Plainclothes (2025)

Plainclothes is baffling. Carmen Emmi has made a movie about the closet and the virtues of coming out of the closet in the year of our lord 2025? Why? Who is this for? 

Tom Blyth is quite good in this, but the direction and screenplay are very bad. And I am truly confused by the photography decisions. The images consistently—in the middle of scenes—switch to a grainy VHS version of the same shot. I think this is supposed to be a kind of visual cue for the main character’s anxiety, but it never felt like that while watching the movie. 

The other truly baffling choice is to tell the story in two different time sequences. The movie begins and ends at a New Year’s Eve party and then basically everything else is a very long flashback that moves in more-or-less sequential order. But the movie would have made a great deal more sense if it actually just moved in sequence without the consistent jumps to the party in the present. Instead, the viewer spends nearly a third of the movie’s running time trying to figure out what’s going on. And the tension of the party itself—which should actually be very, very high—feels like just another episode in this man’s anxious everyday life. 

 The real issue, though, is the subject matter. I fail to understand how the very important issues surrounding men who have sex with men in the 1990s (this film is interested in homophobia, AIDS, cruising, and the closet) relate to 2025. It's not that that wasn't an important period; it was. But this is a movie that's interested in moralizing about that time period, and in telling a story about a man working through those issues. In this way, Plainclothes refuses almost completely to relate to issues facing men who have sex with men in the present day, and the issues of the 1990s feel almost completely irrelevant.

At least there was this man to stare at:

Circus of Books (2020)

Circus of Books is a completely charming portrait of two middle-aged straight folks who run a gay bookstore called Circus of Books (a Los Angeles institution for 30 years) and distribute gay porn. I loved it. (It's on Netflix right now.)

Spetters (1980)

Well Spetters is a stunning early Paul Verhoeven film from 1980. There is a lot to say about it, but it is especially notable for a storyline in which a young man is beating up gay hustlers and stealing their money in order to appeal to a young woman who only likes guys with money. But then a gang of four men, led by the woman's brother, rapes this young guy, who, as it turns out, was behaving in this homophobic way because he is actually queer. This entire storyline is fascinating, and I expect I'll probably need to watch this film a couple more times.

A Few Questions about Etiology and Sexuality

Two weeks ago, my uncle emailed me to ask me if I would tell him more about my sexuality. He said he was curious about some aspects of it and had some questions for me to answer if I was willing. I said yes. His questions surprised me (mostly because of some of the assumptions they made about queerness), but I thought the answers I gave him might make interesting reading, so I'm sharing them here.

I've told some of these stories before on this blog, but because memories shift and pictures of the past change, it makes sense to tell these stories again with the different emphases and valences they have taken on in the ever-shifting present. I found these questions both easy and difficult to answer – difficult mostly because I rarely think about these kinds of things – but I tried to answer them as best I could. These were his questions.

1. How old were you when you were exposed to a sexual situation either in the form of pornography or in person. Was the event accidental or what would be considered a violation, or an abusive event. Were you the victim of any protracted abuse either emotionally, physically, or sexually?
2. How many experiences did you have before you realized you may be homosexual?
3. What steps did you take to open up about it? How old were you when you did?
4. You’ve mentioned that you are an atheist, what impact, if any, did your sexuality have on your theological beliefs?

This is how I responded:

First off, I think it fair to say that I begin from the basic assumption of benign sexual variation: people are different; they have all sorts of different desires; and we know that all sorts of various things form those desires and attractions. That said, I assume that what we call homosexuality or a homosexual orientation is no better or worse than any other basic orientation, and that if it is abnormal (and it is statistically less normal, at this moment in history, than what we call heterosexuality), then that doesn't make it bad or wrong or dirty; a norm is a norm because of societal pressures and assumptions, not because it has some kind of moral authority. This is as true of norms in weight, height, skin color, and right-handedness as it is for normative sexual desires. I want to say, too, that my experiences as a queer person can't really stand in for queer people as a whole, and I have found that people have all sorts of different stories and paths for the understanding of their desires.

The answer to your first question is that I was not ever exposed to sexual situations or pornography at a young age, and I was not sexually abused or violated either emotionally or physically. I first heard of homosexuality at church. I remember feeling different from other kids as a young kid – I was picked on and bookish – but I seem to remember more than anything other people's assumptions about my effeminacy or my lack of masculinity: things like my father telling me not to cross my legs like women do when I sat down but to cross my legs like men do, or other adults telling me to hold books by my side at arm's length rather than close to my chest (one of these is the way women hold books and one of these the way men hold books, apparently). I remember this one time I was at some talk about masculinity and sex held at a park by our pastor and him asking a few of us boys (I can't remember who else was there or how old I was, but this would have been in 6th or 7th grade) what we ought to do if we felt desire toward someone of the same sex. I remember knowing so little about sex and desire that I volunteered an answer and said aloud "you should ask that person". The pastor looked at me like I was an idiot and said "That person wouldn't know anything". I had no idea. I never saw pornography until I was in high school (and of course that pornography was heterosexual), and I don't remember ever walking in on anyone having sex.

Cute Boys                             Me                  

The answer to the second question relates to the church, too. As I said, I felt different as a kid, and of course I also felt sinful as a kid. We were all told how sinful we were all the time. So because I felt sinful, because I felt this different, evil thing inside of me for which I didn't have words, when the pastor brought up "homosexuals" as a kind of bogeyman (he did this frequently), I thought "maybe I am one of those". I always identified with the evil characters in fairy tales and children's stories, even stories from the Bible. I was a sinner, and I knew that, and so I knew I was one of the bad people. What I am saying is that I am not sure that I would have named myself a homosexual unless I wasn't told so frequently that I was bad and that homosexuals were bad. But who knows. I started finding myself attracted to other boys when I was in 9th grade, I think. That would put me at 12 or 13. And I had a name for that from my church. I had never heard of bisexuality or any other option. So I knew I was attracted to other boys, and I knew that made me a "homosexual", and I knew that was very, very bad. I prayed for a long time to ask my parents' god to make it go away, but my desires persisted. Their god didn't do anything to help me.

I know that some people learn about their sexual desires through sexual experiences – a person may try sex with various people and then figure out his or her sexuality from there, but that isn't what I did. I had my first sexual experience with a guy when I was 20 or 21 (quite old by today's standards). I had been attempting to stifle my desires and make them go away for about seven years before I ever was willing to try anything. I would say that I definitely missed out on this period of time that your question assumes. I wasn't really free to experiment sexually, or didn't feel myself free to do so, and so I didn't learn about anything that way.

In answer to your third question about when I began to open up about it – I was 20 or 21. Most everyone by this time had sort of figured things out, I think. If a young man is not talking about heterosexuality all the time, and if he hasn't had sex with a woman, he is probably queer. It's a sort of unspoken rule, isn't it? I think my parents probably knew I was queer (I'm not sure how long they had known), and definitely a good many of my friends already knew. Still, I came out to all of them one by one: first to my best friends, then to my parents. I was in college by this time, and this was very difficult because I had been actively lying for a long time, and this means I was a liar. It's hard to convince people that one is being honest when one has been lying to one's friends for a very long time. Even though it was 20 years ago, and I know that my lies were lies that my society wanted me to tell about myself, I still have a lot of guilt about this.

I remember my conversation with my friends Derek and Jaime very well. Derek said to me, "You'll always have a home with us." This was a question of an actual place to live – there was always the fear that my parents would kick me out of the house – as well as a question of an emotional place I could call home. It was the perfect answer. My friend Jill said "I already knew". My friend John hugged me and said he was afraid I was going to tell him that but that he was going to try very hard not to judge me. I don't know how well I remember the conversation with my parents. I most vividly remember my father beginning to talk about sin. I remember that I stopped him. I said to him that the word sin could not mean anything to me anymore because if I believed that I was destined for hell and that I was never going to be happy, then that led to me killing myself. If god simply hated me, then I should die. I had gone down that road in my mind already. But I had decided that instead of dying I was going to try to be happy and live a life in the world.

I don't think my atheism is related to my sexual desires. But I will say that I do think Christianity is incompatible with being a happy, well-adjusted gay person. Christianity has been hostile to homosexual activity for much of its history, and to my mind there isn't much sense in trying to reconcile all of that hatred. But that isn't why I became an atheist. I became an atheist when I realized that I really really wanted there to be a god, but that that desire for someone to take care of me was very similar to my desire for The Lord of the Rings to be real. (Seriously. It is quite a funny comparison, but this is what happened.) Just because I want something to be real doesn't make it real. Believing in a god would make the world so much easier to live in; believing that someone is watching over me and cares about me would make the world feel safer. But that doesn't mean there is a god. It just means it would be really nice if there were one. In other words, I came to atheism rationally through making logical sense of my feelings about the Christian god.

Obviously, a good many ideas have shaped my current views on sex and sexuality – many of which have changed in the last 20 years – but this is my recollection of the period up until age 21 or so. As I say, that was a long time ago, so my memory may be faulty, but this is what I remember.

It is only very recently that I have started to interrogate the interlinked history of homosexual practices and Christianity – I've only just in the last year read John Boswell's Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality and Louis Crompton's Homosexuality and Civilization – and I think that's mostly just because I haven't really even been interested in the Church's ideas about sexuality. They seem to me merely a method of social control. What is clear from history is that homosexual practices (and even more frequently bisexual practices) have existed in almost all societies everywhere around the globe. What changes around the globe is the different ways those practices have been treated by their societies. I simply haven't had much interest in what made me gay or what makes other people gay. To my mind, once we can say that there is nothing wrong with it, the reasons why people like the things they like sexually seem to matter just as little as why people are left-handed or like cilantro or don't like the color green.

Victim: the Most Surprising Film from 1961

What a stunning movie this is! I've just watched Basil Dearden's Victim for the first time and I'm just bowled over.

Incidentally, I have had Victim in my queue for years as something I needed to see – important gay cinema and all that – but I only just watched it because I recently watched another Dearden movie (Khartoum) and thought it was well directed, so I looked up other movies I'd seen of his and remembered that I'd thought his direction of Saraband for Dead Lovers in 1948 was also quite good, and then I saw on his filmography that he directed Victim. In any case, I moved it up in the queue, and I'm certainly glad I did.

In the first place, Victim is a superbly made film noir: it's a crime film that follows several different people, creating a web of intrigue. In fact, it begins with a man fleeing the police for a crime we the audience knows nothing about and which the filmmaker keeps hidden from us. We know next to nothing about what is going on for the first fifteen minutes of the film. It's intensely interesting. We meet many of the film's major characters in this first fifteen minutes, but we are unable to make sense of almost any of it.

The plot of Victim, once this first act is over, is a kind of detective story, in which a man who has been wronged attempts to solve a mystery. This part of the film is intriguing and exciting, and trying to beat the con-artists and murderers is a satisfying narrative.

Sylvia Sims & Dirk Bogarde

But Victim is also a film that is invested in a pro-homosexual point of view: in 1961 when sodomy was still illegal in Britain. At least five times – and maybe more – the film makes the case that the anti-sodomy laws in Britain need to be changed, that they are simply a reward for blackmailers and thieves. There is a great sequence when a police detective tells his subordinate that he should be less prejudiced – Protestantism used to be illegal in Britain too, he informs the lieutenant drily. We also see people's ugly prejudices, and the film exposes them as relying only on disgust and not on any real basis of morality.

The central role is played by Dirk Bogarde (who may have been a closeted gay man himself), and Bogarde is insanely good in the role. It's a performance of powerful nuances. But, of course, he has an excellent script to work with, and Dearden's direction is honestly perfect. I really loved this film.

* * *

There is one thing I need to ponder for a little longer. Twice in the movie a character uses the phrase flourish like the green bay tree to refer to the idea that a homosexual might live a life of freedom. Both times the phrase is uttered contemptuously – first by the prejudiced cop and later by one of the blackmailers. The phrase is originally from the book of Psalms, chapter 37 verse 35. The King James Version reads:

I have seen the wicked in great power, and spreading himself like a green bay tree.

I am intrigued by this usage of the phrase. I was not aware of this, but clearly the phrase had, by 1961, become a kind of code for homosexual. A little Googling has turned up a use in Agatha Christie's 1952 novel Mrs. McGinty's Dead in which a character says that a character in a play she's co-writing can't be gay: "But you can't have him a pansy, darling", she says. "Not for this sort of play. I mean it's not green bay trees or anything like that. It's thrills and murders and clean open-air fun." This passage in Mrs. McGinty's Dead heavily implies that Christie's famous detective Hercule Poirot is a "pansy", but I'll leave that be for the moment, because I'm trying to follow up on this green bay tree business.

The "play" of which the character is thinking is, of course The Green Bay Tree by Mourdant Shairp from 1933 – a gloomy piece about a homosexual and his young protégé that ends in murder. The play avoided censorship by never making this completely explicit, and the author denied it, but everyone knew what the play was about, and if one didn't understand the play's subject matter to be homosexuality, The Green Bay Tree wouldn't make a bit of sense.

There is a Louis Bromfield novel called The Green Bay Tree, as well – this novel is not about homosexuality, and so this is likely not the source of this meaning being laid on the phrase.

Intriguingly, the Oxford Dictionary of Phrase and Fable defines the phrase this way: to develop vigorously in a congenial environment, whether or not this is deserved. There is no hint in this definition that the phrase should be linked with homosexuality.

Similarly, the early 20th century theosophist Gottfried de Purucker uses the phrase without any inference of homosexual meaning in his essay "The Great Heresy of Separateness". In 2002, M.C. Beaton also used the phrase (apparently) without this homosexual inference in one of her Hamish Macbeth mystery novels, Death of a Celebrity.

But Christie's use in 1952 and Victim's double-use in 1961 seem to demonstrate that the phrase was widely understood in mid-century Britain as the vigorous development (to quote the Oxford Dictionary) of a certain kind of person.

BoRhap Horseman

I saw Bohemian Rhapsody tonight. I had been avoiding it. The problems with both the script and the set were widely reported. Sacha Baron Cohen was supposed to play Mercury but quit the production. Then Rami Malek had director Bryan Singer fired during production. (Dexter Fletcher finished the shoot. Also, how is Bryan Singer still even working? Spacey fell hard but Singer is still around? Really?) Then BoRhap got terrible reviews. I thought the whole thing was sort of a train wreck. I don't usually like train wrecks. I don't even get pleasure out of watching things that people say are so bad they're good. So I was prepared to look away.

But then BoRhap became the most popular musical biopic of all time and made a ton of money and it became clear that Rami Malek is almost definitely getting a Best Actor nomination. Since I usually gamble on these sorts of things and try to pre-game these movies, I figured after the SAG nominations that I had to see BoRhap. It's almost certainly getting a best actor nomination, and it may also get nominations in sound mixing and costume design. It might even deserve those last two nominations.

It's worth saying, too, that I loved Ben Hardy in this movie. He plays Queen's drummer, Roger Taylor, and he's excellent.

The thing about BoRhap is that there's just not much to it. That's sort of odd to say for a movie that is 2 hours and 14 minutes, but there simply is not much of a plot: Queen gets famous and then... Queen stays famous. To be fair, most of the film is actually about Freddie Mercury and his weird relationship with his girlfriend–fiancée Mary. There are two very long scenes where Queen fights with a record producer about whether or not "Bohemian Rhapsody" is a good song. These pass for plot as well as for conflict in Anthony McCarten's screenplay, and I have to say that even though these scenes don't work, they do give the movie a kind of structure on which to hang a story.

Ben Hardy as Roger Taylor

The screenplay itself is pretty terrible. Just as one example, there's this really clunky sequence where Mercury's dad explains that their family is of Parsi heritage and, like, basically reads a little Wikipedia summary of Parsi ethnicity. The rest of it is your typical rock-star drama. Lead singer becomes too big for the band, turns to drugs and sex and easy living (more on this in a moment), and deserts his faithful brothers in the band who have been nothing but loyal. But then! He learns his lesson and comes crawling back. Humbled, he asks for forgiveness and his band forgives him. Then they give a reunion performance and everyone cries. You've seen this before. We all have. And here's a drinking game: take a shot every time a member of Queen says "we're a family".

But... and here is where we really run into trouble – at least for this viewer – BoRhap has a great deal of trouble dealing with Mercury's sexuality. BoRhap is rated PG-13. It's about 1970s rock stars and it is rated PG-13. This creates a very serious problem. The band doesn't do any hard drugs in this movie. Instead they drink a lot, pop a pill every once in a while, Roger Taylor has sex with multiple women, and Freddie Mercury... fucks guys on the sly. Well, he looks at them, anyway, and attends a lot of parties where other guys make out.

The villain swoops in

Homosexuality, however, is central to this movie. Since drugs or sex can't really be the obstacle that draws Mercury away from his band and his girlfriend, what the screenwriter instead has done is move homosexuality tout court into that role. So, there is this underlying force that threatens Queen at all points throughout the movie, and that threat is homosexuality – first in an inchoate form and then in the form of BoRhap's antagonist, Paul, who is, as far as this film is concerned, evil incarnate. Paul is the descendant of those old school gay vampires in Hollywood movies made in the 1940s and '50s, feeding off of Freddie and destroying him; he's a figure of two-dimensional homosexual predation. Queer desire is presented as illicit, troubling, seedy, and dangerous from its first introduction in the film. And BoRhap maintains this association throughout. Homosexuality is what disrupts Freddie and Mary's relationship; homosexuality breaks up Freddie and Queen; Freddie's homosexuality is the way the film indicates his lassitude and depression; and homosexuality is what finally kills Freddie. Homosexuality is structurally the film's villain: it is a haunting force that Freddie can't quit and that eventually destroys him. BoRhap goes so far as to present homosexuality as something separate from Freddie, like a terrible addiction. It's as though Freddie isn't gay, it's just that he struggles with being gay and is troubled by his sexuality, which torments him and won't let him alone.

Rami is as curious as I am

Now, this very well may be the way Mercury experienced his own sexuality – how should I know how he experienced it? – but the thing that bothers me is that this becomes the structure of the film, which uses homosexuality as the film's central obstacle and makes homosexuality itself into BoRhap's villainous force. I found this outrageously homophobic.

Still, Queen's music is great. And Malek has Mercury's physicality down perfectly. As boring (and offensive) as I thought the screenplay was, all the concert stuff is pure pleasure. It's impossible for me to be annoyed with great concert footage or shots of audiences singing along and loving their lives. (The middle-aged woman next to me in the theatre who alternated between checking her phone and singing along, seemed to me to feel the same way. She was there for the karaoke. The dialogue? Not so much.)

And it's hard not to think of "We Are the Champions" as a gay anthem, and despite the film's homophobia, the song still feels like that in act three when it appears in BoRhap. The direction even helps with that feeling a little.

Weirdly, in other words, even though the film is, on the one hand, homophobic, it also can't help but celebrate queerness as a lifestyle or as a performance. Mercury is flamboyant, outrageous, and, well... queeny, and if BoRhap tries to say that gay sex is bad, it still maintains a love for gay style. Bohemian Rhapsody celebrates that, at least, and there is definitely something to love in that celebration.

Boy Erased

Joel Edgerton's Boy Erased is pretty good. It has its problems. But if you're me, and you grew up in a Baptist house afraid you might be gay, it's pretty intense. I cried so many times that I lost count.

The plot works like this. Young Jared (Lucas Hedges) says goodbye to his mom and dad (Nicole Kidman and Russell Crowe) and enrolls in a program that promises to help him get rid of his homosexuality and return to the love of the Christian god. Most of the movie involves time spent in sessions of this conversion therapy – which are all legitimately insane but wouldn't quite sound insane to the ear of a good Christian boy like I was growing up.

Christianity and other spiritual practices already involve accepting things that don't seem rational and making sense of things that apparently contradict one another. And these are desperate young people who really don't want to be gay, so they are willing to try anything that promises the possibility of normal heterosexuality. So the idea that, say, making a list of the different "sins" practiced by members of one's family or learning how to hit a baseball might help a person get rid of same-sex attraction (that's what they call it) can seem like a great idea. At the very least, one can see why someone would be willing to commit to a program like this. The Baptist church has made homosexuality into the unpardonable sin par excellence, so nothing can be off the table when it comes to trying to change a gay kid into a straight kid.

I'm about to say something that I think might be controversial.

I honestly can't say that the gay conversion therapy in Boy Erased seemed that crazy to me in Baptist terms. None of the activities practiced in the therapy sessions seemed any more or less coercive, violent, bullying, shame-inducing, or insane than anything I experienced in church growing up. I'm really grateful my parents never sent me to any gay conversion camp (Thanks, mom and dad!); that would have totally sucked. But – although the film doesn't have anything to say about this – church life is actually like a constant gay conversion therapy in miniature. An effeminate boy feels constant pressure to behave in more masculine ways, to walk differently, talk differently, bend his body differently, firm up his handshake, tell certain kinds of jokes, play every sport possible, and pursue young women romantically. All while, of course, learning the scriptures and going to church all the time. In fact, if a boy does get a little too interested in masculine pursuits like girls or sports and thus slacks off in his more important spiritual duties, this is mostly ok with everyone. There is nothing, see, worse than homosexuality, except, perhaps, like, straight-up Satanism. So, yes, Boy Erased is a document of a terrible ordeal that several kids are made to endure because of their alleged sexual desires, but I would say that every kid growing up in the Baptist church feels these pressures, and queer kids in the Baptist church are made to feel them acutely.

The other structural element to the film is a set of flashbacks to earlier sections in Jared's life – all while he is an older teenager. These include sequences with a high school girlfriend, a Christian crush at college, and a Canadian painter. These are all intriguing, but I am not going to say anything about them because of spoilers. One of the sections is, in fact, very surprising.

But the film is not, as it turns out, very surprising. It mostly feels conventional. It's a very typical story – something like Thelma from a couple years ago – of a gay kid learning to be ok with being gay (although how he learned that is unclear, even apostrophized by the filmmakers) and then trying to deal with his mostly homophobic parents.

Edgerton's direction is not great either (although his performance in the film is quite good). The whole thing is very somber in tone, and the film is almost completely unbroken by humor of any kind – even though Kidman does her best to lighten the mood occasionally. A more confident filmmaker would have included more moments of humor, and so the fault is mostly with Edgerton's inexperience, I think. But also (and I also complained about this in my We the Animals review), the filmmaking has almost nothing gay about it, either. This is a film about a gay kid that is almost completely unrelated to gay culture. Even Jared's desire for his college friend Henry is rendered only through Lucas Hedges' facial expressions. The camera does nothing to tell us how much Jared desires Henry or what he wants from Henry. (There is, for example, this great sequence when the two go for a run together and Henry lifts his arms to stretch, and Jared sneaks a glance at his exposed belly. The camera shows us nothing – only Jared in medium shot looking furtively at his friend. Edgerton's camera, in other words, doesn't identify with Jared's desires; it stays outside of them, observing them without seeming really to understand.) The only campy moment in Boy Erased is in a single title-card at the end of the film – it is a good joke, but I could've used a bit more of this in Edgerton's relentless movie.

Edgerton also uses slow-motion way more than he needs it, contributing to the overall ponderousness of Boy Erased but not really contributing at all to our understanding of Jared and his journey toward reckoning with his same-sex attractions. But this is actually the point. The purpose of Edgerton's movie is a kind of public service announcement about how terrible gay conversion therapy is. Further, Boy Erased is a film designed to tell people about how awful gay conversion therapy is while not saying terrible things about Christianity or the Baptist church and not being a gay film. This is a mainstream film for mainstream audiences designed to change people's minds about gay conversion therapy and get some laws passed banning the practice. These are, perhaps, noble aims, and I haven't anything negative to say about them, but they make for a stilted film that doesn't hang together as nicely as it might.

The acting is great, though. I liked Lucas Hedges in Manchester by the Sea and Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri, and I loved him in Lady Bird, but he carries Boy Erased and does it wonderfully. He gives a beautiful, vulnerable performance, and I believed every second of it. I also really loved Russell Crowe, who is, I know, great in everything. Nicole Kidman (who I also love) is the only one who feels out of place here. She is acting a little too much, as though she is just too different from her character to play her quite without comment. Cherry Jones makes a fabulous cameo and has a great scene. Edgerton himself is also pretty great. Xavier Dolan has actually rather a large part, but I found him distracting. I see him way too much as a sort of outspoken enfant terrible of gay Canadian cinema for me to believe him as a kid who really wants to go back to being a good hetero Christian.

As for Oscar nominations... I don't know. I am skeptical. I don't think this movie is very good, even though my own adolescence made the whole thing deeply moving. I can see Hedges getting some Oscar buzz as the main character, but I have trouble seeing him with a Best Actor nomination. I am fairly certain that Troye Sivan (who also plays one of the kids doing the conversion therapy) wrote an original song for the movie (it is, of course, also quite ponderous). These two seem like the only real shots Boy Erased has for nominations. Nothing else really stands out.

(Sidebar: if you know me and you have seen the movie, you know that there is also something that I should be talking about here that I am not talking about. This is the surprising section to which I alluded above. I don't want to spoil that plot point, so I'll talk about it at another time.)

The Closet and Its Protections: On National Coming Out Day and Love

On this National Coming Out Day, I am in a dormitory on the campus of Louisiana State University, having escaped Tallahassee for Hurricane Michael.

Today – because of all sorts of recent circumstances in my life – I am reflecting on coming out in new and different ways. George Chauncey tells us, in his extraordinary book Gay New York, that young gay men used to come out into gay society. That the phrase come out used to mean something like a debut, an introduction into adulthood or a marking of a new status in the community. Post Stonewall, with the arrival of gay politics and the invention of National Coming Out Day, coming out was coupled with protest and activism: out of the closet and into the streets was the common rejoinder. One came out in order to mark one's positionality as a member of a group of active gay people.

I am fond of both of these formulations of coming out. They both have an intriguing resonance for me, and they seem linked in several key ways to community, to making a statement, to self-definition.

Lately, though, I have been pondering our obsession with outing, with insisting that some gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans, and other non-hetero people publicly define themselves. I was struck especially by an extraordinary campaign by the actress Chloë Grace Moretz against the film Boy Erased in which Moretz trashed the film (which is about gay conversion therapy) because it was directed by a straight white man and stars a straight white man. Her own film, she said, "was directed by a bisexual woman of diversity". Moretz's position, leaving aside the questionable phrase "woman of diversity", is that one film is more authentic than the other because the roles are played by queer people in one and not the other and because one film is directed by a queer person and one is not. Maybe so, but sexuality doesn't really work that way. And who's to say who is gay and who is not?

I had assumed, for about a year now – at least since Lady Bird – that Lucas Hedges (who stars in Boy Erased) was not straight. This made me more invested in his career and more interested in his artistic choices. Moretz's accusation that Boy Erased had a straight man as its lead performer, then, struck an odd note with me. But he isn't straight, I thought. Who is she to say that he is or is not straight, especially when he has said nothing about it publicly? Worse yet, her statement seemed to throw the gauntlet down – actively to question his sexuality or to ask him to either defend or deny his heterosexuality. This is an unfair position either way, and it is the business of none of us – especially since the film is not about an out and proud young man but a boy who is actively trying to make a life for himself and is in fact negotiating the closet and the very serious risks of coming out. Sure enough, Lucas Hedges recently did come out as "not totally straight", a common enough formulation for young people these days. It would have been nice if Hedges hadn't been pushed to do that, though, and I find Moretz's position totally unacceptable. We don't know what Joel Edgerton's sexuality is either, thank you very much, and it isn't anyone's job to force him to confess it to us so that we can feel better or worse about enjoying his movie.

(I suppose it is also worth mentioning that some folks I know have accused Senator Lindsey Graham of being gay and closeted. Accused of being gay – it's an interesting way of putting things. To my way of thinking, Graham deserves our contempt for his actual politics not for his perceived hypocrisy, his perceived queerness, or his perceived closetedness. His relationship to his own sexuality is of no interest to me compared to his reprehensible political positions. And we should all be careful of attempting to out Senators or accusing politicians of queerness. Graham is hardly the only Senator who might be accused of hiding his sexuality.)

This summer I broke most of my rules and dated a closeted Christian guy. He is a really special man whose relationship with the closet was way more complicated than I understood then or understand now. He hadn't told anyone about being gay, and he has no intention of telling anyone that he is gay. His relationship with his family, his relationship with his religion, his relationships with his friends, and his relationship with his workplace all demand his heterosexuality. Those relationships make no room for the possibility of him being anything other than heterosexual. He doesn't want to come out, but, of course, how could he want to do something that would jeopardize and possibly destroy his relationships with everyone he loves, with everything he knows, with everything that gives him value as a human being? The closet, in other words, is a demand that his society makes of him. Closets are created by homophobia, by a restriction of options for queer people. And so I am arguing that queer people owe nothing to those closets. There are no rules for how queer people ought to interact with those closets, for what they ought to do in response to those closets. Queer people did not make the closets and they owe the closets nothing. It is not my job to judge how a person deals with a closet she didn't make in the first place.

Has this man's choice been heartbreaking for me? Certainly. But it is his job to decide what he thinks will make him happy or what he thinks is right. And it is not my place to impose my version of what I think will make him happy onto him. Most of us rebelled against our parents' versions of what our happiness ought to look like. I have no desire to replicate that same system in reverse when it comes to someone I love.

Being queer is very difficult for a very large number of people – and I think sometimes those of us who are out and proud forget how hard being "out" can be. What I want, on this National Coming Out Day is to try not to privilege the "out" position. For some of us, the closet is saving our lives. For some of us, the closet is (merely?) saving our careers. For some of us, the closet is saving us the headache of having to deal with relatives who ask too many questions. The queer people in our lives deserve our love no matter what relationship they have with the closet. Let us love each other with fierceness and generosity.

120 Battements par Minute (2017)

120 Beats per Minute is basically perfect. It is without question the best movie about AIDS I've ever seen. As a friend recently said to me: It might be the best anything about AIDS I've ever seen.

The final 20 minutes of this movie are absolutely extraordinary, capturing perfectly the impulses to mourn and party and fuck and protest that have been so beautifully theorized by Douglas Crimp and others. But it's no use even singling out those final 20 minutes because the entirety of 120 Beats per Minute is superb, and the performances – particularly Nahuel Pérez Biscayart's – are excellent.

Some Post-Christianity Musings

I had an interesting conversation today when an acquaintance from my childhood church days messaged me out of the blue. I won't include her name here, obviously, but she's given me permission to share this little exchange. Calvary Road (whose name you will read below) is the church that I attended until I was in the sixth or seventh grade.

 * * *

Hi Aaron. I don't know if you remember me. I was thinking of us as kids and remembering what a cool kid you were. Just looked you up and saw how successful you have become. Just wanted to tell you congratulations.

Of course I remember you! Thank you so much. I don't always feel so successful, but things are indeed going pretty well!

I was reading up on you. You seem to have found your purpose. And you help others too. That's amazing. I'm happy for you. It must have been hard for you at Calvary Road. I'm sorry for anything that you went through there. You were (and are) such a creative soul and an inspiration to me.

This is very sweet of you to say. It is one of the sincere missions of my life to become more generous and to give more and be kinder to others. As for Calvary Road, I don't know... I think adolescence is difficult anyway. In many ways it was quite hard - feeling always that I didn't fit in and feeling always like there was something wrong with me. 

This was my church growing up. But without the fancy doors.

But, it is funny: I always say that that church turned me into a gay man, actually. I am not sure if I would have become gay had not the pastor of that church constantly vilified queer people – pointed them out as different and evil. I, as a boy, felt different, sinful, and strange, as though I didn't fit in, so when I heard about gay people as bad, different, etc. I thought to myself Oh I must be that thing.

In many ways, I think that the church gave shape to my life through that vilification. It's odd. Of course, I think the church did a great deal of damage to me too, mentally and physically (since so much of what our bodies become begins in our brains), and I am very sorry about that. And... then there are my parents, who will never quite know how to love their queer son the way I would like them to love me.

But... perhaps my work now is aimed at redressing a lot of those things, and maybe I am gaining a good amount of satisfaction by attempting to make more space in the world for people like me (and not like me).

Sorry that was a really long answer, but I am feeling introspective today and I appreciated the sensitivity of your comment.

I love your response. I'm honored that you shared it with me. Growing up in that church was difficult and damaging. I didn't see the light until I was 30 (yikes) and they were sabotaging a budding relationship. I ended up leaving because of that. And it wasn't until I was married to my husband for several years with kids that I realized that I didn't fit into the normal heterosexual box. I remember being afraid I was gay as a child and teen. Now I know it's more complicated than that. Not exactly sure what I am, but it's funny when my husband and I check out the same woman.

I think of you often and wish that I could have been a better friend growing up.

And that pastor is dangerous. His words are dangerous. I go to therapy to re-program those things that I learned. He has damaged so many. And it has turned me off of religion.

I’ve been thinking a lot about these things recently because I have been (up until a couple weeks ago) dating a man who is very involved with Christianity and hasn’t figured out (yet) how to reconcile his faith and his queer desire.

And maybe sometimes it does take until age 30.

* * *

I've written about this before – about Christianity and queerness – in my piece in QED from a year or two ago. And I was angry for a long time, rejecting Christianity outright and really being furious with Christianity and what it does to queer people as they grow up. But I have changed my mind in recent years – this has a lot to do with my efforts to understand and empathize with queer Christian students for whom Christianity is still very generative – and I am neither hostile toward Christianity per se nor to belief in a god per se anymore. At least I don't think I am. This has taken me a very long time, though.

There is much more to say about my relationship with this Christian man, too. But I am not ready to narrativize my love for him yet. I am not yet prepared for our relationship to turn into a mere story.

Cinema Q

I decided to make this list after reading yet another critique of how Call Me by Your Name. The author of this particular think-piece was bemoaning the lack of queer cinema. What he meant was that although we have more films with representations of gay people in them, and even (I think he said this) more films about gay topics, we don't have filmmakers who are using the kinds of queer filmmaking techniques pioneered by Derek Jarman.

Pariah

In the first place, I don't really see how this is remotely true – Saint Laurent and Cemetery of Splendour and Moonlight and Carol simply were not that long ago, and each of them is plainly using queer techniques. As, for that matter, is Call Me by Your Name.

The main critique I read of Call Me by Your Name was, of course, that it didn't have enough sex in it. I can't say I really disagree. Although I thought the film was very sexy, the novel is explicit in ways that the film seemed occasionally to avoid. Not that Call Me by Your Name isn't sexy; it obviously is. And there are plenty of quite explicit sequences in it. But it seems to shy away slightly from gay sex. I don't need to make excuses for that, and I don't particularly care to. I rather agree. This bothered me a lot about Moonlight, too, even though I also loved that film.

God's Own Country

I think what irks me when I read takedowns of Call Me by Your Name by queer critics is that they always seem to want the movie to do everything. Call Me by Your Name is too romantic, and it doesn't deal with homophobia, and there's not enough sex, and it's set in the 1980s, and it doesn't deal with HIV/AIDS, and it's too bisexual, and it's about two males, and it doesn't take place in the U.S., and it's not about me. Theses writers seem to be really furious that every gay film doesn't include all the things. Which leads them to hate, say, Love, Simon, for not being the queer teenage breakthrough film they've been looking for forever, or to complain: where is the Moonlight for ladies?

Signature Move

Do we need more films about queer people? Yeah. Do we need more films about queer women in particular? Yeah. Do we need more movies about trans and gender-nonconforming folks? You know we do. Do I want to watch more stories about queer people that don't end in tragedy? For sure.
 
But every film about queer people doesn't need to do all things, and my first reaction whenever I read complaints like the ones about Call Me by Your Name is Oh! You don't see enough movies about queer people. Because it turns out they are there. Did you want a movie about a young woman developing an attraction to other women and developing superpowers at the same time? You should see Thelma. Were you interested in watching more explicit gay sex as part of the film's narrative? You should see Beach Rats. Were you interested in homophobia and its effects on both sex and love? You should see God's Own Country. Did you want to see a movie about a girl falling in love with a gender-nonconforming person in Chicago? You should see Princess Cyd. Were you interested in HIV and its effects on the queer community? You should see 120 Beats per Minute. Did you want a pure fantasy about a teenager meeting another queer teenager and developing a relationship? You should see Handsome Devil. Were you wanting a movie about a transwoman dealing with homophobia and grief? I hope you saw A Fantastic Woman. And these were just the films released in 2017.

120 Beats per Minute

My point is that these films exist. We're just not watching them. And then we're complaining that the ones that we do watch don't do all the things we want them to do. All the critiques I read of Call Me by Your Name were tinged with this complaint. But it's not this enough. And I wished it did more of this. That's cool. It's totally valid. Call Me by Your Name was doing its own, particular, Luca Guadagnino–James Ivory thing. Ivory has been making movies since the early 1960s and he sees the world a certain way, and Guadagnino has particular interests as a filmmaker related to sensuality and nature and food. I loved this film, and I loved it for what it was... and I also understand not loving it for those same reasons. But to move from there to complain about the state of queer filmmaking is, to my mind, ignorant. Watch more queer movies and you'll see that there are lots more queer stories out there. I can't think of a better time for queer cinema than right now – and maybe that's because I recently saw 120 Beats per Minute, which was easily one of the best movies of 2017 and is unquestionably the best film about AIDS I've ever seen. It actually just might be objectively the best film about AIDS ever made.

So, I want to inaugurate a Cinema Q list. A long list of movies about LGBTQI topics and queer people for every year. The list will be annual and will link to whatever comments I've written about it. I am imagining this as a resource, but also as a kind of memory bank. I will update this list continually when I know about a queer film or when someone messages me a recommendation.

The female Moonlight, incidentally, was called Pariah. Did you see it?

Cinema Q

Kink, Identity, and "Sexuality"

I have been thinking a lot, for the last two weeks, about kinky sex practices, domination/submission, violent or painful sexual activity, leather, and identity. This has been spurred by two different friends and their careful promptings. (I am surrounded by smart folks and, as always, I am grateful for that.) One shared this article – "Is Kink a Sexual Orientation?" by Jillian Keenan – saying, incidentally, that he thought the piece was "poorly written garbage nonsense". Another asked me what I thought about the large amount of violence in gay pornographic films. (I will post on a different day about this.)

Leatherdyke Dorothy Allison

Meanwhile, I have been reading, for the last week or so, the collection of essays called Leatherfolk, edited by Mark Thompson. Thompson's book was a groundbreaking collection in gay and lesbian studies when it was originally published. I had read essays from it before (Gayle Rubin's "The Catacombs: a Temple of the Butthole" is a classic!) it was just something I had never got around to reading from start to finish. Leatherfolk is part theory, part history, part politics, and part spirituality. I loved the first three sections and was almost completely bored by the fourth (For the record: I have nothing against people deciding to explore existential or universal truth through fisting – fist for whatever reasons you like! And in fact I have no doubt that a person can reach a higher plane through pain just as she could reach a higher plane through hallucinogens. I just find that the people who actually want to talk about this – who, incidentally, all call themselves shamans or faeries or words like that – speak in a language that doesn't connect with me. Get your spirituality however you like, but I've come to understand that this is not for me.)

And this weekend, for a course I'm teaching, I reread Rubin's "Thinking Sex", that game-changing essay that articulated new theories of sex-positivity and benign sexual variation during the culture wars of the 1980s.

* * *

Is kink a sexual orientation? The answer is obviously. What is orientation except the direction in which one is oriented? I don't understand why Keenan has chosen this term to begin her inquiry. It seems to me that her real question is Is kink a sexuality? In other words, should kink be given the same status in our culture as homosexuality and heterosexuality – a status now in some ways protected by the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Obergefell v. Hodges?

Keenan cites Dan Savage as one person who mostly disagrees with the idea that kink might be a sexuality. She quotes him as saying, "While some kinksters identify strongly with their kinks and are open about their sexual interests, being into baby bonnets or bondage isn't about who you love, it's about how you love."

I find this line of reasoning completely incoherent. Frankly, I do not define sexuality as having any relationship to love. Let me make a change that I hope will be helping Savage out: If we rephrase him so that he's saying "[kink] isn't about who you fuck, it's about how you fuck", then we get closer to the heart of the matter, and we get to the stakes of this question that is, in fact, central to mainstream LGBT politics.

The LGBT movement has carved itself a niche whereby it claims ownership of something called "sexuality", and this movement claims that a person's sexuality is only a small part of who one is. (Sometimes this part is considered the most important component of who someone is – as when they call on an actor to come out of the closet – and sometimes this part is referred to as an almost totally inconsequential attribute – as when they say that someone, usually an athlete, "just happens to be gay".) In any case, for the mainstream LGBT movement, sexuality (homo or hetero) is something essential, unchanging, and biologically given; it is also something that is deeply oneself, in many cases explaining the self.

And no matter how many people stand up and say "no that isn't how sexual desire works for me", no matter how many people say they have chosen their homosexuality, no matter how many people identify as bisexual or pansexual or asexual, no matter that historians have shown that across time sexualities have differed widely, and no matter how many straight people have occasional sex with same-gender partners, the LGBT movement tells us: no, actually, we are all born this way. And you are either born this way or born that way.

In other words, the movement has opted for this unchanging, biologically given version of sexuality instead of one more closely linked to reality. I guess this essentialist version of sexuality makes more sense to some people (the police, non-denominational ministers, your parents). More importantly, the movement has done this because they assumed it would be easier to get acknowledgement and concessions from the conservative state this way. And they have succeeded. This has been a way to get recognition from the state. That is all good and well. But most queer people (and lots and lots of straight people) know that this essentialist tale is simply not true. (Anyone who has ever experimented with a sexuality other than his or her own ought to be able to attest to that.) But as they propagated this essentialist story, they also shored up the gender binary and (worse yet) lied about how desire actually works in human bodies. Jillian Keenan's own bisexuality and kinky queerness point up the lie in this LGBT position.

We have a political term for this, of course. It is called strategic essentialism. Those who opt for strategic essentialism know that we are not all essentially one certain way, but we opt for this story in order to achieve political change. But it seems to me that many in the LGBT movement actually believe the essentialist story that we thought we were using strategically. And if we believe this lie, and teach it as orthodoxy, it will become essentialism itself. In fact, if the U.S. Supreme Court is saying it, it seems to me that essentialism has arrived.

I don't know who these people are, but they seem fine.

You may actually see your sexuality as something with which you were born. That is fine for you. But it is absurd to look at someone who says she wasn't born gay and tell her that oh yes of course you were. While there may not be as many sexualities as there are queer people. It is important to remember – as Eve Sedgwick reminds us in Epistemology of the Closet – that we are all very different from one another. We see our sexualities in different ways, we explain the origins of our sexualities in different ways, and we engage in all sorts of sexual practices that differ from one another. In fact, I'm willing to bet that you have done one or two things with one of your sexual partners that you never did and never would do with one or other of your partners. Any identity we claim with one another is bound to be strategic, contingent, temporary – certainly the identity claimed between gay men and lesbians must be!

So: Is kink a sexuality? Yes. Certainly as much as heterosexuality and homosexuality are sexualities. Kink is a mostly inexplicable, possibly acquired, orientation toward particular erotic behaviors. I fail to see how being erotically interested in leather or tennis shoes or denim is any different from being interested in penises or vaginas or breasts. (Incidentally, most of us have asses and mouths and fingers, not to mention ears and eyes and armpits.) Still, the truth as I see it, is that there really is no such thing as either homosexuality or heterosexuality except as practices. What the question underlines is that the frame of sexuality is a weak one for explaining actual human behavior.

Dan Savage and others, the judicious keepers of the LGBT movement, can't grant "sexuality" status to other modes of queerness because this would undermine the essentialist position. Was a kinkster born this way? That is how the movement understands what sexuality is, so that is what they would have to argue. (The idea is absurd. Even if I was born liking, say, racially mixed guys with hairy chests of a certain age, society expects me – since it values marriage – to change my orientation over time to racially mixed guys with hairy chests of a different age.) As Keenan notes in her essay: "Some friends have told me that kink should not be considered an orientation since that could open the door for any deeply felt sexual identity to claim that status. Is sexual orientation a slippery slope? Are we two clicks away from a strong preference for nerdy-Jewish-tech-guys-with-dark-hair-and-an-athletic-streak being called an 'orientation'?" But arguing that these sexualities are essential opens up a whole other can of worms; it leaves open the possibility that someone might want to categorize rape-fantasy as a sexuality and someone else might want to categorize cross-generational attraction as a sexuality. Who knows what proliferation of unspeakable sexualities we might unearth? Who knows what protections we might have to ask the government to grant. My two examples are designed to point up just how much the LGBT movement's position is actually wedded to the same old hierarchy of sexuality that was in place long before its own arrival. The LGBT movement still wants to be able to discriminate between bad sexualities and good sexualities, proper sexualities and improper sexualities. They can't help judging, and they most assuredly haven't heeded Gayle Rubin's thirty-year-old call for a theory of benign sexual variation. The granting of "sexuality" status to kinksters would undermine the main thrust of the LGBT movement's position, to wit: that white gays are well behaved citizen-subjects who want to vote and get married and purchase sofas and time-shares and lawn mowers just like everyone else.

Fakir Musafar

There must be other paths to increased sexual liberty. The essentialist one has (apparently) been the easiest one, although obviously it has not been easy! But it is also a path that has re-confirmed the power of the state/church. It is a path that grants government more power, a path that asks for the government to recognize us and not to recognize others. This request for recognition, in addition to excluding explicitly those whom we have decided we do not wish to be recognized, also has the effect of giving the state itself more power. Why are we arguing that the state that has the authority to recognize what is and is not acceptable sexual behavior? Why have we decided that what we all want is the government to grant us our humanity? Not only is this a terrible political practice for anyone who believes in liberty, but it is also a terrible politics for anyone who believes in sexual freedom. And if we pin our hopes to government recognition of humanity, we are bound to be disappointed when the government changes and other, more hostile rulers, take the place of the benign ones we believe we've convinced. We are granting the government more power because we believe that it will do the right thing. But governments do not do the right thing, they do what is politically expedient. And even if they do the thing that you think is right for a little while, that doesn't mean that they'll do it indefinitely, and the voting public can always change its mind, stirred to action by the next ridiculous politician in a baseball hat.

The folks from Fifty Shades Darker

It is worth asking why Jillian Keenan wants kink to be granted sexuality status. The benefits that have, in the United States, accrued to essentialist sexuality have been great indeed... for a select few. But serious leatherfolk were already complaining 25 years ago that S/M practices had gotten too soft, too bourgeois, too respectable. When Keenan answers Savages comment that "[kink] isn't about who you love, it's about how you love" with the retort that "kink is how I love my husband", I have to admit to shaking my head at the absurdity of the claim. Perhaps there are leatherfolk who could read such a sentence without laughing, but I assume that any domina worth her salt would feel her gorge rise or burst out laughing or both. Love? Husband? This is radical sex? It sounds a lot like Leave It to Beaver. 

I propose that we begin actually to believe that sexual variation is benign. I propose that we make it a project to convince people not that we are all the same but that we are all different and that that is ok. I propose that we begin to believe that people should be free to make their own sexual choices – and that people actually make those choices and not that they are driven, through some genetic or chromosomal compulsion, to do those things. 

This would mean taking ownership of our desires and pleasures.
It would mean that we stopped asking whether this or that sexual practice was good for society.
It would mean that we stopped worrying about why someone was into a particular sexual practice and worried instead about how to make it better for her and the sexual partner or partners involved. 
I am no utopian, as you probably know if you know me, but it seems to me that these ought to be the terms of any fight for sexual equality. Trying to convince congressional republicans and our sexagenarian aunts and uncles that the kinky sex we're into or the non-committed, non-monogamous sex we're into, or the porn we like, or the particular ways we like to be touched, choked, stroked are just like the sex grandma and grandpa used to have is a battle that we will lose even if we win. We'll only wind up using kink "to love our husbands more". And in order to keep our positions in society, we'll find ourselves in the reprehensible position of needing to judge the "weirdos" whose sex isn't as respectable as ours.

Separating Our Selves

I'm reading the Marquis de Sade's La Philosophie dans le Boudoir at the moment with a couple of other gay men (queer book club!) and one of the things that I am finding interesting about it is that it is – as the title Philosophy in the Bedroom might have intimated – a series of philosophical dialogues that take place in the bedroom. Sade's dialogue, though, is actually a dialogue about philosophy. These sexually voracious characters talk about more than sex; they talk about Enlightenment philosophy, the nonexistence of gods, ethical points of view, justice, etc.

And sex is obviously a kind of background for this philosophy: once one decides that freedom and pleasure are important ideals, one's philosophical ideas are shaped by those principles. But I think I am surprised with the fluidity with which Sade moves from talking about, say, giving to the poor (or not, as the case may be) and, some scandalous-for-the-eighteenth-century sexual activity like lesbian cunnilingus.

I think the reason I am interested in this easy switching between the world of le boudoir and the world of la philosophie is because I am not sure I do this switching so very well. Now, obviously, I am a queer man who has made his queerness central to the practice of his own scholarship, and indeed I both write and read history from the point of view of queer historiography. I always say that I learned how to be queer from the theorists I read and loved when I started studying: Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherríe Moraga, Pat Califia, Leo Bersani. And this queer subject position and my political interests have influenced my own investments in queer theory. This is one of the ways that queerness and queer theory have had an effect on literary studies, on historiography, on the humanities in general. The personal is political, feminist criticism taught us, and many of us have made queerness not only central to our own life-worlds but also central to our critical position within our fields.

But this is an identity position and a critical position related to my subjectivity not exactly (in fact rather far from) a sexual position. And what I am not sure I do so well is move with fluidity between the philosopher I understand myself to be and myself as a desiring sexual subject or (less frequently) a desired sexual object.

I am thinking about this because I recently finished Nick Salvato's brilliant book Obstruction, and in chapter one he theorizes embarrassment as a feeling that arises in a social situation when the performance of self is exposed "as undesirably or nonideally multiple and divided" (40). In other words, we feel embarrassment when a self that we are used to performing in one social situation is somehow exposed or highlighted in a social situation in which we are not used to performing that (version of our) self. For example, I may be quite comfortable talking in a very in-depth way about The Lord of the Rings and the history of Middle Earth with one group of friends, but would feel distinct embarrassment were one of those people to ask me a detailed question about Tolkien in front of a group of my students. My teacher-self and my Tolkien-loving self don't really move in the same spheres, or rather I perform one version of my self to my students and another to my Tolkien-loving friends. And this confusion of selves or perceived-as-incorrect spatial configuration or relation for one (or more of my selves) is experienced affectively as a cringe or blush – embarrassment.

But we are talking about sex (or at least we were), and I was saying that I don't think that I've done a very good job of merging my sexual self and my philosophical self. Or perhaps what I mean to say is that I have kept these two versions of my self quite separate for reasons I am not sure I really understand. I don't think this is to say that I am embarrassed about my own sexual desires or activities or partners as a philosopher, but perhaps I am embarrassed about the philosophy in my bedroom, concerned to the point of embarrassment with oh-I-don't-know ethics or critical race theory or radical queer feminism or (and this seems very likely) the theorization of sexual violence.

I am not really sure where I am headed with these observations, but perhaps what I want to say is that for Sade, sex – the boudoir – makes philosophy very very simple. Sexual liberty as a personal political mandate makes theorizing about the rest of his world so much easier. For me, on the other hand, I think philosophy has made sex rather a bit more difficult.