GLR July-August 2022

for it—rising inflation! He doesn’t directly connect the two phe nomena but focuses instead on people’s beliefs about inflation and gender. What they have in common, Kirk avers, is that both are governed by “laws of nature” that people disregard at their peril. Just as you can’t create wealth simply by increasing the money supply (which is what causes inflation), you can’t change your gender through a simple act of will. But even if we accept both of these propositions, Kirk never explains how they’re causally connected. In the end, he falls back on the old Pat Robertson playbook of divine wrath and retribution—wrath over the visibility of transpeople, retribution as rising inflation—with no attempt to disguise the mash-up as other than completely ar bitrary. One could just as easily start with the current wave of anti-trans legislation in the U.S. and posit that God has brought inflation to the land as punishment for these wicked laws. The End of Sex Aprominent white nationalist, Nick Fuentes is telling his male supporters that having sex with women is gay. He makes this astonishing assertion thus: “Having sex in itself is gay. ... Think about it this way: What’s gayer than being like ‘I need cuddles. I need kisses. I need to spend time with a woman.’ That’s very sus[pect].” In other words, the sex act is a girly thing, so by abstaining totally, Fuentes boasts: “That makes me really more heterosexual than anyone.”A leader of the right wing “Groyper Army,” a violently racist, anti-Semitic group that participated in the Jan. 6th uprising, Fuentes has admitted that he once kissed a girl in high school, but after that he never wanted to kiss a girl again. At some point he starts to sound like General Jack Ripper in Dr. Strangelove , whose disgust over spilling his “essence” with a woman leads him to start a nuclear war. It’s tempting to see Fuentes’ views as bizarre and unprecedented, but really it’s an old obsession he has stumbled upon, a rejection of (heterosexual) sex because of its association with women and the values they represent (love, nurturance, compassion). From the Puritans to the Nazis to today’s white nationalists, it’s baked into authoritarian movements past and present. Now It’s Official To be covered in The New York Times can be newsworthy in itself, even when the item being reported on isn’t newsworthy at all. Two cases in point: 1. A retrospective on Ed Koch, NewYork’s mayor from 1978 to ’89, addressed what has been an open secret for decades: the mayor was gay. Since Koch never came out publicly, The Times ’ story had the effect of making it official by—well, by being The Times . While presenting the ample evidence for Koch’s gayness, the paper didn’t address its own reticence on the topic. Some would call it complicity in Koch’s closetedness when he was mayor, which coincided with the height of the AIDS crisis in NewYork. His desire to protect his secret may well have played a role in his slow and inadequate response to the plague. 2. On a less sinister note, The Times ran a lengthy piece on the fact that many lesbians like to read romance novels, treating it as a hot new trend. Ahem, this very magazine ran feature arti cles on lesbians’ love of romance fiction in 1995 and 2006. What The Times article did, yet again, was to make this phe nom official for the general public. So be it. Summer is here, and anyone walking along Herring Cove Beach in Province town on a sunny day can discover it for themselves. July–August 2022

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