Episode 11: Homocons

The state sometimes good and sometimes bad.

Yes.

You know, that is such a good encapsulation of this book.

Hello, I'm Adrian Dobb.

And I'm Moira Donegan.

And whether we like it or not, we're in bed with the right.

So Adrian, what are we talking about today?

Today we're going to talk about homocons.

homosexuals who nevertheless are conservative, or maybe because of that are conservative.

I don't know.

But we're going to be talking about, yeah, I don't know, log haven, gays, whatever you want to call it.

And I should say, like, this is a huge topic.

This is a large continent, not a very attractive continent, but it is a big continent.

And so, you know, this is probably going to be our first foray into this land.

But I'm very excited that we have a guest with us today who I think can guide us through some of that.

We are joined by Sam Huneke, who is an an assistant professor of history at George Mason University, and he's the author of States of Liberation, Gay Men Between Dictatorship and Democracy in Cold War Germany, which came out in 2022, and A Queer Theory of the State, which came out this month.

And he's also written for the Boston Review, The Washington Post, The Point, and the LA Review of Books.

And Sam also, I should mention, is a former advisee of mine, which is very exciting.

So I was not involved in any way in the writing of the amazing Queer Theory of the State, but I did see states of liberation in many, many drafts over the years.

So excited to get to talk to you about this, Sam.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

It's great to be here.

Awesome.

So it's such a big topic.

We have to be a little circumspect about how deep we go into this.

Yes.

So one thought I had, we could start with this book that actually a friend of both Sam's and mine, our Stanford colleague Paul Robinson, wrote back in 2004, which is an interesting one.

It's called Queer Wars.

Sam, correct me if if I'm wrong.

Is this

the first history of gay conservatism?

It's certainly one of the early, right?

It's certainly one of the early ones.

I mean, I think Paul was talking about this before anyone else really, right?

I mean, because this is sort of the era of gay marriage.

This is the era when that's really becoming a national issue, when a lot of the people who he's talking about are sort of becoming almost the more gay mainstream.

And so I think he's one of the first people to sort of conceptualize this as

gay conservatives or or the gay right.

Right.

Yeah.

So it's a really interesting, interesting book, but it's also by now like almost 20 years old, which I think is kind of fun to think about.

Like, is this sort of like an invariant of gay history, or is this like, is there a history here?

Is there a line of tradition here?

Maybe for our listeners, I'll just mention briefly the kinds of people he's talking about, just so we start sort of attaching some names to this.

It's three chapters.

It's a short book.

The first is Bruce Barr and His Friends.

This is about the literary critic and essayist Bruce Barr, famous for that book, A Place at the Table, but also the editor of a pretty influential book at the time, Beyond Queer, challenging gay left orthodoxy from 1996.

And it has like Andrew Sullivan in it.

And

it sort of adds a bunch of sort of anti-PC rhetoric.

It has, you know, Jonathan Rauch, who has been like basically writing that particular gravy train for like 30 years to like talk about how like the lefties have a stranglehold on the gays and how that's actually kind of a form of what we today would call cancel culture or something like that.

So that's the first chapter.

Then it's Andrew Sullivan and then it's the sexual conservatives, as he puts it.

So that's Michelangelo Signor Riley and Gabrielle Rotello, which is interesting.

With Rotello, he's probably mostly talking about, or I believe he's mostly talking about sexual ecology, AIDS, and the destiny of gay men, which comes down pretty strongly on the have-less sex end of how to deal with the AIDS crisis, right?

Like very much a pull yourself up by the bootstraps kind of thing.

That's also a song that Andrew Sullivan was playing in that era.

There's some intellectual overlap here, although Andrew Sullivan, of course, most famous for his enthusiasm for race science.

Just want to sort of cut in, it's interesting how that, I mean, obviously I'm a German historian, and it's interesting that sort of trope or argument of, you know, cutback on the sex guys also makes its way to Germany.

But there it's not so much associated.

I mean, obviously there are people on the right who are making that argument, people who belong to helmut kohl's conservative coalition government but there's also people on the gay left more like larry kramer who are making that sort of argument and that to me that chapter also i reread it and that's of course the trickiest one right because like that's where he comes closest to using conservative as kind of a metaphor these are people who are let's say like a little bit uptight about what should happen they're not therefore going out and being like and and also you know we must reform the tax code or something like that whereas you know as maura was pointing out like, Andrew Sullivan's sexual conservatism goes along with a, you know, robust interest in craniometry and stuff like that.

So, you know, other things we might associate with, let's say, more conservative positions.

And I think Paul is pretty upfront in the introduction to that book that not everyone he's talking about necessarily self-identifies as a conservative, but rather his aim is to try and diagnose this kind of queer conservative thread in contemporary culture.

Yeah, one of the really interesting things he says in that book, I remember, is he sort of, so I should say Paul is, I think, born in 1940, if that's right.

I think that's right.

I think that's correct.

And almost all the people he's talking about are born in the first couple of years of the 1960s.

So he's also kind of telling young gays what they're doing wrong.

And he does frame this kind of, as this kind of Oedipal revolt that they have.

They're sort of betraying their gay elders almost.

So there is like, he does give us a sense of why the book needs to be written in 2004, which I think is kind of interesting.

Because of course, like, that would not be our explanation today.

I mean, like, a lot of these people are still with us, but it does seem interesting that like he has a real account of like why, why in 2004 do we need to write about this?

It's also, I mean, you know, Paul, as you said, is a friend of both of ours.

He's not necessarily the logical person you would have immediately thought would write this, right?

Because he's, you know, there are plenty of people on the sort of more radical gay left who very much vociferously disagree with people like Andrew Sullivan and you know the gay marriage crusade and so on and so forth.

But Paul is very much a sort of moderate when it comes to these things, right?

He's on the left.

He sees himself as being on the left, but he's not one of these sort of either intellectual or movement radicals.

I mean, I think one of his most famous pieces that he wrote was a title sort of review of Foucault's history of sexuality for New Republic of all places, in which he just trashes Foucault and starts out this review saying, you know, the goal of this review is to convince you not to buy this book.

You know, so he's, it's interesting that Paul in 2004 sort of sees himself as the right person to take on this gay conservatism.

And perhaps even the fact that he's not on the sort of radical left is what sets him up to do to do justice to these thinkers.

Yeah.

Right.

So maybe I'll briefly run through what he thinks of as the main aspects of this gay conservatism.

So three things identify it, right?

One, it refuses to ally itself with the causes of other marginalized people, right?

And sometimes even advocates for their marginalization.

It's ultimately gender conservative.

That's say it worships masculinity and has a fundamentally hierarchical view of gender.

And it's actually pretty anti-sex in its own way, and it's kind of Puritan in its own way.

And I guess the opening question, I'm sorry, this was like all just a big buildup, but like, is that still true?

Are gay conservatives like that?

Right?

Like in 2004, that seems exactly right.

I think he really does a pretty brilliant job analyzing that, but it's almost 20 years ago.

Has this shifted?

If anything, I think, you know,

I guess I think one hard thing, as you sort of alluded to in the intro and the buildup to this, is that there are so many different directions we could go in when we're talking about gay conservatives, right?

And so to some extent, I think it really depends on who specifically we're talking about.

But my gut instinct, sort of as you phrase this question, is that things have actually gotten worse in terms of who we might think of as gay conservatives and their positions on other marginalized groups, their positions on gender, their positions.

Maybe sex is a little bit different.

Maybe because we've sort of emerged a little bit more fully from the AIDS crisis, at least in sort of the Western world, right, you have PrEP, you have remedies that are much more easily accessible, certainly than were available in the early 2000s.

So maybe we can sort of put sex to one side, but when it comes to other marginalized groups, in particular, racially and ethnically marginalized groups, and gender, I actually think gay conservatives might be even sort of further to the right than they were when Paul was writing.

And I guess I'm thinking of people like Peter Thiel, right, who famously went and supported Donald Trump at the 2016 Republican convention and had this line about, you know, I'm proud to be a gay man, I'm proud to be a Republican, and I'm proud to be an American.

I'm thinking of figures like James Kerchik, who's sort of like almost, I don't know, like my generation's Andrew Sullivan, or at least that's, I think, what he's trying to be.

And then if you look to Europe, obviously there's figures like Alice Vidal, who, right, I mean, is,

you know, close to, if not a neo-Nazi, but also a sort of proud lesbian.

And so I think, you know, what really just, to my mind, what really actually distinguishes these people is both that they really do not have sympathy for other marginalized groups.

And in fact, don't even necessarily see themselves as marginalized, right?

And that's maybe a key distinction.

Yeah.

And then with gender, I mean, gender is almost like the thing that sets them apart, right?

These people, what sort of unites a lot of these, these homocons

is that they

are so unwilling to even admit that trans people belong in a sort of broader queer movement, right?

It's the LGB without the T sort of thing.

I mean, one one thing that I think you've already mentioned with Alice Vaider and other figures, I do think that the glass ceiling is also slightly different, right?

Like Paul's menagerie are a bunch of dees, and he kind of comes out and says, oh, this is actually, I think, mostly a gay male phenomenon because the access that we have to privilege and power.

But that's no longer the case, I think.

I think that gay women have made some real inroads in

being heinous, I guess.

Yes, unfortunately.

I mean, you know, and obviously we can sort of look to the UK as almost ground zero for a lot of this, right?

With the sort of TERFs

and plenty of both queer women and sort of self-identified feminists who are sort of virulently anti-anti-trans.

You know, and I mean, one of the weirdest figures, obviously, is J.K.

Rowling, who sort of sees herself, I mean, she isn't queer herself, obviously, but she, as far as I know, sees herself as being a sort of friend to gay people and lesbian people and has all these sort of, you know, turf lesbian buddies who she hangs out with and yet is, you know, like one of the sort of patient zeros for the sort of anti-trans panic we're living through.

We also have, you know, stateside, we have Barry Weiss, who

is the centerpiece of millennial conservatism, has an extraordinary amount of funding and has really built like an ideological apparatus around the force of her charisma and who also will deploy her own bisexual identity as a weapon and as an item of credibility in her own rejection of what she alleges is like a intellectually incurious left-wing queer politics.

Yeah, no, I mean, absolutely.

Barbie Weiss is a

what a what a character.

You can't forget about Barbie Weiss.

Some of us are not allowed to forget about Barbie Weiss.

Oh yeah.

Oh God.

I, you know, I had just been going through a very happy period where I had forgotten.

And you've just dragged me out of that.

Sorry, Sam.

Sam got to write a book about queer theory in the state, and I got to write a book about cancel culture, meaning I'm subscribed to just about everything she uploads out.

I'm like, ooh, Bari wrote something.

So, yeah, no,

I live with the certainty of her existence day to day.

Yes.

I mean, it's weird.

So when I was writing this book, and when we were sort of conceptualizing this episode of your podcast, it sort of struck me that, you know, this book, I'm dealing with plenty of figures who I sort of disagree with.

But ultimately, I think this is a book where I got to basically take a bunch of thinkers who, even where I disagree with them, I really admire them.

I take their work seriously.

I think their work is really productive.

And so it's a very happy book.

But sort of as I reread it and in sort of preparation for this, I was thinking in the background, there is this sort of gay conservatism that all of us are sort of implicitly arguing against.

And to some extent, I I think the book is a reminder to everyone on the sort of broad gay left, queer left, that they are the sort of true people who we're arguing with, not with each other.

This might be a good moment to like talk about our three buckets of like characteristics of the gay conservatives.

So we sort of like talked about the refusal to ally.

We've also got like the

worship of masculinity.

Yes.

So tell us a little bit about these like people's, the new gay conservatives and their relationships to masculinity.

Because, you know, even though we've got this like broken glass ceiling where, you know, the girl bosses are out here being conservative and representing lesbians while doing so, we do have this like

still majority male scene of gay conservative intellectuals.

And I would probably extend this to some conservative women.

We have like real ethos of a masculine ideal.

Yes.

I mean, I think, you know, part of this is

it ties in with the refusal of gender, right, as a sort of category of analysis for these people.

And so actually where my mind went when you were framing this question is that I think it's oftentimes these women, these sort of TERF women who are sort of at the forefront of making this argument, right?

And the way that they're oftentimes framing it is in terms of a sort of sex or gender essentialism that is necessary to undergird the kind of feminism or lesbianism that they buy into, right?

That basically, if you can't distinguish who or what is a woman, then the entire feminist or sort of lesbian political project falls apart.

And so I think the necessary corollary to that then is that if there's this gender essentialism for women, there also has to be this gender essentialism for men, right?

And we obviously see that when we get into like these sports debates where there's this blithe assumption that any trans woman is going to sort of beat any person who's born a woman in any sport, which is obviously, I mean, it's empirically untrue, right?

We know that this is empirically untrue.

And yet anytime, you know, a trans woman or trans girl like places in a sporting event, we have to hear about it.

And we have to hear about how this proves that, you know, whatever.

Sorry, that's sort of a bit of a rabbit hole.

But I guess my point is that I think, you know, when I think about this sort of gender sex essentialism, the sort of femininity and masculinity, it oftentimes is the women who I associate today as being really at the forefront of that.

And I guess when I think about people like Andrew Sullivan, who is obviously still kicking around, or James Kerchik, I don't think of them being as explicit, or George Santos, who we were sort of chit-chatting about, right?

I don't think of them as being sort of as explicitly like hyper-macho-masculine in the way.

And what's curious about that is, you you know, I think, and maybe we should sort of sidebar this for a bit later, but there is this much longer tradition of gay conservatism that goes back to 19th century Germany.

And that's when you really get into like these hyper-masculine dudes who think that the fact that they have sex with other men makes them not only sort of as masculine as straight people, but even more masculine than straight people.

Yeah.

So I fully agree with you that the cover under which sort of essentialism mostly presents itself today is exactly like rejection of queerness and rejection of gender even as a concept, right?

I actually have Judith Butler's new book here, Who's Afraid of Gender?

Little Galley Brag.

Very excited.

But it's noticeable, right?

And the people you mentioned earlier, I mean, Alise Weide and also like, it was like Jens Spahn in Germany.

So like,

they're both on record as being like, I'm not queer.

I'm in a committed relationship with a person of my sex.

And you're like, okay, great.

I mean, like, I'm so glad we cleared that up.

Right.

You dumb asshole.

Anyway, but like, it's, you're right.

There's a kind of like a refusal of ambiguity, a refusal that this might mean anything about the categories through which we hierarchize our society being wrong, right?

Which seemed so implicit for so many queer people for so long.

But to say, like, no, no, no, I just play this game differently, but the game as you're playing it is exactly right.

And any advantages you derive from that are totally legitimate.

You know, like, exactly.

Like, you, if you were to play women's sports, you would be great at it.

You would be way better than like it's it's saying like that the natural stuff behind it is just as set in stone as it was, as it seemed in the 1960s or early 1960s.

I just happen to articulate it slightly differently, right?

Like that's the reassuring thing there.

Right, exactly.

But there is this sort of buy-in to normativity and to the idea of also that there's a sort of social normativity that is vouchsafed by, you know, a sort of natural order of things.

And one of the sort of most

telling, I think, examples of where this breaks down are actually athletes, you know, who have an extra chromosome and don't right fall, you know, and so you have these female runners, and I'm the names are escaping me.

Asterisk.

Pastor Semenia.

Yes, yes, thank you.

Right.

And who have gone through these lengthy battles to basically prove that she's a woman?

And then, you know, various sports bodies have basically told her that she has to take estrogen to sort of be, you know, a real woman for the purposes of competing.

And this just shows that these people don't actually have an interest in what is quote unquote natural.

They have an interest in some sort of hierarchy.

Right.

In hierarchies and some sort of preconceived norm that they are carrying around in their heads and that they want everyone to conform to.

So here's an interesting thing.

And I love the way Morad framed that question because I think you're absolutely right that the essentialism is slightly more dialed down.

And I think George Santos is a perfect example of that,

a gay conservative.

So we should say for our listeners, in case this comes out in a few weeks, that we are all living with the monumental discovery that George Santos misappropriated a bunch of campaign donations from conservative donors to purchase, what was it?

An OnlyFans subscription.

An OnlyFans subscription, which like

Botox and Sephora.

Good for him.

Yeah, I mean, I

now love her.

No, I do not.

George Santos is a great example of something you and I talked about, Adrian, which is how gay conservatives who might once have been, as Sam alluded to, in like the German context, very allied to a presentation of masculinity, they're now availing themselves as camp of camp.

You know, we've got Milo Iannopoulos, we've got George Santos, we have the Gen Z TikTok right-wing influencer, Christian Walker, Herschel Walker's son, who is, you know, they've all

got an affect that is very much playing on, you know, sort of patterns of gay humor, a lot of gay vernacular, and harnessing this towards, you know, conservative ideological ends.

But they're not just drawing on camp as sort of a means of making themselves ironic.

They're drawing on camp as a means of making themselves seem almost counterintuitively, like more authentic, right?

It's like it's a way of relating with their audience.

It's supposed to draw the audience into a conservatism that is like sort of in the know.

Yeah.

That's the conservatism of the Trump era, right?

He's just a pretty campy guy.

He is.

No, I mean, and it is sort of a use of humor and camp and sort of contemporary cultural idioms to make also conservatism or fascism less threatening, right?

And sort of somehow get people.

I mean, I mean, the fact, right, that Adrian, that we were chuckling about George Santos, I think is indicative of that, right?

I mean, he's dangerous, yeah.

Right, he is dangerous, right?

And these sorts of concerns, I mean, I

obviously am not a supporter of Trump, but I do at times find myself chuckling at things that he says or does.

And it's, I think it's very intentional, right?

It's a sort of almost weaponization of humor for political ends.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, so the other question then is like, if Camp is sort of, and I I mean, right, Susan Sontag wrote about this in the fascinating fascism essay already, right, where she sort of says, like, there is something, there's a dangerous affinity here, right?

Like, there's a seductiveness to this kind of imagery, which both manages to be campy and fascist at the same time.

But at the same time, like, it makes me wonder, like, there was a line of critique at the very beginnings of queer theory, sort of very early 80s to mid-80s, that kind of said the real problem is a conservatism that's laced through the gay community it's mostly like gay men at that point the gay community's fetishization of a certain kind of butchness right this is the famous castro clone right where the people like leo bersani were pointing out like this is a form of male and white supremacy and we you can't really that's that is

not good.

That is how we become complicit in Reaganism.

It seems like that bullet we dodged.

Now,

now it's the opposite that like, you know, the okr can like become basically like uh can can get normativized and can get co-opted yeah right well i mean any

and this you know i also gets to

i think there there is this sort of at times assumption within queer theory that certain types of performances are inherently progressive.

And this obviously shows, right, that's not the case, right?

That you can have someone who looks like a Castro clone and is maybe, you know, hyper-progressive, hyper-radical.

And you can have someone who acts and looks like George Santos, who is a Trump Republican.

But I think you're right.

I mean, there is this sort of long-standing, again, association that I know we'll get to between this sort of hyper-fascistic masculinity and gay men in particular, and this sort of obsession, an almost sexualized obsession with masculinity that I think informs this strand of queernesses, both sort of sexual and social presentation, but also their politics.

This reminds me a bit of, you know, something I keep seeing on

what we might call the hetero-right,

which is an increasingly avowed claim that masculinity is itself a proxy for the legitimacy of power, right?

So

you keep seeing it's I send it a past life, so I have to cover all the Republican presidential debates.

And those have been, you know, quite unsubtle virility contests.

People make jokes about each other's height.

They will, you know, allude to being willing to commit violence.

We're recording at a time when in Congress, just I think Monday or Tuesday, there was...

Yeah, yeah, everyone's beating each other up.

Yeah, a senator threatened to fight a union representative at a Senate hearing.

Kevin McCarthy also supposedly like shoved or elbowed or committed some kind of physical act of violence against a rival congressman, also in the House.

And, you know, you've got this conservatism that is resorting not just to these sort of like puerile little adolescent displays of toughness, but actually to like physical violence, you know, namely, especially the icing on the cake, of course, being January 6th, right?

So, like, where is gay masculinity in this newly avowedly masculinist violent right?

Where does that fit in?

Because I don't feel like George Santos is going to challenge anybody to a fight, right?

He's doing something kind of different.

Yeah, no, you're right.

He is.

I mean, he's stealing people's babies.

Did you catch that a week or two ago?

Wait, no, please explain.

He walked out of some office with a baby and a reporter yelled after him, is that your child?

And he yells back, not yet.

And it was, it turned out, I think it was, I think it was a staffer's child and he was was basically using the child as like a prop for some sort of stunt.

It was all, but you're right.

This is not right.

None of this has anything to do with masculinity.

And again, that's, I mean, this is something where I think I don't have a good answer, I guess, about, you know, when I think about these sorts of queer conservatives, I don't think of, or the gay male conservatives, I don't think of masculinity really as the thing that's sort of foremost on their minds.

Again, and that sort of sets them apart from earlier generations of gay conservatives.

But what is true is that they are anti-trans, right?

I mean, James Kerchik, right?

He sort of got on my radar for the first time when I read his, I believe, Atlantic essay about how the gay rights movement has succeeded and it's time to sort of pack up and go away.

And trans rights are a different thing, and we don't need to concern ourselves with that.

And I mean, it's obviously a very short-sighted view.

And what's interesting, I guess, this also gets back to this question of being able to empathize with other forms of marginalization or otherness, that these people no longer see themselves as being marginalized, right?

I mean, we have George Santos, who is a congressman, despite sort of multiple felony indictments.

At least maybe he won't be a congressman by the time this airs, but I really think they don't see themselves, right?

They have sort of gotten what they need out of this and are ready to pack up and go home, right?

They can now live their sort of comfortable upper middle class existence.

They can vote their pocketbook.

They can vote Republican.

And that's sort of the end.

It's, you know, it's time to declare victory.

And it's quite striking, right?

I mean, this is entirely in opposition to someone like Martin Duberman, who posed the provocative question maybe seven years ago, has the gay movement failed, right?

And that's sort of the opposite side of the spectrum.

But one thing I did want to mention is back actually when I was a grad student still at Stanford, I did a little project on gay voting trends.

I have a sort of ongoing fast, I guess, obviously I have a fascination with sort of state forms and with democracy and how democracies actually function.

And it turns out there isn't actually that much high quality polling about how queer people actually vote.

But from what I was able to find, you actually,

in most Western democracies, queer people have started becoming more conservative.

As they have gotten rights, they have become less ideologically left-leaning.

And so this isn't, you know, the U.S.

is sort of an exception to that.

And I think the reason for that is that we have one of our two major parties, you know, continues to be virulently virulently homophobic.

And even when they're sort of tentatively trying to do the sort of British thing of breaking trans people off from the LGB side of the movement, they can't help themselves, right?

They still hate gay people.

And so it hasn't really worked here.

But in Germany and France and the UK, you do actually see gay men and lesbians starting to vote more conservative, starting to vote for the AFD, starting in some polls, they showed Maureen Le Pen's party actually doing better among gay people than among straight people, sort of on the theory that this is the Islamophobic party that will protect me from the homophobic Muslims.

Well, I was going to bring that up.

So, on the one hand, yes, I think that there's a sense that there's greater security, but at the same time, these LGBT, or usually not T, LGB voters.

Well, with the exception of Caitlin

Jenner.

Jenner, thank you.

Caitlin Jenner.

But so,

what is that?

The LGBC.

So, they,

right, there's this tendency to weaponize your own sense of threat again, right?

Like especially when it comes in Europe to Muslim immigrants, right?

Like, and this has been going on for quite a while.

Bruce Barr, who Paul wrote about in that book, made his name in the early 2000s as an early kind of,

I would call it like Islamophobic kind of intellectual who really sort of warned.

What's the book, While Europe Slept, right?

Like, yes, I think that's the.

Yeah, it's like, you know, that's sort of an Urtext for this kind of thing.

And this idea that, like, oh, I'm being threatened by.

So, in some way, it's not that they're saying, oh, I'm unthreatened.

It's to say, I need the power of the state behind me.

I deserve, and this is where we're back with the natural hierarchies.

I deserve to have the state behind me to smite those who would make me feel uncomfortable or afraid.

Well, and what's interesting is they've moved from a position of maybe not these individual people, right?

But gay men, because gay men and some lesbians, right?

That's who sort of we're generally talking about, and then some bisexual people as well, that they have moved, broadly speaking, from a position of saying,

we are a persecuted group, and like other persecuted groups, we deserve not to be persecuted, to now saying,

we are part of the norm, we are part of the mainstream, and we deserve to be protected from these other groups, right?

That they no longer, they see themselves as being allied with those quote unquote normal people rather than with those marginalized groups that they might have at one point sort of had sympathy with or tried to ally with.

And here is where Marine Le Pen is super interesting in the Rassemble Mont Nationale, because of course the way those kinds of parties, and I think the Republicans do this to some extent, but it's, I think, a lot less pronounced than in Europe.

What they do is they use then lesbian, gay, and bisexual people to sort of construct the white straight mainstream of society as implicitly threatened.

Right.

Like we, you know, Marine Le Pen is extremely consistent in basically saying, you know, we're not pro-gay, we're pro-French, right?

She's basically saying, oh, we're worried about gay bashings, but we're not worried for our gay neighbors, we're worried for them as French people, right?

Like, read, like, you know, white French people, right?

That's what she means by that, right?

Meaning, the fear of the homophobia of a supposed interloper or a racialized other becomes a way to imagine the majority of the population as somehow minoritized and a potential victim and a potential target, right?

Like the same way that all these people are like, you know, we, you know, in Europe are like, oh, we, you know, we can't let Syrians in because like they might be homophobic.

It's like, I don't know how to put this, but you're homophobic.

What, what, what, I don't understand why, like, I'm scared of you.

Like, I don't understand what makes this guy any different.

Lived around homophobes all my life.

You know, some of them had Arabic first names.

A lot of them had German first names.

They come in all stripes, it turns out.

right because i think one of the curious things right about i mean your point about how le pen is sort of appealing to people's frenchness i think is really an important point because one of the mysteries i think it's less of a mystery why a gay man in 2004 would maybe identify as a conservative and think that you know they could vote for george w bush's republican party right i mean i as you know a middle schooler back then still thought that this was an odious party, but compared to today's Republican Party, I can sort of understand how you might come to that conclusion.

Today, though, I mean, the Republican Party is chock full of people who are quite explicit about their hostility, not only to trans people, but also to gay and lesbian and bisexual people, right?

And about how, I mean, there's the religious fanatics, the religious, right, who think that this is an abomination, this is, you know, sinful, this is whatever term they want to use.

The people who were talking about, you know, how monkeypox or impox is, you know, another sort of God's wrath on the gays and how queer people needed to be sort of rounded up and put into quarantine camps when this was happening.

And, you know, there was an incident maybe a year or two ago where at the Republican convention in Texas, I think the state level Republican convention, the log cabin Republicans were like locked out of participating.

And, you know, we're sort of shocked about this.

And it's, you know, there's that meme that goes around Twitter every once in a while about the leopard eating party.

And

I didn't think leopards would eat my face, says lady who voted for the leopards eating faces party.

Yes, exactly.

And so I do think that figuring out, okay, not only how are these

conservative gay people sort of reconciling these two, but also how is it that politicians are allowing them to be reconciled,

even while still making space within those political movements for deeply homophobic forces.

I think this might bring us to a third aspect of the homocon worldview, which is their like anti-sex puritanism.

So like to go back to our old friend Andrew Sullivan, you know, he spent a lot of the AIDS crisis sort of scolding people for having unprotected sex, comparing unprotected sex to murder.

And in his early advocacy for gay marriage, you know, including the essay, I believe in 1987, that really sort of the origin point for the movement's turn away from AIDS activism and like towards marriage advocacy was reasoned on this idea that marriage would encourage chastity and monogamy, which, you know, somebody should tell the straight people that.

They

love having affairs.

But, you know, this was an idea of marriage as a way to save gay men from themselves, to outsource the cost of caring for them from the state into like the private marital unit, but also to try and instill a kind of sexual morality morality in these communities that, you know, in this worldview needed to be somehow regulated.

Yeah, no, I mean, again, I wonder to what extent, I mean, I think a lot of these people still believe the same thing, right?

I mean, Andrew Sullivan is still kicking around.

Maybe what has slightly shifted with marriage is that it has become apparent that you can give gay people marriage and they will still be just as slutty as they were before.

I mean, I think you can certainly do a sort of careful analysis and point to ways in which, yes, I'm sure marriage has had a somewhat disciplining effect on queer people.

You know, when queer people get married and then wind up in court, yes, we have no fault divorce, but distribution of assets and so on and so forth, things might get ugly if, you know, you had an open marriage or whatever.

But that said, I think, at least in my anecdotal experience, marriage does not seem to have changed the sort of sexual mores of queer people who I'm friends with.

So, you know, I think there's that argument has somewhat fallen by the wayside.

Also, simply the fact that we have it and it's considered more or less a settled issue, although, of course, certain Supreme Court justices have raised the question of whether or not we should truly consider it settled.

My guess is there were certainly some of these folks who were harboring such views about monkeypox.

I mean, what was so interesting about the MPOC scare, right, is that

It really did become the sort of Rorschach test for queer intellectuals.

And I don't think that how people viewed it necessarily fell along strictly partisan lines.

I mean, most people who were sort of debating this all were on the left, right?

People who generally cared about this were on the left.

But I don't, you know, I was actually trying to figure out recently what Andrew Sullivan thought and said about impox and came up short, I did not find very much.

And so that's sort of a question where I think.

But there were people on the left who were sort of having this view of like, okay, this is a disease we know how to deal with.

So why don't you just stop having sex for like a few months, right?

And then there were the people who were saying, How dare you?

It is, you know, my God-given right as a faggot to have sex, and I will do so.

Anyway, I guess the point I'm trying to get at is: I don't have this sense that this sort of sexual Puritanism is quite as significant an argument, and maybe that also has to do with the sort of Trumpification of the right in this country, right?

How plausibly can you claim to be a sexual Puritan when you have someone like Trump as your standard-bearer?

Only heterosexual pussygrabbing, please.

Well, this strikes me as part of the

floundering of the post-Dobbs Republican Party is bound up in this inability for them to say with a straight face that they actually believe in sexual chastity.

I mean, some of them are trying,

but it's not a very convincing part of the right and where they are sort of most coherent in their rationalization of

the sadistic abortion policies that they're rolling out is not when they're talking about sexual chastity.

It's when they're talking in terms of like just pure sadistic punishment, right?

And so their heterosexual politics have also receded from the idea of like abstinence or like restraint.

Right.

Yeah, I guess I never thought about the fact that, like, that's a really good point that in some way their fictions of chastity depended on abortion being free, being available and legal.

And now you have to sort of like, the fact that this is not a way people live is like glaringly out in the open.

Right.

No, it's true.

I mean, the other thing I think that's worth pointing out is that conservatism or right-wing political movements, and I think, you know, there's obviously a conversation to be had about the fact that not all right-wing political movements are necessarily conservative, right?

We sort of conflate the two in our country.

But right-wing political movements are not always anti-sex, right?

I mean, again, in my own field as a German historian, the most famous example of this is Nazi Germany, where the Nazis are against certain kinds of sex, but they are very much in favor of, you know, sex that will lead to Aryan babies.

And they don't particularly care how it happens, if it happens within a marriage or not, if it's the result of adultery or not.

You know, their goal is procreation.

I mean, that's one place, I think, where we also can talk about, where we can tell that basically the sexual conservatism of today's homocons sort of hits a kind of limit, which has to do with gay parenting.

And I say this as a gay parent, that like you'd think that if marriage had this effect of normalizing queer relationships, right, in the way that conservatives profess to like, you would think that they would be all for gaybies, have gaybies stop preferring monkeypox to each other.

Well, the opposite, of course, is true.

We have all these messed up kind of groomer discourses to discredit gay parenting.

So it turns out that if you live with, you know, just two men with a cute little baby and a dog and whatever, they still find a reason to find that, you know, terrifying and scary and potentially subject to violence, which is another, which probably also takes the wind out of the sails a little bit of this kind of like, because the implicit thing with the Sullivan position is always like, they'll let us live so long as we just tone it down on the vamping and the cottaging and the clubbing guys.

Like, I swear they'll be good.

And it's like, nope, turns out if you do all that, they're still coming to burn down your house, you know?

Yeah, yeah, no kidding.

I do, I mean, it's, I,

it is interesting to think about to what extent Andrew Sullivan was right and that sort of people around him making this argument about gay marriage were right or wrong, because it has, I do actually think that granting marriage equality has

been a hugely successful strategy for, you know, giving queer people rights.

And, you know, I mean, leaving aside the question of the actual positive sort of financial and emotional impact as it had for, you know, real people, I think when you look at, you know, just opinion polls in asking people about their opinions of LGBT people, it's quite clear that as this issue gained salience and after the Obergefell decision, well, first the Windsor decision and then the Obergefell decision, that, you know, support for queer people rose immensely in this country.

And there was this sort of normalizing effect in terms of how people saw gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans people.

In that sense, I think Sullivan, you know, to give credit where credit is due, was actually correct to a certain extent.

I think where he's wrong, as I've said, is in what you were saying, Adrian, that there hasn't been from the far right, from the sort of radical homophobic right.

There's not been any toning down of that rhetoric.

If anything, over the last five years, we've seen it ramp up.

And at the same time, it has not, I think, led to a meaningful change in queer sort of sexual behaviors or proclivities.

Which gets at an interesting thing about Sullivan.

I mean, let's talk about him a little bit more here because what I noticed in your book, Queer Theory of the State, you talk about him as a liberal, and we've been sort of talking about him as a conservative.

I should say those two are obviously not in contradiction, and you just reminded us of that, that like these absolutely can go together.

But it's kind of interesting and might be worth talking about or explaining to our listeners why we're using both those terms like in what ways is he a liberal and what ways is he a conservative right so i mean i think you know the way that i use liberal in the book and increasingly use liberal in my daily life is not in the way that the american punditocracy uses liberal right i mean we talk about liberal here in this country as being sort of left to far left and you hear people being like alexandre ocasio-cortez being described as very liberal or extremely liberal which just does not and so the way i use liberal which is, I think, how most scholars nowadays use the term, is much more in its original meaning, right?

That you are someone who is in favor of a restrained state.

In particular, you are looking for restraints on the state when it comes to economics and when it comes to individual liberties, right?

And so you, at least in theory, believe in robust sort of civil rights, personal freedoms.

These are oftentimes called negative freedoms or negative liberties in the sense that they result from a lack of state involvement, right?

That's where the negative comes in, and that you are similarly in favor of a generally sort of laissez-faire liberal or neoliberal market, right?

And this is where you then also get neoliberalism, which is sort of an extension of these liberal ideas with the sort of added caveat that you favor applying a sort of market rationality to pretty much everything that the government or that society does, right?

And so instead of perhaps a classical liberal would see the economic sphere as a sort of distinct area or sphere separate from the government, separate from society, Neoliberals are saying, no, no, everything is a market, right?

Everything can be monetized, everything can be thought about in these sorts of market rationalities.

So, in that, that's sort of how I'm using the term liberal.

And there's obviously a space within that liberal paradigm for people who consider themselves conservative, right?

And so, that's why when we get to neoliberalism, we talk about left neoliberalism and right neoliberalism, right?

A left neoliberal is someone like Tony Blair or Bill Clinton who is coming into office and saying, Yeah, let's cut away the regulatory state, let's cut away the welfare state, but at the same time, let's try to increase the kinds of civil rights that our government is offering or vouchsafing for various marginalized groups.

You then have right neoliberals who are the kinds of people who want to go in and install Pinochet as dictator of Chile.

And who retire at Stanford University.

Yes, your colleagues.

Yeah, as I call them, as I call them, our faculty meeting, yes.

So that's how I'm using the term liberal in this text, is to mean that sort of much more narrow set of what you believe government should rightfully be doing.

And so in that sense, marriage is a classical, you know, it's obviously a conservative value, as Andrew Sullivan makes the case for, but it's also a liberal value, right?

Because you're basically saying this is sort of a right and we should be extending it to everyone equally.

And that is some of the sort of, you know, that's both the genius of liberalism as a broad political philosophy is that it's sort of a big tent that does make room for a lot of very diverse values and positions.

It is a quite capacious political ideology.

It's also, I think, the genius of gay marriage as an issue in that it was able to bring a whole host of people from a quite wide ideological spectrum along with it.

In part because I think they all thought they were going to get the thing that they specifically wanted out of it, which I think is, again, where we get back to liberalism as a political philosophy or political ideology, that it's very good at, I think, convincing people that they will get the thing they want out of it.

Yeah.

I'm glad you said that because there's something interesting in your book that I thought a lot about, which I should say, queer theory of the state is really kind of a lot about thinking about how queer theory has been, as an academic project, has been maybe a little hostile to the state.

Right, exactly.

So you ask, and I'll quote there, whether it is possible to work out a theory of the state that unites the critically anti-normative impulses of queer theory and the empirical need for the state, coercive though it may be.

And it really struck me reading the book in preparation for this that, in some way, that what you're proposing, what you're asking for, is the exact inverse of what a lot of the homocons that Paul criticized in his book are about, right?

Because they combine a comfort with the normative claims of the state, what Jasper Puar would call homo-nationalism, and a real disinterest in what the state actually does in their own ways.

They're all libertarians, right?

Right.

No, that's true.

I mean, that's a really good way, I think, of framing the difference.

But they're a weird sort of right-wing, Reagan-esque libertarian, right?

Where they're libertarian about certain things, but maybe less libertarian

about others.

Morality drips through every nook and cranny of their supposedly market rationality, right?

They're like,

oh, oh, wait, you just hate these people.

Like, that's not

rationalism.

That's just you don't like them.

Right, exactly.

I mean, you know, it's always so wild to me whenever, again, to sort of go back to Pinochet and the sort of CIA's rich career of sponsoring coups during the Cold War.

We have a penny for every time someone goes back to Pinochet and responsibly.

Right, but the whole notion that you need force and you need a coup to impose a certain vision of the quote-unquote free market, right, sort of gives up the whole game, right?

This is not a free market.

This is not actually about having a small state.

This is about having a state that redistributes wealth upwards, that is interested in protecting the rights of certain people and not others.

And this is actually precisely the queer critique of liberalism, right?

Is that liberalism is essentially hypocritical and that people who say that they want, you know, rights for everyone, they want everyone to have an equal, you know, share of the economic pie through this sort of free market, but you have to sort of pull yourself up by your bootstraps, that they are completely willing to use state power and state violence to suppress those people who, as you were saying, like they just don't like.

And this goes all the way back to the origins of liberalism during the Enlightenment, right?

This is something I got into a little spat with Susan Nyman about recently, about sort of the extent to which we can see the Enlightenment and the sort of early liberal project as something that is sort of value neutral and essentially a positive or something that is actually taking a side on behalf of white cis straight men.

Anyway, that was a bit of a tangent.

But your original question is a good one, right?

That these gay men, these gay conservatives, and some lesbians, yeah, they're very comfortable with normative claims.

They make plenty of normative claims themselves, as we've talked about, especially around gender.

And they don't have a particular interest in what the state does unless they perceive the state as somehow harming them, right?

And then they're very happy to go after the state.

But I think what's interesting about queer theorists on the left is that even when the state is at least ostensibly acting in their interests, there's still this deep insecurity about whether or not it's good and whether or not the state ever can be a force for good or for progress, which as I was trying to sort of tease out in the book, that's a real shift in terms of how the left thinks about the state.

And it's not just queer theorists, right?

It's the entire left in the sort of Western world that undergoes this shift in the sort of 70s through the early 2000s, basically.

Anyway, it's sort of an interesting puzzle or paradox that as there's this receding interest in the state on the left, and I do think sort of queer theory is at the forefront of that, there is this sort of right-wing complacency or happiness with the state or willing, you know, that they are not tying themselves up in knots about the state other than as a sort of political weapon, as we see, you know, with the quote-unquote weaponization of government inquiries in the House of Representatives today, right?

They don't care about the weaponization of government.

What they care about is scoring political points on Joe Biden.

Or they don't like other people weaponizing the government.

Right.

Well, they or protecting Donald Trump, right?

But the notion that you have a completely above-board investigation of Donald Trump, that the president has done everything in his power to sort of isolate himself from, that that is being held up as a quote-unquote weaponization of government.

And then at the same time, Donald Trump is sort of explicitly saying, yes, I'm going to use the DOJ to go after my enemies, right?

I mean, but again, this is indicative of the kind of ways that people on the right and people on the left think about the state and their own role within states and opposing states today.

And that there still is a real disconnect.

The state is sometimes good and sometimes bad.

Yes.

That, you know, that is such a good encapsulation of this book, right?

I mean, I, because I feel like right now, queer theory so frequently just says, you know, the state, always bad.

So getting to the sometimes good part is, is the, is the goal.

Well, and we might point out that that has to do with its historic extraction, right?

Yes.

Queer theory as it, I mean, so you trace it back to post-structuralism, which I know our mutual friend Susan Neyman would also do, fully believe that.

But it very clearly comes out of the experience of the AIDS crisis, right?

Where like basically it was the first text to really sort of use what we would today call the queer theoretical lenses, such as Leo Bersani's, the Recta McGrave, et cetera, are entirely about the way that even when the government is trying to help, it ends up doing this kind of biopower thing that will ultimately crush LGBT people sort of under its heel.

Now, you point out in the book that that's not that different from a famous line of Ronald Reagan's, which is sort of the scariest sentence in the English language:

I'm from the government and I'm here to help.

I'm here to help, right?

So, like, there's something to that, but of course, it does have to do with the fact that this is very much a project of a moment where, if indeed, when the federal government thought it was doing the right thing, ended up with, you know, absolutely horrid kind of approaches, even if they didn't take the advice of friend of the pod and or campy conservative William F.

Buckley to, you know, to tattoo gay men with a, what is it, Barco?

Is it what was he going to do?

Something like that.

I forget exactly.

Yeah.

What a, what a, what a fucking sweetheart.

No, I mean, I think, you know, I think a really good example of that is actually like the Biden administration's approach to to impox, which was just sort of ham-handed and stupid.

I think we can look at the Reagan administration's approach to HIV and say, no, there was an element of malice in this.

There was something intentional.

And then, you know, you can compare it to what other countries did, you know, as I do in my first book.

and make the point that, no, like even in Kohl's, West Germany, which you also have a center-right government in power, they actually take a technocratic approach to it.

They address it head-on, and they're quite successful in dramatically shrinking the number of new infections.

And so I have complete sympathy with this strand of queer theory that comes out of the AIDS crisis and says, yeah, our experience with the state is that it is, it's evil, right?

I mean, it's trying to kill us in a very literal sense.

I guess the sort of question I have then is, is that an acceptable basis on which to build what claims to be a kind of universal theory or universal method of critique?

And I guess the answer I come out with is no, right?

I think that

that manner of critique and that perspective has a very valuable place in terms of thinking about the state and thinking about society, which is, by the way, something that these conservatives would deny, right?

They don't think that this method of critique actually has a sort of place in social discourse.

But I think at the end of the day, you then need to be able to think constructively and think about, okay, we've identified the problems, but what can we actually do to start fixing them?

And that, I guess, is also something that the conservatives would be uninterested in, right?

I mean, they sort of conservatives by the very definition of the term are somewhat uninterested in diagnosing social ills and advancing them, right?

They're interested in preserving the status quo.

And feel that those for whom the status quo is not working deserve it to some extent, right?

Right, exactly.

Well, if the status quo is working and it appears to not be working for certain people, then it must be because of something that they are doing.

Right.

We've been doing a lot of Moynihan thinking, so we're just like,

we're quite in the words to like, it's like, it's actually the poor's fault.

No, but I love this like optimistic intervention in queer political thought.

Yeah, well, thanks.

I will see if other people love it.

I did, I have to say that when reading someone like Susan Naiman, at times I sort of found myself thinking, this is uncomfortably close to what I'm arguing.

But I think that the,

I hope that what readers will find is that this was a chance for me to think with a bunch of thinkers who I really admire, even when I, when I disagree with them.

I mean, Foucault, first among them, right?

I mean, Foucault is someone I've been thinking with and against for well over a decade now, and who I, you know, is one of my absolute favorite thinkers, but I also love to disagree with him.

Well, and as you point out, there is a long history within queer theory of exactly that.

It does have this wonderful feature of like basically subjecting everything to critique, including itself.

Like you mentioned, the famous Lisa Duggan, Queering the State.

Yes.

But also like the Petrus Liu book, he positions that as a queer theory book, right?

And like it's still saying, saying there's a whole bunch of things, a whole bunch of precepts of this body of theorizing that really need to be reconceived, right?

Like, yeah,

they have real blind spots and those are starting to become a real problem.

Yes.

No, and this, I mean, I think this is a work that very much fits into a current sort of stock taking among queer theorists about what is it that we are doing, what is it that we've done, where are the flaws.

I'm glad you mentioned Lisa Dugan, because she is is another thinker who I

really love to think with.

I think she is one of the sharpest of the sort of UR queer theorists.

And she is one of the few who does think seriously about sort of state, politics, economy, right?

So this queering the state essay that you mentioned was a major source of inspiration for this piece.

And she makes a lot of these points about early queer theorists that they are posing as politically radical, but in fact are very uninterested in sort of solutions, solutions, right?

And this was part of the difficulty of this piece: of sort of threading the needle: okay, these people are saying they're political, they're saying they're radical, they're saying they're progressive, but when you actually drill down and look at what they say they want to do or want to happen, they do wind up sounding a lot like sort of left libertarians.

And I think Dugan does a really good job of pointing that out and sort of skewering them for it.

And in the same way, you know, and she's also one of the first people to really draw attention to the imbrecation of gay politics and neoliberalism, right?

And coining the term homonormativity to do so.

So, I, you know, again, another thinker who I sort of recommend to everyone and frequently assign to my students.

Nice, nice.

Another thing that we might briefly mention for listeners not that familiar with queer theory, of course, is that like Dune's background is in American studies, I believe, right?

But like, yes, a lot of them were just also just like me literature professors.

And like, that always did influence their politics in the sense that it ended up being like, here's a cool political intervention based on my reading of Henry James.

And you're like, okay, I mean, it's not uncool, but I could see why in the aggregate, people might be like,

right, when are we going to get to the politics part?

It feels like we're mostly making our way through the penguin, you know,

the black books, basically.

And like, and that's cool, right?

Like, but like, there was an awful lot of radicalism tied up in like really heterodox readings of Oscar Wilde, I guess what I'd say.

Hard thing to do there.

No, I mean, and actually, I don't know if you're familiar with a book from a few years ago called Sexual Hegemony by Christopher Chittey, but he sort of makes that same point, right?

That actually there is a class politics to a lot of early queer theory, and it's a bourgeois class politics, right?

That these people are, these scholars were, whether intentionally or not, privileging a sort of middle-class bourgeois white voice, oftentimes from the sort of 19th or early 20th century, in the form of this literature that that was sort of the substance of queer theory and that this had in fact sort of buried this much longer and much more politicized queer history that he is tracing through sort of the port cities of early modern Europe.

And so, you know, I guess to me that points out is that there is this sort of,

I mean, it's not just sort of gay conservatives against the rest, right?

There's all of these political formations that are actually really quite difficult at times to tease out, right?

There is a sort of long, rich history of a kind of queer Marxist working class politics, which I think is what Chitty's tapping into.

And that's quite distinct from the kind of middle class bourgeois liberal, although it doesn't want to admit that it's liberal politics of a lot of queer theory.

At least that's my sort of take.

Well, I think there's something to it.

I mean, something I always have my students look at when I teach these texts is to look at what people wrote their first book on.

A lot of these are, a lot of the really radical stuff about queer theory comes out in people's second books.

And I'm not going to name any names here, but like to a tenured professor, that is very, very noticeable because that means that that's the book that came out after they got tenure, right?

So it is once again about institutions and access to institutions.

And I do not begrudge anyone.

Like the idea that you couldn't get tenure with epistemology of the closet, I get it.

Like it's a fucked up world.

But it does do this thing where like basically, you know, as you say, like these were highly credentialed academics reproducing a bunch of the preconceptions that sustained their milieu, let's say.

And then they took it to really interesting and cool places.

But like, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out where the certain blind spots might come from in that undertaking.

Yeah.

Right.

No, exactly.

And I think it

also oftentimes, I mean, one of the two sort of pet peeves I have with queer theory as a German historian are both the sort of allergy to empiricist historiography, right?

The notion that we should actually care what really happened in the past, a lot of queer theorists are sort of opposed to that notion, to put it mildly.

The other is that it's so U.S.

focused, it's so US-centric.

And again, as I've sort of touched on or where we were talking about with the AIDS crisis, right?

It takes what happened.

in the U.S.

in the last sort of 40 years as paradigmatic, which isn't to say that what happened in the U.S.

in the last 40 years isn't interesting and important, but it is not always the same as what is or has happened in other parts of the world and should not necessarily be held up as a sort of standard against which to judge the rest of the world.

I mean, that might be a good place to ask sort of a final question or a final set of questions, really, which is, right, you are not a U.S.

historian by training.

I mean, you know your way around U.S.

history.

And you're pointing out that like the story that we've been telling kind of about conservatives like has been quite an American one too.

And so it might be, we've been, we've strayed a couple of times.

We've talked about Maria.

We've talked about Alice.

The question of gay conservatism as a global phenomenon, like do we have a like, can we talk about that or is that too broad or yeah, you know, what are the what are the

vectors and flight lines there?

I think, and this might be a great chance to, you know, take us back to 19th century Germany, to the Kaiserreich, to the days of Kaiser Wilhelm.

But I guess my quick sort of, I guess, hypothesis, I guess, here is that

I think in order to have a gay conservative, you first need a gay left.

I think that one can't exist for that, right?

You need, I think you need some sort of gay rights movement, which is almost always going to exist in some form on the left before you can have gay conservatives.

That's at least my sort of my working hypothesis.

At least, not that you don't have people in the past who, you know, were men having sex with men who are conservatives.

That's not my point, but people who we can sort of categorize in this way as being self-identified gay men or queer or something in that realm who then see a connection between that identity and their conservatism.

I think that requires the existence of some kind of gay rights movement.

And so, you know, when we look at Germany, I mean, the sort of iconic example of this is, of course, Ernst Grumm, who was the leader of the SA of the Nazi stormtroopers.

You know, he does not identify as a gay man per se, but he is a man who sort of very self-consciously has sex with men.

I believe he was a member of, or maybe through a friend, was a member of Hirschfeld's, Magnus Hirschfeld, the sort of pioneering doctor who was a major homosexual rights activist in the 1920s and early 1930s.

So he had this group called the Scientific Humanitarian Committee, and I believe Rum was in some way, you know, loosely affiliated, either subscribed to their magazine or was a member, but I would have to double-check that.

In any event, he is then outed in this big scandal, the Social Democratic Party, right?

Because the Nazi Party is homophobic.

They see homosexuality as this sort of decadence of the Democratic Republic.

But so the Social Democratic Party outs this high-ranking Nazi to try and create a scandal and hopefully hurt the Nazis at the polls.

It doesn't really work.

And part of it is that Röhm is a very close friend and confidant of Hitler's.

Hitler and Rüm use the informal German do with each other as opposed to the more formal z.

But then of course this all comes crashing down.

In 1934, there's the infamous Night of Long Knives, where Hitler, for sort of other reasons, orders the assassination or the murder of his friend Rum, as well as other high-ranking SA leaders, many of whom are also gay men.

So, that's sort of like the UR gay conservative, at least in my mind.

And, you know, part of what makes him so interesting, and in this case, I actually do think he's sort of paradigmatic, is that he actually saw a connection among his, you know, sort of sexual attachment to other men, his sort of allegiance to fascism, and his experiences as a soldier on the front in World War I.

And the sort of thread connecting all three of these was masculinity, to sort of return to one of our earlier questions, where he was part of a German tradition that saw male-male love not as homosexuality, right?

They intentionally reject the term homosexuality as being overly clinical.

It's something that people like Hirschfeld have created.

So they reject that term.

They see this not as making them a minority or in some way, you know, effeminate or degenerate, but rather it means that they're hyper-masculine, right?

That they are able to tap into this level of masculinity that is unavailable to most

sort of straight men and certainly unavailable to women, right?

They do not see any similarity between this and what we today call lesbianism.

So, you know, that's really the threat.

And you have many other people.

There's a group called De Eigena.

It's also the first sort of homoerotic periodical in Western history that very much peddles this notion, right?

That it's sort of, I mean, we would think of it almost as a universal bisexuality that they buy into, right?

That every man has the possibility of sort of having these deep sexual or romantic or emotional bonds with other men.

And this also doesn't foreclose on having a wife, having children, etc.

But this is a unique and sort of transcendental kind of relationship.

And again, the core feature of this is masculinity.

But what's interesting interesting also is that it's very much tied to, you know, as we've sort of been talking about throughout, other forms of exclusionary behavior.

So these people are deeply racist, they're deeply anti-Semitic, they're deeply misogynistic, right?

And so in some ways, you know, this has a lot of differences with the kinds of gay conservatives we've been talking about today.

But I think there are still some through lines in terms of these being queer people who don't see their queerness as defining them as outsiders, but rather see it as in some ways being constitutive of their place, sort of at the center of what is quote unquote normal.

I love this idea that there's a necessity for a gay left, or at least for the kind of idea that being gay or lesbian might commit you to something.

Right, right.

That definitely I'll buy, because there are texts like, you know, Thomas Mann writes this essay about marriage where he's basically like, you know, it's about order, it's about generations, it's about productivity, et cetera, et cetera, whereas the opposite is just dissolution, et cetera, et cetera.

And of course, he's saying that as most likely a gay man, right?

Like

whatever the hell his deal was, but like definitely involved being gay, right?

And like the idea, like he knew what the alternative could be.

That I fully buy.

At the same time, there's something interesting in the German context that I often think about, a kind of gay conservatism that does not identify itself with the state, but is sort of higher than the state.

I'm thinking here, and this is something I eventually will inflict on more as an episode

about the Georgia circle.

Stefan Georges, this poet in the Weimar Republic, well, actually early already, turn of the century, writes this highly symbolist poetry, beautiful stuff, and gathers around himself this kind of Ersat's religion, right, which

somehow seems to almost entirely involve young men.

And he's like, guys, we have these secret teachings that no outsider must know.

And everyone, everyone who like looks at this from the outside, including Tomas Mann is like, it's gay stuff, right?

Like the secret is gay stuff, right?

So we're clear on that.

And like, it's unclear still what it was.

But like, but these kind of hieratic teachings.

And it, of course, is this kind of what they call the secret Germany, right?

And the idea of the secret Germany is, yes, it identifies with the nation, but it's higher than the state.

It's higher than even the status quo.

It's sort of, it's a hyper version of the status quo in some way.

Yeah, it's a sort of transcendental view.

The wildest part about, so I don't know if I ever told you this, Adrian, but when I did my undergraduate study abroad in Germany, I sort of had like a Georgia semester where I took multiple courses on Stefan George.

And Robert Norton, who wrote the big Georgia biography, was teaching there.

So I studied with him and it was traumatizing.

not studying with him,

studying Georgia.

I want to be clear.

Studying Georgia was traumatizing because, you know, I mean, he has sort of infamously difficult poetry to read.

yeah you know it's it's it's high it's really really hard but he's a fascinating figure and i was gonna so the two things i wanted to mention is that you know the the sort of deity who they worship in this fake religion is a 16 year old boy from munich named maximilian kronberger who dies of cholera or something what some 19th century disease maximin and they right they rechristened him maximin and sort of georgia is this high priest and they have all these photos of him dressed up like a sort of grecian god and that are printed in this poetry book that is published.

And so, you know, there's something deeply homoerotic about all of this.

I mean, it does not take a genius to glean any of this.

What's also fascinating, though, is that one of the young members of the Georgia Kreis was Klaus von Stauffenberg, who was the leader of the July 20th plot on Hitler's life.

And allegedly, probably apocryphally, but allegedly, when he's being executed by firing squad, the last thing he yells out is: Long live secret Germany.

Sacred Germany.

Yeah, yeah.

It's either sacred or secret we don't they don't know

uh turns out it's hard to articulate if uh

firing squad but uh and that you know is is the sort of and i don't think there's ever any indication that like plausible stauffenberg was gay no but so but again i this is also where you get this muddledness or messiness of sexual identity which you know in to some extent in the same way that gay conservatives today reject gender theory or gender identity as as real, these gay conservatives back then were rejecting homosexuality, right?

They were saying these labels don't make any sense.

They're sort of against nature.

You're trying to sort of turn something that is natural and beautiful into something clinical and diagnosable.

But I think you're right that there is almost a sort of like queer suprematism or supremacy that is incipient in a lot of these works or a lot of these figures.

Yeah, I forget who coined that term, but there's this idea of an aristocracy of need or of beleagueredness, right?

Like I'm set apart from everyone else by my desires, and that makes me better than them, right?

Like, there's uh, like you get a little bit of that in the novel like Ian Forster's Maurice, right?

Where, like, who's like an utterly mediocre dude until he's like, ooh, do I, do I like guys, right?

Like, they hyper-charge this, and they basically say, like, this is what makes me better than ordinary, right?

That's an interesting kind of version of this that I think is hard for us to fathom today, but that like really had some important post-war ramifications.

I years ago read my way through a bunch of kind of early early homophile periodicals, mostly in Switzerland, because they published them there.

Like one thing you find is a lot of Georgia.

They're like, oh, he was one of us.

He's great.

And the other thing is

they say, well, and we have to grapple with gay fascism because let's be honest, that was us too.

Right.

So like, these are gay men in 1947 being like, yeah, our bad.

Right.

And it's like, guys, I mean, come on.

Like, you don't have to beat yourself.

Like, you do not own this.

But like, that was definitely a position, this idea that there had been something kind of gay about the Nazis and that there was something about this kind of queer supremacism that could become kind of fascist ideology.

That was very not, I mean, I can't tell you how representative these people were.

It's like five writers in like two

journals, but like this was a position people could take at the time and say, hey, we really have to talk about this.

This is a problem.

And their answer, of course, was like, we have to democratize queerness.

We got to go out into public, into the public sphere.

We got to be part of civil society.

We have have to be just like everyone else.

Like we are not better than them.

And

that's got to be understood.

Right.

And in some ways, I mean, I think that that first gay rights movement in Germany can very much be interpreted as

this sort of debate between a minoritizing and a universalizing view of sexual otherness with the sort of valences that the sexual minoritizing view, which is the view of sort of Hirschfeld, and then it, of course, gets picked up by the sort of homophile campaigners after the war, is a fundamentally democratic view.

It's basically the sort of view of we are basically like a pressure group or a special interest group or I actually don't want to use that term, but

we are a distinct social minority in a democratic polity and we have to behave that way and we need to sort of advocate in you know for our rights in the same way that any other minoritized or other sort of marginalized group would.

But then the universalizing one right is this sort of one where the distinction is you know it doesn't see a distinction in terms of sexuality between themselves and, you know, the quote-unquote normal straight people, but it does see all sorts of other differences of race, class, gender.

And as you're saying, sort of, it sees a sort of aristocracy of these queer people who are sort of better than everyone else and have a right to sort of lead the nation, lead the country.

And so I think that...

as you point out, that the more democratic minoritizing vision is the one that ultimately won out.

And that's sort of the turf that we're still debating all of these things on, on, right?

I don't think, I mean, with the exception of maybe like Elo Iianopoulos, there's no one who has returned to that sort of earlier, undemocratic, universalizing idea of sexuality.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Maura, should we have a question about conservative lesbians?

We have very few now, but like, I can't think of any before a certain moment.

I mean, it occurs to me that queer supremacism, as it is articulated in like early 20th century Germany, like might be most robustly contextualized as

having

ideological misogynist foundation, right?

Like that, and that's probably worth talking about, right?

So there's reasons that this tendency arises less often in lesbians that are just kind of like boring gender inequality reasons, right?

Like women have fewer opportunities to ascend to positions of social power and therefore

fewer occasions upon which they find themselves in in a position to like ideologically defend that power, right?

It's just like, you know, if you are pregnant and barefoot in the kitchen, it's harder to, you know, develop a robust sense of your own superiority.

And then, you know, I think we do see that sort of turf development in like the 21st century as being sort of like a downstream side effect of like meaningful feminist advance.

But the other reason that this is happening to men isn't just that they're in the public sphere, but that they're like invested in masculinity, which is like, you know, in many ways, it has a supremacist logic.

You know, I wish these poor guys writing in homophile magazines in Switzerland weren't beating themselves up for being gay.

I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, it's that you're men.

It's that that's the problem.

Totally

got him wrong.

It also, I also do wonder, like, you know, if we think about a lesbian suprematist movement, it would almost certainly be a separatist movement, or what we have are separatist movements.

And it's just either it's a withdrawal from the structures of the broader society, not identification with it.

Because, like, yeah, even in the 1960s, that was like, that would have been, or when it was, when Herland was written, or when

Helena von Tuskowitz wrote her book about how men are diseased and have to be basically shunted aside, like it's from a, it's a place of withdrawal because the idea that the levers of power and the hierarchies of society belong to you is just such a foreign idea in that in that situation.

There is, you know, you got to shout out Valerie Solanas for

breaking the glass ceiling on genocidal logics.

There's like, we've got one.

We'll leave it at that.

We'll leave it.

We started with Andrew Sullivan.

We ended with Valerie Solanas, which honestly describes like 80% of our podcast episodes.

And it's so best today again.

So thank you so much, Sam, for being here.

Yeah.

Thanks for having me on.

In Bed with the Right, we'd like to thank the Michelle R.

Clayman Institute for Gender Research for generous support.

Jennifer Portillo for setting up our studio.

Our theme music is by Katie Lyle.

Our producer is Megan Kalthis.