DFW or DeLillo in his prime could write a great novel about Trump, although I’m not quite sure how you’d swing it. Re: fascism (of whose or of what kind I’ll leave to you to decide) I’m always thinking that someone should write the American equivalent of the sea of fertility, some abyssal nihilist account of the decay of the national angel through disastrous reincarnations from upwardly mobile citizen-prince in the 20th century to gooning groyper in our time.
always a delight to be discussed--I wouldn't posit gay-queer as a binary... as I have written on Substack in that piece complaining about Benjamin Moser, 'queer' has multiple meanings, one of which names the inherent uncanniness of sexuality per se in the way that it resists both our normative moral frameworks and our attempts to corral its slippery energies into cohering around even what we might take to be an anti-normative oppositional identity. In that sense Lawrence and Forster, for example, could be said to be both queer (exploring what's beyond, forbidden, excessive, chthonic, utopian, etc in sexuality) and trying to unqueer it (as prophets, like Whitman and Carpenter as you astutely say, of a new sexual order, liberated, happy, and so on)... it might be indeed interesting to think more about those tensions in their works and the similarities of the authors with the question of their 'sexual identity' (homo/heterosexuality) suspended (along with questions about, say, gender, feminism, etc, in their work), or at least not given analytic priority, focusing on their metaphysics of 'sex' alone to see more how they're playing the multiple and somewhat contradictory roles inherited from the 19th sex-reformers of both rebels and restorers... (Interestingly Lawrence was a big inspiration for gay writer/activist Larry Kramer who wrote the screenplay for Women in Love--which for me is a dreadful movie that reveals Lawrence to be, most of the time, a sort of drearily moralizing Ken Russell--but mileages will vary!)
As to Auden, well, he's homosexual but not gay in the sense of gay literature--his openly gay verse is scant and hardly circulated, although he was part of a closeted network and promoted other such authors such as a young Ashbery (or as Paul Franz has recommended to me, the brilliant Alan Ansen). Wilde too was a married man with children. They were neither of them gay in the contemporary sense, although of course they inspired much of its sensibility (even as much of it is also constructed in opposition to their elitist, Paterian, Romish, sneering, tinkering, arch Great Uncle Arthur silliness)... Lawrence is perhaps closer, backward from Whitman and forward to Kramer, to the modern gay spirit, if we want to keep turning the labels inside-out.
At any rate, it's not a question of setting 'queer' up against 'gay' or anything else. 'Queer' being what it is, it is not capable of being instantiated in an identity, author, text, tendency, etc, except in a self-negating ironic way (what has happened with institutional and academic queerness). Everyone, as a conditional of being a sexual (that is, psychic) agent is queer; no one, as the bearer of any cohrently avowable position, is queer. It oughn't to be a question--which is to say it often is one--of finding that this or that author is excitingly or disturbingly 'queer' in opposition to something 'normative' or 'homonormative', only of tracing, hopefully with the pleasure of wonder along with the occasional dizzy spells of bewildered horror, how such queer stuff as sexuality grounds and undoes the selves, roles, orders etc we cannot make, maintain, or transmit out of anything else...
You have finally worn me down! For months I have been hovering outside the paywall. Your teasers about Major Arcana push all my buttons...it sounds like exactly the sort of book I would love, but I've been afraid to commit, for fear I wouldn't be able to keep pace with your releases. but now that the book is done and published, the pressure is off. I'm still outside your paywall, but I've ordered my copy.
DFW or DeLillo in his prime could write a great novel about Trump, although I’m not quite sure how you’d swing it. Re: fascism (of whose or of what kind I’ll leave to you to decide) I’m always thinking that someone should write the American equivalent of the sea of fertility, some abyssal nihilist account of the decay of the national angel through disastrous reincarnations from upwardly mobile citizen-prince in the 20th century to gooning groyper in our time.
always a delight to be discussed--I wouldn't posit gay-queer as a binary... as I have written on Substack in that piece complaining about Benjamin Moser, 'queer' has multiple meanings, one of which names the inherent uncanniness of sexuality per se in the way that it resists both our normative moral frameworks and our attempts to corral its slippery energies into cohering around even what we might take to be an anti-normative oppositional identity. In that sense Lawrence and Forster, for example, could be said to be both queer (exploring what's beyond, forbidden, excessive, chthonic, utopian, etc in sexuality) and trying to unqueer it (as prophets, like Whitman and Carpenter as you astutely say, of a new sexual order, liberated, happy, and so on)... it might be indeed interesting to think more about those tensions in their works and the similarities of the authors with the question of their 'sexual identity' (homo/heterosexuality) suspended (along with questions about, say, gender, feminism, etc, in their work), or at least not given analytic priority, focusing on their metaphysics of 'sex' alone to see more how they're playing the multiple and somewhat contradictory roles inherited from the 19th sex-reformers of both rebels and restorers... (Interestingly Lawrence was a big inspiration for gay writer/activist Larry Kramer who wrote the screenplay for Women in Love--which for me is a dreadful movie that reveals Lawrence to be, most of the time, a sort of drearily moralizing Ken Russell--but mileages will vary!)
As to Auden, well, he's homosexual but not gay in the sense of gay literature--his openly gay verse is scant and hardly circulated, although he was part of a closeted network and promoted other such authors such as a young Ashbery (or as Paul Franz has recommended to me, the brilliant Alan Ansen). Wilde too was a married man with children. They were neither of them gay in the contemporary sense, although of course they inspired much of its sensibility (even as much of it is also constructed in opposition to their elitist, Paterian, Romish, sneering, tinkering, arch Great Uncle Arthur silliness)... Lawrence is perhaps closer, backward from Whitman and forward to Kramer, to the modern gay spirit, if we want to keep turning the labels inside-out.
At any rate, it's not a question of setting 'queer' up against 'gay' or anything else. 'Queer' being what it is, it is not capable of being instantiated in an identity, author, text, tendency, etc, except in a self-negating ironic way (what has happened with institutional and academic queerness). Everyone, as a conditional of being a sexual (that is, psychic) agent is queer; no one, as the bearer of any cohrently avowable position, is queer. It oughn't to be a question--which is to say it often is one--of finding that this or that author is excitingly or disturbingly 'queer' in opposition to something 'normative' or 'homonormative', only of tracing, hopefully with the pleasure of wonder along with the occasional dizzy spells of bewildered horror, how such queer stuff as sexuality grounds and undoes the selves, roles, orders etc we cannot make, maintain, or transmit out of anything else...
You have finally worn me down! For months I have been hovering outside the paywall. Your teasers about Major Arcana push all my buttons...it sounds like exactly the sort of book I would love, but I've been afraid to commit, for fear I wouldn't be able to keep pace with your releases. but now that the book is done and published, the pressure is off. I'm still outside your paywall, but I've ordered my copy.