Inversion

With contributions by Blake Smith, Roger Lancaster, David Moulton, Stephen Adubato, Amir Naaman, Ran Heilbrunn, Pierre d’Alancaisez, Travis Jeppesen, Oliver Davis, Yotam Feldman, and Marcas Lancaster.

Today’s world of PrEP, Pride parades, and gay marriage eclipses the wildest dreams of the sexual revolution. While it was formerly deviant to promote gay lifestyles, it is now ‘problematic’ to suggest that not all departures from the norm are in the homosexual’s best interest. Amidst this excess, a new wave of discontentment rises among the once-keenest proponents of sexual progress: gay men.

What happened in the transition from inversion to homosexuality, gayness, and queerness? Why do some gay men lament the freedoms afforded to them by sexual and social acceptance? Bold and daring, the essays in Inversion reflect on the vicious cycle of debasement, acceptance, sacrifice, and liberation that homosexuality has been stuck in for longer than it wishes to acknowledge.

As gay culture fails to confront its history, it adopts hollow narratives of struggle. Some gay men fear losing their freedoms, some advocate for sexual restraint, while others, lost in the ever-expanding LGBTQIA+ ‘community, ‘ continue to make maximalist ideological demands of those outside. These responses mark a fracture in gay life. If there is some essence to homosexual desire, how is it being served by today’s gay culture and queer politics? Has the gay man – homosexual, queer, or inverted – rendered himself obsolete?

Bringing together contributions by eleven leading thinkers, theorists, and critics who examine the consequences of pink-washing history, denial of sexual realities, and the memetic nature of desire, Inversion reclaims homosexuality’s lost depth in an era of profound discontent.

Fearless in its critique and challenging in its proposals, Inversion considers the cultural and political aspects of gay life after homosexuality as it battles with queerness and the allure of a reactionary return, pharmacologically fueled sexual degeneration, and existential dread.

Author Biography

Pierre d’Alancaisez is a critic, curator, and researcher interested in the changing role of art and its social institutions. His writing has appeared in The Critic, ArtReview, The Spectator, and Compact. Blake Smith is a historian and translator who lives in Chicago. He writes regularly for Tablet, American Affairs, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Foreign Policy. Roger Lancaster is a professor of anthropology and cultural studies at George Mason University. His research tries to understand how sexual mores, racial hierarchies, and class predicaments interact in a changing world. His award-winning books include The Struggle to be Gay – in Mexico, for Example. David Moulton is a writer and independent researcher interested in literature, philosophy, and the history of science. He is working on a novel. Stephen Adubato is an associate editor at Compact, and his writing has been published in the New York Times, Newsweek, and First Things. He teaches philosophy and religion, and is the host of the Cracks in Postmodernity platform. Ran Heilbrunn is a scholar specializing in political theory, technology, and current affairs. He has written for outlets such as Newsweek, Der Tagesspiegel, and American Affairs. He teaches at Wittenborg University. Amir Naaman worked as a mailman, a cook, a bookseller, a comics publisher, a house painter and is now a personal trainer at the gym. His first novel The Hummingbirds, a homosexual horror story, was published in 2020. Travis Jeppesen is an American writer living in Berlin. His books include Settlers Landing, Bad Writing, and Victims. He is known as the creator of object-oriented writing, a metaphysical approach to art writing that attempts to inhabit the art object. Oliver Davis is a professor of French at University College Cork and co-author, with Tim Dean, of Hatred of Sex, a critique of queer theory’s forgetting of sex and the wider culture’s obsession with trauma. His research in political technologies spans contemporary French philosophicalaccounts of politics, queer studies, the psychedelic humanities, conspiracy theory, and mis/disinformation. Yotam Feldmam is the author of The Solar Mind, a philosophical treatise on scarcity and abundance, and director of the award-winning documentary The Lab. He was previously an investigative writer for Haaretz newspaper and is the founder and editor of Lot, a neo-decadent Hebrew literature and art magazine dedicated to the myriad forms of perversion and faith. Marcas Lancaster is a writer, producer, and self-professed ‘failed gay’ based in London. He is writing his first and only novel for which he hopes to be martyred.