Inversion: Gay Life After the Homosexual. Edited by Amir Naaman and Pierre d’Alancaisez (Verdurin, 2025) 

I should start by saying that this book comes with a huge warning: the themes are ‘adult’ and the language is unrestrained. It has a certain significance for the current cultural moment, nevertheless, and the question it poses could be expressed like this: what happens to a minority community that defines itself in terms of breaking the rules of the majority, when the majority gives up on the rules? In order to practise ‘inversion’, there needs to be something to invert. In order to be upside-down, there has to be an established idea of what is up and what is down. If people begin to say that, really, there is no ‘up’ and ‘down’, your project becomes impossible. The editors complain:

‘Gay men… have become normies, albeit a peculiar kind of normies that get an entire month of Pride dedicated to them.’

One contributor contrasts the homosexual causes of the 1960s with those of the 1990s: in the latter decade it was about the inclusion of homosexuals in the institutions of marriage and of the military, when, as he remarks, they would in the earlier decade have rather destroyed both. Several authors note with irritation the way that the homosexual lifestyle has become packaged by corporations and the entertainment industry. The contributor Travis Jepperson reminds us that once upon a time the accusation of being a ‘poser’, of laying claims to views, characteristics and achievements one does not possess, was the worst thing one could say about a writer or artist (indeed, this was true not just in his chosen subculture). By contrast, today, being a poser, or virtue-signaller, is more or less compulsory. No one in a boardroom or friendship group need actually believe the latest nostrum; they just have to genuflect towards it.

This goes along with the ferocious enforcement of orthodoxy, of a kind that makes the Spanish Inquisition look like a gang of spliffed-out hippies. As Jepperson puts it:

‘anything deemed too wild or outré was now officially banned by the new litertardi [sic] who themselves lived in perpetual fear of making any misstep that might result in cancellation and loss of power … the privileging of appearance over actual substance (e.g. the oft-repeated phrase “it’s not a good look”) has enabled the careers of so many mediocrities who were able to check the correct boxes, but have virtually nothing to offer in the talent department.’

Reading this, one might think that all some of these authors need is a walrus moustache and a glass of port to fit into the most reactionary social circles of yesteryear. Indeed, when I first opened this book I did not expect to find a sympathetic discussion of the philosophy of Putin’s favourite ideologue, Alexander Dugin (by Yotam Feldman), or a discussion of the immigration conspiracy theories of Renaud Camus (by Oliver Davis). The reason I did open the book is that some of the collaborators extend this intellectual curiosity to Christianity, something most clearly displayed in Stephen Abudato’s contribution.

However, the authors are mostly still wedded to their identity as opponents of a particular system, despite the almost total disappearance of that system as a social, cultural or legal reality. Jepperson even feels he has to describe what he does not like about the new cultural establishment as ‘the right-wing Left’ because, he tells us, the real Left is anti-authoritarian. He seems to have forgotten that this happens with every successful revolution: one set of norms is overthrown, yes, but it is replaced, not with nothing, but with another set of norms, and if these new norms are to undergird a new social order, they will have to be enforced. In order to be anti-authoritarian, anti-establishment and anti-rules today, you have to take aim at liberalism, but for all their frustration with how things are, I get the impression that the contributors are not quite ready for that conversation.

The editors present this book as an opportunity for the authors to say the unsayable, so perhaps they would appreciate it if I broke what seems to me a taboo of their own. They tell us:

‘Homosexuality is in crisis because, having turned all art and culture gay, it has lost the friction that once sustained it.’

By ‘homosexuality’ here they are not referring to the mere fact that some small percentage of men are same-sex attracted; they intend a cultural movement, which can be said to have shared attitudes, styles and aims. With this in mind, what the editors mean, but apparently don’t quite want to say, or perhaps even to think, is that this movement depends for its vigour, and perhaps for its very existence, on a particular kind of social order. The social order that hosted homosexuality in its earlier stages, as a matter of historical fact, was a mostly Protestant Christian society. 

To say that homosexuality depends, in some sense, on wider society that rejects its values and way of life may sound offensive, which would be very much in the spirit of this book, but I mean it as a description, not an insult. It is an interesting fact that Catholic societies tend to create a lot of space for non-standard cultures and ways of life – that could never become the whole of a society. Celibacy is one kind of example; prostitution is another; then there are court jesters, beggars, mercenaries, gypsies, mendicant friars, hermits and outlaws. All of these groups have their own relationship with the mainstream, but in every case we can say both that they could not exist without the mainstream, and also that, in their own way, they contribute something to it.

The relationship could be fraught, and with some groups, such as Jews, the failures of tolerance are more notable than the successes. But for many of them, we see the kind of ‘friction’ which makes possible artistic and intellectual creativity, a friction that can only be sustained by a self-confident mainstream society that upholds its own values without seeking the total destruction of the dissident and the eccentric. It was possible for the Church to allow the Guild of Prostitutes to sponsor a stained-glass window in Chartres Cathedral; it was possible for respectable people to tell their children stories of the folk hero Robin Hood; it was possible for the village simpleton, the Ravi, to occupy a place of honour in Provençal nativity scenes; it was possible for St Francis to beg the citizens of Assisi for stones to rebuild a chapel, and to demonstrate to them a different way to live out the love of God.

On the other hand, the Protestant society of Britain and America in the industrial age was more regimented, and just as a harsh political radicalism emerged there in reaction, so did a sexual radicalism that aimed, in principle, at the obliteration of the sexual norms that sustained that society.

I am not making an argument here, or even a proposal. I simply observe that there have been ways, in the course of the centuries, for marginal communities to exist in creative tension with the mainstream, that have not involved the destruction of either group. This possibility exists for a mainstream society very different from our own, and for marginal groups that would themselves have developed in very different ways.