Blake Smith is one of the premier public intellectuals in America. Even if that title had the same meaning or prestige today as it did in the twentieth century, his work on Substack as well as at Tablet magazine, where he is a contributing writer, would still be right up there: from Susan Sontag’s fiction to Foucauldian biopolitics and the Zionism of Hannah Arendt, he expands our thinking in every area. While his range of interests rivals any critic in recent memory, the throughline in his body of work is his gayness. Particularly of late, with provocative pieces on Robert Glück, John Ashbery, Larry Kramer, and Garth Greenwell, he’s set his sights on gay men’s literature, as well as queer theory. This spring, Smith and his colleague Tae-ho Kim published a critique of what they see as the homophobic (not to mention paranoid) elements of queer theory, which frequently depict gay male identity not as politically or aesthetically legitimate, but one that perpetuates capitalism and other systems of “oppression.”
Speaking with Kim and Smith is a welcome relief from today’s dreary clichés of both academia and cultural criticism. In a more civilized age, the two of them would have been discussing the matter on prime-time television, sized up by a simpering Bill Buckleyean moderator, rather than in the stuffy pages of The Chronicle. Luckily, after meeting them both separately on visits to New York (Smith resides in Chicago, Kim in Seoul, Korea), I caught them for a discussion on Zoom some weeks before their article was published in March.
I had plenty of research to do if I wanted to keep up with these erudite queens. I phoned cultural historian Steven Watson and asked to pilfer through his personal papers, which yielded numerous archival issues of magazines like Gay Sunshine and The Gay and Lesbian Review (formerly of Harvard). I did the same with Grand contributor Glennda Orgasm (Glenn Belverio), who took a break from her six o’clock martini to run down five flights in Alphabet City and loan me over a dozen issues of After Dark. Smith, Kim, and I also discussed Weimar-era gay periodicals and their respective ideological stances (Kim is fluent in German and conducted research on these publications for his dissertation at the University of Chicago. He is also at work on a novel.)
Here is our edited and condensed chat.
Shields: To non-theory-versed readers, could you two explain how queer theory became so puritanical and anti-pleasure?
Smith: Queer theory is really frustrating, but also interesting, because it has a lot of fundamental tensions. It emerged alongside, then absorbed and replaced Gay and Lesbian studies. Which, in the eighties, people like George Stambolian, were trying to found as an analogy to Black studies, Asian American studies, Chicana studies, which have had their own intersections with postmodern theory. There’s an existing academy today to promote scholars and cultural objects from these demographics. Gay and Lesbian studies was supposed to do that for this emerging canon of novels and aesthetic objects that were coming out of American gay culture. And that ended up not happening. In part because of AIDS, in part because “queerness” as theory ended up absorbing that in the academy. [Lee] Edelman and [Leo] Bersani were able to pretend that promoting the universalizing psychoanalytic frameworks of queer theory could somehow go hand-in-hand with an interest in gay men, and a canon of homosexual writers like Proust, Hart Crane, and Jean Genet. They don’t really like [Andrew] Holleran and [Edmund] White. They don’t particularly like contemporary gay culture. But they could have their cake and eat it too. They could imagine that gay men and the queerness of gay sexuality could be seamlessly linked to a progressive politics. But what we’ve seen in the last 15 or 20 years is the failure of such gay male theorists to provide either an institutional platform or a theoretical justification for the gay male cultural canon having a place in the academy. Which is pretty bad. A lot of people 15 or 20 years ago were saying, “Queer theory needs to get over sexuality. We need to be thinking about affect, about feeling. Sex is over.” And now, the primary interest of [queer theory] is neither gay male identity nor its culture.
Kim: A certain psychoanalytic strand of queer theory regards desire as fundamentally normative. It equates social desirability with the essence of sexual desire. So, what you desire is not what you actually want, but completely given by the hegemonic thought, most of the time capitalist, imperialist, the list goes on. In this framework, all your desires become suspicious, and you have to be always on guard about what you desire and what you like. Queer sexuality, as well as oppositional politics, were then introduced as theoretical antidotes to dominant forms of desire, because queerness is allegedly so destructive in its incomprehensible formlessness—a force that can destroy all normative constraints.
Shields: You’re describing a nightmare, obviously.
Kim: When people disavow the “homonormative” gay identity as outdated, they have to be reminded that this form of gay maleness was a new invention made in America in the late twentieth century, and has been in no way as homogenous as they would like to believe. What has been particularly concerning to me in the abuse of terms like homonormativity is how they often stigmatize the notion of gay identity as unreflexive and reactionary from the get-go, as a kind of imagined archenemy of queerness. Of course, such accusations can be easily disproved when one actually looks at gay literature written in the 70s and 80s. The best example would be, of course, Andrew Holleran’s Fitzgeraldian novel Dancer from the Dance (1978), where two protagonists represent seemingly incompatible personalities and lifestyles: Malone, a former lawyer from the Midwest who dreams of a domestic life with a husband, and Sutherland, a flamboyant party queen from the South who likes to poke fun at Malone’s idealism, or one might say, “normative” desires. Ethan Mordden’s Buddies cycle follows a similar pattern. What’s interesting and generative about such works is that they do not stage such tensions as an ideological war where only one side can win but as a matter of friendship and humor—we’re all in this together. It’s very Proustian, in the sense that everyone enjoys the right to be remade and reinterpreted.
Smith: [Daniel] Halperin has the polemical but, I think in a lot of ways, accurate book, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality. We could say, well, less than 50 years of gayness, right? Less than 50 years of gay male identity. That’s a historically contingent formation, and it might disappear.
Shields: It’s disappearing before our very eyes. I was thinking about you guys this week because I’ve been reading all these gay magazines, After Dark. Here’s one with Angela Lansbury on the cover [holds issue to camera]. And the other one is called Gay Sunshine, a wonderful newspaper—
Smith: Oh yes—that was Winston Leyland, out of California—
Shields: —and even though After Dark is “not gay,” there are these advertisements for personal male masseurs and “spas for the discerning gentlemen.” Everything I’ve ever wanted in a magazine, so completely not contemporary in its sensibility. My friend Glenn Belverio calls After Dark “a closeted person’s magazine,” which he meant approvingly. So it’s probably impossible to authentically recover this aesthetic.
Smith: After Dark is interesting — they often come up in Christopher Street as a point of attack, because After Dark is implicitly gay, like Details magazine. And it was about diva worship. I guess this is also what Grand is doing—obviously for a gay reader, but not explicitly said. Christopher Street was like, we’re not going to run things on divas and female celebrities, and we’re going to be openly gay. But I’m sure a lot of the readership was the same people, and probably even many of the writers and photographers and such.
Shields: Tae-ho, what do you make of that kind of the dialectic that Blake just pointed out between Christopher Street and After Dark, the openly versus the coded gay?
Kim: I think there are two kinds of pleasures when it comes to an identity. The first kind is the closeted version, where you have an identity and the pleasure that comes from hiding it. The wager of gay literature is, we have this identity and we’re not going to hide it anymore. But then in order to animate this identity, you have to move it around somehow without shrouding it with a different veil. So how do we create the sense of movement without this sense of indirection? And I think that was the challenge of gay literature back in the day, and I think it’s still the challenge. A lot of people prefer to disintegrate this notion of identity and not deal with it. But I think the difficult task is, how do we foster a sense of identity in a way that can afford us pleasure without being stagnant?
Shields: In Gay Sunshine, there will be a black and white photo of a hard cock next to a serious political essay, or following an interview with Tennessee Williams. For me, it’s a heavenly experience to encounter erotic images next to serious ideas and good writing. When I was in Catholic school and we were doing Sex Ed, we had this horrible textbook with a flower on the cover of it, and there was a chapter about how to avoid masturbating. The message of the chapter was, the more serious of a person you became—the more books you read, the more volunteering you did, the more athletics you were involved in, you just would get less horny. No fap: a path to sainthood. I think that I still secretly believe this on some level, that seriousness is a neutered state, and yet I long always to become more serious. When I see a hard cock next to a great essay, I feel like Saul on the way to Damascus. To me, this is a never-ending game of lost and found, always pursuing a de-eroticized seriousness, and then remembering that this very notion is a lie. Now, Tae-ho, you’ve done a lot of archival research about the Weimar Republican world of gay literary journalism. What did you learn about gay German readership of the period?
Kim: The homosexual movement in the early twentieth century and late nineteenth century in Germany revolved around different groups with diverging ideological commitments. One large group was sexological, whose scientific journals represented an attitude that we should decriminalize homosexuality from a scientific point of view. Then there was another side, which was much more literary. They called themselves masculinists, and they had that distinct German sort of misogynistic take on women as well as a pederastic strain of literary analysis.
Shields: What kind of gay male misogyny was it?
Kim: There was an argument that homosexuality is a form of Greek life. It was the only form of sexuality that did not focus on reproduction of the human population. A purely cultural reproduction that occurred when men were erotically attached to other men. Basically, women were incapable of participating in this cultural eroticism. So they were not theorizing on lesbianism or anything else. It was not about a gender inversion. Often it also showed an anti-Semitic tendency, because women and Jews were regarded on the same lower level. So there was a competition between these Greek-minded masculinists and also the psychological branch, which was represented by a Jewish doctor, Magnus Hirschfeld. He asserted that the gay men are actually women in the psyche, and that’s how homosexuality should be justified, based on the ground that they were born this way. These were competing strands of theories around the topic of homosexuality. and each had their own vision and produced different types of magazines.
Shields: It’s kind of Wagnerian: what you were talking about, opposing women and Jews against homosexual men. Wagner once remarked, “The creative impulse is itself anti-Semitic.” [The masculinists] extend from the creative arts into sexuality, putting women and Jews into the weakling role.
Kim: It’s a similar line of thinking.
Shields: Were any of them as accessible as After Dark, or were they all deeply serious?
Kim: There were more commercially oriented publications targeting a larger demographic as well, with photography, personal ads, advertisement for various establishments like cafes and bars—very much in the style of magazines like Christopher Street, The Advocate, After Dark, etc.”
Shields: Blake, have you seen these magazines? Or do you know German?
Smith: I neither know German nor have seen these magazines. You know, I’m anti-German.
Shields: But you’ve done archival research into the magazines I’m more familiar with, like Christopher Street.
Smith: Through [Tae-Ho], I read Michael Denneny’s book On Christopher Street: Life, Sex, and Death After Stonewall, about his work on Christopher Street Magazine and creating Stonewall editions at Saint Martin’s press in the late seventies through the eighties and nineties. I was interested in this because of its connection to Foucault, whom I’ve been writing about since around 2020. Not only had Denneny interviewed Foucault for Christopher Street, but Foucault identified Christopher Street as in alignment with his own conception of gay politics and identity. I’ve been kind of thinking about the ironies of how all American academics, everyone who’s been to college, in fact, in America, is steeped in a certain vulgar Foucauldianism, which in theory is about being suspicious of the biomedical establishment, and of identities and visibility. Yet during Covid, no one was interested in the former, and in our era of queer-LGBT identity politics, no one is being Foucauldian in that way, either. Everyone is steeped in post-modern language, but in fact have quite the opposite sort of real politics.I think the Christopher Street people—and this is the foundation of the relationship to Foucault—were really concerned with the novelty of a gay identity and culture. So not one that’s just homosexual. As people like Ed White, Andrew Holleran, and Michael Denneny are saying in the late seventies, there has been already for some time, in America and other Western countries, a homosexual literature. [James Baldwin’s] Giovanni’s Room, [Gore Vidal’s] City and the Pillar, [Gerald Walker’s] Cruising. Some of it might be stylistically brilliant, but it’s all a certain vision of the suffering invert. And you have, on the other hand, a sort of implicitly gay world of commercial pleasures, the gays going to Hello, Dolly! or something. Beside that camp homosexual sensibility, there’s a continuing militant homosexual or gay politics in the early seventies that’s aligned with feminism and revolutionary leftism in the US, dominated by this Boston collective and their magazine, Fagrag. So If you look at an issue of Fagrag from the seventies, it’s gays, women, black people, prisoners, the colonized, the disabled, animals, children, who all need to work together to overthrow the able-bodied cis-hetero patriarchy. And Christopher Street is not interested in that, and they’re not interested in Gore Vidal-ism or James Baldwin-ism. They want novels about gay people who live distinctly gay lives.
Foucault said something to the effect of, in France I’m a homosexual, but in America, I’m gay. By which he means that there was a specific mode of life that was not medicalized and not stigmatized.
Tae-ho Kim
Kim: During the period of Violet Quill, the specificity of gay literature is for the first time no longer the closet narrative. It was also not necessarily a coming out narrative. but rather articulation of identity in an attempt to create unforeseen forms of gay life. That specific period of time where all these magazines were being created was the time where conscious political efforts were first made to create something like a gay community. That’s radically different from writing apologia for the suffering of gay men and trying to advocate gay life from that perspective. It’s something like an ethical engagement with gay identity, not as something that is essentialist, but at the same time not something that you can just arbitrarily dissolve. Foucault said something to the effect of, in France I’m a homosexual, but in America, I’m gay. By which he means that there was a specific mode of life that was neither medicalized nor stigmatized, but rather where people assume their own identity in a radically new way, to create or to engage with themselves, and to engage with similar people.
Smith: I think it’s a really important point Tae-Ho made about them not being coming out stories or stories about being trapped in the closet. For us, the paradigmatic novels are [Larry Kramer’s] Faggots and [Andrew Holleran’s] Dancer from the Dance, both in ’78. Of course, they’re not equally good. Dancer from the Dance is actually really good, Faggots is kind of annoying, although it’s funny. But they’re both about narrator protagonists in their 30s for whom coming out is not a question. There’s no, “What to do about myself? How to talk to my parents?” The motive is, well, I’ve been in gay life for a while. How do I feel about it? What do I do with it? And in both novels they come to the conclusion that, well, I want to take a step back and want to be somehow critical of it. I also appreciate all of its pleasures and specificities, and I want to catalog them. And then I want to think, now that we’ve created this, and I participated in it, what’s next? What is it possible to do with gay identity? And that’s a totally different problematic both from everything that had come before. If you read someone like Garth Greenwell, whom everyone told me to read because I’m in Bulgaria, it’s as though we’re back to James Baldwin and Gore Vidal. There’s not a gay world. It’s a sad guy unable to connect.
Kim: Ed White and Michael Denneny both complain that the gay critics are the worst enemy of gay writers because they all have this notion of what is being a politically correct—not even politically, but just a correct gay person, and want to see represented in literature and cinema. They constantly throw away the pie that everybody wants to increase and share with others by claiming, oh, this is not good enough, or this is not what I imagine gay life should be. Instead of letting people be and see where different directions of gay identities might go.
Smith: Part of what’s unpleasurable about Grinder and Tinder is, you’re so defining who you are and what you like to do that nothing actually erotic can happen afterwards. Something actually erotic, like, oh, I wasn’t expecting to get peed on tonight! But you know, that is entertainment!
Shields: I do want to say that there are elements of queer theory that do not bother me when they show up in places that are not, strictly speaking, theory. For example, this is from Parker Tyler, for whom I have incredibly high regard, in his book Screening the Sexes: “I have logically assumed that the basic genders are irrelevant. Male and female are biological patterns. The whole body, not just the sex organ, is an individual’s erotic instrument. The sum total of this human function is to be called the sexual personality—gender.” Now, this is written in the seventies, so anticipates ideas by Eve Sedgwick and Judith Butler. For some reason, due to I guess merely my personal prejudices, when I encounter it in Tyler, I feel very excited. I find it a mentally erotic experience to read Tyler in general. But when these ideas show up in other writers like Butler, I simply run for the hills. Why is that?
Smith: I’m doing some work now on [Parker] Tyler’s big poem, “The Granite Butterfly,” from 1945. If you haven’t read Sam See, he had this article from 2011 that really put Tyler back on the map academically and critically. [See] had an amazing life. He got this sweet job at Yale, and then when he was about my age, just a few years into the job, died in police custody of a drug overdose after a domestic dispute with his former partner. They both had restraining orders on each other. And then, in the course of this, it came out that he was on RentMen, prostituting himself while teaching at Yale. Very exciting. James Franco a few years ago would have done a biopic on him, if he hadn’t been canceled. Now, for someone like Tyler, who may be said to be in the homosexual but maybe not gay generation, the point of the statement that you quoted is to maybe license certain practices of interpreting cultural objects like movies and writing in order to increase certain possibilities of aesthetic pleasure. A few years later, for someone like for Foucault and for Christopher Street, the point is a kind of collective identitarian experiment with new forms of living and new forms of shared pleasure. The meaning of such a statement coming from, like, Butler in the nineties and now is really a political program in which specific acts of cultural subversion are linked up to a broader project to overturn a whole social normative framework. So there’s this huge difference in scaling, from the individual aesthetic to a collective form of life. I’m certainly not anti-liberal and I’m not anti-left, exactly. But I’m suspicious about the ease of moving up those scales.
Shields: I began reading through that Edmund White-edited anthology that the two of you recommended to me, The Faber Book of Gay Short Fiction. It’s a very well-selected, very exciting book. The James Purdy story, “Dawn,” is a small masterpiece of point of view. I was also somewhat surprised to see it included, since Ed famously could not stand Purdy.
Kim: That’s a strength of Edmund White, and a really important function in any kind of society, when there are a couple of people who are capable of holding all these different tensions within a community. Even when they have completely different theses about what gay literature is or what gay life should be. I think–Blake often makes this point in a variety of articles about this [Hannah] Arendtian view—if we have to have a certain notion of sameness, then we should all share something even when we disagree. And that’s the only way that a political movement can gain momentum. And I would say a lot of pitfalls of queer theory already assume that coming together is oppressive because it excludes certain other people. That gay or lesbian identity is bad because it already defines what gay or lesbian identity is or should be, which is a moral and ethical confusion. It doesn’t mean that when we have a gay or lesbian identity that we all agree upon what gay and lesbian life should be. There are different components to what identity is: it brings people together, and it also makes it possible for us to differentiate ourselves from others within the same community. But I feel like more and more, queer theory has emphasized this point of coming together itself as oppressive in its very essence. Edmund White writes all these good blurbs for basically every single gay publication that comes out. And I think that’s an important role that he’s still promoting all these new authors and willing to read them, too.
Shields: The greatest blurb Ed has ever written was for Derek McCormack’s Castle Faggot: “This is what it felt like to sit in a crib with another baby and to play blissfully with your own shit while your mothers sat downstairs drinking cocktails.”
Smith: I need a coffee table book of Edmund White blurbs. I’m sure many are better than the book that they blurbed. But that is a critical function: being that impresario, that person who brings different kinds of gay men together. It would be hard to equally like the kind of thing that Andrew Holleran does, and the kind of thing that Dennis Cooper and Robert Glück do, but [White] can take a step back and say, we need all of this sort of thing in the community. It’s important to have a rich and varied aesthetic talent. I think in a better world, he would have been a professor in Gay Studies.
