one book, move to articles and books it cited in the footnotes, and soon one of those would send me off in another direction.  Then I'd write about it.  Sometimes this process was more interesting than at other times, but over time I covered a lot of ground.  This wasn't a sign of my great patience, but of the persistence of the problem. I'd leave the subject for awhile, then pick it up when I found a book that drew me back in.

Come to think of it, the biggest hurdle I had to get over, even as a lifelong atheist, was to recognize that Jesus was not a good person, not a great and wise teacher, not an authority on anything. Apart from being wrong factually, as in his end-times teaching, he was often wrong morally, in his fondness for extreme punishments especially. And there was no reason he should have been other than he was. This, I think, is the hurdle that stops even many atheists and other nonbelievers: they want to reject religion and churches, but they still want a Jesus they can admire, a Jesus who'd be their best friend, someone they could have a beer with and laugh at all the stupid Bible-thumpers. This drives a lot of the hatred for Paul, for example the claim that Paul plumb ruint Jesus' beautiful simple teaching of love. Jesus was distorted and misunderstood by the stupid apostles, but they understand him.

It requires determined selective reading of the gospels, which depict Jesus as an end-times prophet, a hellfire and damnation preacher, a faith healer and exorcist who cadged money from his (often wealthy) followers, who taught his followers to break with their families and was hostile to normal human sexuality.  These traits, which non-fundamentalists are aware of in the sects they've left, aren't visible only through the eye of fancy-pants biblical scholarship.  They're right there on the surface of the text, and critical scholarship hasn't really dislodged them. I don't mean to be smug about this: I found them easy to ignore for quite some time, partly because the critical scholars I read didn't dwell on them either.  But since they are emblematic of the Christianities that liberal Christians and secularists alike despise, shouldn't they get more attention?  They don't, though, even when they're pointed out. 

Part of the explanation for this, I think, is the normal human tendency (which I share) to view others in either-or terms, as totally good or totally bad.  Either Jesus was, at the very least, a supremely good man and a moral visionary, or he was a totally evil person, as in C. S. Lewis' "Lord, Liar, or Lunatic" trilemma from his Mere Christianity. I'm not going to discuss it here, maybe another time, but for now it's relevant for the problem of how to evaluate our heroes. If people have trouble dealing with the clay feet of people who are unquestionably merely human, then it will be even harder to assess someone who stands at the apex of Western civilization.  Even those who reject the churches want to use his prestige, and they'll work very hard to preserve it in their own minds, by their own standards.

So, for example, this post by gay African-American former Clinton staffer Keith Boykin, which the Facebook Memories feature sent my way recently:

 

I think they both are equally God-fearing Christians. Or neither, as you like. Obama has as much innocent blood on his hands as Trump, but for Boykin and others that fact has to be ignored.  It's fair and reasonable to try to evaluate both of them based on the evidence, but for the true believer, Obama fan or MAGA, it's unacceptable and indeed unthinkable.

At this point I insist that we don't have enough reliable information about the "historical Jesus" to evaluate him at all.  We probably never will. People who want to be Jesus' BFFs usually seem to have a good grasp of the problem; at best they believe that since the Bible is not a reliable historical source, they can pick the parts they like and dismiss the rest as inauthentic.  That's not how it works, but of course they have the First Amendment right to believe what they like, if not to demand that others accept their version of Jesus. It's why I stress the less appealing traits Jesus is assigned in the gospels, and which they ignore -- except quite often to accept the hell-and-damnation part for people they hate. Recognizing that the world wasn't created in 4004 BCE or that Moses didn't write the Pentateuch isn't enough; it's barely a beginning.

Down the Memory Hole

Ah, NPR's Scott Simon.  What a guy.

On Saturday morning, Simon interviewed Cardinal Blase Cupich to find out why three American cardinals, Cupich among them, had criticized Donald Trump's foreign policy in Venezuela, Greenland, and elsewhere.  

The interview was of little interest, but at one point Cupich sneezed, and Simon said "Gesundheit!" He then chortled at the crazy idea of him, a layman and a non-Catholic, saying "God bless you" to a Prince of the Catholic Church. Cupich accepted it graciously.

The trouble is, Gesundheit is German for "health," not "God bless you." I know, I know, it's the thought that counts, but NPR is supposed to be high-quality, fact-based journalism.  Not that Simon's smarmy combination of coziness and obsequiousness is either one.  But it jolted me awake, and I figured I had an easy blog post in hand, so I waited for the transcript to be posted.

A few hours later, I read the transcript, and the exchange wasn't there.  I listened to the sound file; it too had been edited.  I don't know why.  If Simon was embarrassed by his tiny error -- no, he seems incapable of embarrassment. This isn't a big thing, but it's emblematic of NPR.

Elsewhere in the interview, Simon asked:

What about the argument, for example, that 8 million Venezuelans have voted with their feet and left their own country. It's a quarter of the population. Hasn't removing Nicolás Maduro to stand trial for drug trafficking in the U.S. opened the door to change?

It's true that extensive emigration from Venezuela has taken place, but it predates Maduro's regime.  First, when Hugo Chavez became president, wealthy Venezuelans moved to Miami, which has long been a haven for right-wing Latin Americans. Then as the US moved to strangle the Venezuelan economy with sanctions and other forms of economic warfare, plus support for multiple military coups,.poorer Venezuelans joined the exodus.  Most stayed in the region; certainly the US didn't intend for them to come here. How much of this flight was due to political opposition to either Chavez or Maduro and how much was driven by economic need probably can't be distinguished.  But I don't think, in years of waking up to NPR's morning news programs, I've ever heard more than token acknowledgment of destructive US policy, and never of its role in driving emigration. Nor did Cupich say anything about it, for what that's worth.

In other faith-based news, CNN reported on Saturday that our new American Pope had issued a warning that

“As we scroll through our information feeds, it becomes increasingly difficult to understand whether we are interacting with other human beings, bots, or virtual influencers,” Pope Leo wrote on Saturday.

“Because chatbots that are made overly ‘affectionate,’ in addition to always present and available, can become hidden architects of our emotional states, and in this way invade and occupy people’s intimate spheres,” he added.

So true! That the clergy's role.

(I'm also worried about many people's turning to AI constructs for emotional support, but there are good as well as bad reasons why they do it. Clergy in all sects have not distinguished themselves by their respect for boundaries with vulnerable believers, and their superiors (and even parents) have protected the abusive ones. I'm still concerned by people who turn to AI for interaction that is designed never to cross them, just as I'm concerned by people who turn to pets for it. The trouble isn't just that it's difficult to understand whether one is interacting with other human beings or with computer software, it's that many people prefer the software to actual human beings.  That chatbots can become abusive is worrisome too.  But this is too serious for what I meant to be a lighthearted post.)

Nobody's Perfect

Spoilers Ahead. 

I mentioned that there were other gay-themed projects aside from Heated Rivalry in recent release that I was interested in seeing.  Foremost among them was The History of Sound, which got very positive press after it screened at Cannes last year.  I watched it this weekend, and I was disappointed by it. It won't be available on home video until late March, so I'm nervous about giving away too much about it.  I'll keep my comments general for a paragraph or two.  If you want to see it without preconceptions, you should stop reading now.

The History of Sound is, I admit, very well produced and acted, as you can tell from the trailer I started off with here. It's the story of two young men who meet in 1915 and immediately fall in love over their shared love of traditional ballads. They spend three months traveling around Maine, seeking out people to collect songs from. They record these songs on wax cylinders, a cutting-edge recording technology of the period. Afterward they are separated by circumstances; one stays on to teach music, the other goes to Europe and becomes a choral performer.  They fall out of touch.  The one who went to Europe drifts from relationship to relationship, but returns to his home farm in Kentucky when his mother dies. They never reunite, but one becomes a famous ethnomusicologist and in 1980 is ultimately reunited with the long-lost wax cylinders he and his love collected so many years before.

That ending prevents The History of Sound from becoming the kind of breakout romance Heated Rivalry is now.  Mass audiences generally want happy endings for their love stories.  I do too, but I'm not rigid about it.  My objections to The History of Sound are about other aspects of the film.

I got the impression from the first publicity I encountered that The History of Sound was based on an actual, historical pair of song collectors. I soon found out that I was mistaken: it's based on short stories by one Ben Shattuck, who wrote the screenplay.  Fair enough; I'm always frustrated by movies that are "based on," or worse, "inspired by a true story," because I want to know what liberties were taken with the true story, and usually they negatively affect the result; so I didn't have to worry about that here.

Still, I was bothered by numerous things, not all of them strictly historical.  That song-collecting trip through Maine in winter, for one. There's no snow at all, the guys sleep outside in a tent.  For another, the Maine landscape looks exactly like the Kentucky landscape where the film begins. For yet another, the narrator, Lionel (played by Paul Mescal) tells us at the beginning that he has synesthesia - he not only hears but sees and tastes sound -- and perfect pitch. The synesthesia doesn't play a role in the rest of the movie, though there are a couple of random scenes where Lionel goes into a rapture when someone else plays music; at other times he has no such reaction.

The two young men don't seem to have any misgivings about their forbidden love, except for one flashback late in the story where David (Josh O'Connor) asks Lionel if he has any.  Lionel says no.  This doesn't strike me as anachronistic: sometimes same-sex lovers didn't feel bad about their love because they didn't realize they were Sodomites or Sapphists, or were just good at denial. Contrariwise, a good many same-sex lovers in our liberated times still feel paralyzing guilt.  O'Connor and Mescal turn in fine performances, the love scenes make it clear that Lionel and David are committing acts that in the day could have sent them to prison; my complaint is not about The History of Sound as queer cinema.

More important historically, I took for granted at first that David and Lionel, or at least the filmmakers, knew that they were only two of many song collectors. The research didn't begin with the invention of recording technology either.  But as the film went on, I got the impression that it was treating them as lone pioneers, culminating in the 1980 TV interview with Lionel at the very end, touting his book on the subject as some sort of towering revelation.  I grew up on the 1950s and 1960s "folk revival," not just the Weavers and the Kingston Trio or Bob Dylan and Joan Baez but Alan Lomax's big books of traditional songs and numerous old-time musicians like Mississippi John Hurt and Elizabeth Cotten who re-emerged in old age from obscurity to become stars of the folk festival circuit. My favorite account is Robert Cantwell's When We Were Good: The Folk Revival (Harvard, 1997), but there are many others.

The film's focus on a few ballads seemed off to me as well.  If there were few black people in New England before WWI, other song collectors went after not only the next variant of "Barbara Allen" but "Negro" spirituals, work songs, and the like - not to mention dance music, shape-note hymns, and much more.  I don't think I believe that an experienced song collector like David (as a boy he'd traveled to England with his uncle to find songs) would not have known "Silver Dagger" in 1915; it was made famous by Joan Baez in the 1960s, but its origins - in England! - were well-known.  Someone, I think, was stretching for a meet-cute moment to bring Lionel and David together. It may work for many viewers of the film who don't know anything about folk ballads, but I thought it hung far too much on a slender thread.

As a result of that interview, Lionel receives the box of thirty-seven wax cylinders that he and David recorded so long before.  It seems anti-climactic to me.  I like low-key films, but it's possible to be too low-key.  The leads' performances sustain the film, but they're not enough to make it hold together.  I agreed with the Guardian's review, which I found only after I'd thought out this post:

This is a film about music as well as love, but the folk songs, for which Mescal and O’Connor gamely fabricate enthusiasm, sound like museum pieces kept under glass and the love story itself feels as if it is kept under glass. The accents and line-readings feel like painstaking expert reconstructions rather than the real thing and the love scenes are at half-throttle – as if they are there to be remembered sadly rather than experienced ecstatically in the here and now.

I repeat, I was disappointed by The History of Sound.  It's a labor of love by all concerned, but it falls flat for me. 

Apocalypse Not

Wow, this video totally BLEW MY MIND!!!!  It revealed that underneath Dan McClellan's dour, take-no-prisoners, data-over-dogma exterior, there beats the heart of a wishy-washy liberal cafeteria Christian.

Everybody's entitled to their opinions, of course.  Mine is that, if asked, I would reject the question.  I go with (I think) Helmut Thielicke, who wrote decades ago that scholars, at least, should abandon reliance on a canon.  As the late Edmund White liked to say about the literary canon, people who really love reading aren't interested in canons; they (we) want more and more books.  Canons are for people who don't like to read, and want to limit radically the number of books they "have" to read. Scholars of early Christianity should be interested in as much literature from the period as they can get at, because they know that the canon didn't exist then anyway.  Deciding which book one would remove from the canon is like constructing your own Dream Team of elite athletes, a useless if briefly entertaining exercise.

On top of that, McClellan's reasons are extremely poor.  If the Revelation wasn't written by the traditionally ascribed author, neither was most of the New Testament. "John" was a common name at the time, like "Jesus" or "Mary." There's no reason to think that "John" intended to be confused with the author of the Fourth Gospel, who wasn't named John anyway. Unlike the other three gospels, the Fourth Gospel singles out one of its characters as the author, but never by name.  The people who constructed the eventual canon were wrong about most of their decisions anyway, so why cite them as authorities?   If McClellan objects to the Revelation because of authorship, he should throw out most of the canonical New Testament too.

The bit about the Revelation being about a Jesus who wasn't the Jesus of the Sermon on the Mount is hilarious.  The Jesus of the Sermon on the Mount is a Gehenna and damnation preacher - cut off your hand if it leads you to sin, or be cast into eternal fire!  (Matthew 5:29-30, Dan. You know it as well as I do.)  It's not surprising that lay Christians and village atheists skip over those parts, but McClellan is, as he likes to remind us, a scholar of the Bible.  He knows better.  The Revelation develops themes that are everywhere in the New Testament and early Christianity, they aren't at odds with it except possibly in degree.  First take the beam out of your own eye, Dan.

McClellan goes on to say: 

And [the Revelation] was widely accepted precisely because of leaders saying, "Well, we have to include it." And primarily because it allowed them to structure power and values and boundaries over against the Christians that they didn't like.

To the limited extent that this is true, it's true of the rest of the New Testament. Most of those writings contain denunciations of false teachers, prophets and brethren among Christians. My favorites are the short letters ascribed to John -- the same John to whom the Fourth Gospel was eventually ascribed, though probably not by him either -- in which the author orders his followers to withhold fellowship from his opponents, and then he complains because fellowship has been withheld from him.  It happened to the Apostle Paul, as he reports in Galatians. That's how these things go; you could call it karma. 

These passages, and there are a lot of them, allowed leaders "to structure power and values and boundaries," but they could be and were turned against the leaders. I think that the Revelation has more often been used by those at the bottom of their communities to justify overthrowing those at the top, and that's why it's unpopular with the learned and privileged. For examples, see Norman Cohn's The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages (1957).  I recall one episode Cohn recounted in which the Inquisition came to some city to root out rebellious troublemakers but had to flee when they met violent resistance from the populace.  Cohn was indignant about this; he seems to have been somewhat confused about power and values and boundaries.

The early Christians rejected the power structures of their time, but they wanted to upend them, not eliminate them.  Jesus taught that the last would be first and the first would be last; no more than his followers could he imagine an end to hierarchies, nor did he want to.  He expected that when the rich and mighty were brought down, he and his followers would be raised up.  He would ride into town at the right hand of power, and all authority in heaven and earth would be his.  Vengeance would be terrible - for the bad guys, but they deserved it. The earth would be cleansed of their defilements in blood. 

It happens that this video went up just as I began reading 1 Enoch, in McClellan's recommended Hermeneia version.  Enoch, as McClellan knows, strongly influenced Jesus' milieu and likely Jesus himself.  The same fantasies of divine vengeance and heavenly armies slaughtering the ungodly run through 1 Enoch.  Here's an example from chapter 10:

And to Michael [the Most High] said, “Go, Michael, bind Shemihazah and the others with him, who have mated with the daughters of men, so that they were defiled by them in their uncleanness.  And when their sons perish and they see the destruction of their beloved ones, bind them for seventy generations in the valleys of the earth, until the day of their judgment and consummation, until the everlasting judgment is consummated. Then they will be led away to the fiery abyss, and to the torture, and to the prison where they will be confined forever. And everyone who is condemned and destroyed henceforth will be bound together with them until the consummation of their generation. <And at the time of the judgment, which I shall judge, they will perish for all generations.>" 

It's a common trope in apocalyptic writing, and as McClellan knows, Jesus was an apocalyptic preacher who thought only a few would be saved.  What would happen to the majority?  Shhhhh, it wouldn't do to talk about that.  As I've said before, those who'd like to get rid of the Revelation forget or never realize that its bad points are everywhere in the New Testament, especially in Jesus' teachings.

Thinking about all this led me to reread James Barr's Holy Scripture: Canon, Authority, Criticism (Westminster, 1983). Barr was theologically conservative, but in this book he basically deconstructed (I'm using the word accurately here, I think) the whole idea of the canon. For example, the people who lived in biblical times and are featured in the Bible didn't have the Bible.  Yes, the first Christians had the Tanakh, aka the Old Testament, but they didn't have the New Testament. Nor is the biblical canon specified in the Bible (23-4):

It was impossible to provide scriptural proof for this most central of questions,namely, which precisely were the books which had been divinely inspired.  No passage in either Old or New Testament gave a list, nor indeed, as we shall shortly see, did any passage give any indication that they cared seriously about the question. The List of Contents prefaced to the Bible, though it was all-important for the total shape of what lay within, was not part of the inspired text of the Bible itself. For evidence about what was within the canon, one had to go outside the canon itself.

This is also true of other parts of Christian apologetic, such as the claim that all twelve of Jesus' original followers were martyred; maybe so, probably not, but the evidence for most of them comes from outside the Bible. Barr lays out the contradictions in orthodox, traditional accounts of the canon and how the idea has been used.  The book is densely written, but if you could follow the quotation above and have access to a university library, it's worth tracking down and reading. Video scholars like Dan McClellan, Bart Ehrman, and others can introduce you to the subject, but sooner or later it's vital to do some reading - not only of their books but of others.  Barr wrote several books for a general audience, as did other scholars I learned a lot from.  I also read the work of scholars I disagreed with, including conservatives and fundamentalists, and I learned from the experience.  As Rabbi Hillel told a doubter, go and learn.

He's Sure the Boy I Love

So: Heated Rivalry.  

I haven't seen the show and probably won't until it is released on home video; maybe not even then.  I did read the book, though.  I found it sitting there, readily available, as an e-book through my public library, and it wasn't bad.  But it wasn't good enough to make me want to read the others in the series or to subscribe to stream it.

I have watched a lot of promotional videos about it on YouTube, and I was impressed by the young leads.  They're poised, smart, and funny, dealing well with their sudden fame. I especially enjoyed some network anchor type (Rachel Roberts, I think?) interviewing Hudson Williams before the Golden Globes. She said something about how much we've seen of him and Connor Storrie in the media, and Williams said cheerfully that of course everybody has seen all of them -- referring to the nudity in the series. The interviewer was taken aback, I suppose because he'd said the quiet part out loud, and completely without shame or prurience. It's normal in pretty much all media to giggle like adolescents about sexual content, and I doubt these supposed adults will never outgrow it.

Still, I was pleasantly surprised by how comfortable a lot of older media people were with the fact of a gay love story becoming immensely popular.  It's as it should be. There's no reason why heterosexuals shouldn't be able to identify with gay characters.  Heated Rivalry was written by a straight woman for straight women, and the series was written and directed by a gay man, but when the elderly Al Roker is gushing about how romantic it is, I think we've come a long way. This is good news because by all accounts the series puts its many sex scenes in the viewer's face, so to speak. There's no way to deny that these male characters are having sex repeatedly over a long period, it's important to them, they aren't just homosocial.

While Heated Rivalry is probably unprecedented in degree, for film or for television, it's not new in kind. A few people have mentioned Brokeback Mountain, also written by a straight woman for a straight audience though produced by heterosexual filmmakers. It wasn't nearly as sexually explicit as Heated Rivalry, but it was much better than, say, Philadelphia.  But it did end with Gay Doom, and Heated Rivalry doesn't.  That's some kind of progress.

But let me dredge up the past a bit more.  Patricia Nell Warren's The Front Runner was published in 1973.  I remember seeing copies displayed in a mall bookstore, and somehow I knew it was about gay men.  Indeed, it was about gay athletes: not just the title long-distance runner and his coach, but other gay athletes were prominent characters.  The sex scenes were explicit enough to upset some squeamish male reviewers, but even better, the gay characters weren't struggling to Identify As Gay.  The young runners were politically conscious, even militant - a stance notably absent from Heated Rivalry.  The book had a tragic ending but with resolve that life and love would go on, and Warren later produced a sequel or two.  There was ongoing buzz about a possible film version - supposedly Paul Newman had bought the film rights and wanted to play the coach, but it never happened.  Warren herself was lesbian, and continued to deal with gay themes in her later novels.

Then there were Mary Renault's historical novels, especially the ones about Alexander the Great.  The Persian Boy, about Alexander's second love Bagoas but also featuring his long relationship with Hephaistion, was a best-seller.  Again, rumors circulated about a movie, but it never happened.  Ancient Greece has inspired gay fiction, from the ambitious to the dire. (I'm thinking especially of Felice Picano's An Asian Minor: The True Story of Ganymede in the latter category.)  Anne Rice wrote some interesting historical fiction this vein, such as A Cry to Heaven about Italian castrati; and of course her vampire novels are famous examples of the straight woman identifying with her gay(ish) male heroes.  Madeline Miller's The Song of Achilles, a young-adult story of Achilles and Patroclus, made some gay men angry for some reason; I thought it was fine.

But as I've said here before, there's a lot of LGBTQ fiction around these days, and quite a few movies too.  I'm not sure why Heated Rivalry has taken off, though I'm glad it has. There will be a second series going into production soon, with the same leads carrying their characters' story forward.  I expect there will be knockoffs, imitations, that won't do as well because they aren't as good. Sturgeon's Law always applies.  I don't care, because I don't have to watch them or read them.

The thing is, I'm not all that interested in formulaic romance stories, and Heated Rivalry is formulaic.  The hockey angle, which excites a lot of people, is just window-dressing.  The core of the story is the characters' struggle to overcome the obstacles in the way of their love -- obstacles which are internal as much as they are external.  Rachel Reid handles this plot well, but it's old hat and she has nothing to add to it. A lot of the trouble, I admit, is that I'm old and I've seen it all before; besides, everybody knows how a romance is going to turn out.  Her guys' angst is understandable in its pro-sports setting, but even that is required by the romance plot.  Heterosexual romances also have to set up barriers for the lovers to overcome, but the reader knows that they will be overcome.  Romance novels nowadays are marketed by subgenre, and Heated Rivalry is always described as "enemies/rivals to lovers." I don't find that very interesting, just because it's a formula.  A lot of people like it, though; fine.

One thing I've been focusing on in the publicity is the fans. One genre of promotional YouTube video is "celebrities react to thirst tweets," those being social media posts where the writers talk about what they'd like to do in bed with the celebrities. It's often impossible to tell whether the posters are serious or are just trying to be obnoxious. Williams and Storrie handled this assignment with good humor, and it's just part of the publicity machine, but I still thought it was creepy. It's of a piece with the popular tendency of us ordinary shlubs to take for granted that we are the special one that the star would want if we could only meet him or her; or more generally, to assume that if I'm attracted to someone, it's because he wants me and is sending out sex rays to pull me in. This isn't a guy thing or a straight thing, it seems widespread among both sexes and all sexual persuasions. But as I've been wondering for many years now, if you pretend that your desire for another person is a positive thing ("love"), why do so many adults believe that the way to win the other over is to be as obnoxious as possible?  Williams and Storrie have joked often about their butts and their workout secrets to pump up their glutes, which as Williams said, everybody has seen by now.  Many of the fans reciprocate by showing their asses on social media.

There's also excited speculation about the stars' personal sex lives, about which they have been reticent.  I have mixed feelings about this.  On one hand, we should be past the era when one's sexual orientation is a dread secret: it's a public fact about any person.  But on the other, no person is obliged to share the details of one's love life, or sex life, with the world.  That's especially true among gay men, many of whom obsess about who's a top and who's a bottom, again with the seeming assumption that they will ever get near enough to act these roles out with the celebrities.  I still remember that after Boy George had come out publicly in the mid-1980s, a presumably straight interviewer for the rock press assumed that the public fact entitled him to press George for intimate details.  Boy George properly drew the line there, but many people still can't tell the difference.  The fantasies about Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie will go on being spun, but the fantasists need to get a grip on themselves; it's as much as they're going to get.  You know what I'm talking about.

Another reason I'm not champing at the bit to watch the series is that as comfortable as Williams and Storrie evidently are about their sex scenes, I can't help empathizing with actors of any sex simulating sexual acts on the screen or onstage. The more the envelope is pushed, the "steamier" the scenes become, the more many viewers will want and demand, and the more they'll believe that they could bed the actors if they met, the more entitled they feel to show their asses on social media and in real life. As it happens, I first heard of the series in a clip on YouTube, of the two men sitting across a space from each other and sweatily radiating sexual tension and nervousness. The chemistry was impressive, and piqued my interest. I think this sort of thing is better conveyed in prose than in visuals, though. It seems to me that at the same time that liberal folk are becoming more panicky about nudity and sexual activity in real life, they also want more skin and simulated sex on film. (Or on stage.)  Maybe as a substitute?  Another thing I like about Williams and Storrie is their comfort with, even celebration of, physical affection with each other.  Not only many straight men but many gay men see hugs and cuddling only as preludes to penetration, even as they may lament that everybody else sees hugs and cuddling only as preludes to penetration. 

I wish Williams and Storrie well. I hope they have long interesting acting careers, with opportunities to be more than eye candy.  I'll also be interested to see what effect Heated Rivalry has on TV and cinema's treatment of gay subjects.  There seem to be some other intriguing projects in recent release, for that matter.

My Top 15 Plus 1 for 2025

I'm pre-dating this post because I started work on it more than a week ago and should have finished it then.

I was fairly productive last year, and got more traffic than I deserved.  Here are the posts that got the most attention.

15. Coulda Woulda Shoulda (159). We told her so, but she didn't listen; she preferred to lose.

14. Scribble Scribble Scribble (165).  The first of several posts on the current state of gay male fiction.

13. Your Call Is Very Important to Us (172).  Elon Musk inadvertently reminded the Internet how bad the private sector is at serving the public, compared to government agencies.

12. Let Jesus Sort Them Out  (173).  Once again, conservative Christians showed how little value they put on children's lives.

11. If You Don't Know, I'm Certainly Not Going to Tell You! (185)  The Blame Game, 2024 Elections edition.

10. That Is What Fiction Means (196).  I understand and feel the appeal of punitive fantasies, the more hateful the better.  But it doesn't make the world any better, or solve any problems.

9. Snatched from the Maw of the Orphan-Crushing Machine (236). I also understand the appeal of fantasizing about saving a lucky few from horrible fates we ourselves created.  Still not a good idea.

8. All I Really Want to Do (323). To boycott Joanne Rowling, or not to boycott her?

7. Whole Lotta ... Somethin' (323). Swept off my feet by every inch of Robert Plant's love.

6. My Father's House Has Many Cafes, Crafts Vendors, Etc. (399). Returning to the site of an antigay church / cafe / vendor mall, and finding only ruins and the cries of the birds.  Look on their works, ye mighty, and despair!

5. That's My Noem, Don't Wear It Out (406).  The limitations of Snopes.

4. Go Ask Joanne (419).  Rowling again.  You're adults, pick out your own damn books!

3. The Trouble With Sydney -- Born That Way?  (441). Actress and blue jeans pimp Sydney Sweeney stirred up a fuss last summer.  It soon blew over...

2. All Your Genes Are Belong to Her (690) ... but not before I wrote a second consecutive post about it.

1. I Will Follow Him (702).  Richard Dawkins is still in idiotic hawker mode. What would I do without him?

Bonus: Who Is My Neighbor? or, I Don't Really Care, Do U (8658). This was a strange one.  One of the sites I use to monitor traffic announced that bots were responsible for much of the views some blogs were getting, and that they would no longer count those views.  I'd like to think that this post earned that absurd number, but I don't think it really did.  Pundit Matthew Yglesias declared it "sus" that American college students cared, or thought they cared, about faraway, foreign Palestine. He didn't feel the same way about Americans who cared, or thought they cared about faraway, foreign Israel. When challenged, he didn't explain why the two cases were different.  An interesting self-revelation, I thought.

Vagabond Scholar's Jon Swift Memorial Best of 2025

Once again, Batocchio has posted his annual Jon Swift Memorial Roundup, carrying on the good work of the late satirist and blogger Al Weisel, alias Jon Swift.  Bloggers choose their own favorite post of the year, and Batocchio links to them.  Have a look, and see what you think.