Lord of the Flies

I have just finished reading Lord of the Flies because progressives often hold it up as a counterweight to Atlas Shrugged, with the added advantage of being an order of magnitude shorter. A plane crash that kills the adults strands a group of preteen British boys on an island, leaving the boys to work out how to govern themselves. The boys' descent into savagery on the island supposedly shows people's need for rules. To me, however, it says more about preteen boys' need for rules.

The book also illustrates an issue that I have yet to see advocates of bigger government address. The boys on the island are left to their own devices to enact and enforce the very rules that they need in order to behave properly and are thus stuck with the paradox of democratic statism that I noted earlier elsewhere, namely, that the same people who cannot run their own lives must somehow run one another's. In-universe, the boys can hope for grownups to arrive on the island and make the needed rules, but in the real world, we cannot.

Book review: Fantasyland

I have just finished Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History, whose title could use a few more colons. The thesis is that "what’s happening in our country today—this post-factual, 'fake news' moment we’re all living through—is not something new, but rather the ultimate expression of our national character."

The author mostly at least goes through the motions of being evenhanded, and he gives the academic left a good shellacking, but he does show biases now and then. For example, he describes the rise of suburbia without mentioning the role of the federal government in promoting either suburban sprawl or suburban racial segregation. Similarly, he discusses the fantasy aspects of new sports stadiums designed to look old and of Disneyfied urban neighborhoods but never even mentions the pervasive fantasy that government financing of such things makes economic sense. Also, some views, particularly on religion, have always been untenable for reasons little better than "because I say so." I find that grating even on subjects on which I otherwise agree with him.

Still, it's true that the post-fact world is nothing new; anyone who has tried to argue with I-feel-it-in-my-heart politically correct people can tell you that. He also says something that I've been saying for ages, namely, that postmodernists and their ilk were useful idiots for creationists and their ilk.

Washington, D.C., and cutting-edge art

In discussing Melissa Chiu's new role as director of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, The New York Times stays true to form and characterizes Washington, D.C., as "staid"; "focused on the traditional, sometimes staid, vocabulary of civic monuments [and unwilling] to embrace a more risk-taking approach"; and "a tough place to introduce unconventional ideas," as opposed to New York, which it calls "a well of contemporary creativity worth tracking." Yet a city's aesthetic tastes are necessarily a macroscopic averaging of those of the people in it, and a city known chiefly as a seat of government tends to attract a different sort of person from one of the world's leading centers of commerce. This point seems lost on the government-worshipers at New York Times.

Someone actually said this: Robert Caro on Manhattan's bookstore desert

We read in this New York Times article that rising rents in some of America's richest neighborhoods, as well as new business models such as online shopping, are driving booksellers out of Manhattan. At least one person has already called for government to step in and do something:

“Sometimes I feel as if I’m working in a field that’s disappearing right under my feet,” said the biographer and historian Robert Caro, who is a lifelong New Yorker.

* * *

“How can Manhattan be a cultural or literary center of the world when the number of bookstores has become so insignificant?” he asked. “You really say, has nobody in city government ever considered this and what can be done about it?”

I hope not; do we need subsidized rents for bookstores on Fifth Avenue? Nonetheless, I imagine that someone in city government has considered it. One of the first things that we learned in law school is "Not every bummer is a tort," but in today's political climate, every bummer is a call for government action.

But I'm not mainstream.

Just as hipsters vehemently deny being hipsters, but still end up in the skinny-jeans-wearing herd, many gay people love to express their disdain for mainstream gay male culture — and heaven knows it has its faults — while partaking of it anyway. In fact, claiming to have distanced oneself from mainstream gay male culture is increasingly part of mainstream gay culture. Moreover, I'm sure we all know people who claim not to be gay clichés while actually being some of the biggest gay clichés around. Yet the aspect of mainstream queer culture that most badly needs to be challenged — political correctness, with its anti-rationalism, groupthink, and shocking resemblance to the religious right — gets a free pass.

My latest letter to the editor

... is the last one here. There is also one by William Donohue, whining about Catholic-bashing. Poor baby.

When the guardians of moral purity outfox themselves (2)

In discussing two flaps over the work of David Wojnarowicz, in 1990 and regarding the National Portrait Gallery Today, New York Times art critic Holland Cotter writes:

One big change from 1990, however, is the nearly universal presence of the Internet. Word of the self-censorship instantly spread, and the video itself, titled “A Fire in My Belly,” went viral, turning up on a number of Web sites, including YouTube. Untold numbers of people could now see something that, without the publicity generated by the dispute, they never would have known existed.

Yes and no. It's undeniably true that the ubiquity of the Internet doesn't help the guardians of right-wing political correctness, and it's also undeniably true that they deserve the credit for making Mr. Wojnarowicz's name a household word. On the other hand, such epic self-pwnage didn't start in the Internet age; bishops railing against Sarah Bernhardt gave her invaluable publicity.

But it's not political correctness when I do it!

It's a good thing we have politically incorrect conservative stalwarts like Catholic League president William Donohue to protect us from the politically correct menace. Otherwise, the politically correct whiners, appointing themselves to be the thought police, would censor art that violates their supposed right not to be offended and would even call such art "hate speech." On second thought, given the recent flap over an exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery, maybe he isn't the best example.

Also, you'd think that the guardians of conservative political correctness (not that there's any such thing, of course) would have learned by now not to give free publicity to what they oppose. They have given huge boosts to the popularity of works by Robert Mapplethorpe and Chris Ofili, among others.

Finally, the Transformer Gallery has announced that it will show the offending piece. To me this indicates that preserving freedom of expression involves less government management of the arts, not more.

First-Friday gallery openings

Many towns have regular evenings — First Friday, Third Thursday, Miscellaneous Mondays — when art galleries stay open late. In Dupont Circle's gallery scene, this event tends to turn into a dating scene for people who wish to appear sophisticated. Yet it's hard to appear sophisticated when you simply elbow your way to the back to get some wine and then stand around talking with your back to the art. The artists are often happy to talk to me simply because I actually pay at least as much attention to the art as to socializing.

The latest transmission from The Blade to earth (2)

Here we go again. This article in The Washington Blade reads less like responsible journalism than like some sort of conservative-P.C. attack piece against gay men. The article opens:

Despite booming sales of the iPad, Kindle and other digital book readers, some see a disturbing trend among gay men: We are reading fewer books today than previous generations.

Yes, that's it exactly: Gay men, and only gay men, are reading fewer books. As evidence, the article cites the closure of gay bookstores. That phenomenon couldn't possibly have anything to do with the increased space given to queer literature in mainstream bookstores. Also, we know that it's completely gay men's fault because lesbian bookstores like Lammas have ... um, never mind.

Our workout routines, ourselves

The joke used to go that gym is gay church. In that case, it has gone from being a C&E social-club church to being a cult. In both talking to other gay men and reading online profiles, I notice increasingly that working out is not just something that many gay men do, as has long been the case, but instead evidently at or the near the core of their self-definition. Many religious leaders would be elated to see their parishioners give such a central place in their lives to their god or gods.

Once, when I noticed a handsome, very muscular man sizing me up, and I finally got the nerve to talk to him, I tried unsuccessfully to get him to talk about anything except his workout routine. While one person does not make a trend, my experiences with other gay men lead me to believe that he is far from unique.

Gay men used to work out to be attractive to other men. After all, being gay men, we cannot simply put on an expensive watch to get a date. Nonetheless, I suppose that eventually, gay men will start hooking up just so that they will have workout partners. Also, leave it to gay men to develop a sexual fetish for forced workouts (no, really -- do a search for it).

On this issue, the queer theorists, with their love of speculation over observation, have gotten it spectacularly wrong. They often advance arguments -- necessarily convoluted and necessarily untouched by empirical reality -- that only upper-class men have the time and resources to devote to working out. If so, an awful lot of gay men of my acquaintance will be surprised to learn that they are upper-class. What is left of a rule in the face of so much counter-evidence?

Full disclosure: Yes, I exercise. I do so because my doctor said that I needed to lose weight. It is not gay church for me.

Queer stock characters that need to be retired

• The guy who finds the great love of his life, dumps him for no reason at all, and then whines about inability to find the great love of his life. This goes double if the character proceeds to be more virtuous than thou to the other characters.
• Someone who is more virtuous than thou, only to be revealed as a hypocrite. We got it the first 950 times.
• A troll with no redeeming characteristics whatsoever. Why couldn't the not so attractive guy be a leading local LGBT activist or the like?
• Christians, unless either experience or research qualifies you to say something about Christians or Christianity.
• The Magical Negro and the Magical Negro's buddies, the Magical Lesbian and the Magical Jew.
• A lesbian who is a professor in the humanities, especially women's studies. Just to spice things up, why not have a lesbian physics professor now and then? Besides, it's not as though all gay men were bricklayers.
• A gay man who, in some completely unexplained way, has limitless financial resources.

More straight-washing from The Washington Post

In an otherwise interesting article in The Washington Post, the author limits the subject of eroticism in art to "men wanting to look at naked women" and even limits discussion of such thoroughly homoeroticized images as the martyrdom of St. Sebastian to their effects on heterosexual viewers. Yet homoeroticism in art goes back for millennia. How anyone can view such works as Ercole e Caco and not see homoeroticism, except through willful ignorance, is beyond me.

The irony! It burns! (3) Ayn Rand and conservatives

Ayn Rand is in the news again, as conservatives increasingly quote her. They seem to overlook that Rand, a militant atheist who was pro-choice on abortion, hated theocratic social conservatism as much as she hated the moochers and looters. They also overlook the contradiction in asserting that morality has no basis apart from God and then appealing to Rand's moral philosophy.

Planning on writing a science-fiction novel?

If you are, please take this simple quiz to determine whether you should proceed.

1. Does the society in your novel have a single polity, namely, a galactic empire?
2. Does it pretty much go without saying that the occupant of the throne of that empire is always an emperor and never an empress regnant?
3. Despite having trillions of subjects, does the emperor find the time to involve himself directly in the nitty-gritty of those subjects' lives?
4. Even though the galactic empire is, well, galactic, are all of its subjects human?
5. Do the planets not differ significantly from places that one might find on Earth in terms of climate, atmosphere, and gravity?
6. As an alternative to the galactic empire, are there multiple worlds, each with a single government, language, and religion?
7. Is Earth called Terra?
8. Do the planets have names, while the stars that they orbit are anonymous?
9. Is the whole point of your novel to express a seventies sentiment about being kind to the environment or about the evils of capitalism or of the Catholic Church?
10. Do you neither know nor care about this thing called "human nature"?
11. Has the society in your novel seen less social change over ten millennia than my rather provincial home town has in the past forty years?

How to score: If you answered "yes" to any of these questions, I recommend that you not write your science-fiction novel.

Oscar Wilde Bookstore

I'm of two minds as to the closing of the Oscar Wilde Bookstore.

On one hand, I have fond memories of the bookstore from my coming out. In 1983, I started graduate school out of state and was just coming out. To explore this strange new world, one weekend I took the Suburban Transit bus from Princeton to New York and the subway down to Greenwich Village. While chain bookstores in malls already had small LGBT sections, those sections were dominated by Gordon Merrick and remaindered relationship guides; they certainly provided nothing like the wealth of information available in a gay bookstore. Also, the cashier's reassuring smile is burned into my memory to this day.

On the other hand, it is no longer 1983, and we have progressed such that LGBT literature is widely available both in general-interest bookstores and online. While some people complain that we are "a movement, not a market," as though those two things were mutually exclusive, I believe that such progress shows how far mainstream society has come in taking our concerns seriously. Institutions often outlive their own usefulness or even render themselves obsolete; there is no reason why bookstores should be an exception.

Planning on writing a gay novel?

If you are, please take this simple quiz to determine whether you should proceed.

1. Will the characters live beyond-fabulous lives in Manhattan, Fire Island, or both with no discernible way to pay?
2. Will you expose the reader to intricate detail about the characters' partying and sex lives, but never tell the reader what they do for a living?
3. Will an important scene of the book take place in a locale that you have never visited and cannot be bothered to research?
4. Will the main character be impossibly gorgeous and universally desired?
5. Will he be an idealized version of you?
6. Will the book be centered on his inner life, even though he doesn't have one?
7. Will he search for true love, find it, and toss it away without motivation?
8. Will he basically live his entire life without motivation, like some supremely fabulous houseplant?
9. Will you provide another major character simply as a foil for the main character's fabulousness?
10. Will one of the characters be a devout Catholic who later commits apostasy and becomes the party boy to end all party boys?
11. How about a crazy right-winger who turns out to be gay?
12. How about a politically correct puritan who turns out to be a whore?
13. Will part of the plot or exposition center on a religion with which you are familiar solely from a newspaper article about it?
14. Will the characters engage in dialog that no one would actually say in real life, just so that you can make a point?
15. Will everyone have HIV?
16. Alternatively, will the book take place in a parallel universe in which, even though it is well after 1981, there is no HIV?
17. Somewhere toward the end, will you include gratuitous praise of lesbians that will not be credible to anyone who has ever actually met a lesbian?
18. Does "Tell; don't show" make sense to you?

How to score: If you answered "yes" to any of these questions, I recommend that you not write your gay novel.