COLUMNIST Nicholas Benton has something potentially life-saving to tell us about the continued viability of gay liberation during these frightening times. In his 2013 collection of short essays, Extraordinary Hearts: Reclaiming Gay Sensibility’s Central Role in the Progress of Civilization (Lethe Press), he articulates how the cosmic spark that set off the historic “eruption” of the modern gay rights movement has not yet quite died out. This is true, he argues, despite assaults on this evolutionary energy system from the forces of assimilationism, consumerism, and postmodernism festering not just in straight society, but also in our very own gay backyard.
Readers may remember learning about Benton’s book from ads in this magazine, which included passages from his book. But the book did not get the mainstream respect that, say, Lillian Faderman’s Gay Revolution (2015) received. Perhaps that’s because Benton’s approach, while very much a solid history of gay ideas in the West, is decidedly confrontational and eccentric. His work dares to discuss same-sex erotic attraction “as a vital and inherent component of creation,” one that is “derived from a visible ‘left-handed’ negative-entropic impulse on the macro-cosmic level.” And Benton (who hails from the effeminacy movement) punches like a prizefighter at those who have severely squandered this grand potential: “The revolution was quickly hijacked by radical hedonists, crawling out of the dregs of a reactionary, socially-engineered ‘counterculture,’ who insisted the enemy of revolution was morality itself.”
To experience the full impact of this Hegel-esque rendering of gay spirit’s epic role in human revolution, Extraordinary Hearts is best read in its entirety. But because this work is made up of a hundred columns that Benton wrote for two Washington, DC, periodicals between 2010 and 2012, it’s also possible to pick out any chapter to get a snapshot account of our rise and fall. There are three major leitmotifs—history, codes of ethics, and attacking our enemies—with an occasional arrow aimed at Benton’s archenemy, famed postmodern philosopher Michel Foucault.
Benton steers clear of heady dialectics on postmodernism, however, pursuing the more modest aim of setting a limit on gay academic culture’s domain in order to restore a more shamanic narrative. Benton clarifies how earlier historians had reclaimed a long-lost legacy. He refers to works by John Boswell and Jonathan Katz, and those from a parallel lesbian tributary, to help us see through a kaleidoscope of images from world history featuring our very own people. Peering through this rainbow-hued lens, he arrives at the works of 19th-century visionaries such as Karl Ulrichs, who “coined the term ‘Urning’ or ‘Uranian,’ derived from a reference in Plato’s Symposium to love between men as ‘the beautiful love, the heavenly love, the love belonging to the heavenly muse Urania.’” Benton also elucidates how Edward Carpenter, the British counterpart to Whitman, “did the most to advance constructive theories about a universal purpose behind same-sex attraction.”
In subsequent chapters, Benton honors the homosexuality of “great poets” such as Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Wilde, along with lesbian visionaries such as Eleanor Roosevelt, and in the process makes a startling claim: This wondrous legacy has been compromised by “the cynical theories of post-modernism,” fueled by an “angry rejection of anything authoritative.” By deconstructing all forms of “gay soul” as nothing but a social construction based in exclusionary white male privilege, the postmodernists of the last decades appeared progressive to those who felt left out. But, Benton maintains, they were actually a “nuclear-tipped Trojan Horse” moving into the inner sanctum of our ideas. Due to their denial of homosexual being as an alternative form of “species survival through the exercise of heightened empathy,” these academics ended up being no less reactionary than those who promote social engineering or who justify war. Benton floats the gutsy hypothesis that the proponents of postmodernism, in subliminal cahoots with right-wing “covert intelligence interests,” agreed that there was no “soul” in being gay, and together “morphed into the Reagan revolution and its worst excesses of the worship of greed and selfishness.”
Such counterrevolutionary impulses, Benton argues, trickled down from the academy to the bedroom. He points to the ancient Greeks to support his critique of predatory hedonism, reminding us of Plato’s depiction, in the Phaedrus, of two horses in charge of a person’s libido, a white horse whose “thirst for honor is tempered by restraint and modesty,” and a black horse known for “wantonness … hardly controllable even with a whip.” Ideally, the charioteer steers the ride so that by the “ability to restrain the ‘lusty horse,’” the rider is “able to honor the beloved and his beauty with a true and enduring love.” Benton’s lament: that the gay sexual liberation movement unleashed the black horse as its “core paradigm” while maiming the empathic white horse.
While many contributed to this crippling dismemberment, Benton mostly blames Michel Foucault, whom he sees as the Pied Piper of “The Age of Contagion … enticing young gay students [toward]‘limit experiences’ [that]led them to degrees of sexual degradation,” thus creating the conditions for “the horrible, premature deaths of 600,000 of our beautiful, very own.” Benton connects postmodernism’s denial of gay values, such as “love” and “romance,” with a cult-like dehumanizing of individuals so all they can do is act like heterosexuals by day while pursuing pleasure by night.
If only Benton possessed some psychology to make more sense of this “anarcho-radical hedonist culture” (as well as his own overly prudish superego). There is nary a word about Freud’s concept of the “death instinct” and/or gay-affirmative psychology’s concept of “internalized homophobia,” or for that matter, in a more positive direction, reference to the archetypal nature of homosexual eros. Benton’s aversion to psychology has him lumping Freud, Nietzsche, and Foucault together as nihilists.
Another weakness is what literary critic Harold Bloom might call Benton’s “anxiety of influence” in making only three passing references to Harry Hay, the genius of gay historical essentialism, while devoting entire chapters to Tennessee Williams, Larry Kramer, and Alexander Hamilton. Furthermore, Benton wishes to replace Nietzsche’s archetypes of Apollo (reason) and Dionysius (passion) with the image of Prometheus as a “transformative and revolutionary symbol.” I hear intimations of Mitch Walker’s articulation of the archetypal double and Uranian Eros as homosexual archetypes. But Benton, who is well-read, doesn’t connect the dots from Ulrichs to Carpenter to Hay to Walker.
Despite these limitations, it seems to me that Benton’s work marks a historic step as “a contribution to a hoped-for new dialogue shaping a fresh, post-postmodern consciousness.” In my view, he makes an important visionary argument: biological procreation must give way to other, more conscious forms of creativity if we are to survive as a species. This is an invitation for courageous intellectuals to articulate a redemptive “gay science” capable of salvaging a sustainable future for our otherwise barbaric species.
Douglas Sadownick is director of the LGBT specialization at Antioch Univ. in L.A.
