Sex and the City: Ari, September 13 (Part 2 of 2)

PRINT

Crown Heights, Brooklyn

Continued from Part I

Meanwhile, downtown, queer theory was falling apart at the seams.

Lakshmi, Ned, Andrea: I meant to finish the second half of this post weeks ago—and then everything changed, again. And so let me back up. In our last episode, Cynthia Nixon was attempting a sanguine slip into socialism, intriguingly echoing her earlier decision to begin identifying as a lesbian without going through the motions of "coming out." And I was about to tell you about my own coming out this year, as an "aspiring communist mystic," on Tinder.

I started thinking about the sexual politics of the contemporary left in the months before the 2016 Democratic primaries, when a moral panic bubbled up about the supposedly amorous pull of the Sanders campaign on young women. I wrote at the time that this panic not only denied women political and sexual agency, but engaged in a dubious long-running battle to cleanse politics of erotics altogether. But all of that was two long years ago. The sexual imaginary in which girls were being whisked away by lascivious Bernie bros makes no sense in the era of Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib and Summer Lee and Julia Salazar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Cynthia Nixon. It was before you could open the New York Times to an op-ed asserting the continued resonance of Irving Howe and Lewis Coser's 1954 declaration, "Socialism is the name of our desire." It was before we seemed to be popping up everywhere, including Tinder, where that desire has engendered new apertures of recognition, red roses strewn across profiles like a hanky code.

Oddly, though, I've sometimes found myself reacting to this transformed landscape with a slightly melancholy sense of déjà vu—because my time spent chilling under the sign of a Tinder communism this hot dystopian summer often felt, of all things, awfully familiar: the quick intimacies; the gossip; the sensitivity to spots where trauma flips into fetish and can also flip back out again; the baseline suspicion that maybe no one is sexually compatible (after which acknowledgment, sex can be weird and fun); the absurdist but also dead serious relationship to futurity conceived outside the contours of the knowable (let alone the nuclear family); the part where I try to remember if "narcissism" is "bad." Familiar because—on a good day, in a good summer—that's not revolutionary, that's just queerness. And melancholy because when you're a cis girl who tends to date cis boys, it's a good summer indeed when you're able to occupy that position in a way that doesn't feel straight.

We were supposed to be here already; or maybe we were here before, not so long ago, in a city much like this one except completely different, in which some kind of urban commons had not yet been fully partitioned; or maybe queerness lay just beyond the rainbow. I can't remember exactly what they told us in college when I first encountered queer theory, but I am pretty sure that when they let us use "queer" as a verb, they were saying that straightness was over, if we wanted it. I wanted it. It was the early 2000s, and there was, of course, another fantastical panorama available to young women who feared they might be attracted to men: it was called Sex and the City. For all the retrospective hypervisibility of Miranda's dykiness, SATC's gay vibes have been indexed much more often to the idea that the show was "actually" about the male gays. Sex and the City extended the franchise of a burgeoning neoliberalized gay culture to straight women, who were invited to create a self-protective distance from what Jane Ward calls the tragedy of heterosexuality by experiencing it as a kind of immersive drag performance. But I was busy avoiding the show the same way that a few years later, when I worked at an office in Soho, I instinctively avoided certain shop windows, because I would be overcome with the impulse to shatter them with a brick and free the beautiful clothes inside. And so instead, I read about 1920s drag balls in George Chauncey's Gay New York and the "self-shattering" experience of anal sex in Leo Bersani's "Is the Rectum a Grave?" But mostly, I read Eve Sedgwick.Sedgwick's Epistemology of the Closet came out in 1990, the same year as Judith Butler's Gender Trouble, and like the latter, it helped to establish queer theory as a field that understood gender and sexuality as defined, and redefined, through their performance. For Sedgwick, this meant understanding homosexuality—a historical formation forged in the late nineteenth century that posited the shadowy existence of a special kind of man marked by aberrant same-sex desires—as a relationship to privileged knowledge: is he or isn't he? The closet, site of the half-articulations and open secrets that attached to him, enunciated "the speech act of a silence," Sedgwick wrote, "not a particular silence, but a silence that accrues particularly by fits and starts."1 To be a homosexual, then, was to be vulnerable to the closet's motto, the schoolyard taunt, "it takes one to know one"—and, potentially, to feel welcomed by it (156). The amazing part of this, for me, was that anyone could feel taunted or welcomed by this call. Sedgwick—a self-avowed "sexual pervert" (63) who was also, as we whispered among ourselves, married to a man!—never asks us to validate her own insistent understanding of herself "'as a gay man."2 Instead, her work compels the reader to grant this performative claim: it took one to know one, and boy did she ever know one. As, I thought, did I.

In Sedgwick's conception, then, and in much queer theory and culture that followed, the closet became the site of a reimagined commons. It was the place that we—whoever felt included in that we—could be fags together; it could make heterosexuality so strange to itself that it wasn't even straight anymore. This involved a certain historical sleight of hand. The first rule of "really" being in the closet is not talking about the closet, the very notion of which (as Sedgwick readily admitted) became available only thanks to the post-Stonewall discourse of coming out.3 But if seeking an imaginative home there could thus be read as paradoxical to the point of perverse, it may curiously have come to seem less so over time, as gay life became increasingly gentrified, and coming out narratives became a tool of American empire. Particularly in and after the 1990s, the critic Nishant Shahani argued later, queer writers and artists recast the closet as a "provisional homeland"4 fit for a diasporist imaginary, an anti-nationalist origin story in which "the stigma of persecution in the past [became] a seductive site for the embrace of otherness in the present."5 By the time I read Sedgwick—whose class on Remembrance of Things Past I later had the insane luck to audit, shortly before the end of Eve's life—the closet seemed so nearly evacuated of those residents willing and able to assimilate, it made perfect sense to me to imagine queers as squatters of history, camping out in the confines of an impossible past.

But this summer I've been wondering if perhaps we were wrong—not, precisely, about the epistemology of the closet, but about the inextricable question of its geography. What if the closet was not in fact in the process of becoming a historical relic by the time of Epistemology, but a cultural logic still very much in force—even for sophisticated New Yorkers, even for the closet's own theorists? What if the desire for socialism was in there all along, a dusty left side of the self-same chamber, mostly overlooked—the speech act of a silence, accruing in fits and starts? What would happen now if we came out?

*

The case isn't hard to make historically. It has been well-documented that, most notoriously during the Red Scare in the United States, "commies and queers"—in Senator Joseph McCarthy's not-so-affectionate phrase—were thrown together into one big closet. The architects of the Cold War held that all manner of slippery cosmopolitans—unmarried women, race-mixers, Jews—opened up lesions in the body politic that Russian infiltrators could slip through. But they drew a particularly explicit analogy between communism and homosexuality, overlapping conspiracies of nervous, sickly men primed to infiltrate the government through their knack for hiding in plain sight. American communists "can identify each other...on casual meeting by the use of certain phrases, the names of certain friends, by certain enthusiasms and certain silences," Arthur Schlesinger wrote in his 1946 manifesto The Vital Center, observing that comrades' coded speech reminded him of "the famous scene in Proust where the Baron Charlus and the tailor Jupien suddenly recognize their common corruption." (Takes one to know one, n'est-ce pas?) Communism "perverts politics into something secret, sweaty and furtive," Schlesinger concluded, not unlike "homosexuality in a boys' school."6 Such sentiments were further militarized in the 1950s, as conservative and liberal government factions battled over who could most successfully root out and persecute queers using the same draconian mechanisms employed to terrorize suspected communists.Under this kind of pressure, commies and queers seeking respectability tried to distance themselves from each other, adopting their own iterations of McCarthyist logic in the process. Recalling her time in the Communist party, Audre Lorde wrote later, "I could imagine these comrades, Black and white, among whom color and racial differences could be openly examined and talked about, nonetheless one day asking me accusingly, 'Are you or have you ever been a member of a homosexual relationship?'" Queerness, after all, "made you 'more susceptible to the FBI.'"7 At the same time, homophile groups like the Mattachine Society, which developed a political vision of homosexuals as an oppressed minority, attempted to leave behind their own Communist party roots by requiring members to sign patriotic loyalty oaths; Mattachine even considered creating its own miniature House Un-American Activities Committee.8

The more difficult question to answer is what happened to this double-sided closet after gay liberation and the end of the Cold War. It's not, precisely, that it was forgotten. If anything, as Shahani observed, the 1950s—the moment when queerness was most relentlessly produced and politicized as stigma—are ubiquitous within late-twentieth-century queer writing and performance that turned to the pre-Stonewall past.9 Think, for instance, of Tony Kushner's 1991 play Angels in America, in which Ethel Rosenberg becomes the ghostly adoptive mother of a man whose partner is dying of AIDS. The historical memory of American communism is transmitted, here, as a secret inheritance. But we might also observe that this image of haunting is undergirded by a basic historical assumption that communism was then and queerness is now, just as the basic assumption that makes it possible to imagine your community into the closet is that you don't, technically, live there.

Yet now that socialism is "back,"10 it feels increasingly plausible to posit, instead, the ongoing existence of a psychic structure that I've been thinking of as internalized anticommunism, which speaks in a voice noticeably similar to the voice of internalized homophobia: why do you want that; stop wanting that; you wouldn't know how to enjoy the thing you wanted if you got it; you're acting like a girl; you're acting like a faggot; this is about your mom; you're so extra; you need to calm down; you're confused; this is a phase; your parents are worried about you; this is for people with structural privilege that you don't have; you hate those people. This last point, I think, is key. A closet is a technology for restricting (while also anxiously heightening) a field of social vision. People in a closet find each other even if they have to pretend they weren't looking, but they do so under circumstances of shame and duress that may make them wish they hadn't. If someone had asked polo shirt guy from the DSA meeting if he was a socialist five years ago, even if he didn't know what they were talking about, I bet he would have blushed.

It might seem almost a bit smug to start referring now, in this moment of mordant enthusiasm on the left, to a socialist closet, as though some preexisting formation had begun to see the sun. But a closet doesn't always appear as a closed door with a party in full swing behind it. It doesn't necessarily look like an underground, and Cynthia Nixon is almost certainly not a Manchurian candidate (though how fun would that be?) This, I think, is why Nixon's lack of interest in narrating her socialist turn, much like her description of lesbianism as a choice, has been both inspiring and frustrating: her speech act courts failure precisely through its refusal to recognize the closet as its staging ground in the first place. Let's keep in mind that before she was a socialist, Nixon was in show business, and that last time entertainers tried to occupy both of these positions at once, the McCarthy regime was so freaked out by how fun it looked, they made a whole blacklist in response. These days, you can open the Washington Post to an op-ed by a conservative who, shaken by the success of Boots Riley's Sorry to Bother You, extols the CIA's Cold War-era "culture war," and suggests the agency ought to start a new one. If Nixon has been an activist for fifteen years and it never occurred to her before that socialism was the name of her desire, there might be a historical reason for it.

*

When I started working on Part I of this post this summer, I wanted to bring some old-fashioned insights of queer theory to the weird succession of images produced around Cynthia Nixon: Miranda, the unconvincing straight woman; Cynthia, the emerging lesbian; would-be Governor Nixon, the post-Ocasio socialist. I imagine them in a row, standing hazily in a succession of doorways like the fuzzy figure on the cover of Epistemology of the Closet. When I picture them this way, I find it hard to see either a genuine progress narrative or a cynical, coercive one. Instead, these images appear as a tableau in a backstage horror movie, wardrobe doors pried open from within to reveal further sets of doors, a subterranean network of dressing rooms beneath a set of Sex and the City the exact size and shape of New York, and a very determined lifelong actress convinced she knows the set so well, she can find her way through in the dark. All of which made me want to turn the question around, and to ask queer theory if in fact the closet might be shaped differently than we tend to think.

And then, mitten drinnen, another figure appeared on the scene. "How are you doing with the whole Avital thing?" a friend I hadn't spoken to in awhile texted one day in mid-August. I didn't quite understand the question at first; I didn't know Ronell personally, had heard rumors a few months earlier and read a salacious Times story that week, but the grand guignol special effects so overwhelmed my reading that it hadn't cut too close. By the end of the week, I was losing my mind over it, as was much of academia and then some. A member of our own little SATC-blogging groupuscule became a leading voice for graduate students trying to explain exactly why we were so upset. Yet still the accusing question lingers of why we care so much about this one; why this one, why the one starring a queer woman and a gay man, why not the other guys. And this is where it gets really real, because of course the reason we care about this one is that—tautologically—we care about this one. Ronell is not a queer theorist herself. But her former student Nimrod Reitman's Title IX complaint against her centers on ornately detailed allegations of verbal harassment that, according to Ronell and some observers of the case, must be understood as coded queer speech askew to dominant relations of knowledge and power. And since queerness, in some of its most powerful formulations, is its speech acts, the stakes of this question are high.

Queerness was supposed to save us, to give us a backward to look forward to, to carry us away from Sex and the City. A new world in the shell of the old; an Oneida; an Oz. Many of us went to grad school because we cared about this vision of queer transgression and saw academia as the place it was being kept alive or, at least, mourned for. And this has, in crucial ways, been true. But it has also been true that apprenticing ourselves to institutional life via tales of old New York without a practicable vision for a new one, as though the queer past was an elite club accepting job applications, functioned for a long time to keep a lid on our rage. An off-Broadway play running steadily since the Nineties: the chosen family transformed by property, adult children squabbling over the fate of a rent-controlled apartment. The commune crumbling under the pressure of its own social reproduction, the small religious order that can't quite be abandoned but no longer commands belief. And at the center of the saga, a wounded, treacherous matriarch—Tilda Swinton ideally, though Cynthia Nixon could play her in a pinch—caught doing everything in her outsized power to articulate herself outside of straightness by loving, identifying with, talking like, mothering, mentoring, abusing, gay men.

"Both Reitman and Ronell are gay, and playful and over-the-top banter is how she talks with her friends in Manhattan's West Village," one journalist wrote, reporting the latter's side of the story. We grimaced at each other: who was going to tell them? A couple weeks later, in a televised debate, Andrew Cuomo accused Nixon of having meddled in city affairs by trying to help Sarah Jessica Parker save her favorite Greenwich Avenue tea place from eviction. A couple days after that, the Village Voice—purchased in 2015 by Peter Barbey, a retail magnate who owns a $26 million apartment in a luxury building that replaced St. Vincent's Hospital, known for its pioneering AIDS clinic, in Manhattan's West Village—shut down for good. "My cock-er spaniel," I imagine Samantha cooing to one of her young men as they stroll arm in arm through the neighborhood now owned by NYU. "I just need more rhetorical cushioning from you," I imagine Carrie saying to Big in a cab stuck on Jane Street. I imagine Charlotte, drunk, sneaking into an office at a gallery opening and dialing a number over and over again. I imagine Miranda at a party full of bankers, dreaming only of brunch.The fissures that have opened up around the Ronell affair have been bracing, ugly, and probably necessary. The graduate student and adjunct labor movement is growing, and the anger being voiced by contingent academic workers and our supporters coalesced this past month into a powerful collective speech act in its own right, a retort to anyone in the industry insulated enough to express shock regarding the allegations: we know something you don't know. But the contretemps has also at moments recapitulated old beefs between queer theory and Marxist analysis—who denies the importance of "culture," who denies the existence of "structure"—and I think we have a chance to do it differently this time. Speculating about a socialist closet suggests an alternate set of relations, in which the McCarthyist crackdown on the everyday life of the left, precisely at the point where commie met queer, created layers of shame that we haven't even begun to work through—and queer theory, for which shame is a specialty, could be a vital resource for doing so. And working from the opposite direction, I wonder if socialist movement-building could become a new site for queer communizing if we were to recognize that—in ways we seem to feel both deeply uncomfortable with and much in search of—it makes us feel super gay. And whether, for those of us to whom this matters, it might create a set of entry points to faggotry that don't depend upon recognition from gay men.

I am not proposing that we throw open the doors of the left side of the closet and march out proudly to take our seats in a new social order that comes to exist through our righteous presence alone. It's rather that I catch glimpses of what things could look like if the whole rotten edifice collapsed, or if we blew it up. Whether a capacious vision of queerness, developed by the generations just before mine in part as a way of imagining autonomy outside the precincts of mass political organization, might now be recirculated and extended through new configurations of organized political life. Whether we have, and should take seriously, an opportunity to rethink our relationships to—I'm sorry but you all walked right into this—sex, and the city.

love,

ari

The Slow Burn, v. 4: An Introduction

Lakshmi, July 10

Ned, July 18

Andrea, July 24

Ari, August 16

Ned, August 22

Andrea, August 30

Ivan Ramos (Guest Post), October 1

Lakshmi, October 13

Audrey Wollen (Guest Post), October 22

*

The Slow Burn, volume 4, will run in this space all summer. Previous summers can still be found on Post45: 

2015: A Summer of Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels - Sarah Chihaya, Merve Emre, Katherine Hill, and Jill Richards

2016: Summer of Knausgaard - Diana Hamilton, Dan Sinykin, Cecily Swanson, and Omari Weekes

2017: Welcome (back) to Twin Peaks - Michaela Bronstein, Len Gutkin, and Benjamin Parker