From the Concepts Series

On the Colonization of Concepts:

Totalitarianism

Hannah Arendt, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, attempts to replace all democracy, including its superior forms, with liberal democracy, and she does this by building up a poor argument that has become a typical one, that the Nazi regime and the 'Stalin regime' can be grouped together as 'totalitarian', as despotic and dictatorial.

This argument is, among other things, subjectible to skepticism from those who feel the oppressions and falsities of liberal democracy.

Notwithstanding its pomposity and success, Arendt's theory of 'totalitarianism' with regard to the Soviet Union is really a reaction to Stalin's rightly saying 'no' to Zionism. One thing we can say is that, ironically, the reactions to Stalin's saying 'no' to Zionism have now themselves become the forces undermining liberal democracy from the anti-democratic direction. But that is another story.

And, Arendt's conflation of regime types and her anti-Stalinism are beside the point of the real narrative of a detrimental totality anyway.

I say 'detrimental' totality because totality itself is not necessarily detrimental but can actually be necessary and valuable to liberation and justice.

If we stick for a moment to the idea of a detrimental totality however, that is, to the idea of a detrimental totalitarianism, we should implicate much more correctly than the 'mass man' of totalitarian theory the heterosexual political regime and its adherents, and thereby perhaps rescue the term from its origins in Carl Schmitt, himself an anti-liberal loved by liberals, and thusly help bring the term 'totalitarianism' into a more correct and less mendacious narrative.

Why should right-wing heterosexuals like Arendt and Schmitt have anything to do with the idea of totalitarianism when they have so little to do with reality?

These fatuous oafs of heteronormativity who portray themselves as clever neologists sail along in boats that are false concepts riding over seas of false discourses.

However much this is the case, and all LGBT/Queer recognize the falsity of dominant discourses, the term 'totalitarianism' is valid in the heterosexual discourse at least in its abstraction and neutralization, in its general idea of something all-encompassing.

We can rescue, co-opt, and colonize the term and idea however, by first merely bringing it from irreality and misdescription into reality, into the reality of the totalizing nature of heteronormative desire.

Heterosexist desire is founded on the obviously false importance, false centrality, false necessity, and absurd valuation of heterosexual desire. This desire however, is as totalizing as it is false: it demands and commands that all of reality, and certainly all of desire, be forced into its falsity. All queers know this absurdity, the absurdity of living under something both falsely valued and total.

Even, however, if heteronormative desire is total, its forms and styles are not constant. Heterosexuals can jump on the bandwagons of 'free love' or 'marriage and family' as forms of heterosexuality without changing at all the totalizing nature of the regime of falsity that heterosexuality is.

Although Stalin did not "fabricate a structureless mass" as Arendt falsely claims (he merely stood up to Zionism, and this was outrageous to Zionists), the heterosexual regime, an actual structureless mass, keeps its power over, above, and beyond all of its specific iterations ("gay friendliness", "the extended family", "swinging", "a man and a woman"), and thus more properly fits the ideas of totality and totalitarianism. Its structurelessness lies in its total nature.

Heterosexual desire is total.

Under its totalitarian regime, queerness can only serve as its amusement, appendage, annoyance, or sometimes, when heterosexuals get either bored or charitable, as its neutralized challenge.

Totalitarianism is, as a concept, falsely conceived and falsely taught in universities far and wide in its Arendtian description. Its reality is buried in the actual and current totality itself, the totality that is the heterosexual political regime (of force, abuse, rule over, fraud, and other traditional political forms).

This is not an apology for Stalin, despite its having recently come to light that Stalin was involved in homosexual love triangles and in cross-dressing. It is rather more that we make outrageous demands of the heteroesexual regime.  These demands are not actually outrageous, but only seem so, because they, like everything else, are comprehended within a false reality of understanding.  

With that all in mind,  I demand that 'totalitarianism' be used henceforth in its proper form, as a description of the political regime that enforces heterosexual desire.

 

Thanks to Shifty, Lefty, and Scheistée De Leon for their comments and input on this blog entry. 

A Brief Note on American History

There is no real evidence that Increase Mather was heterosexual.  

Confessions of Old Hessians

A mantra of my generation was 'rock and roll will never die', also expressed as 'long live rock and roll' and otherwise.  But now it seems that rock and roll has died, in that it does not have the cachet or popularity it once did. 

I think though, that rock and roll has been connected to 'coolness', and that coolness, originally a necessary posture of the sensitive and honest person, has died.  In the ridiculous conservative culture that we now live in in the United States, no one is really cool anymore.  Ridiculously cheesy people only knock off coolness, is the fact of the matter.

Those who adopted rock and roll as a motif and spiritual center have always been in some important sense outsiders, and yet, gay males, as outsiders par excellence, seem to have adopted rock and roll spiritually and musically and culturally less so than straight males, and I can only begin to wonder why this is so.  When I look at gay males who are into rock and roll, I find that I remember many who seemed especially troubled.  But there are so many gay males who are quite troubled  but nevertheless did not adopt rock and roll as a spiritual center and did not have rock and roll as a strong musical preference. And so I feel that I might reject any thesis about gay rockers that starts from the premise of our being generally more troubled than other gay males.  So what is it about gay men and rock and roll?  I mean, why is the gay rocker such as myself, so solitary?  I suppose it is the case that even straight guys who like rock and roll are in the minority - I mean straight guys who really like rock and roll and have always had rock and roll music as a significant part of their music collections and their lives. 

Has gay preference been dictated too much by weak disc jockeys at gay clubs, who, everyone seems to complain, never play music that gay guys like? Though gay bar music is recognizable and predictable and categorizable, all gay guys I speak to claim not to really like what is played at the gay clubs (and by clubs I mean bars also) and yet this unwanted music continues to get played, and almost always at the expense of rock and roll.  This could be filed under the topic of  how a false gay culture is fabricated by media and upheld by non-critical and unvigilant (i.e. unaware and uneducated) gay guys. 

In any case, despite the lack of prevalence of the taste for rock and roll, there ARE plenty of gay rockers out there.  And in some ways the gay rock culture has flourished even as coolness, its progenitor and concomitance, was dying. 

The gay presence in the rock and roll world itself received a boost when my friend Bill, in the late 1990's wrote a letter to Metal Maniacs magazine sizing up and cutting down the heterosexism and homophobia in the rock world, especially in the worlds of metal and death rock. Bill pointed out how pathetic and weak the rockers who relied on the disparagement of LGBT persons to make themselves seem right, strong, or cool, were.   The letter was valuable, but the flood of positive responses it received from across the world was even more valuable, and also uplifting.  The responses were overwhelmingly positive, and many of them were from males who identified as heterosexual. This letter was a watershed in the history of rock and roll queerness.

Another huge boost to the gay rock and roll world, and perhaps its biggest ever, came when Rob Halford, the singer and front man for the godband of metal, Judas Priest, came out as gay. Judas Priest had been, by widespread agreement, the most liked and most emblematic and iconic band of metal music, and thus a focus and spiritual center of rock and roll machismo. Overnight, rock and roll sensibility and spirituality had proved itself to have a queer core.

I think that the hard rock scene has always been homoerotic, and has always been more equalizing than most non-rockers think.  It has also been an early bearer of transgenderism.  My own experiences in the rock scene bear this out.  While there was definitely some alienation as gay man, there was also a greater feeling of equality than in many other scenes. 

In the pit at a Motorhead show in Philadelphia, I was cared for by lots of guys each time I would get banged to the floor by the wild strength being exercised there. Guys who all seemed bigger than I somehow would swoop me up from the floor and hold me for a second from behind, asking if I was alright. They would sometimes protect me from a coming blow in the form of the freight train like forward movement of a group of wayward pit monsters.  The same in the pit at Napalm Death. The same at a Dark Funeral concert.  Once at a Gwar show, I entered the pit dressed as a blue fairy, wearing blue panty hose and wings made of nylon and metal. That show was rough, with one of the members of the band even stopping the show at one point to tell people in the audience to calm down, but I still felt less alienated there than I did later at a gay club frequented by victims of the fashion industry.  And when I went out to a very straight rock and roll bar in Manhattan dressed in trashy hardrock drag[1], the biggest problem I had was dealing with the jealousy of all of the rough-and-tumble "straight" guys trying to compete to pick up on me and buy me a drink.

Now, to take this examination of rock and roll back up to the theme of the blog, I often ask myself the  question whether rock and roll is revolutionary or reactionary.  The question has been asked of punk too, as a sub-genre of rock and roll.  I think that 'culture' for lack of a better term, overall, cannot be pegged as revolutionary or reactionary, but that this may be changing since some theorists are critiquing the use of the concept of culture in a way that sees the very concept as reactionary, or as used to support reactionary ideas. 

Whether or not we can specify how much a part of a culture or a subculture is revolutionary, I know that rock and roll has at least one element of revolution and that is its anger.  Rock and roll expresses anger in rebellion in general, and not just a happy complacence or rah rahism.   What were the jocks and rah rahs supporting anyway, and what was it that rock and roll was against when it stood against the jocks and rah rahs?    Rock and roll was against the establishment, and the establishment was against the revolution. 

 And, I remember rock and roll from a time when it was ok and good to be angry and loud and defiant and to dress in black, but more importantly, I remember when one's look and attitude and even what one listened to helped to define one politically, and being against the establishment is, in the end, a political position.

Within our own rainbow community (I hate the rainbow flag by the way), we have our own establishment.

According to this rainbow establishment, there are many things that characterize the community of queers - of gays, bisexuals, lesbians, and trans persons, but one of them is not anger. Even though Stonewall was an angry revolutionary uprising, and not respectable or of the establishment, establishment queers rest on its anger to advocate non-angry approaches and non-violence and a whole litany of ineffective and community-perverting approaches to justice. 

Rock and roll reminds me, or, it is for me, the music of the reminder that this is a struggle, and that the goal of queerness is to overthrow the heterosexual political regime and to radically change society, and not to assimilate into it and be accepted. 

I think that we need to queer up the rock scene and subculture even more, but also that rock and roll's historical character and sound and tempo and culture should queer up the gay community itself, or at least, those of us with ears to hear its musical and lyrical message of rebellion.

For me the interpretation of rock and roll was always queer.  I'm not very interested in heterosexism in rock and roll or outside of it.  When I hear the crescendo of a rock and roll riff, I thank its creators for getting me hyped ready for queer revolutionary action.  All of the Christian-residual establishmentarianism and rah rahism are what I know is not real when I hear good rock music.  Rock and rollers make, as Judas Priest wrote about, a 'deal with the devil'.   And the devil is not on the side of the establishment. 

I'm here I'm queer; I have the love and anger that revolution requires.

Work me, Miss Halford!

---

[1]   Note:   I was not 'passable'.

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

---

[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.