Here’s a fun irony: this fascinating discussion between three interesting and erudite guys is EXACTLY the kind of intellectual discourse you fear we are losing! ;-) This was wonderful.
Sep 12, 2023·edited Sep 12, 2023Liked by Blake Smith
Interesting convo. Granting that I'm not gay (I am white though!) I was a little surprised that Milo Yiannopoulos never came up here- I've always had a suspicion that his prominence early in the Trump years had at least a small part to play in this trend, and his frantic conversion-religious and sexual- in 2021 seemed to mark an endpoint for what limited tolerance the mainstream right offered gay men in that era-though he's also not American, so he may be beyond the confines of the discussion. Serial conversion would be an interesting topic for either a podcast episode or a Smith essay-it seems particularly common in a certain sort.
Just finished listening to this. Great discussion. I remember how the 2012 RNC still had many appeals to "traditional marriage", then the 2016 RNC had Peter Thiel come on stage and say "I'm proud to be gay and Republican" and received a standing ovation. And I remember in college, gay white guys were pretty isolated from my very progressive, heavily-female campus. Gay masculinity went from progressive to toxic in just a few years.
Fascinating how Asians seem to be recapitulating a lot of the experience of Jews of a few generations ago, including the declining cachet in left liberal space.
And yeah, Yang is the best on a lot of these topics.
I once had lunch with a secular Jewish novelist/journalist that told me that just a few generations ago, writers like Philip Roth and Norman Mailer were considered minorities and given special attention, but now those writers are just considered Dead White Guys in a canon with too many of them.
I think Asians will be going down the same path. Asians are no longer underrepresented in publishing. About 10% of children’s books are written by Asians, who only make up 7% of America. At some point we’ll lose the POC card and be forced into a “reckoning”.
I don't have data on this, but it also feels to me like the number of high profile Asian American journalists has just exploded over the last decade. Staff writers at the New Yorker and New York Times Magazine, best selling novelists, etc. Again, similar to Jews once upon a time, and yeah at some point you'll lose the POC card.
This is maybe a conversation for another time or venue, but I've been doing some reading in gay male and Asian-American lit in the past few months, and one thing that's struck me is how for both there seems to be a really exciting moment in the 70s-90s when writers from these groups are becoming self-confident about working within a particular tradition (modelled in some ways on Black and Jewish American literatures), publishing in 'their own' journals and anthologies but having occasional cross-overs to the New Yorker and mainstream presses--and at the same time there's an emergence of Asian American studies and Gay studies in the academy (although the latter has been melted down into LGBTetc studies)... this seems like in some ways the sweet spot for literary and intellectual production, insofar as writers can develop within networks where they don't have to perform being 'representative' or 'politically correct' to a national audience and can frankly address other members of their 'community' about controversial topics.
It also meant for, I think, greater possibilities of stylistic variation--'gay writers' in the big 80s anthologies include a lot of people who don't have professional writing jobs and didn't do MFAs... some of that stuff is just terrible, but some is also experimental in ways that excitingly exceed the fairly tame realist semi-autobiographical fictions of urbane life constituted prestige 'literature'. And for great 'political' variety as well, to the extent authors can be concerned with hashing out issues in their own subcultures--that it with disagreeing with other people 'like them'--than with talking about and standing-in for 'their group' to a white straight liberal benevolent audience.
It's striking to me now that if I pick up, by mistake, the New York Review of Books or the New York Times Book Review, there will be a huge among of Asian American (women's) memoir-novel type writing run through the MFA wringer of dull sad bland transparent prose (and maybe with some twists to make it more 'literary' as in the case of Ling Ma turning her memoir-type novel into a dystopia, but still having it basically be MFA-type immigration-nostalgia-ennui self-writing) and similar stuff by gays/queers... all of it framed as if these were new and vital stories, when what's 'new', historically, is just that all of this stuff is pitched to elite national publication and mainstream audiences, detaching itself from the particular ethnicized communities that this writing might have been aimed at a generation or two ago. (I tried to pitch something along these lines to Tablet a while ago and didn't get picked up--about my search for the Asian American equivalent of Portnoy's Complaint, and the similarities/dissimilarities between Asian American and Jewish American literature)--it always breaks my brain to see the liberal media speak as if it's doing us this huge favor by 'letting us tell our stories' when these literary traditions are now generations old, and indeed are actually dying. We've somehow decided that 'representation' means having our percentage of time at the NYT-Blob megaphone rather than having autonomous spaces (Asians do seem strikingly unconcerned, relative to Jews, with this--while y'all both fight for Ivy slots, I can't think of anything like an Asian equivalent of Brandeis)
For example, reading through this book of interviews with Asian American authors from the 90s, "Words Matter," I was struck by how many authors had published initially in Asian-American (and not always English-language) papers, journals, etc... and how until relatively recently gay male authors could build their audiences through gay venues and bookstores. I think part of the formation of the sort of DNC-drone Potemkin diversity author is the background collapse of a real diversity of spaces of non-mainstream writing and thinking. In that sense, Wesley Yang maybe looks not only like the first of the new neo-cons, but also perhaps the last of a particular kind of Asian-American thinker in the vein of Frank Chin, who could occupy a position of being independent from the mainstream but networked in more local/specific conversations in a way that I just don't think writing for Substack (as we're all of course doing right now!) can approach...
The Frank Chin vs. Amy Tan and Maxine Hong Kingston gender dispute of the 80s was quite an intragroup flashpoint that would never get discussed in mainstream spaces, unless it's to call Asian men misogynists for saying the truth that Asian women have easier access to mainstream white-dominated spaces than Asian men do. I'm guessing that gay writers also had their own arguments over respectability politics back then, although now I see works like Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller's book Bad Gays where members of oppressed-bucket groups are free to write negative portrayals unhindered by respectability. In a sense, un-respectability is the new respectability.
Also, Chris Jesu Lee has a great piece on the idea of an Asian American book modeled off American Psycho, which is close enough to Portnoy's Complaint in terms of its transgressive anti-MFA no-holds-barred style. He eloquates many of the critiques you have: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2022/06/asian-american-psycho
Cool, I'll check out the Lee. Ben Miller though is a super left-lib queer idiot who castigates guys for being too white, monogamous, narcissistic, un-inclusive etc (he hates me!). He is not a breath of fresh air but rather someone doing a different sort of respectability politics (in which good gays are queer Tumblr commies)
Can you flesh out more what these vital autonomous spaces were for Jews and Black, because none seem to come to mind for me? For Jews way back when something like Menorah Journal, and then the Forward and now Tablet, and I guess Commentary, but I never had the sense that these was much of a distinction, in terms of the kind of writing happening, between what was published in these places compared to the New Yorker and Partisan Review and Dissent and Politics, e.g. And I don't have a sense at all with Black writers. Like the journals where the action was happening during the Harlem Renaissance? I don't have the sense that James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison were finding their voice in specifically black publications, or more recent figures like Toni Morrison., any more than Roth and Bellow and Mailer were.
Not arguing about your characterization of these later moments, but not sure it holds for the earlier ones.
Well, for instance, reading Arendt's earlier writings recently, she's finding her voice in Menorah, Aufbau and other journals... and then it's not as though the New York intellectual journals weren't essentially Jewish (reading, and reading about Isaac Rosenfeld recently--he was a less successful friend of Saul Bellow--I was struck by how self-consciously New York Jewish intellectuals of the late 40s and early 50s were about creating among themselves a little scene from which to launch someone's not-yet-written 'great Jewish American novel' to national prominence... I don't know that much about the cultural and intellectual history of the era though so perhaps it's not accurate to characterize it in terms of a playing on a smaller local Jewish register and a larger national one)! Perhaps the spaces in which Jewish and Black writing were happening in the 40s-60s aren't analogous to what was happening with the cohort of gay writing a generation later (although the gay writers did analogize their situation to that of Jews and Blacks)--but my point would be that it's not for me primarily a matter of having 'our' Baldwin or Mailer on the national stage, but of there being a rich context of secondary and tertiary figures who fill out a distinct intellectual life such that it's possible in the first place for there to be a 'Jewish' 'Black' 'gay' whatever perspective that is multi-faceted and meaningfully distinct from the hegemonic view (which might happen to express itself through various-hued-and-gendered spokesthings)
Jia Tolentino, Hua Hsu, Jay Caspian Kang, Thessaly La Force... yeah there are a few big names now. I don’t think they make up more than 7% though, but it’s getting there.
And Wesley Yang, sort of. Jeannie Suk Gersen at the New Yorker. And in some ways I think it's less about numbers than influence. Compare those names, in terms of their influence on recent discourse, to say, South Asian or Latino writers, and it feels like no comparison. These are people who aren't just filling the masthead. They're making a mark.
I don't really have a theory as to why. Just feels like a thing that's happened.
Wesley Yang hasn't been published in any mainstream publication in a long time. I wonder if it's his fixation on trans issues or something else.
And yeah, one thing that also stuck out to me is how little Latino rep there is in the American intellectual scene. I can think of many white, black, Asian, gay, etc. intellectuals, but no Latinos at all. Last time someone made a contribution to the discourse was Alex Perez with his take on the publishing world.
Here’s a fun irony: this fascinating discussion between three interesting and erudite guys is EXACTLY the kind of intellectual discourse you fear we are losing! ;-) This was wonderful.
Well of course! :)
Absolutely loved this conversation. It has provided much-needed nourishment for my gay loner soul.
Great conversation
Thanks! I really enjoyed it (which after all is the primary purpose of this podcast).
Interesting convo. Granting that I'm not gay (I am white though!) I was a little surprised that Milo Yiannopoulos never came up here- I've always had a suspicion that his prominence early in the Trump years had at least a small part to play in this trend, and his frantic conversion-religious and sexual- in 2021 seemed to mark an endpoint for what limited tolerance the mainstream right offered gay men in that era-though he's also not American, so he may be beyond the confines of the discussion. Serial conversion would be an interesting topic for either a podcast episode or a Smith essay-it seems particularly common in a certain sort.
Well you could come on and we could talk Podhoretz, but I'm sensing maybe you want to stay anonymous.
Just finished listening to this. Great discussion. I remember how the 2012 RNC still had many appeals to "traditional marriage", then the 2016 RNC had Peter Thiel come on stage and say "I'm proud to be gay and Republican" and received a standing ovation. And I remember in college, gay white guys were pretty isolated from my very progressive, heavily-female campus. Gay masculinity went from progressive to toxic in just a few years.
Also reminded me of this Wesley Yang piece:
https://medium.com/s/story/asian-male-resentment-in-the-age-of-white-male-resentment-8d5ce04b2ec4
Being East Asian still gives you a bit of clout in left-liberal spaces, but I can see that going away in the next five years.
Fascinating how Asians seem to be recapitulating a lot of the experience of Jews of a few generations ago, including the declining cachet in left liberal space.
And yeah, Yang is the best on a lot of these topics.
I once had lunch with a secular Jewish novelist/journalist that told me that just a few generations ago, writers like Philip Roth and Norman Mailer were considered minorities and given special attention, but now those writers are just considered Dead White Guys in a canon with too many of them.
I think Asians will be going down the same path. Asians are no longer underrepresented in publishing. About 10% of children’s books are written by Asians, who only make up 7% of America. At some point we’ll lose the POC card and be forced into a “reckoning”.
I don't have data on this, but it also feels to me like the number of high profile Asian American journalists has just exploded over the last decade. Staff writers at the New Yorker and New York Times Magazine, best selling novelists, etc. Again, similar to Jews once upon a time, and yeah at some point you'll lose the POC card.
This is maybe a conversation for another time or venue, but I've been doing some reading in gay male and Asian-American lit in the past few months, and one thing that's struck me is how for both there seems to be a really exciting moment in the 70s-90s when writers from these groups are becoming self-confident about working within a particular tradition (modelled in some ways on Black and Jewish American literatures), publishing in 'their own' journals and anthologies but having occasional cross-overs to the New Yorker and mainstream presses--and at the same time there's an emergence of Asian American studies and Gay studies in the academy (although the latter has been melted down into LGBTetc studies)... this seems like in some ways the sweet spot for literary and intellectual production, insofar as writers can develop within networks where they don't have to perform being 'representative' or 'politically correct' to a national audience and can frankly address other members of their 'community' about controversial topics.
It also meant for, I think, greater possibilities of stylistic variation--'gay writers' in the big 80s anthologies include a lot of people who don't have professional writing jobs and didn't do MFAs... some of that stuff is just terrible, but some is also experimental in ways that excitingly exceed the fairly tame realist semi-autobiographical fictions of urbane life constituted prestige 'literature'. And for great 'political' variety as well, to the extent authors can be concerned with hashing out issues in their own subcultures--that it with disagreeing with other people 'like them'--than with talking about and standing-in for 'their group' to a white straight liberal benevolent audience.
It's striking to me now that if I pick up, by mistake, the New York Review of Books or the New York Times Book Review, there will be a huge among of Asian American (women's) memoir-novel type writing run through the MFA wringer of dull sad bland transparent prose (and maybe with some twists to make it more 'literary' as in the case of Ling Ma turning her memoir-type novel into a dystopia, but still having it basically be MFA-type immigration-nostalgia-ennui self-writing) and similar stuff by gays/queers... all of it framed as if these were new and vital stories, when what's 'new', historically, is just that all of this stuff is pitched to elite national publication and mainstream audiences, detaching itself from the particular ethnicized communities that this writing might have been aimed at a generation or two ago. (I tried to pitch something along these lines to Tablet a while ago and didn't get picked up--about my search for the Asian American equivalent of Portnoy's Complaint, and the similarities/dissimilarities between Asian American and Jewish American literature)--it always breaks my brain to see the liberal media speak as if it's doing us this huge favor by 'letting us tell our stories' when these literary traditions are now generations old, and indeed are actually dying. We've somehow decided that 'representation' means having our percentage of time at the NYT-Blob megaphone rather than having autonomous spaces (Asians do seem strikingly unconcerned, relative to Jews, with this--while y'all both fight for Ivy slots, I can't think of anything like an Asian equivalent of Brandeis)
For example, reading through this book of interviews with Asian American authors from the 90s, "Words Matter," I was struck by how many authors had published initially in Asian-American (and not always English-language) papers, journals, etc... and how until relatively recently gay male authors could build their audiences through gay venues and bookstores. I think part of the formation of the sort of DNC-drone Potemkin diversity author is the background collapse of a real diversity of spaces of non-mainstream writing and thinking. In that sense, Wesley Yang maybe looks not only like the first of the new neo-cons, but also perhaps the last of a particular kind of Asian-American thinker in the vein of Frank Chin, who could occupy a position of being independent from the mainstream but networked in more local/specific conversations in a way that I just don't think writing for Substack (as we're all of course doing right now!) can approach...
The Frank Chin vs. Amy Tan and Maxine Hong Kingston gender dispute of the 80s was quite an intragroup flashpoint that would never get discussed in mainstream spaces, unless it's to call Asian men misogynists for saying the truth that Asian women have easier access to mainstream white-dominated spaces than Asian men do. I'm guessing that gay writers also had their own arguments over respectability politics back then, although now I see works like Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller's book Bad Gays where members of oppressed-bucket groups are free to write negative portrayals unhindered by respectability. In a sense, un-respectability is the new respectability.
Also, Chris Jesu Lee has a great piece on the idea of an Asian American book modeled off American Psycho, which is close enough to Portnoy's Complaint in terms of its transgressive anti-MFA no-holds-barred style. He eloquates many of the critiques you have: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2022/06/asian-american-psycho
Cool, I'll check out the Lee. Ben Miller though is a super left-lib queer idiot who castigates guys for being too white, monogamous, narcissistic, un-inclusive etc (he hates me!). He is not a breath of fresh air but rather someone doing a different sort of respectability politics (in which good gays are queer Tumblr commies)
Can you flesh out more what these vital autonomous spaces were for Jews and Black, because none seem to come to mind for me? For Jews way back when something like Menorah Journal, and then the Forward and now Tablet, and I guess Commentary, but I never had the sense that these was much of a distinction, in terms of the kind of writing happening, between what was published in these places compared to the New Yorker and Partisan Review and Dissent and Politics, e.g. And I don't have a sense at all with Black writers. Like the journals where the action was happening during the Harlem Renaissance? I don't have the sense that James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison were finding their voice in specifically black publications, or more recent figures like Toni Morrison., any more than Roth and Bellow and Mailer were.
Not arguing about your characterization of these later moments, but not sure it holds for the earlier ones.
Well, for instance, reading Arendt's earlier writings recently, she's finding her voice in Menorah, Aufbau and other journals... and then it's not as though the New York intellectual journals weren't essentially Jewish (reading, and reading about Isaac Rosenfeld recently--he was a less successful friend of Saul Bellow--I was struck by how self-consciously New York Jewish intellectuals of the late 40s and early 50s were about creating among themselves a little scene from which to launch someone's not-yet-written 'great Jewish American novel' to national prominence... I don't know that much about the cultural and intellectual history of the era though so perhaps it's not accurate to characterize it in terms of a playing on a smaller local Jewish register and a larger national one)! Perhaps the spaces in which Jewish and Black writing were happening in the 40s-60s aren't analogous to what was happening with the cohort of gay writing a generation later (although the gay writers did analogize their situation to that of Jews and Blacks)--but my point would be that it's not for me primarily a matter of having 'our' Baldwin or Mailer on the national stage, but of there being a rich context of secondary and tertiary figures who fill out a distinct intellectual life such that it's possible in the first place for there to be a 'Jewish' 'Black' 'gay' whatever perspective that is multi-faceted and meaningfully distinct from the hegemonic view (which might happen to express itself through various-hued-and-gendered spokesthings)
Jia Tolentino, Hua Hsu, Jay Caspian Kang, Thessaly La Force... yeah there are a few big names now. I don’t think they make up more than 7% though, but it’s getting there.
And Wesley Yang, sort of. Jeannie Suk Gersen at the New Yorker. And in some ways I think it's less about numbers than influence. Compare those names, in terms of their influence on recent discourse, to say, South Asian or Latino writers, and it feels like no comparison. These are people who aren't just filling the masthead. They're making a mark.
I don't really have a theory as to why. Just feels like a thing that's happened.
Wesley Yang hasn't been published in any mainstream publication in a long time. I wonder if it's his fixation on trans issues or something else.
And yeah, one thing that also stuck out to me is how little Latino rep there is in the American intellectual scene. I can think of many white, black, Asian, gay, etc. intellectuals, but no Latinos at all. Last time someone made a contribution to the discourse was Alex Perez with his take on the publishing world.