Editor’s Note: The brilliant Arthur Evans passed away last year, a polymath activist-intellectual whose published works spanned from 1978’s Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture to 1997’s Critique of Patriarchal Reason and beyond. The former was based on lectures he delivered on Page Street in San Francisco in 1974, which is in keeping with his Socrates-like persona as a public thinker who was a familiar figure around the stoa of Haight-Ashbury for over 35 years.
The latter book, based on materials produced over a nine-year period, was published shortly before this article appeared in the HGLR (Summer 2000). This piece can be seen as a special case of what Evans saw as the central tendency of Western philosophy since the Greeks, the elevation of formal logic to the stature of Truth and the identification of this method with the masculine, thereby establishing an “objective” basis for male dominance and homophobia. What’s more, this form of “patriarchal reason” was boosted in the 20th century by two closeted gay philosophers, Otto Weininger and Ludwig Wittgenstein.
