My Imaginary Friend Can Beat Up Your Imaginary Friend!

I've often seen variations on this theme.  This time I figured out what is wrong with it.

There may be people living on other worlds, but if there are we don't know anything about them.  Myself, I take for granted that they would have cultures and histories and fateful blind spots, just as we do. Of course, I could be wrong.  But any statements or representations of them are fictional, "fairy tales" as the village-atheist meme has it, where someone projects his or her opinions onto them and gets them back endowed with authority.  They can fairly be called "religious."  It's completely normal, but the people who invent or share such memes believe that they're enlightened, superior to the gullible masses.  On the contrary, they are part of the masses.

That's basically it.  I might explore its implications some other time, but this will do for now.

Traditional Values

So much going on, I can't keep up.  I'm too old for this!

Right-wing pundit Jonah Goldberg fell back on a long-standing talking point the other day:

The left does criticize the countries that Goldberg deplores here.  Not always, of course, and not always as consistently as I could wish.  But overall in the US it's the center (or near-right, to label it more accurately) and the right (meaning practically off the scale) that embrace them.  Trump, for example, conspicuously left Saudi Arabia out of his first-term Muslim ban, along with the other nations in Goldberg's list, but the embrace is bipartisan.  

As for China, it was the well-known leftists, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, who brought the Chinese Communist Party into the community of nations. It's usually crazy feminists and leftists who object to Islamic oppression of women, and the Right denounces them for their atheism and contempt for traditional values - until, as with George W. Bush, they decide to invade them ostensibly to protect the rights of women.  (Whatever objections Israel has to the Kingdom, they have nothing to do with its treatment of women.)

The same leftists also criticize our own country for its violations of human rights at home and abroad, and are accused of double standards about that.  Or we criticize reactionary violence against gay people, and are accused of applying corrupt Western values to traditional societies; also false, we criticized our own country first, and still keep having to do it. 

As other commentators pointed out, this question came up in the context of the New York City mayoral race.  Candidates were asked about their allegiance to Israel, which ought to be odd in a local election. Yes, New York is a major city with a sizable Jewish population, but foreign policy shouldn't be a central issue. 

The rest of Goldberg's rant is predictably disingenuous, ignoring Israel's record of violence against Palestinians and its neighbors, which is hardly in the distant past. I believe that Goldberg is also distorting Zohran Mamdani's remarks, and the question he was asked.  It wasn't about recognizing Israel diplomatically, though that is not an unfair question.  He was asked if he recognized Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state.  No country has a "right to exist," and it's not clear what "as a Jewish state" is supposed to mean.  You'd think that it's proper to criticize any country that defines itself in terms of ethnic or religious purity -- but as always, "we come up against the venerable shell-game of Jewish identity: 'Look! We’re a religion! No! a race! No! a cultural entity! Sorry–a religion!' When we tire of this game, we get suckered into another: 'anti-Zionism is antisemitism!' quickly alternates with: 'Don’t confuse Zionism with Judaism! How dare you, you antisemite!'" Again, the left, especially in the US, has a long history of rejecting the idea of race as the basis of a nation; if I reject the claim that the United States has a right to exist as a Christian nation, why wouldn't I reject Israel's right to exist as a Jewish one?  It's the right that defends, even celebrates it, and that includes Jonah Goldberg in his defense of Israel.

Wooing Him From the Dark Side to the Dark Side

NPR's Steve Inskeep struck again this morning.  I was dawdling in bed, but I bounced even before this seven-minute absurdity was over.

INSKEEP: So I want people to know we talk from time to time. I don't really ask about your personal life, and I don't want to go too far here, but have you ever had a breakup like this?

SWISHER: Not like this. Not publicly like this. It's really quite strange, actually, but it's sort of in keeping with their relationship over the last year or so as Musk became very close to Donald Trump.

That's how it began, and it didn't get any better.

SWISHER: Well, I think they've had - you know, he sort of fell in love quickly, didn't he? He sort of went crazy, jumping up and down, doing the chainsaw thing, dedicating his life, moving into Mar-a-Lago, all this stuff, and shifted rather dramatically. Because he sort of was somewhat neutral in politics, had voted for Obama, you know, had a relationship with Trump in the first term, but certainly wasn't, you know, as deeply in love with him as he - and I hate to use these terms, but it's really been quite intense, calling himself BFF or best buddy or first buddy or whatever the heck they used.

INSKEEP: Yeah.

SWISHER: And Trump reciprocated, too.

If you have time and a strong stomach, click through and listen to the audio.  Later on, Swisher says of Trump and Musk that "they're not serious people"; neither are she and Inskeep.  Remember this the next time someone calls NPR a radical-left outlet.

Also, this is weird: NPR's Scott Horsley reported that according to the Congressional Budget Office, Trump's tariffs "could cut the federal debt by $2.8 trillion" in the next decade, while the Associated Press reported that the CBO forecast that Trump's budget bill would "spike deficits by $2.4 trillion over the decade."  Horsley didn't mention the latter forecast, which seems to me a bit one-sided.  Horsley mentioned the effect of tariffs on wine prices, which inspired Inskeep to say:

INSKEEP: Hope you're able to pour yourself a glass, Scott. Thanks so much.

HORSLEY: You're welcome.

But back to the Musk-Trump clash.  Liberal and left commentators were very excited about it yesterday, and you'd have thought that the two titans were clashing in person, face-to-face, instead of remotely.  They were also excited by Musk's threat that Trump's relations with Jeffrey Epstein were going to be revealed, as if Musk weren't a recreational liar who's posted false predictions often before, and as if the Trump-Epstein connection weren't well-documented already. What happens when two habitual liars clash?  Do they cancel each other out, like matter and anti-matter?  None of this is really news anyway.  Many people had predicted that Musk would terminally piss off Trump, and vice versa; the only question was how long it would take.

Rumors are swirling like the dust from the Canadian wildfires that are making my eyes burn even as I write this.  First I read that Trump and Musk were going to meet to iron out their differences, then that the White House had denied it.  But it does seem that some highly placed Democratic centrists believe they see an opening to woo Musk to their side. May their memory be a curse.

The Farewell Symphony

The writer Edmund White died yesterday at the age of 85.  I just stumbled on the news this morning online, but so far, as of tonight, I haven't seen any mention of it in my social media.  My connections there include numerous gay media, publishers, and citizens, so I'm surprised.  I had numerous disagreements with him, but he was a fine writer, courageously chose to be openly gay before many of his contemporaries, he helped open the way for two generations of queer writers, and was very productive.  His most recent book, a memoir, appeared earlier this year; he was productive to the end.  Despite longtime poor health, his death seems to have come suddenly.  I'll miss him, despite my disagreements with him.

In particular I want to highlight a point on which I strongly agree with him:

A canon is for people who don't like to read, people who want to know the bare minimum of titles they must consume in order to be considered polished, well rounded, civilized. Any real reader seeks the names of more and more books, not fewer and fewer.

According to the Guardian, White produced more than thirty books in numerous genres, contributing his share to "more and more books." I prefer his essays and biographies to most of his novels, but it's time to go through all of them again.  It happens that I recently reread the first two, Forgetting Elena and Nocturnes for the King of Naples, so I'll go on from there.

Your Call Is Very Important to Us

 This has been getting some attention:

Musk: My frank opinion of the government is that the government is just the DMV that got big, okay, so when you say, like, let's have the government do something, you should think, do you want the DMV to do it?

My first impulse, like other people who commented on it, was to defend the DMV.  I think I remember some surly staff when I first got a learner's permit in 1967, but since then my experiences have been overwhelmingly positive.  In the past few years I've been to the BMV (as it's known in the Hoosier State) numerous times, not just for my own business but accompanying immigrant friends who needed an interpreter, and the staff have been wonderful: knowledgeable, helpful, and friendly.  The same is true of other government offices: Social Security in two different cities, the office in Chicago where I got my senior discount transit pass, and so on.  Numerous commenters under that post agreed, talking about DMV experiences around the country.

My second impulse was that what this drug-addled liar describes sounds to me not like government offices but private corporations: the impossibility of reaching a human being, being put on hold for hours, being stonewalled, being denied reasonable remedies ...  Most of the complaints I see about stagnant, inefficient, and unfriendly bureaucracy refer to the private sector.  Just try to cancel a newspaper subscription, or your cable service, or any number of other business dealings. Try to get a refund on your ticket for a canceled flight.  Try to talk to a real person without navigating complex menu trees that eventually dump you into an hour-long hold. And then there is the garden of earthly delights that is private health insurance.  These time sinks are the result of companies trying to boost profits by cutting service, which is labor-intensive: hence the menu trees, hence the call centers outsourced to poorer countries.  Next, breathing down our necks, will be AI telephone customer-service robots.  We'll hear a lot about their labor-saving, money saving superiority, but not very much about the actual costs of running and maintaining those systems.

I don't blame the phone center people, who often struggle with English & are hamstrung by the scripts they're given, but they try.  I blame the people at the top, people like Musk. 

About 30 years ago David Gordon published Fat and Mean: The Corporate Squeeze of Working Americans and the Myth of Managerial "Downsizing".  The notion of big corporations as "lean and mean" was a myth then, and I doubt things have changed.  When business-school manager-types take over non-profit institutions such as colleges, they cut professors and service staff while hiring more office drones.  I saw this happen at around the same time, the mid-90s, in the state university food service where I worked.  Kitchen workers were RIFed (for Reduction in Force, the kind of acronym these people adore) in time for the beginning of the school year, and the system was reorganized.  The result was that serving lines got longer, food quality declined, worker morale declined, but the people at the top boasted in bulletin-board memos that another manager had been hired for the central administrative office. This was supposed to make us feel good.  They also brought in counselors, to help us cope with the stress. The entire year was disastrous and the dining service didn't recover for years after that, but the guy who'd done it was kept on for another year at his six-figure salary. New hires were outsourced to a private temp company, resulting in layers of waste: time reports had to be done by in-house managers and again by the company.  Plus the company had to make a profit, so the university paid more for workers.  That debacle was abandoned after a couple of years.  I wonder how much money was wasted.

The government, especially under Biden, tried to fix some of those problems, such as unsubscribing to email lists and getting refunds from airlines, against intense panicky opposition by the big corporations.  I hold no brief for Biden overall, but as a non-rich retiree I benefited from some of his actions.  So did many others.

In a way Musk is only part of the problem, albeit an important part.  One commenter wrote that he sounds like a spoiled toddler.  I say he sounds like a spoiled toddler who was raised on "free-enterprise" propaganda by rich right-wing parents; and that's what he is. The defense of government service many commenters raised was valid, and I was pleased to see it. But I didn't note more than a couple who pointed out that Musk's line applied most accurately to private corporations.

The Best Catch There Is

 “There must have been a reason,” Yossarian persisted, pounding his fist into his hand. “They couldn’t just barge in here and chase everyone out.”

“No reason,” wailed the old woman. “No reason.”

“What right did they have?”

“Catch-22.”

“What?” Yossarian froze in his tracks with fear and alarm and felt his whole body begin to tingle. “What did you say?”

“Catch-22” the old woman repeated, rocking her head up and down. “Catch-22. Catch-22 says they have a right to do anything we can’t stop them from doing.”

I dragged my feet on this post for several days -- weeks by now -- and then events upended some details, but the main point is unchanged.

I've found it difficult to write about US politics this year because 2024 shook so many of my beliefs and assumptions about politics.  Much of what I hear or read involves "what we can expect," what could or might potentially happen, and the predictions of experts of all backgrounds have proven spectacularly wrong.  Will Trump's economic adventuring and corruption bring about a recession?  Inflation?  Experts are happy to weigh in for the news media, but who in their right mind would trust them?  Even though our corporate overlords were proved hilariously wrong when they assured us that there would be a big-time recession in 2023, they still appear and are quoted breathlessly.  After all, eventually they'll be right.

The excerpt above from Joseph Heller's 1961 novel Catch-22 has always haunted me. The thugs who invoked Catch-22 weren't Nazis but American military police.  It should never be forgotten that the US not only has a long history of authoritarian violence, we wrote the book.  There's a sizable portion of the American populace, not limited to MAGA, that approves of and indeed revels in police violence: shock raids, beatings, extra-judicial killings, disappearances.  I wonder how many of Trump's critics today remember George W. Bush's illegal rendition of prisoners to black sites for "enhanced interrogation"?  That's a euphemism that makes authoritarians across the political spectrum moan with sensual pleasure.  But all these practices fit into a larger context that Vincent Bevins discussed in his book The Jakarta Method, showing how the vast 1965 massacres in Indonesia provided a blueprint for US-backed atrocities around the world ever since.  I read it before the 2024 elections, and it troubled my sleep; still does.  It's not only about suppression of the left; dictators usually turn on their own side as they consolidate power.

What disturbed me about Trump's campaign against foreigners in the US was the way he, his spokespeople, and his supporters all assumed not only that every immigrant (undocumented or not) is a criminal but that if someone is a criminal the government can do to them whatever it likes, without due process or any limits at all.  It's Catch-22: they have a right to do whatever we can't stop them from doing.  By "criminal" they mean any infringement of the law whatsoever, real or imaginary: parking tickets, speeding tickets, outstaying their visas, crossing the border without asking "Uncle Sam, may I?" Someone who let a parking meter run out is no different from a rapist or murderer, and is at Trump's nonexistent mercy.  Never mind that Trump himself is a convicted felon, or that he has pardoned hundreds of violent convicted criminals.  (Or that his predecessors are all war criminals - but that's even less important.)

While cruelty pleases MAGA especially, liberals aren't immune to its pleasures either: the idea of punching Republicans, beating up Nazis, putting capitalists to the guillotine, starving hillbillies, etc. also turns on many liberals.  The political scientist Corey Robin recently wrote against the claim that "the cruelty is the point":

One of the claims you often heard during Trump 1.0, which I always thought was misleading, was that “the cruelty is the point.” If you know anything about the history of political intimidation and politically repressive fear, you know that the cruelty is not the point. Silence, obedience, and submission—subjugation for political ends—that’s the point. The goal of McCarthyism was to crush what was left of the New Deal left-liberal alliance, primarily in the labor movement, and it succeeded. The point wasn’t to be cruel.

Trump and some of his allies really are just sadists, psychopaths, and sociopaths. There is no doubt about that. But political intimidation and political repression does have a political goal beyond generic “cruelty.”

I see his point, and I think it should be borne in mind, but I also think it's a quibble that could be a distraction.  I think that for many people, especially but not only Trump and MAGA, the political goal is inseparable from the frisson they get from seeing bad guys punished.  If they could achieve their goal without making someone suffer, that would take away much of their pleasure in the achievement.  As I've written in connection with religion, while many people are uncomfortable with the idea of eternal torment for (other) sinners, many others demand it.  If they won't get to view the suffering of the damned from the bosom of Abraham, what's the point of salvation?  It helps that the idea of Hell is built into New Testament Christianity and the teachings of Jesus. This is a useful idea, I believe, since unlike sending random brown people to brutal prisons in El Salvador, Hell in whatever religious tradition is a fantasy.  It's not something people have to believe in, it's something they like to believe in.  And making it so, on Earth as in Hades, is still one of the most popular parts of Trump's agenda.

Snatched from the Maw of the Orphan-Crushing Machine

  

This is the sort of remark from Francis that won the hearts of many a non-believer, but I don't get the appeal.  

In the first place, while Jesus' teaching on eternal punishment was as inconsistent as the rest of his teaching, it was a theme he returned to often enough that I see no reason to believe it wasn't dear to his heart.  Some scholars have tried to get around it by pointing out that his teaching on the matter wasn't the fully-developed doctrine the later churches produced, but one could say the same of pretty much all his teaching.  He wasn't a theologian or a scholar, he was a back-country faith-healer and end-times preacher, and even if every word ascribed to him in the gospels were authentic (not likely!), we'd have a very sketchy set of doctrines just begging to be filled in by later followers.

A number of Christian apologists have tried to scratch out hints in the gospels of a more conciliatory doctrine that doesn't involve eternal torment, but hints are all they have.  (Yes, the second-century Christian thinker Origen of Alexandria was one such; but he was declared a heretic, and he lived in a notorious hotbed of Gnosticism, so not many would endorse his ideas if they weren't desperate for an ancient precedent.  For example: the evidence is dubious, but most scholars seem to accept a much later rumor that he made himself a eunuch for the Kingdom; should modern Christians follow him in that as well?)  If Jesus did believe and teach that no one would go to hell, that would count against the reliability of the gospels as a source of his teaching.

I've noticed that many of the same people who let wishful thinking be their guide will also denounce Christians with dogmas they dislike as ignoring the overwhelming two-thousand-year bulk of Christian tradition.  When they do it -- and Hell is part of that tradition -- it's suddenly of no account.  I understand why they do it, but I'm not obligated to respect their reasons or their conclusions.

One more thing struck me when I saw the post above, though.  I've seen numerous variations on this theme on the internet over the years:

Why would Hell exist in the first place?  Why would you need to pay to stay or get out of it?  I've written about this before too: faced with solid ancient tradition about suffering after death, people just invent loopholes to get around it.  When the Pope let slip his rejection of two thousand years of Catholic tradition about divine Justice, that's what he was doing.  I wouldn't expect an elderly cleric to reject that tradition, of course: he has too much invested in it to do such a thing. But for non-Catholics and non-theists who get all excited about his qualms is, to my mind, like rejoicing over a child's lemonade stand raising money to save a few* orphans from the orphan-crushing machine.  It's the mildest, safest objection to a horrible, inhumane doctrine that, on top of everything else, is pure invention. There is no hell, there is no heaven, and anybody who claims to know how to escape one or get into the other is a scammer.  "Yeah, but he's a nice, kindly scammer who wishes nobody needed his snake oil!" should be embarrassing, but a lot of people think it's a sign of their good judgment and character.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

*Remember that Jesus taught that only a few would be saved, and most would be damned.  So "few" is precisely correct here.

Coulda, Woulda, Shoulda

Kamala Harris addressed the Leading Women Defined Summit (what?) the other day.

 

She decried people who weren't doing anything, which was interesting because the people who aren't doing anything are the leadership of the Democratic Party, notably Senator Chuck Schumer.  She doesn't seem to have named any names here.  And then she said, "I'm not here to say 'I told you so,' but ..." (which of course she was) before bursting into her familiar drunken wine-mom laughter and adding "I swore I wasn't going to say that."  Okay, fine, but why say it to a crowd of her fans, who presumably voted for her?

A lot of people tried to tell her so during the campaign.  They told her it was a bad idea to defend and support Israeli atrocities.  They told her it was a bad idea to insult and mock important segments of her base.  They told her it was a bad idea to court the Cheney crime family.  They told her she needed to distance herself from Biden.  And so on. She ignored such good advice, preferring to listen to the worst people in her party.  If she had won despite all this, she could gloat and wag a finger at her critics.  It's entirely possible that she'd have lost anyway; but she lost, badly.

I hadn't watched this clip until I saw another one, in which her former running mate Tim Walz criticized her remarks.  Walz is often erratic, but he did a good job here.  He even admitted his own mistakes. True to Democratic establishment form, Harris blamed everyone except herself.

In Our Hands

Someone posted the above clip on Facebook the other day; luckily for me and this post, it was also available on YouTube.  (Probably it came from there.)  I haven't seen The Good Lie, a 2014 movie about Sudanese refugees in the US, and I don't know whether I will.  But this bit stirred up my urge to write.

It appears that the three young men have been brought to the US, and their caseworker (Witherspoon) has brought them to see the bald guy, who is evidently a farmer, presumably to stay with him.  (I said I haven't watched it yet.)  They ask permission to see his cows, and ask if there are any dangerous animals they should watch out for.  Permission received, they walk off, hand in hand.  The bald guy mutters, "I wish they wouldn't do that."  Given that this is America and he's the people of the land, the common clay of the New West, I sympathize with him slightly.  A good many gay American men would read the gesture the same way, except that they would jerk off to it.

Some commenters on the Facebook clip said that holding hands didn't mean the young Africans were gay, which is true, but added that it was no longer seen that way in Africa because of American gays, which probably is not true: it is because of viciously antigay bigots in Africa, abetted by viciously antigay American Christians.  (As some scholars have noticed before, non-Western bigots love to claim that homosexuality is a Western import, even as they happily import Western antigay religious and medical bigotry for their own agenda.)  As recently as 2019, though, I saw male African students in my college town holding hands with one another; it was orientation time for international students, and they'd probably been warned about US attitudes so they looked somewhat nervous, but they held on.

What I'm asking here is why men holding hands came to be seen as a sign of homosexuality in the United States.  During the US invasion of Vietnam, I read that American soldiers saw South Vietnamese soldiers holding hands and decided they were homosexuals. This fed their contempt for the ARVN, though it's likely that NLF and North Vietnamese men also held hands: they were just unlikely to be observed by Americans, and South Vietnamese troops were capable of as much manly violence as Americans could wish.  This was during the 1960s and early 1970s, and I doubt that American grunts had ever actually seen homosexuals holding hands in the US in those days.

Some might argue that men holding hands just is gay, it's common sense.  But it isn't, as shown by the number and expanse of cultures where it's routine.  Nor do those cultures accept male homosexuality.  In the US, norms of male-to-male affection have changed over time, and there's never been unanimity about them.  Walt Whitman's moist nineteenth-century poems about "adhesive" love between men seem to have appealed to many heterosexuals, as did the twentieth-century J. R. R. Tolkien's depiction of fondness between hobbits.  Academics, gay and straight like, refined the word "homosocial" to explain away these relationships, but couldn't explain why what previously had been endearing suddenly set off alarms.  In fact there had always been those who objected that there were "too many kisses in this work to avoid slander, suspicion and mockery."  Personally I favor slander, suspicion, and mockery of those trying to suppress displays of affection, but that's another post.

I associate holding hands with childhood: being required to hold someone's hand in public, while crossing the street, while standing in line with other children, and so on.  Children are ambivalent about it, if I may generalize from my own experience: it means you're a baby who can't be trusted to cross the street by yourself (which you can't), or you are ordered to hold the hand of someone you dislike, whose hands are sticky (unwashed isn't the problem, stickiness is).  But when they feel unsure or unsafe and can't crawl into someone's lap, they'll reach for someone else's hand.  It also signifies mutual belonging, for adults no less than children. Some Americans have explained foreign men holding hands to me as a sign of exceptional closeness and trust, but at best I think they're projecting.  At least it isn't always the case; men in other countries don't seem to need that much intimacy to reach for each other's hands.

Nor should they.  Numerous writers, such as the anthropologist Ashley Montagu, have stressed the importance of physical contact for all people, from infants to adults.  I remember someone telling me in the early 70s, about when Montagu's book was published, that American men could only allow themselves to seek touch through sex.  That's probably still true for many of us, but I have the impression that things have improved since then, and American men are more affectionate than they used to be.  But there's still room, and need, for improvement.  We must respect each others' boundaries, and no one including children should be compelled or pressured to give touch.  One reason I think it's important to push back hard on antigay bigotry is that it is used not only against sex between men, but against affection as well.  That's harmful not only to gay men but to straight ones, and it must not be tolerated.

Speaking of Coincidences ...

I recently read Shy: The Alarmingly Outspoken Memoirs of Mary Rodgers (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2022), pieced together by Jesse Green, with entertaining and informative footnotes, from the reminiscences of Mary Rodgers.  She was the daughter of the composer Richard Rodgers, and she knew a vast array of musical-theater people, from her parents to Stephen Sondheim and beyond.  The book offers up a spicy buffet of dish on all of them, including herself.  It's not for everyone; many readers were offended by her bluntness and openness.  "Make it meaner," she told Green when he showed her his early drafts; "Make it funnier."  He did.

Rodgers was also a composer, a writer, a producer.  Among her credits is the 1959 musical Once Upon a Mattress, which gave Carol Burnett her big break.  I believe I saw the first TV version, broadcast in 1964, but there have been two more since then.  She also worked on Leonard Bernstein's Young People's Concerts, broadcast on TV from 1958 to 1972, which I watched regularly in its first years.

In 1966 Rodgers composed a ditty known as "The Boy from..." for an off-Broadway revue, The Mad Show.  Stephen Sondheim wrote the lyrics, which parody the bossa nova hit "The Girl from Ipanema" but also draw on Rodgers' admitted tendency to fall in love with gay men, such as her first husband and Sondheim himself:

Why are his trousers vermilion?
Why does he claim he's Castilian?
Why do his friends call him Lillian?
And I hear at the end of the week
he's leaving to start a boutique.

The original recording was sung by the actress Linda Lavin, with a breathy -- indeed breathless -- delivery exaggerating Astrud Gilberto's in "Ipanema."  It took me several listenings to fully appreciate Lavin's performance, partly because the recording level was low, but it grew on me. 

Not being a musicals queen, I hadn't heard of Lavin until Rodgers mentioned her in connection with this song.  Then, a few days after I read Shy, I began seeing YouTube clips from a new sitcom, Mid-centuiry Modern, in which Linda Lavin plays the mother of one of the characters.  Interviews with the other cast members contain praise of her greatness and sadness for her loss; she died of cancer in the middle of production of the first season.  At some point I realized that her name rang a bell, but it took me a few days to make the connection.  If I were the kind of believer who sees the world that way, I'd say that God must have been in there somewhere; luckily, I'm not.

We Have Never Been Modern

I recently read When Brooklyn Was Queer by Hugh Ryan (St. Martin's Press, 2019) for a book club, and have mixed feelings about it.  It's a well-done, readable history that draws on some familiar sources and delving into the archives, and on the whole I recommend it.  I learned about the history of Brooklyn, which usually is lost in the shadows of Manhattan, and got some insight into the rise and fall of cities.

What bothered me was Ryan's frequent invocation of "the modern idea of sexuality", with the implication that people used to have old-fashioned, inadequate concepts of queerness that we have, fortunately, moved beyond.  I think he knows better, as I'll try to show, but he keeps returning to that formula.  For example:

However, we can see that Roebling understood his love for his friend to be of the same cloth as his friend’s love for him; it is at most a difference of quantity, not quality. The idea of “homosexuality” had not yet emerged as a separate kind of male-male intimacy. What stands out from this story, aside from Roebling’s lack of shock or disgust, is the absence of any specific words for this type of desire (or the men who profess it) [40].

Or:

The idea that people had a fixed, inborn set of sexual desires that were permanent and could be used to classify humanity into groups was only just emerging among theorists in Europe. There was little agreed-upon language to even discuss those feelings. As Ralph Waldo Emerson pointed out in his essay, the job of the poet is that of language-maker, the person who documents and names the new experiences of the times [24].

I could quote many more examples.  There are a lot of problems in this theme.  For one, are the experiences Ryan is writing about "new"?  He's referring partly to the idea of community, of people classifying themselves into groups based on erotic interests and practice.  It's open to question whether this tendency is new, even in the US: the little communities of "mollies" in eighteenth-century England fascinated gay historians a couple of decades ago, for instance, and social networks and cruising areas are documented around the world, throughout history. There's a substantial literature on this.  I can't tell whether Ryan ignores it because it's not immediately relevant to the topic of queer Brooklyn, or whether he's unaware of it.  One can question how much mollies, sodomites, sapphists and other theorized their communities, but that's not very important unless one is determined to limit "community" to late twentieth-century commercial gay men's culture.  Unfortunately, many do.  But theorizing beyond an ad hoc minimum mostly interests only a small minority of queers, and even those few tend not to do it very well.

For another, as Ryan shows abundantly, "a fixed, inborn set of sexual desires that were permanent" doesn't accurately describe more than a minority of the men and women he's writing about.  This is most obvious in the milieu of sexually-receptive men ("fairies" et al.) and the men ("trade") who penetrate them, whether for money or convenience or both.  Ryan devotes a lot of space to this pattern, at least partly because it's so well-documented in old criminal records, newspapers, and medical literature.  He steps gingerly around the question of the actual sexual orientation of the insertive trade, who according to the lore were younger and would age out of the market as they married and found steady employment.  (This is debatable in many cases, but it's the lore.)

This idea is complicated further by talk of "sexual fluidity," that "We're all a little bit gay," that "most people are bi except for a few at each end of the bell curve."  Despite lip service to such slogans, bisexuality is regarded with skepticism and hostility by many gay men and lesbians.  Among gay men at least, there's a common belief that at heart, trade really only want to be penetrated, and the same gay men who believe themselves doomed by biology to be bottoms turn out to be tops with regard to the very tops they value so much.  (As I've argued before, this is reminiscent of sexist males' belief that all women are really whores at heart.)  There's an analogous uneasiness about femme women among lesbians.  Both concepts -- fixity and plasticity -- coexist in the supposedly modern concept of sexuality.  Ryan's evidence shows this, but he resists it; at least, he never seems to notice the contradiction.  I think it's significant that belief in a fixed homosexual nature arose and became dominant at the same time that evidence against it multiplied not only in accounts like Ryan's but in "common sense" talk about sex.  It's also ironic that "queer," Ryan's label of choice, was rehabilitated in the 1990s against the supposed rigidity of gay and lesbian identities, only to be folded back into supposedly scientific theories of biologically fixed sexual orientation.

To his credit, Ryan is aware of the historical connection of biological determinism and the "modern conception of homosexuality", which I've addressed here before.  Ryan writes:

Early twentieth-century medical science was dominated by the eugenics movement, which believed social problems were rooted in deviant bodies and inheritable traits. This movement reached its apogee with the sadistic, anti-Semitic science of the Holocaust, which has allowed us to conveniently forget the power and prevalence of the eugenics movement in America. Just as people of color, women, and queer people were gaining social power and becoming visible, eugenic science would be trotted out to prove that black people were less human, women were less intelligent, and queer people were a biological dead end that threatened to contaminate good (white) Americans [76].

He doesn't mention class, which was a fixation of the most respectable elements of the eugenics movement, and still is a fallback for it.  But he also writes that "Sigmund Freud’s system of psychoanalysis, and his ideas about sexuality residing in the human mind, only reached American shores in 1909. It would take long decades before they would supplant eugenic ideas about the body as our dominant way of understanding sexuality (and personality in general)" [77]  Is he really unaware that Freud became a whipping boy for feminism and post-Stonewall gay activists, who rightly attacked the psychiatric profession for its role in pathologizing women and homosexuals?  That was before we assimilated ourselves into the profession, and accepted biological determinism while forgetting its ties to eugenics.

He writes:

The same doctors who would define “the homosexual” as a biological class unto itself would also define “the pickpocket” that way, and “the woman who is erotically stimulated by hat pins” as well. Today, it seems natural to view homosexuality this way, and ridiculous to think that being a pickpocket might be a hereditary, biologically defined class. But this is the biased, thoroughly unscientific swamp from which our modern ideas about sexuality arose [77].

I agree, so I don't understand why he writes uncritically about "our modern ideas about sexuality" elsewhere in the book.  Ryan also seems to think that the modern concepts of "transgender" and "intersex" are somehow more valid than their predecessors, that nineteenth- and twentieth-century "fairies" and bulldaggers were really "intersex" or "transgender"?  These concepts, which might sometimes be useful, are just newer social constructions, with the same contradictions and inadequacies as older ideas. That's because "sex" and "gender" are still incoherent and poorly thought out -- possibly more than ever.

So, for example:

According to Ward Hall, a gay man who got his start in the circus in the early 1940s, these [sideshow] acts were sometimes performed by people who were actually intersex, but they were also done by effeminate men and masculine women whose gender presentations were already so at odds with what the audience expected that they believed them to be physically intersex as well [116].

Or again, of a self-identified "fairy" who

told Shufeldt that she was, in our modern terms, intersex (meaning her body had a mixture of typically male and female characteristics), and that she had previously been pregnant. Shufeldt disputed this with his medical examinations, which were so thorough they bordered on being a cavity search. It’s impossible to know what to make of Loop’s assertions. Did she truly believe herself to be intersex? Was this an elaborate camp put on by a fairy out to have some fun with a serious doctor? [79]

Was she "really" intersex?  Apparently not, but Ryan doesn't tell what word she used.  "Intersex" was intended to replace the older "hermaphrodite," which referred to individuals with "both" sets of reproductive organs.  Such individuals are vanishingly rare, so "intersex" might be a slight improvement.  But it seems to have been stretched to include a wide variety of traits, including smaller-than-average penises or larger-than-average clitorises, with the associated assumption of determined gender behavior such as dress or career choices.  And from what I see in online discussion, many people confuse "transgender" with "intersex," and many transgender individuals are trying to base their identities in biology.  It isn't only scientists who love eugenics and biological determinism.

When Brooklyn Was Queer includes a lot of interesting information, and I'd recommend it to anyone who's interested in LGBTQ history.  Just pay attention to the man behind the curtain.  As so often happens, his theory is at odds with his data, but that's useful to know too.  I've never thought that I needed different words for my feelings for other men: it was our enemies who insisted that what I felt wasn't love.  "Same-sex desire" is just desire.  Despite many years of determined efforts to prove otherwise, men who love men and women who love women are biologically speaking just men and women.  Of course "men" and "women" are not obvious (or pre-cultural) categories either, but traditionalists again are the source of the confusion, because of their wish to police other people's gender and erotic lives - a wish that unfortunately is shared by many non-traditionalists.

---------------- 

Page references are to the Kindle edition.

Spread 'Em, Jesse!

I've been mulling over a post on the epidemic of male loneliness, but I think I can address this aspect of it without running on too long.

Some liberal Xers tutted over Fox News pundit Jesse Watters here.  I chose this moment for a screenshot because it shows Watters's legs spread wide under the table.  No disagreement from me, of course: his rules are laughable.

One commenter wrote, "I think a lot of these men have had it enforced into them their whole lives and are afraid themselves of being seen as lesser for not following these 'rules', which also includes making fun of men who don't participate in these behaviors".  This is probably true, but it only raises the question of where those rules came from.  People love to blame customs they dislike on religion, but there's nothing in the Bible about milkshakes, straws, or crossing one's legs.  Even if there were, such taboos would be human inventions, like every other religious teaching.  People observe those rules selectively anyway, even or especially when they pay them lip service.

But I noticed that all the mockery was directed at Watters.  He deserves it, but so does Tim Walz, Democratic governor of Minnesota and Kamala Harris's erstwhile running mate.  The clip which prompted Watters's posturing showed Walz doing some posturing of his own, claiming that he "scares MAGA men with his masculinity" and "could kick most of their a** [sic]!"  I approve of Walz on many matters, and was glad to see him emerging from the shadows to attack the MAGA right, but adopting the same harmful and stupid standards of manhood as his opponents is not the way to do it.

The Great State of Journalism; or, All the Personal Liberties Money Can Buy

There have been two noteworthy developments in elite journalism in the past week or so, which I think are significant more for the reactions they inspired than for their actual importance.

First, the Trump regime assumed control of press access to White House events.  The White House Correspondents' Association announced that "it would no longer coordinate shared coverage of President Donald Trump in an escalating dispute over press access to official events."  "The 'WHCA cannot ensure that the reports filed by government-selected poolers will be held to the same standards that we have had in place for decades,'" announced the WHCA President, Eugene Daniels.

This change should certainly be borne in mind by all consumers of news, but how much of a change is it, really?  The standards of White House press coverage have always been low.  The questions asked by reporters have generally been embarrassingly low in quality, with a few notable exceptions, and those exceptions were usually met with evasive, stonewalling answers.  Reporters who failed to conform with the ritual could be excluded, and it wasn't clear whether the WHCA or the White House excluded them.  Despite the pretense that the press and the government are adversaries rather than collaborators, as the WHCA's announcement tacitly admits, it didn't matter. 

I remembered that the White House press corps complained that Barack Obama wasn't holding press conferences in 2010, and that too was supposedly a threat to press freedom.  I disagreed then, and I disagree now.  The press could, in principle, refuse to play along, refuse to participate in the ritual dance between reporter and subject.  In practice that would never happen, because there will always be scabs who will show up to stroke the President's or other official's ego by asking sycophantic questions.

If Obama is too long ago, the Biden-Harris administration also showed the futility of most press conferences.  Biden also was elusive, and when asked, his spokespeople simply repeated the propaganda line they'd been given.  Kamala Harris also evaded substantive questions during her failed presidential campaign.  For what it's worth, Donald Trump has been much more available to the press than his predecessors, but few outside his cult are satisfied with the results.

The media don't really need the President's presence.  I always mention the great independent reporter I. F. Stone in this connection: when he was excluded from the Washington press corps during the Truman administration, he continued working independently as an investigative reporter on his own one-person newsletter, I. F. Stone's Weekly.  Some of his stories shook up US government claims; imagine what the huge media institutions could do if they devoted their resources to that kind of work, instead of cultivating connections with government insiders.  In fact, they sometimes do.  They don't need access. As Stone said:

I made no claims to 'inside stuff'. I tried to give information which could be documented, so [that] the reader could check it for himself ... Reporters tend to be absorbed by the bureaucracies they cover; they take on the habits, attitudes, and even accents of the military or the diplomatic corps. Should a reporter resist the pressure, there are many ways to get rid of him. ... But a reporter covering the whole capital on his own – particularly if he is his own employer – is immune from these [political] pressures.

The second journalism story involved Amazon founder and now owner of the Washington Post Jeff Bezos, who announced last Wednesday that the Post Opinion Page will henceforth "be writing every day in support and defence of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets."

He added the opinion section would cover other topics, but “viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others”.

“There was a time when a newspaper, especially one that was a local monopoly, might have seen it as a service to bring to the reader's doorstep every morning a broad-based opinion section that sought to cover all views,” Bezos wrote. “Today, the internet does that job.”

Seventy-five thousand digital subscribers have reportedly canceled their subscriptions to the Post in protest of Bezos's move.  There was a similar backlash last year when he announced that the paper would no longer endorse presidential candidates.  He claimed that endorsements "create a perception of bias," though his intervention to kill a planned editorial endorsement of Kamala Harris did just that.  Does it matter, though?  These moves aren't going to make most people suddenly trust elite corporate media, or any media.  From what I can tell, distrust of news media isn't based on any informed or rational evaluations anyway.  Media consumers tell pollsters that they value "accuracy above all else," but how do they know what's accurate?

Bezos has a point, though it doesn't make him look any better.  In the days when even smaller cities had more than one newspaper, it was normal for editorials to reflect the owners' political bias, and objectivity was always a mirage.  That didn't change as the news industry became increasingly monopolized, and while Bezos's invocation of the Internet is in typical bad faith, there are more alternatives available than ever before.  Even if Washington DC had several major newspapers, someone who wanted to be well-informed should look beyond the local product.  In the past, such a person would at least look to the New York Times as well as the Post.  There were daily radio and TV news programs, weekly news magazines, and other sources.  Tearing one's hair over the misbehavior of one newspaper owner is as disingenuous as gnashing one's teeth over the loss of access to inside sources.  But that's what passes for responsible commentary, then and now.

Hey, Censors! Leave Those Kids Alone

Authoritarians often try to present themselves as reasonable, common-sense types who just want to be left alone by all the woke leftists.  Google News referred me this morning to an excellent example of the pattern, a letter to the editor of the Sarasota Herald Tribune.  It's semi-paywalled, and the site nagged me to shut off my adblocker, so if you click through be prepared to deal with that.

The writer was indignant that the Herald-Tribune had run an op-ed opposing "book bans."  The headline, he declared, "shows your paper's dislike of the USA."  According to him there are no book bans in Florida, only restrictions on materials in middle-school libraries.  This is a distinction without a difference, aside from being dishonest: as far as I can tell, the activists involved don't merely want to "restrict" access to materials, they want to remove those materials from the shelves.

"Young people should be shielded from harmful material, be it in books, films, audio or on the internet."  Here we have the faux-reasonable stance.  Who decides what is harmful?  The most reactionary, authoritarian elements of a community, of course. 

"Parents are the people responsible for their children, not the state or activist college students." If the state shouldn't be involved, then why is the state of Florida intervening to decide what materials children should not be allowed to see?  The reference to "activist college students" is a nice evasion.  Activist adults want to decide not only what their children will see, but other parents' children as well.  

And not only children, but other adults: "If the parents want their children to read something, they can easily purchase it on Amazon or at another location (i.e., a flea market)."  Here the underlying agenda peeks out: this writer's illogic, followed to its conclusion, would eliminate public libraries altogether.  If I want to read something, I "can easily purchase it on Amazon or at another location (i.e., a flea market)", right?  One of the reasons public libraries came into existence was because people couldn't afford to buy everything they wanted to read.  It's why public libraries and other public services are so popular with most people, even when they're a bit uneasy about some of the content they provide; it's also why authoritarian scum hate public resources - those who can't afford to pay should just go without.  Censors of literature have always been happy to shield adults from "harmful" material, though as far as I know there's never been any good evidence on what is harmful, or how, or why. 

"Columns like this one by Emily Bowlin do not add to the educational process; they merely mislead individuals. I did not read 'Slaughterhouse Five' in middle school – I read it much later – and I seem to have turned out mostly OK." That last bit is open to question.  The writer is the one who wants to mislead, by confusing material available in school libraries with material assigned in class. Is Slaughterhouse-Five really being assigned in middle schools?  I admit I've been surprised as I've followed the controversy, to see what apparently is being assigned at that level.  

Maus, for example, Art Spiegelmann's graphic memoir about his parents' experience in Auschwitz, was attacked for showing in drawings the nakedness of mouse-headed human beings in a concentration camp.  Supposedly it was assigned reading for middle-schoolers in some districts, and that brought even me up short - not because of the nudity, but because of the overall disturbing subject matter.  I wouldn't forbid a middle-schooler who wanted to read Maus, but it's not a children's book any more than Slaughterhouse-Five. Not because it's "harmful," but because it is upsetting; I'd encourage such a kid to talk to me about his or her reaction. 

I wondered if Maus was being assigned, if it was, because of an assumption that it's a "comic book" and therefore kid stuff.  I wouldn't be surprised, though that very question was discussed amply when it first appeared in the 1980s.  I'd like to think that teachers and librarians would know better, but I'd never assume that.  The bigots and frothers who are at the forefront of book restrictions do not know better, though: they simply want to control what others see.  Significantly, they never seem to recognize that in reviewing these materials, they themselves have been harmed.  It's only weaker vessels they pretend to worry about, and let me stress again that they want to keep other adults from having access to these and other materials.

I was lucky.  At my request, my parents gave permission for me to explore the grown-up section of the public library when I was in second grade.  I wanted to read an encyclopedia, as I recall (this was more than sixty years ago), and I didn't venture beyond that for a long time.  I didn't read Slaughterhouse-Five in middle school because it hadn't been published yet, but I did read Nineteen Eighty-four in sixth grade.  That was on my own initiative; I'd already read Orwell's Animal Farm.  I didn't understand the sexual parts, but I did understand the parts about controlling one's own memory, about the misuse of language, and about resisting political authority - which is more than can be said of many adults.

The role of parents is, I admit, difficult to define.  By custom and law they're given a great deal of power over what their children can read or watch or do.  This isn't always good for the children.  Even today there are parents in the US who don't think girls need schooling past the sixth grade, and not all of them are Amish.  Many parents try to exert authority over their kids even long after they're adults.  The older children grow, the less of a veto their parents should have over their lives.  Material about sex/gender and sexuality must be available once they reach puberty, because their parents can't be relied on to give them accurate information, and it is definitely harmful when a middle-school kid gets pregnant or catches a disease because they don't know how to protect themselves.  Right-wing religious parents are no help at all.  They'd rather children - their own, or other people's children - die rather than get the information they need.  An informed child is a threat to adult authority; that's why right-wing Christians have opposed laws against child abuse, it's not because they want to protect children - very much the opposite.

People Who Don't Look LIke Me

I just finished reading Taiwan Travelogue, by the Taiwanese writer Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, translated by Lin King and published last November by Graywolf Press.  It won the National Book Award for Translated Literature, and got a lot of attention, which somehow brought it to mine.

I began reading it with no real idea of what to expect, which is refreshing for me.  If you're at all interested and want to approach it with an equally open mind, stop reading this post now.  But what I'll be saying here will hit you in the face in any reviews you are likely to find, so I'll proceed.

It's narrated by Aoyama Chizuko, a young Japanese woman whose first novel has been remarkably successful.  She's on a tour of Japanese-occupied Taiwan in the 1930s to boost the film adaptation of her novel, but mainly to write her impressions of the colony and its people. She's a well-meaning liberal, quietly critical of Japanese imperialism, eager to go native as much as possible.  Her guide and translator, Chiruzo, is even younger than she is, but exhibits amazing erudition and linguistic ability, and Aoyama becomes enamored of her, but "Chi-chan" keeps a wary distance.  They travel widely and sample various Taiwanese foods; Aoyama has a "monster" appetite, and puts away plenty.  Her account was published in Japan in 1954, and finally translated into Mandarin decades later.

Somewhere in the first hundred pages I began wondering about Aoyama's liberalism.  I figured out that her account wasn't published until after the Pacific War and the Japanese Empire ended.  Her intense interest in another woman seemed unlikely to have passed Imperial censorship at the time of her trip either.  At that point I looked online for more information, and learned that Taiwan Travelogue is not a rediscovered work from the 1930s but a novel, published in Taiwan in 2020.

As for Aoyama's fascination with Chi-chan, it's ambiguous enough that a determined reader could take it for homosocial desire, but the author is married to another woman. so there's no need to speculate.  (Further investigation shows that the book has been marketed as LGBTQ anyway.)

What made Taiwan Travelogue interesting to me was its awareness that Japanese was a colonial power in Asia, and Yáng's exploration of the power imbalance between the two women.  There's a tendency to suppose that only whites can fetishize people from other cultures, and I think this novel will surprise many queer readers, be they white or non-white, on that score.  From what I've seen in US news coverage and social media discussion of the tensions between the PRC and Taiwan, not many USAns are aware of Taiwan's history vis-a-vis Japan and China; there are many parallels to the history of Korea, which also was colonized by Japan. Lin King worked hard to find English equivalents for the way Japanese and Mandarin encode status differences, which makes the prose a bit awkward at times, but it's necessary.  I was tickled by the way Aoyama refers to "the Mainland," meaning Japan, and "Islanders," meaning the inhabitants of Taiwan.  I hope Western readers will recognize the analogy to imperial language in the US' and Europe's dealings with their colonial holdings past and present.  I didn't find it a fun read, but it was interesting as metafiction, for its tracing of power imbalances, and for its at times overwhelming catalog of Taiwanese cuisine.

So, is Taiwan Travelogue a novel about people who look like me?  Perhaps not, but we still have a lot more in common than most Americans know, or want to know.

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.  Four 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-enough 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.

-----------------------------------------

* 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]