In Bed With The Right - Episode 11： Homocons

00:00:00.000 The state, sometimes good and sometimes bad.

00:00:03.540 Yes. You know, that is such a good encapsulation of this book.

00:00:18.860 Hello, I'm Adrienne Dobb.

00:00:20.620 And I'm Moira Donegan.

00:00:21.660 And whether we like it or not, we're in bed with the right.

00:00:23.900 So Adrienne, what are we talking about today? 0.99

00:00:25.620 Today, we're going to talk about homocons, homosexuals who nevertheless are conservative, 1.00

00:00:31.680 or maybe because of that are conservative. I don't know. But we're going to be talking about, 1.00

00:00:36.020 yeah, I don't know, loghaven gays, whatever you want to call it. And I should say, this is a huge 1.00

00:00:40.960 topic. This is a large continent, not a very attractive continent, but it is a big continent.

00:00:46.940 And so this is probably going to be our first foray into this land. But I'm very excited that

00:00:52.700 we have a guest with us today who I think can guide us through some of that. We are joined by

00:00:58.380 Sam Heunicke, who is an assistant professor of history at George Mason University. And he's the

00:01:04.020 author of States of Liberation, Gay Men Between Dictatorship and Democracy in Cold War Germany,

00:01:08.660 which came out in 2022, and A Queer Theory of the State, which came out this month. And he's

00:01:14.160 also written for the Boston Review, the Washington Post, The Point, and the LA Review of Books.

00:01:19.300 And Sam also, I should mention, is a former advisee of mine, which is very exciting.

00:01:24.500 So I was not involved in any way in the writing of the amazing Queer Theory of the State,

00:01:29.360 but I did see States of Liberation in many, many drafts over the years.

00:01:34.380 So excited to get to talk to you about this, Sam.

00:01:36.800 Yeah, thanks for having me.

00:01:38.080 It's great to be here.

00:01:39.060 Awesome.

00:01:39.680 So it's such a big topic.

00:01:40.980 We have to be a little circumspect about how deep we go into this.

00:01:44.880 Yes.

00:01:45.120 So one thought I had, we could start with this book.

00:01:48.660 that actually a friend of both Sam's and mine, our Stanford colleague, Paul Robinson, wrote back in

00:01:54.540 2004, which is an interesting one. It's called Queer Wars. Sam, correct me if I'm wrong. Is this

00:02:00.500 the first history of gay conservatism? It's certainly one of the early, right? 1.00

00:02:04.860 It's certainly one of the early ones. I mean, I think Paul was talking about this before

00:02:09.000 anyone else really, right? I mean, because this is sort of the era of gay marriage. This is the 0.53

00:02:14.920 era when that's really becoming a national issue, when a lot of the people who he's talking about

00:02:19.940 are sort of becoming almost the more gay mainstream. And so I think he's one of the

00:02:24.860 first people to sort of conceptualize this as gay conservatives or the gay right. 0.69

00:02:31.100 Right. Yeah. So it's a really interesting, interesting book. But it's also by now like

00:02:35.800 almost 20 years old, which I think is kind of fun to think about. Like, is this sort of like

00:02:40.720 an invariant of gay history? Or is this like, is there a history here? Is there a line of tradition

00:02:47.000 here? Maybe for our listeners, I'll just mention briefly the kinds of people he's talking about,

00:02:51.500 just so we start sort of attaching some names to this. It's three chapters. It's a short book.

00:02:56.220 First is Bruce Barr and his friends. This is about the literary critic and essayist Bruce Barr,

00:03:01.540 famous for that book, A Place at the Table, but also the editor of a pretty influential book at

00:03:07.360 the time beyond queer challenging gay left orthodoxy from 1996 and it has like Andrew

00:03:13.720 Sullivan in it and um and it sort of adds a bunch of sort of anti-pc rhetoric it has you know

00:03:20.100 Jonathan Rauch who has been like basically riding that particular gravy train for like 30 years to

00:03:26.740 like talk about how like the lefties have a stranglehold on the gays and how that's actually

00:03:30.860 kind of a form of what we today would call cancel culture or something like that so that's the first

00:03:34.860 chapter, then it's Andrew Sullivan, and then it's the sexual conservatives, as he puts it. So that's

00:03:39.700 Michelangelo Signorelli and Gabriel Rotello, which is interesting. With Rotello, he's probably mostly

00:03:44.980 talking about, or I believe he's mostly talking about sexual ecology, AIDS, and the destiny of 0.96

00:03:49.900 gay men, which comes down pretty strongly on the have less sex end of how to deal with the AIDS 0.51

00:03:56.140 crisis, right? Like very much a pull yourself up by the bootstraps kind of thing. That's also a 1.00

00:04:01.880 song that andrew sullivan was playing in that era there's some intellectual overlap here although

00:04:06.280 andrew sullivan of course was famous for his enthusiasm for race science just want to sort

00:04:12.660 of cut in it's interesting how that i mean obviously i'm a german historian and it's

00:04:17.140 interesting that sort of trope or argument of you know cut back on the sex guys also makes its way

00:04:23.200 to germany but there it's not so much associated i mean obviously there are people on the right

00:04:28.760 who are making that argument, people who belong to Helmut Kohl's conservative coalition government.

00:04:33.580 But there's also people on the gay left, more like Larry Kramer, who are making that sort of argument.

00:04:37.720 And that, to me, that chapter also, I reread it. And that's, of course, the trickiest one,

00:04:42.300 right? Because like, that's where he comes closest to using conservative as kind of a metaphor. These

00:04:47.200 are people who are, let's say, like a little bit uptight about what should happen. They're not

00:04:52.920 therefore going out and being like, and also, you know, we must reform the tax code or something

00:04:57.660 like that. Whereas, as Maura was pointing out, Andrew Sullivan's sexual conservatism goes along

00:05:03.340 with a robust interest in craniometry and stuff like that. So other things we might associate

00:05:10.740 with, let's say, more conservative positions. And I think Paul is pretty upfront in the

00:05:16.180 introduction to that book that not everyone he's talking about necessarily self-identifies as a

00:05:20.680 conservative, but rather his aim is to try and diagnose this kind of queer conservative

00:05:27.240 thread in contemporary culture. Yeah. One of the really interesting things he says in that book, 0.54

00:05:32.000 I remember, is he sort of, so I should say, Paul is, I think, born in 1940, if that's right. I

00:05:38.140 think that's right. I think that's correct. Yeah. And almost all the people he's talking about

00:05:42.620 are born in the first couple of years of the 1960s. So he's also kind of telling young gays

00:05:48.480 what they're doing wrong again and he does frame this kind of as this kind of oedipal revolt that

00:05:53.240 they have they're sort of betraying their gay elders almost so there is like he does give us

00:05:58.000 a sense of why the book needs to be written in 2004 which i think is kind of interesting because

00:06:02.640 of course like that would not be our explanation today i mean like a lot of these people are still

00:06:06.340 with us but it does seem interesting that like he has a real account of like why why in 2004 do we

00:06:11.740 need to write about this it's also i mean you know paul as you said is a friend of both of ours

00:06:17.060 He's not necessarily the logical person you would have immediately thought would write this, right? Because he's, you know, there are plenty of people on the sort of more radical gay left who very much vociferously disagree with people like Andrew Sullivan and, you know, the gay marriage crusade and so on and so forth. But Paul is very much a sort of moderate when it comes to these things, right? He's on the left, he sees himself as being on the left, but he's not one of these sort of either intellectual or movement radicals.

00:06:43.920 I mean, I think one of his most famous pieces that he wrote was a title sort of review of Foucault's History of Sexuality for New Republic, of all places, in which he just trashes Foucault and starts out this review saying, you know, the goal of this review is to convince you not to buy this book.

00:07:05.020 You know, so he's, it's interesting that Paul in 2004 sort of sees himself as the right person to 0.93

00:07:11.120 take on this gay conservatism. And perhaps even the fact that he's not on the sort of radical left 0.54

00:07:15.820 is what sets him up to do, to do justice to these thinkers.

00:07:19.840 Yeah, right. So maybe I'll briefly run through what he thinks of as the main aspects of this

00:07:26.000 gay conservatism. So three things identify it, right? One, it refuses to ally itself

00:07:30.960 with the causes of other marginalized people, right?

00:07:34.720 And sometimes even advocates for their marginalization.

00:07:37.500 It's ultimately gender conservative.

00:07:39.440 Let's say it worships masculinity

00:07:41.960 and has a fundamentally hierarchical view of gender.

00:07:45.700 And it's actually pretty anti-sex in its own way.

00:07:48.900 And it's kind of Puritan in its own way.

00:07:51.560 And I guess the opening question,

00:07:53.320 I'm sorry, this was like all just a big buildup,

00:07:55.220 but like, is that still true? 0.96

00:07:57.300 Are gay conservatives like that?

00:08:00.580 right? Like in 2004, that seems exactly right. I think he really does a pretty brilliant job 1.00

00:08:06.080 analyzing that, but it's almost 20 years ago. Has this shifted?

00:08:10.520 If anything, I think, you know, I guess I think one hard thing, as you sort of alluded to in the

00:08:16.480 intro and the buildup to this, is that there are so many different directions we could go in when

00:08:21.400 we're talking about gay conservatives, right? And so to some extent, I think it really depends on

00:08:25.540 who specifically we're talking about. But my gut instinct, sort of as you phrase this question,

00:08:32.280 is that things have actually gotten worse in terms of who we might think of as gay conservatives and

00:08:38.460 their positions on other marginalized groups, their positions on gender, their positions.

00:08:42.780 Maybe sex is a little bit different. Maybe because we sort of emerged a little bit more fully from

00:08:48.680 the AIDS crisis, at least in sort of the Western world, right? You have PrEP, you have remedies

00:08:55.300 that are much more easily accessible, certainly than were available in the early 2000s. So maybe

00:09:00.600 we can sort of put sex to one side. But when it comes to other marginalized groups, in particular,

00:09:05.320 racially and ethnically marginalized groups, and gender, I actually think gay conservatives might

00:09:09.740 be even sort of further to the right than they were when Paul was writing. And I guess I'm

00:09:14.380 thinking of people like Peter Thiel, right, who famously went and supported Donald Trump at the

00:09:20.580 2016 Republican convention and had this line about, you know, I'm proud to be a gay man,

00:09:24.940 I'm proud to be a Republican, and I'm proud to be an American. I'm thinking of figures like James

00:09:30.860 Kerchick, who's sort of like almost, I don't know, like my generation's Andrew Sullivan,

00:09:36.340 or at least that's, I think, what he's trying to be. And then if you look to Europe, obviously,

00:09:41.340 there's figures like Alice Fidel, who, right, I mean, is, you know, close to, if not a neo-Nazi,

00:09:48.840 but also a sort of proud lesbian and so i think you know what really just to my mind what really

00:09:55.680 actually distinguishes these people is both that they really do not have sympathy for other

00:10:02.500 marginalized groups and in fact don't even necessarily see themselves as marginalized right

00:10:06.200 and that's maybe a key distinction yeah and then with gender i mean gender is almost like the thing 1.00

00:10:11.780 that sets them apart right these people what sort of unites a lot of these these homocons 0.77

00:10:16.040 is that they are so unwilling to even admit that trans people belong in a sort of broader 0.94

00:10:26.400 queer movement right it's the lgb without the t sort of thing i mean one thing that i think you've

00:10:30.820 already mentioned with alice weider and other figures i do think that the glass ceiling is

00:10:36.360 also slightly right like paul's menagerie are a bunch of dudes and he kind of comes out and says

00:10:42.160 oh this is actually i think mostly a gay male phenomenon because the access that we have to

00:10:48.020 privilege and power but that's no longer the case i think i think that uh gay women have made some 0.90

00:10:53.440 real inroads in in being in being heinous i guess yes unfortunately i mean you know and obviously 1.00

00:11:00.240 we can sort of look to the uk as almost ground zero for a lot of this right with the sort of

00:11:05.660 TERFs, and plenty of both queer women and sort of self-identified feminists who are 0.97

00:11:12.860 sort of virulently anti-trans.

00:11:16.280 You know, and I mean, one of the weirdest figures, obviously, is JK Rowling, who sort

00:11:21.200 of sees herself, I mean, she isn't queer herself, obviously, but she, as far as I know, sees

00:11:26.440 herself as being a sort of friend to gay people and lesbian people and has all these sort

00:11:30.940 of, you know, turf lesbian buddies who she hangs out with, and yet is, you know, like one of the

00:11:37.960 sort of patient zeros for the sort of anti-trans panic we're living through.

00:11:43.700 We also have, you know, stateside, we have Bari Weiss, who is the centerpiece of millennial

00:11:50.740 conservatism, has an extraordinary amount of funding, and has really built like an ideological

00:11:56.220 apparatus around the force of her charisma and who also will deploy her own bisexual identity 0.86

00:12:03.280 as a weapon and as an item of credibility in her own rejection of what she alleges is like a 0.70

00:12:09.800 intellectually incurious left-wing queer politics yeah no i mean absolutely barry weiss is i 0.54

00:12:15.540 what a what a character you can't forget about barry weiss some of us some of us are not allowed 0.62

00:12:23.000 to forget about barbie whites oh yeah oh god i you know i had just been going through a very

00:12:30.140 happy period where i had forgotten and you've just dragged me out of that sorry sam sam got to write

00:12:37.380 a book about queer theory in the state and i got to write a book about cancel culture meaning

00:12:40.980 i'm subscribed to just about everything i'm like oh barry wrote something uh so yeah no i i i live

00:12:49.240 with the certainty of her existence day to day.

00:12:52.780 Yes. I mean, it's weird. So when I was writing this book, and we were sort of conceptualizing

00:12:58.520 this episode of your podcast, it sort of struck me that, you know, this book, I'm dealing with

00:13:03.860 plenty of figures who I sort of disagree with. But ultimately, I think this is a book where I

00:13:08.540 got to basically take a bunch of thinkers who, even where I disagree with them, I really admire

00:13:12.780 them. I take their work seriously. I think their work is really productive. And so it's a very

00:13:16.720 happy book. But sort of as I reread it, and in sort of preparation for this, I was thinking in

00:13:22.100 the background, there is this sort of gay conservatism that all of us are sort of implicitly

00:13:27.640 arguing against. And to some extent, I think the book is a reminder to everyone on the sort of

00:13:33.480 broad gay left, queer left, that they are the sort of true people who we're arguing with, not with 0.66

00:13:40.740 each other yeah this might be a good moment to like talk about our three buckets of like

00:13:46.920 characteristics of the gay conservative so we sort of like talked about their fusital ally

00:13:51.880 we've also got like the worship of masculinity yes so tell us a little bit about these like

00:13:58.880 people's the new gay conservatives and their relationships to masculinity because you know 0.84

00:14:03.300 even though we've got this like broken glass ceiling where you know the girl bosses are 0.94

00:14:07.840 out here being conservative and representing lesbians while doing so. We do have this still 1.00

00:14:14.700 majority male scene of gay conservative intellectuals. And I would probably extend

00:14:20.180 this to some conservative women. We have real ethos of a masculine ideal. 1.00

00:14:26.100 Yes. I mean, I think part of this is it ties in with the refusal of gender as a sort of

00:14:36.360 category of analysis for these people. And so actually where my mind went when you were framing

00:14:40.880 this question is that I think it's oftentimes these women, these sort of TERF women who are

00:14:46.680 sort of at the forefront of making this argument, right? And the way that they're oftentimes framing

00:14:52.500 it is in terms of a sort of sex or gender essentialism that is necessary to undergird

00:15:00.120 the kind of feminism or lesbianism that they buy into, right? That basically, if you can't 0.96

00:15:06.740 distinguish who or what is a woman, then the entire feminist or sort of lesbian political 1.00

00:15:13.200 project falls apart. And so I think the necessary corollary to that then is that if there's this

00:15:20.260 gender essentialism for women, there also has to be this gender essentialism for men, right?

00:15:25.560 And we obviously see that when we get into like these sports debates where there's this blithe assumption that any trans woman is going to sort of beat any person who's born a woman in any sport, which is obviously, I mean, it's empirically untrue, right?

00:15:40.660 We know that this is empirically untrue.

00:15:42.980 And yet anytime, you know, a trans woman or trans girl like places in a sporting event, we have to hear about it.

00:15:49.820 And we have to hear about how this proves that, you know, whatever.

00:15:52.640 Sorry, that's sort of a bit of a rabbit hole. 1.00

00:15:54.060 But I guess my point is that I think, you know, when I think about this sort of gender

00:15:57.320 or sex essentialism, the sort of femininity and masculinity, it oftentimes is the women

00:16:02.340 who I associate today as being really at the forefront of that.

00:16:06.560 And I guess when I think about people like Andrew Sullivan, who is obviously still kicking

00:16:10.280 around, or James Kerchick, I don't think of them being as explicit or George Santos, who

00:16:18.920 we were sort of chit-chatting about, right?

00:16:21.340 I don't think of them as being sort of as explicitly like hyper macho masculine in the way.

00:16:28.300 And what's curious about that is, you know, I think, and maybe we should sort of sidebar this for a bit later, but there is this much longer tradition of gay conservatism that goes back to 19th century Germany.

00:16:41.700 And that's when you really get into like these hyper masculine dudes who think that the fact that they have sex with other men makes them not only sort of as masculine as straight people, but even more masculine than straight people.

00:16:54.280 Yeah. So I fully agree with you that the cover under which sort of essentialism mostly presents itself today is exactly like rejection of queerness and rejection of gender, even as a concept, right? I actually have Judith Butler's new book here, Who's Afraid of Gender? A little galley brag, very excited. But it's noticeable, right? And the people you mentioned earlier, I mean, Alize Weide and also like, it was like Jens Spahn in Germany.

00:17:20.360 so like right yeah um they're both on record as being like i'm not queer i'm in a committed

00:17:25.080 relationship with a person of my sex and you're like okay great i mean like i'm so glad we cleared 0.91

00:17:29.920 that up right dumb asshole anyway but like it's you're right there's a kind of like a refusal of 0.98

00:17:36.480 ambiguity a refusal that this might mean anything about the categories through which we hierarchize 0.99

00:17:41.460 our society being wrong right which like seemed so implicit for so many queer people for so long 0.70

00:17:47.900 But to say, like, no, no, no, I just play this game differently, but the game as you're playing it is exactly right. And any advantages you derive from that are totally legitimate. You know, like, exactly. Like, if you were to play women's sports, you would be great at it. You would be way better than, like, it's saying, like, that the natural stuff behind it is just as set in stone as it was, as it seemed in the 1960s or early 1960s. 0.94

00:18:13.500 I just happen to articulate it slightly differently, right? Like that's the reassuring thing there.

00:18:19.000 Right, exactly. But there is this sort of buy-in to normativity and to the idea of also that there's a sort of social normativity that is vouchsafed by, you know, a sort of natural order of things.

00:18:32.100 And one of the sort of most telling, I think, examples of where this breaks down are actually athletes, you know, who have an extra chromosome, and don't right fall, you know, and so you have these female runners, and I'm the names are escaping me.

00:18:52.100 Caster Semenya.

00:18:53.160 Caster Semenya.

00:18:54.220 Yes, yes, thank you. 0.99

00:18:55.220 And who have gone through these lengthy battles to basically prove that she's a woman. And then various sports bodies have basically told her that she has to take estrogen to sort of be a real woman for the purposes of competing. 1.00

00:19:09.800 And this just shows that these people don't actually have an interest in what is quote unquote natural. They have an interest in some sort of hierarchies and some sort of preconceived norm that they are carrying around in their heads and that they want everyone to conform to.

00:19:25.220 So here's an interesting thing, and I love the way Murad framed that question, because

00:19:29.340 I think you're absolutely right that the essentialism is slightly more dialed down. 1.00

00:19:33.560 And I think George Santos is a perfect example of that, a gay conservative. 0.99

00:19:37.300 So we should say for our listeners, in case this comes out in a few weeks, that we are 1.00

00:19:41.260 all living with the monumental discovery that George Santos misappropriated a bunch

00:19:47.960 of campaign donations from conservative donors to purchase, what was it?

00:19:52.460 An OnlyFans subscription.

00:19:54.280 An OnlyFans subscription, which like...

00:19:56.720 As well as Botox and Sephora.

00:19:59.160 Good for him.

00:19:59.840 I mean, I now love her.

00:20:04.820 No, I do not.

00:20:06.080 George Santos is a great example of something you and I talked about, Adrian, which is how

00:20:10.540 gay conservatives who might once have been, as Sam alluded to in the German context, very 0.97

00:20:15.640 allied to a presentation of masculinity, they're now availing themselves of camp. 0.76

00:20:20.520 You know, we've got Milo Iannopoulos, we've got George Santos, we have their Gen Z TikTok right-wing influencer, Christian Walker, Herschel Walker's son, who is, you know, they've all got an affect that is very much playing on, you know, sort of patterns of gay humor, a lot of gay vernacular, and harnessing this towards, you know, conservative ideological ends.

00:20:47.520 ends but they're not just drawing on camp as sort of a means of making themselves ironic they're

00:20:55.620 drawing on camp as a means of making themselves seem almost counterintuitively like more authentic

00:21:01.240 right it's like it's a way of relating with their audience it's supposed to draw the audience into

00:21:07.160 a conservatism that is like sort of in the know yeah that's the conservatism of the trump era

00:21:12.960 right he's just a pretty campy guy he is no i mean and it is sort of a use of of humor and camp and

00:21:21.940 sort of contemporary cultural idioms to make also conservatism or fascism less threatening right and

00:21:29.380 sort of somehow get people i mean i mean the fact right that adrian that we were chuckling about

00:21:34.460 george santos i think is indicative of that right i mean right he's dangerous yeah right he is

00:21:39.200 dangerous right and these sorts of concerns i mean i i obviously am not a supporter of trump

00:21:44.600 but i do at times find myself chuckling at at things that he says or does and it's i think

00:21:50.440 it's very intentional right it's a sort of almost weaponization of humor for political ends yeah

00:21:55.600 yeah i mean so the other question then is like if camp is sort of and i mean right susan sontag

00:22:01.880 wrote about this in the fascinating fascism essay already right where she sort of says like

00:22:06.180 there is something there's a dangerous affinity here right like there's a seductiveness to this

00:22:12.240 kind of imagery which both manages to be campy and fascist at the same time but at the same time

00:22:18.360 like it makes me wonder like there was a line of critique at the very beginnings of queer theory

00:22:23.480 sort of very early 80s to mid 80s that kind of said the real problem is a conservatism that's

00:22:30.880 through the gay community it's mostly like gay men at that point right the gay community is 0.83

00:22:35.700 fetishization of a certain kind of butchness right this is the famous castro clone right 0.85

00:22:40.420 where the people like leo bersani were pointing out like this is a form of male and white supremacy

00:22:45.720 and we you can't really that's that is not good that is that is how we become complicit in

00:22:53.280 reaganism it seems like that bullet we dodged is now uh now it's the opposite that like you know

00:22:59.620 the okr can like basically like uh you can can get normativized and can get co-opted yeah right

00:23:06.100 well i mean any and this you know i also gets to i think there there is this sort of at times

00:23:15.000 assumption within queer theory that certain types of performances are inherently progressive and

00:23:21.940 this obviously shows right that's not the case right that you can have someone who looks like

00:23:26.380 Castro clone and is maybe, you know, hyper progressive, hyper radical. And you can have

00:23:31.460 someone who acts and looks like George Santos, who is a Trump Republican. But I think you're

00:23:36.640 right. I mean, there is this sort of long standing, again, association that I know we'll get to

00:23:43.320 between this sort of hyper fascistic masculinity, and gay men in particular, and this sort of

00:23:49.560 obsession and almost sexualized obsession with masculinity that I think informs this strand of

00:23:57.980 queernesses, both sort of sexual and social presentation, but also their politics.

00:24:03.740 This reminds me a bit of, you know, something I keep seeing on what we might call the hetero

00:24:11.360 right, which is an increasingly avowed claim that masculinity is itself a proxy for the

00:24:19.800 legitimacy of power, right?

00:24:21.420 So, you know, you keep seeing it's, I send it a past life, so I have to cover all the

00:24:27.120 Republican presidential debates.

00:24:30.000 And those have been, you know, quite unsubtle virility contests.

00:24:35.260 People make jokes about each other's height.

00:24:37.200 they will, you know, allude to being willing to commit violence. We're recording at a time when

00:24:44.520 in Congress, just I think Monday or Tuesday, there was-

00:24:48.900 Yeah, everyone's beating each other up.

00:24:50.620 Yeah. A senator threatened to fight a union representative at a Senate hearing.

00:24:56.460 Kevin McCarthy also supposedly like shoved or elbowed or like committed some kind of physical

00:25:01.140 act of violence against a rival congressman also in the house and you know you've got this

00:25:08.180 conservatism that is resorting not just to these sort of like puerile little adolescent displays

00:25:16.960 of toughness but actually to like physical violence you know namely especially the icing 0.70

00:25:21.980 on the cake of course being january 6th right so like where is gay masculinity in this newly

00:25:28.600 avowedly masculinist violent right where does that fit in because i don't feel like george santos

00:25:34.140 is gonna challenge anybody to a fight right he's doing something kind of different yeah no you're

00:25:39.220 right he is i mean he he's stealing people's babies did you catch that a week or two ago

00:25:44.780 when wait no please explain he walked out of some office with a baby and a reporter yelled after him

00:25:52.280 is that your child and he yells back not yet and it was it turned out i think it i think it was

00:25:58.480 a staffer's child and he was basically using the child as like a prop for some sort of stunt it was

00:26:03.840 all but you're right this is not right that none of this has anything to do with masculinity

00:26:08.240 and again that's i mean this is something where i think i don't have a good answer i guess about

00:26:14.200 you know when i think about these sorts of queer conservatives i don't think of or the gay male

00:26:19.240 conservatives i don't think of masculinity really is the thing that's sort of foremost on their

00:26:25.120 minds. Again, and that sort of sets them apart from earlier generations of gay conservatives.

00:26:30.360 But what is true is that they are anti-trans, right? I mean, James Kerchick, right? He sort of

00:26:36.960 got on my radar for the first time when I read his, I believe, Atlantic essay about how the 0.98

00:26:41.760 gay rights movement has succeeded and it's time to sort of pack up and go away. And trans rights 1.00

00:26:46.600 are a different thing and we don't need to concern ourselves with that. And I mean, it's obviously a

00:26:50.980 very short-sighted view. And what's interesting, I guess this also gets back to this question of

00:26:55.880 being able to empathize with other forms of marginalization or otherness, that these people

00:27:00.820 no longer see themselves as being marginalized, right? I mean, we have George Santos, who is a

00:27:05.920 congressman, despite multiple felony indictments. Maybe he won't be a congressman by the time this

00:27:12.160 airs, but I really think they don't see themselves, right? They have sort of gotten what they need

00:27:17.400 out of this, and are ready to pack up and go home, right? They can now live their sort of

00:27:22.720 comfortable upper middle class existence, they can vote their pocketbook, they can vote Republican.

00:27:28.720 And that's sort of the end. It's, you know, it's time to declare victory. And it's quite striking,

00:27:33.780 right? I mean, this is entirely in opposition to someone like Martin Duberman, who posed the

00:27:38.220 provocative question, maybe seven years ago, has the gay movement failed, right? And that's sort

00:27:42.900 of the opposite side of the spectrum. But one thing I did want to mention is back actually,

00:27:46.820 when I was a grad student still at Stanford, I did a little project on gay voting trends.

00:27:52.480 I have a sort of ongoing fast, I guess, obviously, I have a fascination with sort of state forms and

00:27:57.200 with democracy and how democracies actually function. And it turns out there isn't actually

00:28:01.740 that much high quality polling about how queer people actually vote. But from what I was able

00:28:06.920 to find, you actually, in most Western democracies, queer people have started becoming more conservative.

00:28:14.580 As they have gotten rights, they have become less ideologically left-leaning. And so this isn't, you know, the US is sort of an exception to that. And I think the reason for that is that we have one of our two major parties, you know, continues to be virulently homophobic. And even when they're sort of tentatively trying to do the sort of British thing of breaking trans people off from the LGB side of the movement, they can't help themselves, right? They still hate gay people.

00:28:41.420 And so it hasn't really worked here. But in Germany and France and the UK, you do actually see gay men and lesbians starting to vote more conservative, starting to vote for the AFD, starting in some polls, they showed Marine Le Pen's party actually doing better among gay people than among straight people, sort of on the theory that this is the Islamophobic party that will protect me from the homophobic Muslims. 0.98

00:29:04.340 Well, I was going to bring that up. So on the one hand, yes, I think that there is a sense that there's greater security, but at the same time, these LGBT, or usually not T, LGB voters. 0.67

00:29:15.880 Well, with the exception of Caitlyn.

00:29:19.000 Jenner.

00:29:19.740 Oh, yeah, Jenner.

00:29:20.360 Thank you. Caitlyn Jenner.

00:29:21.380 yeah but so uh what is that lgbc uh so they they uh right there's this this tendency to weaponize 0.83

00:29:31.560 your own sense of threat again right like especially when it comes in europe to muslim

00:29:37.100 immigrants right like and this has been going on for quite a while bruce barr who who paul wrote

00:29:41.780 about in that book made his name in the early 2000s as an early kind of i would i would call it

00:29:48.600 like islamophobic uh kind of intellectual who really sort of warned right was it was the book

00:29:53.440 while europe slept right is the right like yes i think that's like you know that's sort of an

00:29:58.160 word text for this kind of thing and this idea that like oh i'm being threatened by so in some

00:30:04.800 way it's not that they're that they're saying oh i'm i'm unthreatened it's to say i need the power

00:30:09.260 of the state behind me i deserve and this is where we're back with uh with the natural hierarchies i

00:30:14.040 deserve to have the state behind me to smite those who would make me feel uncomfortable or afraid

00:30:21.740 well and what's interesting is they've moved from a position of maybe not these individual people 0.90

00:30:27.100 right but gay men because gay men and some lesbians right that's who sort of we're generally

00:30:31.740 talking about and then some bisexual people as well that they have moved broadly speaking from 0.80

00:30:37.500 a position of saying we are a persecuted group and like other persecuted groups we deserve not

00:30:45.000 to be persecuted to now saying we are part of the norm we are part of the mainstream and we deserve

00:30:51.400 to be protected from these other groups right that they no longer they see themselves as being

00:30:57.420 allied with this quote-unquote normal people rather than with those marginalized groups that

00:31:02.480 they might have at one point sort of had sympathy with or tried to ally with and here's where

00:31:07.480 Marine Le Pen is super interesting in the Rassemblement National because, of course,

00:31:11.280 the way those kinds of parties, and I think the Republicans do this to some extent, but it's,

00:31:15.960 I think, a lot less pronounced than in Europe. What they do is they use then lesbian, gay,

00:31:22.200 and bisexual people to sort of construct the white, straight mainstream of society as implicitly 0.66

00:31:27.680 threatened. Marine Le Pen is extremely consistent in basically saying, we're not pro-gay,

00:31:34.360 we're pro-French. She's basically saying, oh, we're worried about gay bashings, but we're not

00:31:39.700 worried for our gay neighbors. We're worried for them as French people. Read like white French

00:31:45.780 people. That's what she means by that. Meaning the fear of the homophobia of a supposed interloper 0.95

00:31:52.260 or racialized other becomes a way to imagine the majority of the population as somehow minoritized

00:32:00.500 and a potential victim and a potential target, right?

00:32:03.900 Like the same way that like all these people are like,

00:32:06.880 you know, we, you know, in Europe are like, 1.00

00:32:08.660 oh, we can't let Syrians in 0.93

00:32:10.620 because like they might be homophobic.

00:32:11.900 It's like, I don't know how to put this, 0.94

00:32:13.120 but you're homophobic.

00:32:14.880 What, I don't understand why, 0.95

00:32:17.280 like I'm scared of you.

00:32:18.440 Like, I don't understand what makes this guy any different.

00:32:21.140 I've lived around homophobes all my life.

00:32:23.000 You know, some of them had Arabic first names.

00:32:25.800 A lot of them had German first names. 0.87

00:32:27.360 It's, they come in all stripes, it turns out. 1.00

00:32:30.140 Right.

00:32:30.280 Because I think one of the curious things, right, about, I mean, your point about how Le Pen is sort of appealing to people's Frenchness, I think is really an important point, because one of the mysteries, I think it's less of a mystery why a gay man in 2004 would maybe identify as a conservative and think that, you know, they could vote for George W. Bush's Republican Party, right?

00:32:56.140 I mean, I, as a middle schooler back then, still thought that this was an odious party. But compared to today's Republican Party, I can sort of understand how you might come to that conclusion.

00:33:07.640 today though i mean the the republican party is chock full of people who are quite explicit

00:33:17.600 about their hostility not only to trans people but also to gay and lesbian and bisexual people

00:33:22.740 right and about how i mean there's the religious fanatics the religious right who think that this

00:33:27.580 is an abomination this is you know sinful this is whatever term they want to use the people who

00:33:32.680 were talking about, you know, how monkeypox or mpox is, you know, another sort of God's wrath 0.63

00:33:38.720 on the gays and how queer people needed to be sort of rounded up and put into quarantine camps 0.66

00:33:43.160 when this was happening. And, you know, there was an incident maybe a year or two ago where at the

00:33:48.420 Republican convention in Texas, I think the state level Republican convention, the log cabin

00:33:53.860 Republicans were like locked out of participating. And, you know, we're sort of shocked about this.

00:33:59.180 And it's, you know, there's that meme that goes around Twitter every once in a while about the leopard-eating party.

00:34:05.380 I didn't think leopards would eat my face, says lady who voted for the leopard-eating faces party.

00:34:10.960 Yes, exactly.

00:34:12.240 And so I do think that figuring out, okay, not only how are these conservative gay people sort of reconciling these two,

00:34:23.600 But also, how is it that politicians are allowing them to be reconciled, even while still making space within those political movements for deeply homophobic forces? 0.53

00:34:53.600 I think this might bring us to a third aspect of the homocon worldview, which is their anti-sex 0.58

00:35:02.180 puritanism. So to go back to our old friend, Andrew Sullivan, he spent a lot of the AIDS 0.94

00:35:09.640 crisis sort of scolding people for having unprotected sex, comparing unprotected sex to 0.58

00:35:15.020 murder. And in his early advocacy for gay marriage, including the essay, I believe in 1987,

00:35:20.980 That really sort of the origin point for the movement's turn away from AIDS activism and towards marriage advocacy was reasoned on this idea that marriage would encourage chastity and monogamy, which, you know, somebody should tell the straight people that.

00:35:37.420 They love having affairs. But, you know, this was an idea of marriage as a way to save gay men from themselves, to outsource the cost of caring for them from the state into like the private marital unit, but also to try and instill a kind of sexual morality in these communities that, you know, in this worldview needed to be somehow regulated.

00:36:05.120 Yeah, no, I mean, again, I wonder to what extent I mean, I think a lot of these people still believe the same thing, right? I mean, Andrew Sullivan is still kicking around. Maybe what has slightly shifted with marriage is that it has become apparent that you can give gay people marriage, and they will still be just as slutty as they were before.

00:36:21.860 I mean, I think you can certainly do a sort of careful analysis and point to ways in which, yes, I'm sure marriage has had a somewhat disciplining effect on queer people, you know, queer people get married and then wind up in court. Yes, we have no-fault divorce, but distribution of assets and so on and so forth, things might get ugly if, you know, you had an open marriage or whatever. 1.00

00:36:42.580 But that said, I think, at least in my anecdotal experience, marriage does not seem to have changed the sort of sexual mores of queer people who I'm friends with. So I think that argument has somewhat fallen by the wayside. Also, simply the fact that we have it and it's considered more or less a settled issue, although, of course, certain Supreme Court justices have raised the question of whether or not we should truly consider it settled.

00:37:10.600 My guess is there were certainly some of these folks who were harboring such views about monkeypox. I mean, what was so interesting about the MPOC scare, right, is that it really did become this sort of Rorschach test for queer intellectuals. And I don't think that how people viewed it necessarily fell along strictly partisan lines.

00:37:33.480 I mean, most people who were sort of debating this all were on the left, right? People who generally cared about this were on the left. But I don't, you know, I was actually trying to figure out recently what Andrew Sullivan thought and said about MPOX and came up short, I did not find very much. And so that's sort of a question where I think, but there were people on the left who were sort of having this view of like, okay, this is a disease we know how to deal with. So why don't you just stop having sex for like a few months, right?

00:38:00.340 and then there were the people who were saying how dare you it is you know my god-given right 1.00

00:38:05.960 as a faggot to have sex and i will do so anyway i guess the point i'm trying to get at is i i don't 0.99

00:38:11.780 have this sense that's this sort of sexual puritanism is quite as significant an argument 1.00

00:38:17.840 and maybe that also has to do with the sort of trumpification of the right in this country right

00:38:22.900 how plausibly can you claim to be a sexual puritan when you have someone like trump is your standard 0.99

00:38:29.260 bearer only heterosexual pussy grabbing please well this strikes me as part of the you know 0.99

00:38:37.120 floundering of the post dobbs republican party is bound up in this inability for them to say 1.00

00:38:44.840 with a straight face that they actually believe in sexual chastity i mean some of them are trying

00:38:50.040 right but it's it's not a very convincing part of the right and where they are sort of most coherent

00:38:58.420 in their rationalization of you know the sadistic abortion policies that they're rolling out

00:39:05.140 is not when they're talking about sexual chastity it's when they're talking in terms of like just

00:39:09.140 pure sadistic punishment right and so their their heterosexual politics have also receded

00:39:14.640 from the idea of like abstinence uh or like restraint right yeah i guess i never thought

00:39:20.440 about the fact that like that's a really good point that in some way their fictions of chastity

00:39:25.240 depended on abortion being free being available and legal and now you have to sort of like the

00:39:31.220 fact that this is not a way people live is like glaringly out in the open right no it's it's true

00:39:38.160 i mean the other thing i think that's worth pointing out is that conservatism or right-wing

00:39:45.100 political movements and i think you know there's obviously a conversation to be had about the fact

00:39:49.700 that not all right-wing political movements are necessarily conservative right we sort of conflate

00:39:54.160 the two in our country. But right-wing political movements are not always anti-sex, right? I mean,

00:39:59.840 again, in my own field as a German historian, the most famous example of this is Nazi Germany,

00:40:04.120 where the Nazis are against certain kinds of sex, but they are very much in favor of, you know, 0.76

00:40:11.360 sex that will lead to Aryan babies. And they don't particularly care how it happens, if it happens 0.85

00:40:17.580 within a marriage or not, if it's the result of adultery or not, you know, their goal is procreation. 1.00

00:40:24.160 I mean, that's one place I think where we also can talk about where we can tell that basically the sexual conservatism of today's homocons sort of hits the kind of limit, which has to do with gay parenting. 0.99

00:40:36.220 You know, I say this as a gay parent, that like, you'd think that if marriage had this effect of normalizing queer relationships, right, in the way that conservatives profess to like, you would think that they would be all for gay bees. 0.99

00:40:51.000 Have gay bees stop transferring monkeypox to each other. 0.96

00:40:54.420 Well, the opposite, of course, is true. 1.00

00:40:56.140 We have all these messed up kind of groomer discourses to discredit gay parenting.

00:41:02.920 So it turns out that if you live with just two men with a cute little baby and a dog or whatever,

00:41:09.560 they still find a reason to find that terrifying and scary and potentially subject to violence,

00:41:15.880 Which is another, which probably also takes the wind out of the sails a little bit of this kind of like, because there's the implicit thing with the Sullivan position was always like, they'll let us live so long as we just tone it down on the vamping and the cottaging and the clubbing guys.

00:41:32.520 Like, I swear they'll be, they'll be good.

00:41:34.460 And it's like, nope, it turns out if you do all that, they're still coming to burn down your house, you know?

00:41:40.400 Yeah, yeah, no kidding.

00:41:42.420 I do.

00:41:42.860 I mean, it is interesting to think about to what extent Andrew Sullivan was right and that sort of people around him making this argument about gay marriage were right or wrong.

00:41:53.060 Because it has, I do actually think that granting marriage equality has been a hugely successful strategy for, you know, giving queer people rights.

00:42:04.460 And, you know, I mean, leaving aside the question of the actual positive sort of financial and emotional impact as it had for, you know, real people, I think when you look at, you know, just opinion polls in asking people about their opinions of LGBT people, it's quite clear that as this issue gained salience, and after the Obergefell decision, well, first the Windsor decision, and then the Obergefell decision, that, you know, support for queer people rose immensely in this country.

00:42:31.840 And there was this sort of normalizing effect in terms of how people saw gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans people. In that sense, I think Sullivan, you know, to give credit where credit is due, was actually correct to a certain extent.

00:42:45.560 I think where he's wrong, as I've said, is in what you were saying, Adrian, that there hasn't been from the far right, from the sort of radical homophobic right, there's not been any toning down of that rhetoric, if anything, over the last five years, we've seen it ramp up. And at the same time, it has not, I think, led to a meaningful change in queer sort of sexual behaviors or proclivities.

00:43:08.080 Right. Which gets at an interesting thing about Sullivan. I mean, let's talk about him a little bit more here, because what I noticed in your book, Queer Theory of the State, you talk about him as a liberal and we've been sort of talking about him as a conservative. I should say those two are obviously not in contradiction. And you just reminded us of that, that like these absolutely can go together. But it's kind of interesting and might be worth talking about or explaining to our listeners why we're using both those terms. Like in what ways is he a liberal and what ways is he a conservative? 0.76

00:43:33.980 Right. So I mean, I think, you know, the way that I use liberal in the book and increasingly use liberal in my daily life is not in the way that the American punditocracy uses liberal, right? I mean, we talk about liberal here in this country as being sort of left to far left. And you hear people being like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez being described as very liberal or extremely liberal, which just does not.

00:43:58.260 And so the way I use liberal, which is, I think, how most scholars nowadays use the term is much more in its original meaning, right? That you are someone who is in favor of a restrained state. In particular, you are looking for restraints on the state when it comes to economics and when it comes to individual liberties, right?

00:44:17.940 And so you, at least in theory, believe in robust sort of civil rights, personal freedoms. These are oftentimes called negative freedoms or negative liberties in the sense that they result from a lack of state involvement, right? That's where the negative comes in. And that you are similarly in favor of a generally sort of laissez-faire liberal or neoliberal market, right?

00:44:37.980 And this is where you then also get neoliberalism, which is sort of an extension of these liberal ideas with the sort of added caveat that you favor applying a sort of market rationality to pretty much everything that the government or that society does, right?

00:44:51.000 And so instead of perhaps a classical liberal would see the economic sphere as a sort of distinct area or sphere, separate from the government, separate from society, neoliberals are saying, no, no, everything is a market, right?

00:45:02.780 Everything can be monetized.

00:45:03.880 Everything can be thought about in these sorts of market rationalities.

00:45:06.620 So in that, that's sort of how I'm using the term liberal. And there's obviously a space within that liberal paradigm for people who consider themselves conservative. And so that's why when we get to neoliberalism, we talk about left neoliberalism and right neoliberalism.

00:45:20.680 A left neoliberal is someone like Tony Blair or Bill Clinton who is coming into office and saying, yeah, let's cut away the regulatory state.

00:45:29.880 Let's cut away the welfare state.

00:45:31.380 But at the same time, let's try to increase the kinds of civil rights that our government is offering or vouchsafing for various marginalized groups.

00:45:39.980 You then have right neoliberals who are the kinds of people who want to go in and install Pinochet as dictator of Chile.

00:45:47.380 And who retire at Stanford University.

00:45:49.620 Yes, your colleagues.

00:45:51.800 As I call them, as I call them our faculty meeting, yes.

00:45:57.040 So that's how I'm using the term liberal in this text is to mean that sort of much more narrow set of what you believe government should rightfully be doing.

00:46:05.640 And so in that sense, marriage is a classical, you know, it's obviously a conservative value, as Andrew Sullivan makes the case for, but it's also a liberal value, right?

00:46:14.520 because you're basically saying this is sort of a right and we should be extending it to everyone

00:46:19.060 equally. And that is some of the sort of, you know, that's both the genius of liberalism as

00:46:24.320 a broad political philosophy is that it's sort of a big tent that does make room for a lot of very

00:46:29.360 diverse values and positions. It is this quite capacious political ideology. It's also, I think,

00:46:35.800 the genius of gay marriage is an issue in that it was able to bring a whole host of people from a

00:46:41.160 quite wide ideological spectrum along with it, in part because I think they all thought they were

00:46:46.920 going to get the thing that they specifically wanted out of it, which I think is, again,

00:46:50.760 where we get back to liberalism as a political philosophy or political ideology, that it's very

00:46:55.600 good at, I think, convincing people that they will get the thing they want out of it.

00:46:59.500 Yeah. I'm glad you said that because there's something interesting in your book that I thought

00:47:03.340 a lot about, which I should say, Queer Theory of the State is really kind of a lot about thinking

00:47:08.360 about how queer theory has been, as an academic project, has been maybe a little hostile to the

00:47:15.920 state. Right, exactly. So you ask, and I'll quote there, whether it is possible to work out a theory 0.96

00:47:20.380 of the state that unites the critically anti-normative impulses of queer theory and the 0.62

00:47:25.540 empirical need for the state, coercive though it may be. And it really struck me reading the book

00:47:30.600 in preparation for this, that in some way that what you're proposing, what you're asking for 0.82

00:47:36.000 is the exact inverse of what a lot of the homocons that Paul criticized in his book are about,

00:47:41.060 right? Because they combine a comfort with the normative claims of the state, what Jasper Puar 0.97

00:47:46.720 would call homonationalism, and a real disinterest in what the state actually does. In their own

00:47:52.700 ways, they're all libertarians, right? Right. No, that's true. I mean, that's a really good way,

00:47:59.100 I think, of framing the difference. But they're a weird sort of right-wing Reagan-esque

00:48:05.300 libertarian, right? Where they're libertarian about certain things, but maybe less libertarian

00:48:11.800 about other things. Morality drips through every nook and cranny of their supposedly

00:48:17.600 market rationality, right? They're like, oh, wait, you just hate these people. That's not

00:48:23.180 rationalism. That's just, you don't like them. Right, exactly. I mean, it's always so wild to

00:48:30.940 me whenever, again, to sort of go back to Pinochet and the sort of CIA's rich career of sponsoring

00:48:38.200 coups during the Cold War.

00:48:40.320 We have a penny for every time someone goes back to Pinochet.

00:48:44.820 Right. But the whole notion that you need force and you need a coup to impose a certain vision of

00:48:52.620 the quote unquote free market, right, sort of gives up the whole game, right? This is not a

00:48:56.680 free market. This is not actually about having a small state. This is about having a state that

00:49:01.180 redistributes wealth upwards, that is interested in protecting the rights of certain people and

00:49:06.440 not others. And this is actually precisely the queer critique of liberalism, right? 0.54

00:49:10.920 Is that liberalism is essentially hypocritical, and that people who say that they want rights

00:49:17.400 for everyone, they want everyone to have an equal share of the economic pie through this

00:49:22.280 free market, but you have to pull yourself up by your bootstraps, that they are

00:49:26.400 completely willing to use state power and state violence to suppress those people who, as you

00:49:31.440 were saying, they just don't like. And this goes all the way back to the origins of liberalism

00:49:35.880 during the Enlightenment. This is something I got into a little spat with Susan Nyman about

00:49:41.640 recently, about the extent to which we can see the Enlightenment and the early liberal project

00:49:46.700 as something that is value neutral and essentially a positive, or something that is actually taking

00:49:52.940 aside on behalf of white, cis, straight men. Anyway, that was a bit of a tangent. But your

00:49:58.560 original question is a good one, right? That these gay men, these gay conservatives, and some lesbians, 0.57

00:50:03.760 yeah, they're very comfortable with normative claims. They make plenty of normative claims

00:50:07.080 themselves, as we've talked about, especially around gender. And they don't have a particular

00:50:11.720 interest in what the state does, unless they perceive the state as somehow harming them,

00:50:16.480 right? And then they're very happy to go after the state. But I think what's interesting about

00:50:21.580 queer theorists on the left is that even when the state is at least ostensibly acting in their

00:50:28.260 interests, there's still this deep insecurity about whether or not it's good and whether or

00:50:34.380 not the state ever can be a force for good or for progress, which as I was trying to sort of tease

00:50:40.840 out in the book, that's a real shift in terms of how the left thinks about the state. And it's not

00:50:47.460 just queer theorists, right? It's the entire left in the sort of Western world that undergoes this 0.82

00:50:51.880 shift in the sort of 70s through the early 2000s, basically. Anyway, it's sort of an interesting

00:50:57.780 puzzle or paradox that as there's this receding interest in the state on the left, and I do think

00:51:03.960 sort of queer theory is at the forefront of that, there is this sort of right-wing complacency or

00:51:10.440 happiness with the state or willing, you know, that they are not tying themselves up in knots

00:51:15.920 about the state other than as a sort of political weapon, as we see, you know, with the quote,

00:51:21.020 unquote, weaponization of government inquiries in the House of Representatives today, right?

00:51:25.420 They don't, they don't care about the weaponization of government, what they care about

00:51:28.560 is scoring political points on Joe Biden, or they don't like other people weaponizing the

00:51:32.960 government, right? Well, they, or protecting Donald Trump, right? But, but the notion that

00:51:37.580 you have a completely above board investigation of Donald Trump that, you know, the president

00:51:43.100 has done everything in his power to sort of isolate himself from, that that is being held

00:51:49.000 up as a quote unquote weaponization of government. And then at the same time, Donald Trump is sort

00:51:53.280 of explicitly saying, yes, I'm going to use the DOJ to go after my enemies. But again, this is

00:51:59.140 indicative of the kind of ways that people on the right and people on the left think about the state

00:52:05.080 and their own role within states and opposing states today, and that there still is a real

00:52:09.640 disconnect the state sometimes good and sometimes bad yes that you know that is such a good

00:52:16.300 encapsulation of this book right i mean i because i feel like right now queer theory so frequently

00:52:22.420 just says you know the state always bad so getting to the sometimes good part is is the is the goal

00:52:29.880 well we might point out that like that has to do with its historic extraction yes like theory as

00:52:35.100 it, I mean, so you trace it back to post-structuralism, which I know our mutual friends who's

00:52:40.400 Neyman would also do fully believe that, but it very clearly comes out of the experience

00:52:45.320 of the AIDS crisis, right?

00:52:46.380 Where like, basically, it was the first text to really sort of use what we would today

00:52:51.340 call queer theoretical lenses, such as, you know, Leo Bersani's The Rectum of Grave, etc., 0.63

00:52:56.160 are entirely about the way that even when the government is trying to help, it ends 0.90

00:53:02.340 up doing this kind of biopower thing that will ultimately crush LGBT people sort of under its

00:53:08.960 heel. Now, you point out in the book that that's not that different from a famous line of Ronald

00:53:13.680 Reagan's, which is the scariest sentence in the English language is, I'm from the government and

00:53:18.700 I'm here to help. I'm here to help, right? So like, there's something to that. But of course,

00:53:23.300 it does have to do with the fact that this is very much a project of a moment where if indeed,

00:53:29.420 when the federal government thought it was doing the right thing ended up with you know absolutely

00:53:35.180 horrid kind of approaches even if they didn't take the advice of friend of the pod and er 0.69

00:53:41.720 campy conservative william f buckley to uh you know to tattoo gay men right with a what is it

00:53:49.000 barcodes or what was he gonna do something like that i forget exactly yeah what is what is what 0.97

00:53:53.800 a fucking sweetheart no i mean i think you know i think a really good example that is actually like 0.99

00:53:58.500 the biden administration's approach to mpox which was just sort of ham-handed and right stupid i 0.99

00:54:04.720 think we can look at the reagan administration's approach to hiv and say no that there was an 0.94

00:54:08.860 element of malice in this there was something intentional and then you know you can compare

00:54:12.840 it to what other countries did you know as i do in my first book and make the point that no like

00:54:18.000 even in kohl's west germany which you also have a center-right government and power they actually

00:54:22.440 take a technocratic approach to it they address it head-on and they're quite successful in

00:54:26.400 dramatically shrinking the number of new infections. And so I have complete sympathy

00:54:31.380 with a strand of queer theory that comes out of the AIDS crisis and says, yeah, our experience 0.98

00:54:36.740 with the state is that it is, it's evil, right? I mean, it's trying to kill us in a very literal 0.84

00:54:42.700 sense. I guess the sort of question I have then is, is that an acceptable basis on which to build

00:54:48.080 what claims to be a kind of universal theory or universal method of critique? And I guess the

00:54:53.520 answer I come out with is no, right? I think that that manner of critique and that perspective has

00:54:58.580 a very valuable place in terms of thinking about the state and thinking about society, which is,

00:55:04.600 by the way, something that these conservatives would deny, right? They don't think that this

00:55:09.340 method of critique actually has a sort of place in social discourse. But I think at the end of

00:55:15.740 the day, you then need to be able to think constructively and think about, okay, we've

00:55:19.680 identified the problems, but what can we actually do to start fixing them? And that, I guess, is

00:55:23.420 also something that the conservatives would be uninterested in, right? I mean, they sort of

00:55:27.240 conservatives by the very definition of the term are somewhat uninterested in diagnosing social

00:55:32.400 ills and advancing them, right? They're interested in preserving the status quo.

00:55:36.420 And feel that those for whom the status quo is not working deserve it to some extent, right?

00:55:41.940 Right, exactly. Well, if the status quo is working and it appears to not be working for certain

00:55:46.800 people, then it must be because of something that they are doing.

00:55:48.920 right we've been doing a lot of Moynihan thinking so we're just like

00:55:52.060 we're quite in the way to like it's like it's actually the poor's fault

00:55:57.000 oh no but i love this uh like optimistic intervention in critical thought yeah well

00:56:06.500 thanks i will see if other people love it i did i have to say that when reading someone like susan

00:56:13.000 niman at times i sort of found myself thinking this is uncomfortably close to what i'm arguing

00:56:18.440 But I think that the, I hope that what readers will find is that this was a chance for me to think with a bunch of thinkers who I really admire, even when I disagree with, I mean, Foucault first among them, right? I mean, Foucault is someone I've been thinking with and against for well over a decade now, and who I, you know, is one of my absolute favorite thinkers, but I also love to disagree with him.

00:56:41.840 Well, and as you point out, there is a long history within queer theory of exactly that. 0.89

00:56:46.400 It does have this wonderful feature of basically subjecting everything to critique, including

00:56:51.460 itself.

00:56:52.040 Like you mentioned the famous Lisa Duggan queering the state. 0.88

00:56:54.760 Yes.

00:56:55.060 But also like the Petrus Liu book, he positions that as a queer theory book, right?

00:56:58.720 And like, it's still saying there's a whole bunch of things, a whole bunch of precepts

00:57:03.100 of this body of theorizing that really need to be reconceived, right?

00:57:08.240 Like, yeah, they have real blind spots and those are starting to become a real problem.

00:57:13.300 Yes.

00:57:13.720 No, and this, I mean, I think this is a work that very much fits into a current sort of

00:57:19.020 stock taking among queer theorists about what is it that we are doing?

00:57:24.500 What is it we've done?

00:57:25.780 Where are the flaws?

00:57:26.740 I'm glad you mentioned Lisa Dugan, because she is another thinker who I really love to

00:57:33.940 think with. 0.79

00:57:34.600 I think she is one of the sharpest of the sort of or queer theorists. And she is one of the few who does think seriously about sort of state politics economy. Right. So this queering the state essay that you mentioned was a major source of inspiration for this piece. And she makes a lot of these points about early queer theorists that they are posing as politically radical, but in fact, are very uninterested in sort of solutions. Right. 0.98

00:58:00.640 And this was part of the difficulty of this piece of sort of threading the needle of, okay, these people are saying they're political, they're saying they're radical, they're saying they're progressive. But when you actually drill down and look at what they say they want to do or want to happen, they do wind up sounding a lot like sort of left libertarians. And I think Dugan does a really good job of pointing that out and sort of skewering them for it.

00:58:20.440 And in the same way, you know, and she's also one of the first people to really draw attention to the imbrication of gay politics and neoliberalism, right? And coining the term homonormativity to do so. So I, you know, again, another thinker who I sort of recommend to everyone and frequently assigned to my students. 0.73

00:58:39.620 Nice. Nice. Another thing that we might briefly mention for listeners not that familiar with queer theory, of course, is that like Dugan's background is in American studies, I believe. Right. But like, yes, a lot of them were just also just like me, literature professors. And like, that always did influence their politics in the sense that it ended up being like, here's a cool political intervention based on my reading of Henry James. And you're like, OK, I mean, it's not uncool, but I could see why in the aggregate people might be like, right.

00:59:09.580 when are we going to get to the politics part it feels like we're mostly making our way through

00:59:13.300 the penguin uh you know right black books basically and like and that's cool right like

00:59:19.860 but like there was an awful lot of radicalism tied up in like really heterodox readings of

00:59:25.040 oscar wilde is i guess what i'll say yeah hard hard thing to do there no i mean and actually i

00:59:30.360 don't know if you're familiar with a book from a few years ago called sexual hegemony by christopher

00:59:34.580 Chitty. But he sort of makes that same point, right? That actually there is a class politics

00:59:41.040 to a lot of early queer theory, and it's a bourgeois class politics, right? That these people 0.98

00:59:45.960 are, these scholars were, whether intentionally or not, privileging a sort of middle-class bourgeois

00:59:53.500 white voice, oftentimes from the sort of 19th or early 20th century, in the form of this literature

01:00:00.040 that was sort of the substance of queer theory, and that this had, in fact, sort of buried this

01:00:05.860 much longer and much more politicized queer history that he is tracing through sort of the

01:00:12.080 port cities of early modern Europe. And so, you know, I guess, to me, that points out is that

01:00:16.620 there is this sort of, I mean, it's not just sort of gay conservatives against the rest, right?

01:00:21.860 There's all of these political formations that are actually really quite difficult at times to

01:00:26.860 tease out, right? There is a sort of long, rich history of a kind of queer Marxist working class

01:00:33.020 politics, which I think is what Chitty's tapping into. And that's quite distinct from the kind of 0.62

01:00:37.820 middle class bourgeois liberal, although it doesn't want to admit that it's liberal politics

01:00:43.260 of a lot of queer theory. At least that's my sort of take. Well, I think there's something to it. 0.81

01:00:48.280 I mean, something I always have my students look at when I teach these texts is to look at what

01:00:52.820 people wrote their first book on right a lot of these are a lot of the really radical stuff

01:00:57.660 about queer theory comes out in people's second books and i'm not going to name any names here

01:01:01.980 but like to a tenured professor that is very very noticeable because that means that that's the book

01:01:06.940 that came out after they got tenure right so it is right once again about institutions and access

01:01:11.960 to institutions and i do not begrudge anyone like the idea that you couldn't get tenure with

01:01:16.260 epistemology of the closet i get it like it's a fucked up world but it does do this thing where

01:01:21.520 basically, as you say, these were highly credentialed academics reproducing a bunch 0.92

01:01:28.480 of the preconceptions that sustained their milieu, let's say. And then they took it to really

01:01:34.220 interesting and cool places. But it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out where the certain

01:01:40.120 blind spots might come from in that undertaking. Yeah. Right. No, exactly. And I think it also

01:01:47.440 oftentimes, I mean, one of the two sort of pet peeves I have with queer theory as a German 0.55

01:01:53.120 historian are both the sort of allergy to empiricist historiography, right? The notion 1.00

01:02:00.600 that we should actually care what really happened in the past, a lot of queer theorists are sort of

01:02:06.340 opposed to that notion, to put it mildly. The other is that it's so US focused, it's so US

01:02:12.580 centric. And again, as I've sort of touched on, or we were talking about with the AIDS crisis,

01:02:15.740 It takes what happened in the US in the last sort of 40 years as paradigmatic, which isn't to say that what happened in the US in the last 40 years isn't interesting and important, but it is not always the same as what is or has happened in other parts of the world and should not necessarily be held up as a sort of standard against which to judge the rest of the world.

01:02:36.560 I mean, that might be a good place to ask sort of a final question or a final set of questions, really, which is, right, you are not a U.S. historian by training.

01:02:44.040 I mean, you know your way around U.S. history.

01:02:46.900 And you're pointing out that, like, the story that we've been telling kind of about conservatives, like, has been quite an American one, too.

01:02:53.300 And so it might be, we've been, we've strayed a couple of times.

01:02:55.500 We've talked about Marie.

01:02:56.780 We've talked about Alice.

01:02:58.600 The question of gay conservatism as a global phenomenon, like, do we have a, like, can we talk about that?

01:03:04.080 Or is that too broad?

01:03:05.480 Yeah.

01:03:05.920 You know, what are the vectors and flight lines there?

01:03:10.420 I think, and this might be a great chance to, you know, take us back to 19th century Germany, to the Kaiserreich, to the days of Kaiser Wilhelm. 0.86

01:03:19.460 But I guess my quick sort of, I guess, hypothesis, I guess, here is that I think in order to have a gay conservative, you first need a gay left. 0.99

01:03:29.720 I think that one can't exist with it, right? 0.92

01:03:32.260 I think you need some sort of gay rights movement, which is almost always going to exist in some form on the left before you can have gay conservatives. 0.83

01:03:43.120 That's at least my sort of my working hypothesis, at least not that you don't have people in the past who were men having sex with men who were conservatives. 0.76

01:03:51.320 That's not my point. But people who we can sort of categorize in this way as being self-identified gay men or queer or something in that realm who then see a connection between that identity and their conservatism. I think that requires the existence of some kind of gay rights movement.

01:04:08.440 And so, you know, when we look at Germany, I mean, the sort of iconic example of this is, of course, Ernst Röhm, who was the leader of the SA of the Nazi stormtroopers. You know, he does not identify as a gay man per se, but he is a man who sort of very self-consciously has sex with men. 0.63

01:04:29.540 I believe he was a member of, or maybe through a friend was a member of Hirschfeld's, Magnus

01:04:37.200 Hirschfeld, the sort of pioneering doctor who was a major homosexual rights activist in the 1920s

01:04:43.140 and early 1930s. So he had this group called the Scientific Humanitarian Committee, and I believe

01:04:48.360 Röhm was in some way loosely affiliated, either subscribed to their magazine or was a member,

01:04:54.520 but I would have to double check that. In any event, he is then outed in this big scandal,

01:05:00.020 the Social Democratic Party, right? Because the Nazi party is homophobic. They see homosexuality 0.96

01:05:04.600 as this sort of decadence of the democratic republic. So the Social Democratic Party

01:05:09.400 outs this high-ranking Nazi to try and create a scandal and hopefully hurt the Nazis at the polls.

01:05:14.800 It doesn't really work. And part of it is that Röhm is a very close friend and confidant of

01:05:20.780 hitlers hitler and rum use the informal german do with each other as opposed to the more formal

01:05:26.380 z but then of course this all comes crashing down in 1934 there's the infamous night of long knives

01:05:32.980 where hitler um for sort of other reasons orders the assassination the the murder of of his friend 0.50

01:05:39.800 as well as other high-ranking sa leaders many of whom are also gay men uh so that's sort of like 0.93

01:05:46.120 the were gay conservative, at least in my mind. And, you know, part of what makes him so 0.87

01:05:52.120 interesting, and in this case, I actually do think he's sort of paradigmatic, is that he

01:05:56.460 actually saw a connection among his, you know, sort of sexual attachment to other men, his

01:06:03.720 sort of allegiance to fascism, and his experiences as a soldier on the front in World War One. And

01:06:10.400 the sort of thread connecting all three of these was masculinity, to sort of return to one of our

01:06:15.340 earlier questions where he was part of a german tradition that saw male male love not as

01:06:22.420 homosexuality right they intentionally reject the term homosexuality as being overly clinical

01:06:27.020 it's something that people like hirschfeld have created so they reject that term they see this

01:06:31.860 not as making them a minority or in some way you know effeminate or degenerate but rather it means

01:06:37.920 that they're hyper masculine right that they are able to tap into this level of masculinity that

01:06:42.420 is unavailable to most sort of straight men, and certainly unavailable to women, right? They do not 0.61

01:06:49.280 see any similarity between this and what we today call lesbianism. So, you know, that's really the 0.92

01:06:55.540 thread. And you have many other people, there's a group called Daigona, it's also the first sort

01:07:00.640 of homoerotic periodical in Western history that very much peddles this notion, right? That it's

01:07:05.880 sort of, I mean, we would think of it almost as a universal bisexuality that they buy into, right?

01:07:10.100 that every man has the possibility of sort of having these deep sexual or romantic or emotional

01:07:15.560 bonds with other men. And this also doesn't foreclose on having a wife, having children,

01:07:20.160 et cetera. But this is a unique and sort of transcendental kind of relationship. And again,

01:07:25.360 the core feature of this is masculinity. But what's interesting also is that it's very much

01:07:31.100 tied to, as we've sort of been talking about throughout other forms of exclusionary behavior.

01:07:38.120 So these people are deeply racist, they're deeply anti-Semitic, they're deeply misogynistic, right? And so in some ways, you know, this has a lot of differences with the kinds of gay conservatives we've been talking about today. But I think there are still some through lines in terms of these being queer people who don't see their queerness as defining them as outsiders, but rather see it as in some ways being constitutive of their place sort of at the center of what is quote unquote normal. 0.61

01:08:07.600 I love this idea that there's a necessity for a gay left, or at least for the kind of idea that being gay or lesbian might commit you to something.

01:08:18.680 Right, right. 0.99

01:08:19.440 That definitely I'll buy.

01:08:21.760 Because there are texts like, you know, Thomas Mann writes this essay about marriage where he's basically like, you know, it's about order.

01:08:28.040 It's about generations.

01:08:29.000 It's about productivity, et cetera, et cetera.

01:08:31.220 Whereas the opposite is just dissolution, et cetera, et cetera. 0.96

01:08:34.160 And of course, he's saying that as most likely a gay man, right? 0.97

01:08:37.400 like uh whatever whatever the hell his deal was but like definitely involved being gay 0.77

01:08:41.660 right and like the idea like he knew what the alternative could be that i fully buy at the

01:08:47.380 same time there's something interesting in the german context that i often think about a kind

01:08:51.840 of gay conservatism that does not identify itself with the state but is sort of higher than the

01:08:57.840 state i'm thinking here and this is something i eventually will inflict on more as an episode

01:09:01.900 uh about the georgia circle yes this poet in the weimar republic well actually early already

01:09:09.240 turn of the century writes this highly symbolist poetry beautiful stuff and gathers around himself

01:09:15.960 this kind of ersatz religion right which um somehow seems to almost entirely involve hot young men

01:09:23.820 uh and and and he has and he's like guys we have these secret teachings that no outsider must know 0.56

01:09:29.380 And everyone who looks at this from the outside, including Thomas Mann, is like, it's gay stuff, right? The secret is gay stuff, right? Just so we're clear on that. And it's unclear still what it was, but these kind of hieratic teachings. And it, of course, is this kind of what they call the secret Germany, right?

01:09:47.360 The idea of the secret Germany is, yes, it identifies with the nation, but it's higher than the state. It's higher than even the status quo. It's a hyper version of the status quo in some way.

01:09:59.220 Yeah, it's a sort of transcendental view. The wildest part about it. So I don't know if I ever told you this, Adrian, but when I did my undergraduate study abroad in Germany, I sort of had like a Georga semester where I took multiple courses on Stefan Georga. And Robert Norton, who wrote the big Georga biography, was teaching there. So I studied with him and it was traumatizing. Not studying with him. Studying Georga, I want to be clear, studying Georga was traumatizing.

01:10:25.780 because you know i mean he has sort of infamously difficult poetry to read you know it's it's high

01:10:31.460 it's really really hard but he's a fascinating figure and i was gonna so the two things i wanted

01:10:35.760 to mention is that you know the the sort of deity who they worship in this fake religion

01:10:41.040 is a 16 year old boy from munich named maximilian kronberger who dies of cholera or some things

01:10:48.580 want some 19th century disease maximin and they right they rechristened him maximin and sort of

01:10:53.940 George is this high priest, and they have all these photos of him dressed up like a sort of Grecian god and that are printed in this poetry book that is published. 0.99

01:11:02.000 And so, you know, there's something deeply homoerotic about all of this. 1.00

01:11:07.140 I mean, it does not take a genius to glean any of this. 0.97

01:11:10.320 What's also fascinating, though, is that one of the young members of the George Christ was Klaus von Stauffenberg, who was the leader of the July 20th plot on Hitler's life. 0.62

01:11:20.040 And allegedly, probably apocryphally, but allegedly, when he's being executed by firing squad, the last thing he yells out is long live secret Germany. 0.61

01:11:28.420 Long live secret Germany.

01:11:28.920 Yeah. 1.00

01:11:29.540 It's either sacred or secret.

01:11:30.840 We don't know.

01:11:31.340 We don't, right.

01:11:32.580 Turns out it's hard to articulate if we're in front of a firing squad.

01:11:37.180 And that, you know, is the sort of, and I don't think there's ever any indication that like Klaus von Schaufenberg was gay.

01:11:42.780 No.

01:11:42.880 But again, this is also where you get this muddledness or messiness of sexual identity, which, you know, to some extent, in the same way that gay conservatives today reject gender theory or gender identity as real, these gay conservatives back then were rejecting homosexuality, right?

01:11:59.460 They were saying these labels don't make any sense.

01:12:01.480 They're sort of against nature.

01:12:02.920 You're trying to sort of turn something that is natural and beautiful into something clinical and diagnosable. 0.89

01:12:07.660 but i think you're right that there is almost a sort of like queer suprematism or supremacy that

01:12:13.760 is incipient in a lot of these works or a lot of these figures yeah i forget who who coined that

01:12:19.060 term but there's this idea of an aristocracy of need or of beleagueredness right like i'm set

01:12:24.520 apart from everyone else by my desires and that makes me better than them right like there's uh

01:12:31.480 you get a little bit of that novel like enforcers maurice right where like who's like

01:12:35.940 an utterly mediocre dude until he's like oh do i do i like guys right like they hyper charge this

01:12:43.460 and they basically say like this is what makes me better than than ordinary right that's an

01:12:48.520 interesting kind of version of this that i think is hard for us to fathom today but that like

01:12:52.900 really had some important post-war ramifications i years ago read my way through a bunch of kind

01:12:59.800 of early homophile periodicals mostly in switzerland because they published them there

01:13:03.940 like one thing you find is a lot of georgia they're like oh he was one of us yeah he's great 0.71

01:13:08.480 and the other thing is they say they say well and we have to grapple with gay fascism because let's 0.76

01:13:14.740 be honest that was us too right so like these are gay men in 1947 being like yeah our bad right and

01:13:21.100 it's like guys i mean come on like you don't have to beat yourself like you do not own this but like

01:13:26.140 that that was definitely a position that this idea that there had been something kind of gay about

01:13:31.800 the nazis and that there was something about this kind of queer supremacism that could become

01:13:36.660 kind of fascist ideology that was very not i mean i can't tell you how represented these people were

01:13:41.640 it's like five writers in like two journals but like this was a position people could take

01:13:47.780 at the time and say hey we really have to talk about this this is a problem and their answer

01:13:53.120 of course was like we have to democratize queerness we got to go out into public into

01:13:57.000 the public sphere we got to be part of civil society we have to be just like everyone else

01:14:01.040 Like, we are not better than them. That's got to be understood.

01:14:04.760 Right. And in some ways, I mean, I think that that first gay rights movement in Germany can very much be interpreted as, you know, this sort of debate between a minoritizing and a universalizing view of sexual otherness with the sort of valences that the sexual minoritizing view, which is the view of sort of Hirschfeld, and then it, of course, gets picked up by these sort of homophile campaigners after the war, is a fundamentally democratic view.

01:14:30.040 It's basically the sort of view of we are basically like a pressure group or a special interest group, or I actually don't want to use that term.

01:14:37.280 But, you know, we are a distinct social minority in a democratic polity, and we have to behave that way.

01:14:44.280 And we need to sort of advocate in, you know, for our rights in the same way that any other minoritized or other sort of marginalized group would.

01:14:51.860 But then the universalizing one, right, is this sort of one where the distinction is, you know, it doesn't see a distinction in terms of sexuality between themselves and, you know, the quote, unquote, normal straight people, but it does see all sorts of other differences of race, class, gender. 0.57

01:15:09.100 And as you're saying, sort of, it sees a sort of aristocracy of these queer people who are sort of better than everyone else and have a right to sort of to lead the nation, lead the country. 0.82

01:15:18.920 And so I think that, as you point out, that the more democratic minoritizing vision is the one that ultimately won out. And that's sort of the turf that we're still debating all of these things on, right? I don't think, I mean, with the exception of maybe like Eloy Yiannopoulos, there's no one who has returned to that sort of earlier undemocratic universalizing idea of sexuality. 0.87

01:15:40.160 yeah yeah well should we have a question about conservative lesbians we have very few now but 0.88

01:15:45.500 like i can't think of any before a certain moment like i mean it occurs to me that queer supremacism

01:15:53.400 as it is articulated in like early 20th century germany like might be most robustly contextualized

01:16:02.220 as like having um ideological misogynist foundation right like that and that's you know

01:16:09.820 probably worth talking about right there's there's reasons that this tendency arises 1.00

01:16:14.900 less often in lesbians that are just kind of like boring gender inequality reasons right like women 1.00

01:16:19.980 have fewer opportunities to ascend to positions of social power and therefore right fewer 1.00

01:16:27.660 occasions upon which they find themselves in a position to like ideologically defend that power

01:16:32.140 right uh it's just like you know if you are putting barefoot in the kitchen it's harder to

01:16:36.700 you know develop a robust sense of your own superiority and then you know i think we do see

01:16:41.380 that sort of turf development in like the 21st century as being sort of like a downstream side 0.99

01:16:47.200 effect of like meaningful feminists in vans but the other reason that this is happening to men

01:16:52.520 isn't just that they're in the public sphere but that they're like invested in masculinity which

01:16:56.200 is like you know in in many ways it has a supremacist logic you know i i wish these

01:17:01.280 poor guys writing in homophile magazines in Switzerland 0.99

01:17:04.120 weren't being gay. 0.94

01:17:05.900 I'm like, no, no, no, no, no.

01:17:06.840 It's that you're men.

01:17:07.760 That's the problem.

01:17:10.120 You guys have totally gotten me wrong.

01:17:12.940 I also do wonder, like, you know,

01:17:14.960 if we think about a lesbian supremacist movement,

01:17:17.080 it would almost certainly be a separatist movement

01:17:18.760 or what we have are separatist movements.

01:17:21.180 And it's just either it's a withdrawal

01:17:23.300 from the structures of the broader society,

01:17:25.900 not identification with it.

01:17:27.220 Because like, yeah, even in the 1960s,

01:17:29.580 that was like, that would have been,

01:17:30.760 or when it was when her land was written or when when helena von truskovitz wrote her book about

01:17:35.980 how men are a disease and have to have to be basically shunted aside like it's from a it's

01:17:42.340 a place of withdrawal because the idea that the levers of power and the hierarchies of society

01:17:48.740 belong to you is just such a foreign idea in that in that situation there is you know you got a

01:17:55.300 shout out Valerie Solanas for, you know, breaking the glass ceiling on genocidal logic. There's 0.94

01:18:01.380 like, we've got one. We'll leave it at that. We'll leave it. Well, we started with Andrew

01:18:05.480 Sullivan. We ended with Valerie Solanas, which honestly describes like 80% of our podcast episodes

01:18:11.380 today again. So thank you so much, Sam, for being here. Yeah. Thanks for having me on.

01:18:18.180 In Bed with the Right would like to thank the Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research

01:18:21.960 for generous support.

01:18:23.200 Jennifer Portillo

01:18:23.900 for setting up our studio.

01:18:25.660 Our theme music

01:18:26.340 is by Katie Lau.

01:18:27.360 Our producer is Megan Kalthus.

In Bed With The Right - December 04, 2023

Episode 11： Homocons

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