What I'm Reading This Week (Non-Poetry)

Michael Warner. Contrarian gay theorist. Dissident among activists.

I'm probably going to disagree with like three out of four of the book's central arguments (the author limns these in his preface).

But I relish the author's wit, and his writing on the manipulations and politics of sexual shame and sexual judgment resonates strongly with me.

Strong echoes of Foucault here. Because his theorizing often aligns itself with the literary transgressives who have been monsters in the name of love. I find myself thinking of Genet, Burroughs, Wieners, Acker.

From the preface: "It explains why those who care about policy and morality should take as their point of departure the perspective of those at the bottom of the scale of respectability: queers, sluts, prostitutes, trannies, club crawlers, and other lowlifes."

So the author is brave. He's intellectual, but with a mouth on him. He's not going to apologize for using words like "trannies." He doesn't play those games. I mean the games dumber intellectuals play.

I think this is sort of "A society is only as sick as its secrets."

We pretend that only applies to the individual.

And how not to love an author who can start a book with this: "Sooner or later, happily or unhappily, almost everyone fails to control his or her sex life. Perhaps as compensation, almost everyone sooner or later also succumbs to the temptation to control someone else's sex life. Most people cannot quite rid themselves of the sense that controlling the sex of others, far from being unethical, is where morality begins. Shouldn't it be possible to allow everyone sexual automony, in a way consistent with everyone else's sexual autonomy?"

I'm not far enough into the book yet to know if the author's belief that gay activism shouldn't be so invested in the gay marriage agenda (presumably to the exclusion of civil unions and the recognition of other unconventional relationships by the state, social services, etc.) will eventually make any sense to me.

Right now, I see it as a sort of farcical political necessity. You have to abolish slavery to get to the thing which comes after slavery, to my mind.

It strikes me (giving up on gay marriage) as saying, "Slavery was so fucking stupid, let's just pretend it never happened."

I think we have to abolish slavery first. And then we can talk about why nobody can really be a slave to anybody else. After the civil law question has been addressed we can address the natural law question.

Warner opposes himself to Andrew Sullivan's landmark essay of the nineties in which the argument is, basically, not being queer is the new queer. If queer means what it used to mean, that is. Transgressive. Transformative. The fifth or sixth estate.

To me marriage, has always meant something much deeper than the thing recognized by the state, or the lasting union or lasting sexual union thing. But I see artists who never met as married for all time, quite often. I realize patter like that is useless to a would-be legislator and even counterproductive to discussion.

But if you really believe in marriage, you know it's a hell of a lot more than a boy and a girl in a car commercial with some cheesy bokeh effects behind them.

Personally, I feel married to a number of dead people. Men and women and some unclassifiable. When people speak ill of my husband or wife, I grow queasy and like that person less.

I'm not trying to be cavalier.

But to return to this book. It's great so far, even when I strongly disagree with it.

Check this....

"It might as well be admitted that sex is a disgrace. WE like to say nicer things about it: that it is an expression of love, or a noble endowment of the Creator, or liberatory pleasure. But the possibility of abject shame is never entirely out of the picture.If the camera doesn't cut away at the right moment, or if the door is thrown open unwontedly, or the walls turn out to be too thin, all the fine dress of piety and pride will be found tangled around one's ankles. In the fourth century B.C., the Athenian philosopher Diogenes thought that the sense of shame was hypocrisy, a denial of our appetitive nature, and he found a simple way to dramatize the problem: he masturbated in the marketplace. Many centuries of civilization have passed since then, but this example is not yet widely followed."

I was so reminded of a line by the poet Mary Ruefle when reading that, an apology that opens one of her poems: "I'm sorry, but to the gods we look like dogs fucking."

The funny, catty high school vernacular of I'm sorry but is what makes the line.

To whom is Ruefle apologizing for showing us ourselves under some mythical sub specie aeternitas? Is she chastising herself? Is she joking?

Or is she merely being literal. The aerial view would make us look exactly like that.

But in sex we don't inhabit the aerial view, the god's-eye perspective.

So I don't agree with the admittedly very funny, winsome paragraph above by Warner.

Of a certain type of sex that's true. All sex is hunger sex, but there are different types of hunger. And sex often changes even as it's taking place, which is one of its divine mysteries. It's a great crucible for transubstantiation of spirit. If we miss that, we truly are just dogs fucking.

And yes, it's also a crucible for s.t.d.s, deadly ones and the rest.

So if shame comes out of anything, it's often the shame we feel ourselves for risking our desire for transformative growth against our body's health.

People want to pretend that sex exists only to end friendships (well, the movies pretend to believe that) but sometimes it's the converse. I've seen many genuine friendships start in sex and not "end poorly."

This all depends upon expectations, the constraints of other relationships, a healthy attitude towards sex, physical health, honesty...so many things.

When Yeats writes, "A pity beyond all telling is hid in the heart of love" I want to put a line next to that which reads "A pity beyond all telling is hid in the heart of sex."

These are two completely different pities. The first is about the "mouse-gray waters flowing" that threaten one's love with extinction.

The second is about the frailty of the human animal's attempts to fully experience another human being and feel and give a sort of total sanctification of another soul at once. Through the funny shortcut of sex. It is, usually, a doomed idealism. And even doomed idealisms of this sort have romances which should be written for them. Just like the other ones. (Or is that requiems?)

I've only just started this book, but it has me thinking in a hundred different directions. And I like books like that.

Even in disagreement we find ourselves.

Maybe I should say especially in disagreement we find ourselves.

It's sad this book has only twelve (mostly glowing though) reviews on Goodreads, and those from mostly queer writers/readers.

And yet it seems to have garnered national attention. Because it's the sort of book the more thoughtful journals want to review.