This post was submitted by Andrew Fogle

“I want you to whip me like a horse in a Dostoevsky novel,” I said to the stranger with the riding crop and jackboots. He smiled the kind of knowing smile that can only reflect a deep existential engagement with one of the most capable articulators of the modern condition, then cleared space on the dance floor with an authoritative wave of his leather rod, and proceeded to strike me with all the patient fury of a Russian peasant. A literature major within earshot, momentarily distracted from his iphone, quietly soiled his skinny jeans.

This strikes me as the sort of thing that doesn’t happen often outside the queer world. Straight friends might seasonally bastardize Donne or Shakespeare with unpardonable Valentine’s Day poetry in desperate bids to trick their partners into thinking that their grey matter is a little more elastic than their Department of Agriculture desk jobs might suggest (think of it as the cortical equivalent of crotch-stuffing), but this kind of regular artful synthesis of the sexual and the intellectual seems, happily, a uniquely gay achievement.

At least it’s an achievement we find when we’re very lucky, and when we work very hard for it. Michael has already diagnosed one risk — the lure of sublimation which, in one form or another, has glaciated what should have been the happy, carefree, and blessedly stupid adolescent years of far too many queer folk. The capacity to hyperintellectualize, cultivated over so many years of evaded PE classes and dateless (but not homework-less) Friday nights, makes for an especially potent kind of repression, one made all the more insidious by the encouragement of teachers and parents who would too quickly and too eagerly confuse a straight-A student with a straight A-student (if you have to read over this clause more than once, it probably doesn’t apply to you). Maybe surprisingly, college can make these things worse, as the promise of suffocating intemperate libidos in the fluorescent canyons of university library stacks pushes unsuspecting young neurotics into tragically cerebral love affairs with, say, the Socrates of Plato’s Symposium, or the reactionary German metaphysician Arthur Schopenhauer (and if the stale odor of poorly-concealed autobiography leaking from your laptop fan vent isn’t noticeable by now, you’ve either gone too heavy on the Marc Jacobs EDT or are reading this from a Starbucks bathroom). As measured in transcripts and scholarship money, this kind of pedagogical asceticism has its value (this is of course no new insight: to my understanding, the channeling of homosexual lust into rigorous scholarship is the basic premise of Jesuit education). But there are some things it cannot do, things that make you reconsider overcaffeinated assertions made to beautiful and visibly bewildered young men that that “the brain is the largest erogenous zone,” things that make you regret that your GPA points outnumber your lifetime sexual partners (consider briefly what this means even in the best case, and let your heart break a little bit. Please.)

Anyone who has left a Nellie’s trivia night with a bruised ego and an intellect dimmed by more than alcohol knows already that DC queers are a fiercely well-educated crowd (one might venture to speak of the “Cliterati” or “Cocknoscenti,” depending on one’s taste in genitalia and blood alcohol content at the time of composing a blog post). Anyone who regularly strains to eavesdrop on the collared yuppies who tend to walk away with prizes knows also, and painfully well, just how desperately shallow this kind of education can be. There is, then, an opposite and equally treacherous tendency in the life of the gay mind: a relentless dumbing-down and compartmentalization of knowledge that produces the kinds of personalities which, even in the best coffeehouses, always somehow manage to steer promising conversations into headphoned Lady Gaga youtube marathons. That no small number of this crowd is easy on the eyes, a phenomenon which obsessed (or obsesses) the old gay with its dubious erotic fixation on dependent immaturity, can be of no serious interest to our new way of thinking (looking like a Greek statue is only marginally useful when you can’t outperform one on a GRE exam – but then there’s always porn, or, if you’re really reckless, GOP congressional internships.)

The task, it seems to me, is to explore ways of thinking and living which would allow us this: not to harmonize and reconcile these kinds of inner struggles, expecting a kind of symmetry from our patchwork monkey souls that the cruelly improvisational gods of natural selection could only laugh at, but to cope with this division as best we can, dealing however precariously and however impermanently with an irreducible antagonism and trying our darndest to rearrange the tiny fragments of beauty, love, and dignity that luck sometimes drops near enough in the dirt. TNG has done characteristically great work in getting these kinds of conversations off the ground: a dedicated forum for alternative gay “ideas” short on the internecine bitching of Foucault fanboys and deep on excitingly unpolished, original reflection makes for, by my lights, one of the most electrifying corners of the internet. But it would be a shame to leave things at this, we floating new gay brains posting with effective anonymity whatever set of defense-mechanism intellectualizations we’ve used to make it through one more week. It would be a shame because these brains are bound up in bodies just as varied and interesting as the ideas they excrete, and these bodies will remain invisible even to ourselves until we integrate the internet forum paradigm into a more expansive kind of intersubjective project.

Consider something as ambitious as a combined book and sex club, where new gays could learn how to be comfortable in their own bodies and minds – and, more importantly, in the bodies and minds of others. Intense sessions of textual analysis and reciprocal lecturing would be followed by activities even more excitingly oral, at least for those non-liberal-arts-majors who hadn’t already creamed themselves after the fourth Derrida reference in as many minutes. Fetish wear would be welcome, as would The Brothers Karamazov. Kafka enthusiasts would politely be asked to leave, for safety reasons.

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