Ofri Ilany, Vanity von Glow, Travis Jeppesen, Ran Heilbrunn, Amir Naaman
Return to Sodom

Travis Jeppesen: How to Be a Pervert with No Body

Is there is such as thing as ‘queer art’? If so, does its existence hinge on the representation of sexuality? Is that representation by necessity tragic?

In his Queer Abstraction Manifesto, Travis Jeppesen considers the form of abstraction – in opposition to figuration and representation – as the defining characteristics of a queer, impossible to codify artistic impulse. 

Ofri Ilany: What is Left of the Homosexual Hero?

The Uranian movement of the late 19th century is today largely forgotten, in part for its output of pederastic poetry. Its members, however, cast a long shadow over liberation movements that were not ostensibly linked to homosexuality.

Ofri Ilany’s presentation explores the life of Jaacob de Haan, a Dutch dandy and author whose homoerotic writings shocked readers in the early 20th century and who turned into a radical anti-Zionist when he settled in Mandatory Palestine. De Haan’s activism uncomfortably links the project of homosexual liberation with the utopia of God’s ‘chosen people’.

Vanity von Glow: After-School Drag Club

Drag was once the quintessential gay art form. It encompassed transgression, campness, and, above all, bad sexual taste. Today, with the RuPaul’s Drag Race topping media charts, drag is more popular than ever. Despite, if not owing to this explosion, a new form of drag dominates nightclub and cabaret stages: the pro-social performance tame enough to entertain an audience of teenage girls.

Is this transformation of drag into a safe party game the byproduct of the wholesale “normalisation” drive promoted by HR departments that has affected many other parts of life? Or does drag’s close relationship to sex itself play a part in the form’s transformation? Drag performer Vanity von Glow reflects on the changing social expectations that have turned many adult entertainers into theme park attendants in the over the decade she has spent on international nightlife stages.

Ran Heilbrunn: Abolish Queer Theory

Queer theory has long prided itself on maintaining a uniquely robust connection to social developments originating outside academia. Distinguishing itself from the legacy of 1960s–70s gay liberationism, queer culture emerged in the 1980s–90s in response to a new generational experience: the AIDS crisis. Yet, as one recent book explains, “it is not who you are but what you do that makes you vulnerable to infection with HIV,” the identity-based gay politics of the 1970s was ill-suited for confronting the epidemic. The supposedly more fluid logic of queer thus facilitated coalitional activism and challenged the framing of AIDS as a “gay disease.” At the same time, a new scholarly tradition took shape: queer studies institutionalized the wave of research on homosexuality generated in the wake of AIDS and opened new avenues for thinking about the connections between politics, society, and sex.

From today’s perspective, this history feels increasingly distant. The relationship between the actual lives of ordinary gay men and whatever intellectual activity now taking place under the banner of queer theory is marked by an ever-deepening rift. Strikingly, it is precisely those gay men who are generationally or culturally closer to the experience of the AIDS years who are most likely to feel profoundly alienated from the category of “queer.” As Ran Heilbrunn will argue, this disconnect is an inevitable consequence of queer theory’s lingering commitment to a hyper-politicized view of sex. The historically understandable but intellectually indefensible insistence on tying the study of homosexuality to progressive ideology has rendered queer theory increasingly detached from contemporary gay culture and concerns. Revitalizing gay cultural and intellectual life, it will be argued, must begin with a depoliticization of our relationship to sex. It is time to disentangle the queer from the gay.

Amir NaamaN: Slouching Towards Avalon

The American novelist Marion Zimmer Bradley was celebrated as much for her 1983 feminist retelling of the Arthurian legend The Mists of Avalon as for her lesbian erotica of the 1960s. She also pioneered a new form of fandom for her readers, and together with her husband Walter Breen built a closed community of neo-pagan utopianists. Theirs would be a new society free from the masculine constructs of Christianity and heterosexuality. The movement received lavish praise from scholars and critics, while in the shadow it descended into crime and depravity. Breen was later convicted as a child molester and revealed as a likely CIA asset. 

Amir Naaman questions how insular ideological communities, such as science-fiction subcultures, build their moral systems. What is sexuality’s role in the creation of revolutionary or pseudo-revolutionary political ideologies and utopian thought?