Can Heterosexuals Be Radicals? 

Queer persons observe heterosexuals' delusions daily, and we immediately recognize such delusions, though they are so frequent that they are rarely pointed out.  There might be an eye roll from one of us to another, or a grimace when we witness how endlessly unaware and delusional heterosexuals are gratis the heterosexual political regime in which they operate, and its fortification and legitimization of myriad delusions and frauds.  The next level of awareness up from pure delusionality is denial, which produces fraudulent behavior in heterosexuals, and we witness this daily also, including its affective behaviors, most prominent of which is a kind of desperate affectation in manner and comportment, manifested in, for example, a kind of false pleasantry combined with insult and in the most ridiculous hypermasculine vocal posture and equally ridiculous carriage in men, another common behavior of which is the abuse of women. 

Queer critiques of the left and of radicalism already exist, but what has not been asked is the palpably relevant question of whether or not heterosexuals can ever really be radicals. The reasons for asking this question are:  1)  For heterosexuals themselves, no amount of opposition they face as whatever else they might be, is targeted against a base of utter powerlessness.  2) When faced with homosexuality and queerness (i.e. reality) heterosexuals always panic.  All so-called radical heterosexuals, when faced with queerness, turn instantly into liberals, sputtering out and throwing out stupidly typical liberal-conservative ideas about liberation, like marriage and acceptance, while lacking any real radicality whatsoever, which radicality would take away every shred of power they have, reducing them to powerlessness - a taking away of all the inarticulable benefits that accrue to those who masturbate along with the rules.  

I went to apply for positions in person at a California university and was ushered right in to the offices of big heteros in chairmanships who wanted to be sure to include queer radicalism in the program, but shunt it into its own niche. " We're looking for someone who can teach queer politics," they panicked.  Not, "we're looking for someone who can teach politics."  All politics is queer, and queer only, and this is the mandate of queer radicalism.  "Politics" as taught by them, in the universities, is a lie told by incompetents. 

On this trip to the university, not only was I immediately shunted into the queer partition, even though I am perhaps most adept at teaching ancient political philosophy, and know the standard hetero interpretations and denials in this terrain backwards and forwards so that I can repeat them in order to win honors and offices.  I was also forced to witness again this panic at finding an out queer person, and thus subjected to false respect, false because it came from a position of false and undeserved power, even if many heteros have gotten good at composing themselves (they have to take deep breaths and it takes practice) in the face of queerness/reality.

There is nothing more radical to the heterosexual mind than simply being queer/gay/lesbian, so forth.  Their panic and incompetence when faced with reality is alone enough evidence to point to where real radicality lies.  We are speaking here of incompetence with regard to radicality, of foreignness to the heaven of reality.

No radical wants to be 'accepted' into the dank dungeon of  heterosexual society, the one that conservative queers vie for, queers who will sell anyone out for a little piece of false power and the dank and sad life of a disingenuous coward.  Conversely, the best that the best of the heterosexuals, those fundamentally disaffected by the regime of heterosexuality, can do is to look for modes of articulation for their plight while still enjoying the power of the regime.

The terrible and repulsive insult of straight men playing roles in movies as sensitive gay men, or of hetero men dressing effeminately while still enjoying great power over those are homosexual, is what the actual lives of heterosexuals who are "socially radical" consists in.   The heterosexual political regime of course gives great credit and accolades to "sensitive" straight men.  But radicalism means taking away every shred of credibility, respect, and decency from heterosexuality. No revolution will be complete until those who hide like worms under the dirt of the heterosexual regime are powerless.

So much for heterosexual radicality, which really means heterosexuals giving up all power and social respect and living a life of insulting, begrudging  "acceptance" and constant sexual assault.

The last time I checked, this was not even close to happening. 

With all due respect then to logic, reality , and to what is truly radical, we must answer the question this essay poses in the negative:  Heterosexuals cannot be radicals.



Barebacking Feels Like Resistance

I'm so lonely for friends, and for comrades in arms.  I've given up on the latter, but I'm still seeking the former. 

Another guy  whom I thought was just a friend, whom I tried to make a friend, now has me bent over a small stool and is asking, "Can I come inside?"  He's saying, "Tell me you want that load!"  

I'm not sure I do want it.  I mean, I'm ambivalent. I've just recently had a conversation with another  guy who had run out of options for treatment of H.I.V. disease, and who had come to the desert to die.  I don't want to acquire a virulent strain of H.I.V., or something else even temporarily painful.

But his dick is fat and hard, and I'm so lonely.  

Already, my loneliness for friends is a compromised one.  Really, as a revolutionary, one needs one's friends to also be compatriots, to be comrades, to be fellow revolutionaries.  One of the hallmarks of the revolutionary is the inability to separate personal life from political mission and from the lust for justice.  But, I've mostly given up on finding the combination of the two.  

Before he started to try to fuck me, when I thought we were going to be just friends, this guy had actually expressed some ideas that did not evidence the typical American gay man's desperate avoidance of all serious political criticism, and he made me feel the possibility of real resistance again.

But, I know that this kind of talk that he was doing often turns out to be empty talk, now, in the year "2016", a year when we are so far from queer revolution that it seems unimaginable, and yet also a year in which it has never been so necessary.  

I'm desperate.  I'm lonely.  For older gay men, the revolution is a moribund memory.  For younger ones, it is something incomprehensible, unnecessary, old-fashioned, and passé.  

Oh, how I wish I could give it up, this silly revolutionism. This awful revolutionism which makes me lonely.  But inside me it still lives.  I am just too old.  And too young.  I'm too old in that I have to carry with me the memory of strong, brave,  angry, gay men who stood up for themselves and who were highly politically conscious - the ones who served as my heroes and exemplars.  And I am too young to have experienced the revolution when it was powerful, when we had the G.LF. and the G.A.A. and Stonewall and the Black Cat and Barney's Beanery, and when nobody was a sellout. Too old to believe the false reformist and conservative narratives of gay progress, yet too young to just relish the revolution and remember it directly and fondly reminisce in my easy chair looking at my war laurels;  too young to just give up, to be content with "once upon time". 

 

How I wish I could be free from the awareness, from the desire for justice, from the knowledge, from the integrity which makes one a revolutionary.  But I cannot.  I keep acting for the revolution, alone, or essentially so, and in spite of myself.  

The revolution is forced to live in lonely, odd, and dark places, the places where one can still find danger in this crazed, counterrevolutionary society where everyone now espouses the manufactured desire for absolute safety and security.  

I do not want security.

I do not want safety. 

I do not want delusional and incompetent heteronormative "public health policy".

I want justice.  

I feel it,  I feel the unarticulated rebellion and lust for true freedom that revolution brings about in the aggressive barebacking that gay men are doing in dark places.  I feel the anger, aggression, and joy. The forgetting. The extension and enhancement of le petit mort.  Inside that unsecure, unsafe world where revolution lives.  In that world whose foundations are in love and resistance.  In my mind the old Alison Limerick song plays "Follow me down. Deep down. Where love lives."  

"Tell me you want it baby" he says. 

I want in on this conspiracy.  I take the revolution where I can get it.  Where danger, and freedom lie, where they live.  

His hard dick is starting to pulse powerfully and he's moaning, asking again to hear that I want it.

And, as I risk death, and reject safety, I stamp out the reformist, safety-mongering voices in my head, the voices of the weaklings who have destroyed the good life and revolution, by demanding safety and security - the voices of reasonable and respectable people. 

I strike one for the revolution. And I can't help it.

I'm doomed to believe in the revolution. 

I answer him.

"Give it to me!" 

HOMO SUM[1]

          Question:  Who has the power to define humanity? 

          Of late I have been thinking about two concepts related to humanity: the subhuman and the post-human.  I sometimes use the term 'subhuman' to refer to political figures like Betsy and Doug De Vos and Mike Pence, to refer to their intellectual masters, persons like Harvey Mansfied and Harry Jaffa, and to refer to anyone who attacks LGBT persons in the crass-cum-civil public and masturbatory way that such attackers do.  Despite the fact that right-wing media in the U.S. (the only media Americans are allowed to consume) legitimize these types of persons, there are many of us who know the degree of vulgarity, ignorance, backwardness, petty cowardice, and disgracefulness to humanity that these persons indicate, and these are those of us who are not fooled by the legitimization of persons for whom no term seems to capture the reality of what they are other than the term 'subhuman'. 

          I am taken of late with another term too, a term which seems to be an attempt to relate the changes in the cultural production of persons and personhood to the concept of the human, and that is the term 'post-human'.  One of the ways in which this term comes up for me as a concept is in work or discussions of (traders, speculators, financial figures, governors) who are understood to be "psychopathic".  Despite the serious shortcomings of the general construct "psychopathy"[2], its particular, described elements, elements such as egomania and calculation, seem to show as disproportionately present in some prominently powerful and influential social groups, such as financial speculators and governors.[3] 
         
        The concept of the "post-human" to me refers generally to the new type of person who is being produced by the manufactory of culture, and this person has characteristics which are described in the literature on the concept of 'psychopathy'.  This type of person is also perhaps characterized by a media and church and government manufactured attraction to crude violence and abuse.  Michael Alig and Ernie Glam address this in one of the videos in their video series 'The Peeeuw!' (their guest JJ actually brings up the concept of 'posthumanity'):

          In any case, what is being produced socially is a type of person whose humanity is called into question by terms like 'post-human'.  One could even imagine that what is posthuman could be radically liberatory or progressive, but if so, such a posthuman progression would certainly be created by queers. 

           And, there is a specifically retrograde and anti-gay element of this current distancing from humanity of which I write here.  This element can be found in, for example, attacks on queer persons which use the pejorative 'homo'.  Heterosexists who rest on power that is not earned but rather lazily fallen back upon by those who could not create their own power, that is, those who benefit from the heterosexual political regime without doing anything to earn their power, use this term to attack gay persons.

          What is missing from many discussions of changes in humanity and in society is, as usual, the queer element.  We are still buried in silence constantly, especially now that the ridiculous idea that "diversity" means that queers can be just like straights, and that creepy and extremely sexually aggressive heterosexual families can invade our physical, communal, and psychic spaces and masturbate their family values all over them.  Are such types even human?  I'd like to ask that question.

          The cultural production of persons now rolls off the assembly line persons who think that the 'gay question' is now solved, and that liberal-conservative ideas of gay progress are accurate and correct.  History is being written right over our lives with lies and even with ignorant and traitorous gay complicity in these lies.

           I would like to assert that the ideological manufactories of personhood, such as Hollywood movies and the educational system which teaches 'acceptance' and 'tolerance' and other ridiculous and pathetic ideas about gay personhood, that these manufactories are producing a post-human type who is anti-gay as well as being sociopathic in other ways. 

           When I have been called 'homo' by some creepy straight guy (and there are very few left who are not creepy), one of the things that I think is, "Yes, that is right."  I am a person in the genuine sense, a "homo", and you are not.  I am not false and cowardly and highly affectatious; I am not a cowardly adherent to power structures that I did not myself have the power or courage to either create or reject; I am not a creepy person who is constantly in a mode of public masturbation and who defines his identity at the expense of others.  In other words, I am a 'homo', a true human being in the original sense, the proper sense, in the ideal and correct sense. 

           I am not a willing and acquiescent product of the manufactories of personhood. I reject these in a violent, radical, and revolutionary way, and I fight endlessly against undeserved power, like the false, incompetent, and cowardly power to define humanity that has been acquired by the heterosexual political regime and its slavish adherents.  I do this because I am a human being in a true sense.   Homo sum.

T.S. Bandito

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[1] Latin for 'I am a human being'.

[2] For an alternative but related conception of the 'posthuman' pathology which focuses on the growth of narcissism, see the work of Michael Holloway King:  https://www.michaelhollowayking.com/blog

[3]   Noll. Thomas, et al.  'A Comparison of Professional Traders and Psychopaths in a Simulated Non-Zero Sum Game'.  Catalyst. Vol. 2, No. 2 2012, 1-13;  Silver, James. 'The Startling Accuracy of Referring to Politicians as Psychopaths'.  The Atlantic, July 31, 2012: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/07/the-startling-accuracy-of-referring-to-politicians-as-psychopaths/260517/  .   For a defense of the reification of 'psychopathy', see Hare, Robert D. 'Psychopathy.  A Clinical Construct Whose Time Has Come'.  Criminal Justice and Behavior. Vol. 23, No. 1, March 1996, 25-54.

I AM OUTRAGED THAT QUEERS ARE SURVIVING[1]

          I am out at a gay bar, and it's a convivial atmosphere.  Guys are friendly and flirtatious.  But as I look them over at some length, I don't ultimately feel too compelled by any of them, so I go to sit on the outside patio on a bench, by myself. 

          There are still guys out here, though at a comfortable distance.  The music isn't really moving me hard or fast enough (I'm a rock and roll gay boy who actually really likes hard rock and sometimes needs it), so I put on my headphones.

          It's then that I notice a guy who is so beautiful to me that he makes me upset, makes me panic a little about what to do about it - in a way that people you find really beautiful and attractive can do.

          I'm upset because I don't know how to react to him, and I'm flummoxed by his offensive beauty - offensive because I was doing just fine with my distance and my music and my watching, and yet now I feel consternation over what to do about this beautiful guy I've seen.  What would I or could I even do with him?  Lie down next to him and just behold him?  He had the kind of beauty that makes the desire for sex move into a subordinate position to the desire just to be in his aura - to merely be near or with him.

          I go through the vacillations of trying not to look/looking, trying to forget about him/thinking only of him, deciding to try/deciding not to try.  During one of my failed attempts to not look, he catches my eye, and smiles in a way that shows marked notice and interest.  I'm shocked and horrified and panicked.

          Now the stakes are higher, and I'm more upset and flummoxed than ever.  What the hell and fuck to do now?  I'm nervous.

          He is dark.  He has black eyes and black hair.  Thick and long eyelashes.  An exquisite face with a small but elegant nose and incredible cheek bones. His eyes are both extremely dark and extremely alive and bright, but without any luridness at all, and his bearing shows what seems to be a confidence and poise in the bearing of great beauty. His hair is thick and wavy. He's dressed a bit dorkily, and I'm not sure how much awareness he has of this. He's wearing long shorts and cream colored socks that are of medium height.  He's muscular and a bit hairy in certain places, but with no signs whatsoever of the common gym or sculpted looks or of the "bear" look.  He has a naturally tight body in the manner of a foreigner and of a young man, and not the overfed look of an American in his second youth, like most of the guys here. I finally decide that his socks must not be contrived, because he otherwise shows no signs whatsoever of contrivance.

          I look.

 He looks, and smiles easily.

   I look away.

     I look back.

      He looks. 

  His friend sits down near me and then he himself moves closer.

             He speaks to me. 

          [Happiness, Excitement, Possibility, and Panic all enter from stage left and fulminate]

My expectation is something like that his life and thoughts will consist of things befitting great beauty as a variety of greatness, the kind of thoughts and living one reads about in ancient literature - the kind of thoughts that one should be able to impute to someone who possesses great beauty.

So I am surprised when, after his lengthy asking about me, I get to ask him about himself and hear his response.  I ask him what motivates him, what excites him, what gets his motor going these days. 

He tells that he is merely surviving. 

He has a mundane job, lives in the Valley, and is merely surviving. He actually uses the word 'surviving'.   

I have told him that I am out that night because I did not want to go back to where I am staying - where I am merely staying.  And that I came out because, being in survival mode, I had not wanted to go sleep with the handful of people with whom I could trade sex for comfort and camaraderie, for a place to sleep, for weed.      

He told me that he understood completely and that he had recently passed out of such a phase, and was holding on to his slightly improved state of survival.  He seemed terrified of going back to that state that I was in, and yet, for him, where he was now was clearly still only just surviving.

 It became evident in talking to him that I was hearing what I had heard many times from honest L.G.B.T. persons  - that they had ceased to dare to dream after being forced into survival mode for a rather long time.  This ceasing to do anything but place cautious stock in survival was then too familiar, and also personal. When people ask me how I am doing I often answer that I am surviving, since I am not one who favors either dishonesty or small talk, and who thus prefers honest answers, even if they interrupt the requisite politenesses that people want to get through quickly in any conversation.

But in this boy, with his great beauty, beauty that one might write about, beauty that made me think that he could be a king or a god, there was, so incongruously, a depressed demeanor that the people often call 'realistic', one that is a particular cohort of L.G.B.T. persons now, despite heteros' labeling of us as 'fabulous'. 

We are somewhere between fifty and sixty per cent of the homeless in the United States, and we have lost so much of our independence and freedom.  

Being an older queen, I can actually remember the 80's.  "In the late 80's, all the young gay guys that I knew had their own apartments, a car, and enough money and freedom to go out to dinner once or twice a week and to go on at least short vacations pretty frequently", I am saying to my friend one day. He concurs, saying that he remembers this too.  Today though, I know almost no gay guys in their twenties who have such means or freedom or independence.

This is to leave aside the social and political facts of our lives.  And, no one wants to mention the needs of gay men. How we have lost our sexual freedom and independence, and thus free determination of even our sexual, romantic relationships and friendships.  How our needs are not the same as those of straights, and how our economic and social abuse and degradation are related. 

So many of us are in survival mode, deprived of independence and of the freedom to develop our own lives and communities,  and I am enraged by this.  Outraged.  The words of Dorothy Allison run through me, and I repeat them often and everywhere.  She wrote better of this problem than I, and wrote in an earlier time, wrote to us as queer persons "I need you to do more than survive."[2]   

I am outraged at the lost potential of queer persons.  I define oppression in somewhat the way that Terry Eagleton defined it[3], as the forced loss of development of possibility and potential. 

The beauty of this boy bespoke a potential that his resignation seemed to confirm had been there but had been relegated to the shadows by his forced entry into survival mode. 

Beauty's potential, intelligence's potential, the creation of culture and new social forms, voluptuous living:  all of these, are not really possible under the heterosexual political regime, which speaks out a discourse of "gay-friendliness"[4] and of "progress"[5] for queers, when all the while our potential and our possibility ends up in the gray, depressed, tiring and deflating world of economic survival.  Survival is worse for us because we're not the prosaic ones. We're not the ones who make life dull and stupid.  We are not trying to define or prove ourselves at others' expense.   We are not sexually assaulting everyone publicly with our fascist "family values" fetishism, or with our desperate, hysterical, sexually aggressive and assaultive sanctification of children. We are not somehow at the same time delusional and insipid.   

We are not the common fodder and exudate of the heterosexual political regime. 

We are not made for survival.

We are capable of living so many possibilities that are buried under the mode of life that surviving under this regime is. 

It felt to me like this boy's beauty deserved better.  It feels to me like so much queer extraordinariness deserves better.

Forgive me as a corny old queen with a memory of a time when queer life was not about survival, and for being one who waxes nostalgic about this. 

But, if I am allowed to speak as such, I would like to claim that we should no longer talk so much about being "out" but rather we should speak about survival, but that if  we speak of being "out" we speak only of it with its proper suffix appended, and thus speak only of outrage.

Action Jackson

( My heartfelt thanks to T.S. Bandito for inviting me to be a guest blogger)

         

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[1] This blog post is by guest blogger Action Jackson.

[2] Dotz Allison, 'Survival is the Least of My Desires'

[3] Eagleton, Terry.  Ideology (Don't make me go find the page number and the other bibliographic stuff  yet; or do make me go find it, so this can get published).

[4] Gay Friendliness:  1.  A mode of the invasion of gay spaces by heterosexuals  2. The euphemism which is intended to disguise this invasion.    (These definitions from the Gay Dictionary).

[5] Progress here means the supposedly improved ability to live without being attacked so long as we live and act like conservative or commonplace heterosexuals.