Postmodern Poo

One of those arm's-length reads: Frank Browning's A Queer Geography. A pervading nastiness, a stinky, indefinable something, the olfactory presence of which lingers and assails--then ¡ploop! on page 159, a whole turdlet of a quote from Michel Foucault:


"We have to understand that with our desires, through our desires, go new forms of relationships, new forms of love, new forms of creation. Sex is not a fatality; it's a possibility for creative life."


And what follows--what flows--after, is the rankest and ickiest stream of narrative discourse that I have ever encountered: beginning with a long "appreciation" of Foucault and continuing with a short biography of a "successful" black male prostitute who died, rich, of AIDS; containing the author's reverent, admiring apologia for those for whom money is an aphrodisiac. What strikes one immediately about postmodernists, besides the stink of them, is how utterly it does not concern them that Foucault was a pretentious, ill-educated and dull poseur with no historical, or any other real insight, and no understanding of the things he wrote at such monstrous length about; while at the same time he was so much the Enemy of Mankind that, when he began to suspect he'd contracted the HIV virus, he spent as much time as he could in gay bathhouses for the purpose of spreading his infection: Browning can, therefore, say, "Whatever his faults as an 'amateur' and idiosyncratic historian, however much his inquiries were a cover for an exploration of his own life," and go on without a blush to assever, "Foucault synthesized what is for me the crucial conundrum of queer life: How do I make of my homosexuality a bridge of engagement with other people, other experiences, other imaginations, other ways of living." ¡phhrrtt!


But as for that carefully crafted [and prolix--It sounds like hard work, being careful not to let your meaning become too disgustingly obvious--I've excised a lot of it] Whore's Credo: [Dismissing "the presumption that romance and attraction are only authentic if they are unadulterated by power, ambition, and need," as being the "...fables...of secure men of the middle class,]...Women...have always understood the pragmatic parameters [ho, ho, ho--my italics] of love. Generally precluded from holding positions of independence and security, women have known that love and romance are not neatly separated from primal longings for a secure place in the world. From the elegiac essays of Virginia Woolf to the Pop-Tart potboilers of Danielle Steele, women have told us that passion is never pure...blah, blah, blah...pheromones must be measured by a mate's ability to help provide a secure place in the world...." And so, naturally, being in every significant way, at least from a Neo-Marxist Feminist perspective, just the same as a woman, a black male homosexual whore puts it this way:


"I've had lots of lovers," Brandy [Sic! He 'borrowed' the name from a local call-girl] went on, "and the moment I understand that their vision and their knowledge about themselves do not allow them to provide me the safety and security I need, living in a racist society, I drop those boys. I do not hang around."


Need I say more? Actually, I suppose it's not all that clear that what our 'Brandy' means is: As soon as it begins to dawn on him (What must it take?) that the white boys he's been tricking with are not about to pay him money, or let him crash for free, he's on to fresh woods and pastures new.