Homosexual, Gay, Queer (and a soupçon of porn)

About this episode

Blake Smith discusses his book-in-progress on Michael Denneny and the complexities of gay cultural identity.

My frequent conversation partner Blake Smith is back on the pod today to talk about his book-in-progress on the pioneering gay editor Michael Denneny as well as a related essay, “ For the Love of the Gay World, ” just published in a new anthology . In both endeavors, I think, he’s doing some version of the same thing, which is to make his case, that gay men briefly had, then lost, but could have again a coherent, self-reflective cultural and intellectual world by and for themselves. As he writes: Part of what the playwright Larry Kramer called, two decades ago, the tragedy of today’s gays is that in order to begin a potentially generative, or productively divisive, conversation about the state of male homosexuality (its culture and politics, its problems and affordances) we must undergo an ordeal of conceptual and historical clarification. Without doing so, we are likely to miss the real objects of our agreement and disagreement, wasting time with opinions expressed in each interlocutor’s jumble of inherited, half-comprehended categories. It is hard for gays to talk sensibly to each other about where we are and how we got here; the ideas by which we understand that ‘we’ and its…

People in this episode

Host: Daniel Oppenheimer

Guest: Blake Smith

Topics covered

• gay culture
• homosexuality
• intellectual discourse
• cultural history
• queer identity

Keywords

• gay men
• cultural world
• intellectual world
• homosexuality
• cultural discourse

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