Inversion
Subtitle: Gay Life After the Homosexual
By: Edited by Amir Naaman and Pierre d'Alancaisez
Publisher: Verdurin
Published: 2025
Place of publication: London, UK
Language: eng
Format: paperback
Number of pages: 460
ISBN-13: 9781068450709
Copyright date: 2025
First sentence: GAY MEN, the former foot soldiers of sexual
and social liberation, today find themselves par-
alyzed by their hard-won freedoms. The endless
choice offered to them by, at one end, hookup
apps and, at the other, the drive for total cul-
tural representation, has left them numb and
unable to decide what they actually want. The
choices available to them today are lackluster.
The once celebrated homosexual artist, for ex-
ample
—
clandestine like Proust, witty like Wil-
de, or transgressive like Genet
—
has given way
to the gay ‘creative’ marketing manager, fashion
stylist, or, at best, ‘content creator,’ for whom
gayness is indicative of aesthetic conformism
and middling taste. In social hierarchies, the once
powerful homosexual outsider has traded his
influence for respectability through institutions
like gay marriage, just as marriage ceased to mean
much at all. Since the passing of the AIDS crisis,
the gay man has even lost his status as a special
kind of nature’s victim, settling for a diet of pills
and injections designed to make gay sex the same
as any other.
Table of contents: title: Amir Naaman, Pierre d’Alancaisez: Introduction; title: Gay men were once the foot soldiers of liberation. Today, the crisis of their culture is at once cliché and taboo. Why is it so difficult to faithfully critique gay history, sex, politics, and nature?; title: Blake Smith: For the Love of the Gay World; title: What do gay men have in common? Smith traces gay’s historical evolution, proposing that the articulation of shared cultural interests might help build a ‘gay world’ once more.; title: Roger Lancaster: Being and Having in the Gay World; title: How do terms like ‘gay’ and ‘faggot’ mark a homosexual’s status? Lancaster looks at the ongoing gentrification of identities, challenging fundamental questions of belonging.; title: David Moulton: Towards a Gay Art of Suffering; title: Can books turn a reader gay? Exploring the evolving gay canon as art and propaganda, Moulton critiques its entanglement in biopolitics.; title: Stephen Adubato: The Deception of Orientation Essentialism; title: What does the ‘sex’ in homosexual stand for? Sexual liberation rendered the true nature of gay sexuality moot. Is it ontologically possible for a man to be gay lest he recognizes the true nature of homosexuality’s defining practice?; title: Amir Naaman: Wars of Desire; title: Why do Western queer activists identify with fighters engaged in brutal conflicts on the other side of the world? Naaman proposes that the fantasy of righteous battle is an erotic, rather than a political issue.; title: Ran Heilbrunn: Abolish Queer Theory!; title: Why has queer theory failed to account for the reality of gay life? Heilbrunn charges the field’s luminaries with an aversion to the male body, male sex, and, ultimately, men.; title: Pierre d’Alancaisez: Freedom of Disassociation; title: What is the gay ‘community?’ Finding that ‘everyone in’ is the door policy of both queer clubs and nation-states, d’Alancaisez explores attempts to defend gayness through appeals to essence, culture, and politics.; title: Travis Jeppesen: Gay Shame; title: Why can’t gay culture sustain its once-vital taste for transgression? Jeppesen bemoans the rise of conformism, indicting today’s queer intellectual and artistic scene with censoriousness and grift.; title: Oliver Davis: The Great Gay Replacement; title: What should we do with bad gays? Reading the one-time cult erotica author Renaud Camus, Davis discovers the roots of the writer’s turn to immigration conspiracy theory in his homosexuality.; title: Yotam Feldman: Twilights of Homosexuality; title: Is homosexuality the Trojan horse of Western ideology? Taking his cue from Alexander Dugin’s ‘realist’ denunciation, Feldman exposes the homosexual’s propensity for deceit and intrigue.; title: Marcas Lancaster: Anathema; title: Was homosexuality’s degeneration foretold in the libertine excess of de Sade’s Sodom? Lancaster narrates the unpalatable truths of the AIDS crisis in florid, viral detail, finding in gay excess an image of liberal life itself.