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"We have been telling a few lies": the words mark the end of what we could call the overture of Leo Bersani's 1987 essay "Is the Rectum a Grave?"1 The lies Bersani is referring to are, in the first place, the dignifying fantasies gay male activists have spun about the necessarily liberatory consequences of same-sex attraction. Right-wing politics, he has just reminded us, consort quite nicely with some men's "marked sexual preference for sailors and telephone linemen."2 He is about to tear off into what for some of us, more than thirty years later, remains a famous rebuttal of Dennis Altman's claims for the gay bathhouse as a space of Whitmanian democracy. Bersani begs to differ: "Your looks, muscles, hair distribution, size of cock, and shape of ass determined exactly how happy you were going to be during those few hours[.]"3 Such deflationary rhetoric is, of course, one of Bersani's hallmarks. But he's not alone in it. In fact, uncomfortable truth-telling constitutes a central tradition in what we have for a while been calling queer culture.
Think of Amber Hollibaugh and Cherríe Moraga's landmark 1981 piece "What We're Rolling Around in Bed With: On Sexual Silences in Feminism," which expresses impatience with the "lofty," "delicate" way lesbian sex was being discussed in their activist circles and calls for a feminism that would accommodate "dykes who wanted tits."4 Think of Susan Stryker's 1994 essay on the "monstrous" nature of transgender identity, in which she writes as "a self-mutilated deformity, a pervert, a mutant," or of Robert Reid-Pharr's 1996 remark that "if you believe the propaganda, it would seem that every time a fag or dyke fingers a vagina or asshole is a demonstration of queer love and community."5 Think of José Muñoz's 1999 definition of disidentification as an acceptance of the "politically dubious or shameful" aspects of sexuality, or Michael Warner's claim from the same year that in queer culture "no one is beneath [abjection]'s reach, not because it prides itself on generosity but because it prides itself on nothing. The rule is: Get over yourself."6 Think of Heather Love's 2007 insistence on the dark appeal of "ambivalence, failure, melancholia, loneliness," or, just yesterday, Andrea Long Chu's claim that...