Episode Details

Episode Reading List:

* From Queer to Gay to Queer, James Kirchick

* How Hannah Arendt’s Zionism Helped Create American Gay Identity, Blake Smith

* When the Pope Hits Your Eye Like a Big Pizza Pie, That’s Ahmari, James Kirchick

* Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Big Fat Nonbinary Mistake, Blake Smith

* Are Conservatives the New Queers?, Blake Smith

* Wesley Yang, The Souls of Yellow Folk, John Pistelli

I have a working hypothesis that no one has suffered a more dramatic decline in a certain kind of social status, as a result of changes in left-liberal elite culture and politics, than white gay men. Less than a decade ago they were at the vanguard of social progress, having led a gay rights movement that achieved an extraordinary series of legal, political, and cultural victories. Now they're perceived as basically indistinguishable, within certain left-liberal spaces, from straight white men. In some activist circles they may be even more suspect, since they're competing for leadership roles and narrative centrality where straight men wouldn't presume (or particularly desire) to tread. 

My hypothesis, if it's accurate, is interesting on its own terms, as part of a much longer history in America of ethnic and other minority groups rising and falling in relative cultural, intellectual, and literary status. It's also interesting, however, for what it tells us about the recent evolution of left and liberal politics, as they've shifted and reshaped themselves in reaction to both great victories, like the legalization of gay marriage, and to depressingly intractable problems like the persistent racial gaps in wealth, health, incarceration, and crime.

I’m less interested in the justice or injustice of this shift in standing (though I’m somewhat interested) than I am in the facts of it and its implications. Why has it happened? What does it feel like for the people who have experienced it? What are its implications? Will there be a backlash? To assist me in thinking through what it all means, I invited to the podcast Blake Smith and Jamie Kirchick. 

Jamie is a columnist for Tablet magazine, a writer at large for Air Mail, and the author of last year’s New York Times bestseller, Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington. He has long been an outspoken critic of some sectors of the gay left and what he perceives of as their desire to subordinate the project of achieving full civic and political equality for gay people to a more radical, revolutionary project to tear down conventional bourgeois ideas of gender, sexuality, marriage, family, monogamy, and identity. In a recent essay in Liberties, “From Queer to Gay to Queer,” Jamie