Gayest Ex Machina

It is not that I object categorically to novels about wealthy families with domestic troubles. Let's not throw out the Balzac with the bathwater. But Michael Cunningham is not Balzac.

By Nightfall, his new book, is typical. A vaguely dissatisfied, generally middle-aged, somewhat unhappily married, fairly prosperous, mostly unremarkable New York art dealer drifts into his forties, finds himself . . . well, drifting, and because this is a Michael Cunningham novel, he falls into a swoon for his wife's much younger brother, a homosexual set piece whose lovingly described body is lugged on and off the stage at various important scenes like a divan in a Donizetti, something pretty to fall against while warbling. This Mitchell Gold sofa is nicknamed "Mizzy," or The Mistake, an affectation and a telegraph so stunningly tone-deaf and totally out of place that it feels as if it were accidentally inserted from the novelization of a Logo original movie. In addition to evoking, for main-character Peter, an androgynous image of his wife as a younger woman, Mizzy recalls his dead gay brother, for whom he still harbors obliquely incestuous feelings. Now that would seem like it might lend the proceedings a little heat, at least, but everyone's lust is evoked lyrically and held at a slightly prim distance. Because of Cunningham's obvious Proustian ambitions, I was repeatedly reminded of Aciman's Call Me by Your Name, which is a book that actually has the cock and balls to give you a hard-on even as it manages to work in interesting bits of Heraclitus. (Aciman's next novel, set among prosperous New Yorkers, was on the contrary a failure; one wonders about the territory.)

By Nightfall moves between scenes of relentless interiority, by which I mean the boring personal taxonomy of an overanalyzed yuppie's mental architecture, and catty art-world commentary. The art stuff is occasionally funny, but depressingly phoned-in. Its hustlers and fakers, its earnest believers, and its ancillary clients and artists are all of type, and it reads like an impression of what the world of contemporary art is like by a person who has read a lot of people's impressions of what the world of contemporary art is like. Everyone's dilemmas are banal; nothing is at stake; no one is ever happy, and the closest it gets to sadness is a state of exhausting, agitated anxiety about nothing in particular. Peter wonders if it is possible to be gay for just one dude. (But given his feelings about his departed--from AIDS, of course--brother, isn't it more like, two dudes?) In life, probably not. In a Michael Cunningham novel, you betcha.

Exogenous vs. Endemic

The controversy over Chamber of Commerce election funding raises a very real and important issue: the genuine threat posed to our political system by unknown funders who can pour massive amounts of money into negative ads while hiding who they are.

-Glenn Greenwald

Caveat lector: Glenn goes on to criticize the hysterical and hypocritical whining about "foreign money" by those who take the delightfully fungible stuff themselves, and yet, nevertheless, I think you see in the above excerpt the core of Glenn's and my disagreement, why despite sharing certain, uh, proclivities, we will never see eye-to-eye. Glenn is concerned about threats to our political system. I think that our political system is a threat.

Boo-yeah

Justin's brief comment on the unspooling crisis of phony foreclosures is a good one, although I don't think the issue is so much "sympathies [that] lie with banking institutions"--which is not to disagree that they exist--but active antipathy toward the unfortunate, less a desire to help some bank clear its balance sheet than a viciously inhumane desire to punish the moral failing of impoverishment. Note first the terminology, "deadbeat," a word typically confined to describing adults who don't support their children. The self-lauded American characteristic of fair play has always been tinged with the habits of envy, jealousy, and disdain, and the supposed personal failings of the unfortunate have long colored our collective attitude toward their plight. (Curious, isn't it, for an, ahem, Christian nation, but then, I don't know, the synoptics are boring and confusing, or whatever.) The attitude toward these supposed deadbeats is likewise suffused with the angry self-entitlement that drives social anger toward the supposed largesse provided to poor blacks, illegal immigrants, etc., as if the threadbare socioeconomic provision offered by America to its poor represents the same sort of morally hazardous reward as huge finance-industry bonuses. The extremely modest amelioration of deprivation becomes instead the unscrupulous greed of the underclass, who, we are told, often intentionally maintain themselves in a state of poverty and want in order to benefit from handouts. Likewise, a defaulting home-"owner" is perceived as running a kind of underhanded scam to acquire free housing, and the bank is perceived effectively as an arm of ethical and legal enforcement, retreiving property that is in effect being stolen by the defaulting inhabitant. And by the way, the banks are acting in a semi-official capacity here; they are acting as state-sanctioned agents of enforcement. You can thank One-Term for that on your own time.

More Jusfolks

The monographic literature on the subject is, to begin with, as far as I can tell, exclusively about boys. A representative example of this revisionist, ego-based psychoanalytic theory would be Richard C. Friedman's Male Homosexuality: A Contemporary Psychoanalytic Perspective, published by Yale in 1988 [...] Friedman's book, which lavishly acknowledges his wife and chuldren, is strongly marked by his sympathetic involvement with the 1973 depathologizing movement. It contains several visibly admiring histories of gay men, many of them encountered in nontherapeutic contexts. These include "Luke, the forty-five-year-old career army officer and life-long exclusively homnosexual man"; and Tim, who was "burly, strong, and could work side by side with anyone at the most strenuous jobs": "gregarious and likeable," "an excellent athlete," Tim was "captain of [his high-school] wrestling team and editor of the school newspaper". Bob, another "well-integrated individual," "had regular sexual activity with a few different partners but never cruised or visited gay bars or baths. He did not belong to a gay organization. As an adult, Bob had had a stable, productive work history. He had loyal, caring, durable friendships with both men and women". Friedman also, by way of comparison, gives an example of a heterosexual man with what he considers a highly integrated personality, who happens to be a combat jet pilot: "Fit and trim, in his late twenties, he had the quietly commanding style of an effective decision maker".

Is a pattern emerging? Revisionist analysts seem prepared to like some gay men, but the helthy homosexual is (a) one who is already grown up and (b) acts masculine.

-Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (via Duncan)

Cuomo's kids are 16, 16, and 13. I'm sure they've seen plenty of bikinis and grinding already. But Paladino is right about the gyrating Speedos. Gay pride parades aren't the best thing to take little kids to, especially if you want them to think of homosexuals as normal people. You'd be better off taking them to a picnic where boring gay couples chat about one another's kids and gardens. You'd be better off, in short, if gay people were married.

-William Saletan

Now interestingly, what Saletan's "normal people" have in common is not so much that they have internalized our culture's sexual inhibitions, nor yet that they have entered into imitative forms of monogamous heterosexual lifetime pair-bonding, AKA maywidge, but that they are all of the same class. The tossed-off descriptions, "boring couples," "kids and gardens," are economic signifiers. "Normal people" are the bourgeoisie.

Gay couples with children are almost uniformly wealthy (in America: "middle class"), except in such cases where there is a child(ren) from one or other partner's previous heterosexual relationship(s), in which case it's extremely rare for the same-sex partner to share legal custody. Although not all individual adoptions are expensive, adoption generally is, with costs often running into the tens of thousands of dollars, and with the indirect costs for gay couples exceeding those for straight couples because the principle means for them to demonstrate requisite qualities like "stability" is through the demonstration of shared fiscal resources. The financial and legal costs of establishing same-sex partnerships are substantially higher as well.

"Normal people" are well-paid, college-educated, white-collar professionals in gentrified urban enclaves or wealthy near-ring suburbs.

Professional gays were never especially friendly to queer liberation to begin with, and were quickly coopted into a reliable Democratic voting block. They can be counted on to support the Democrats' socially conservative agenda, backing marriage initiatives and military service, for instance, while looking with predictable, bourgeois, and largely lily-white displeasure at any public display of actual gay affection or genderbending. A few comfortable gay-male stereotypes are permissible--love of opera or musical theater; good taste in fashion and décor--but even drag, which to an insane, reactionary fag like me seems incredibly retrograde and outmoded, is a step too far: too radical, too déclassé, too in-your-face. (No one much thinks about lesbians, who are divided into women--acceptable, feminine--and everything else--not acceptable.)

So long as gays can be folded into the socially conservative institutions of American life, they will be welcomed by conservative writers like Saletan and by mainstream politicians, who will rightly see them as a block of well-to-do, family-bound individuals who will reliably support the duopolistic, corporatist agenda of the ruling class. Poor and blue-collar gays may occasionally be useful as a Democratic voting bloc, if they vote, but their numbers are relatively small and their importance negligible. The bumpers-and-grinders in the gay pride parade are useful only as counterexamples, to herd on-the-fence gays into the normal-people camp by painting actual gay life as perverse, oversexed, and not in keeping with conservative (i.e., normal) social values. Do you want your boss or your "future employer" seeing you in a jock strap getting fondled by a bear on the back of a float? Didn't think so.

I do admire the brilliance and success of the strategy. Just as is the case with so-called race relations, when it comes to different sexualities and gender identities, the real divisions are class divisions, and the manipulation of anti-gay sentiment, like the manipulation of racism and anti-immigrant xenophobia, serves principally to undermine any solidarity within the lower classes.

Play Renegades or something. I've got to get myself together.

By the way, this is my favorite thing on the internet, bar none.

Quoheleth

Yeah, you know, I basically think that Dan Savage is a clown, and I find the whole "It Gets Better Campaign" to be exactly the sort of cheaply sentimental, we-are-the-world, C-list celebrity self-love-fest that I most despise, in which hugely lucky and successful individuals with lives of comfort and privilege far beyond that which any reasonable person might expect blather to kids about how great their lives are going to be, when, let's face it, for a lot of them, life is going to be pretty bleak, not because they are gaylesbianbiseckshultranngeed, but because they are destined for a gray adulthood of deskbound wageslavery in a crumbling imperium caught in the last vicious, violent throes of its own impending, senescent diminution. Instead of being bullied for being swishy, they will be bullied by tyrannical bosses, sociopathic corporations, cops, landlords, taxmen, banks, mortgage lenders, credit card companies, etc. Their burdens will not decrease, but become ever greater, but they will by then have been more fully indoctrinated with the pernicious ideology of responsibility, and suicide, finally a rational escape from the grand-guignol horromedy of American life, will seem to them an abdication beyond the realm of contemplation, and so they will slog on in their misery, through demotion and divorce, through forclosure and debt, through a miserable lifetime of work punctuated by a sadly hollow leisure dominated by vacuous entertainment and lousy cocktails until an old age marked by decrepitude, isolation, confusion, and lonely--but natural, at least--death. But at least they won't feel ammoral cuz they like dicks.

Anyway, that said, um, I do agree with him: fuck fucking Obama. Fuck that guy. What a bunch of sententious pricks.

Exit, Apprentice

This is a relatively minor item, but what on earth is going on with Proggressivia getting her support hose in a twist over "foreign funding" of Chamber of Commerce political ads. Like, isn't this supposed to be the game for all those kookster rightwing xenophobes and neocons, the anti-Mosque brigade claiming that Park51 is being secretly paid for by interest from Sayyid Qutb's old passbook savings acount, the Goldbergers sniffing out Saudi royals in the academical stylings of Tariq Ramadan, the birthers declaring Obama to be a wellpaid agent for the Martian-backed Soviet Caliphate and all that. I thought that libuwuls were far too sophisticated and cosmopolitan to engage in fanciful conspiracy theories about sinister foreign cabals and secret masters.

Now she's dead, all light has gone

Like Callas, Sutherland was presumed destined to sing Wagner, and like Callas, she found a vessel for her artistry in bel canto. Can you blame her? Wagner didn't much care for the human voice, which, like his audiences, her preferred to torture into exhausted submission. Callas herself famously observed that to be a musician was to live to serve the music, but in the case of Wagner, service more closely resembles servitude. Bel canto is no less difficult; it makes extraordinary demands on its women in particular. If Wagner is a marathon, Donizetti is a decathalon, and whereas a Wagnerian singer is ultimately a vocal thread in an immensely overwrought orchestral Rube Goldberg device, a Norma or Lucrezia is totally exposed, for triumph or failure, not only because at last her voice is the music, but also, but equally, because she's not just some allegorical mythological pastiche in a crackpot 19th-century Dungeons and Dragons episode, but because the great tragic heroines are exposed as human beings--it isn't easy to tear out your own heart while singing a high E-flat.

Atlas, Drugged

One of the persistent bugaboos of Equus africanus asinus americanus is the supposed "mainstreaming" of "insanity", which is to say, the occasional newspaper profile of some kooky character whom the Donk believes to be beyond the pale, a purveyor of "dangerous rhetoric" or what have you, a hate-monger, a "genocidal maniac." Now I will stipulate that Pam Geller is an hysterical ninny, and yet I want to offer up a challenge to La Digs: compare the number of Muslims killed by Pam Geller to the number killed by yer boy, Barack. The numbers don't lie, sister. I mean, lemme aks you this: if penning fulminating diatribes on the internet makes you a genocidal maniac, then what does orchestrating the open occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan along with secret wars in Pakistan, Yemen, and the Horn of Africa make you?