I Miss When Homoeroticism Was Erotic

Ah, the never-ending Wicked promotional tour! The Bataan Death March of theater kids over-enthusing about the most cynical fucking expression of parasitical cultural regurgitation I can imagine, a horror show of emaciated celebrities gritting their teeth, doing a bump, and going through the motions of selling movie-like product to dead-eyed Gen Alpha zomboids who spend most of their time trading their Vyvanse for Robux… on it grinds. The online world stands agape, bathing in the awesome erotic power of the relationship between whatever’s left of Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande, a pairing absolutely throbbing with sublimated passion. We know this because, well… they’re vaguely nice to each other? They seem friendly? They’re professionally warm? Yes friends, this is the stuff that launches a million thinkpieces about sapphic desire, these days, a couple of women rising above the challenges of autophagy to kind of gently coo and paw at each other for the cameras. FEEL THE HEAT.

Let’s set aside for the moment that there has absolutely, 100%, undeniably been multiple meetings in the marketing department at Universal Pictures where they conspired to make the world’s most gullible people think that there’s some sort of romantic entanglement between Erivo and Grande. Let’s set aside that the studio probably sent notes like “There’s an extra $50K in it for you if some good gifs of you holding hands start making the rounds.” Let’s set aside the fact that the entertainment industry is just galactically cynical about this stuff and knows that if you scatter a little Gay Dust on the publicity effort, the rubes will fall all over themselves to suck it up. Completely substance-free waves at theoretical queerness are about as edgy as your average episode of Young Sheldon, these days, but nevermind. Set aside your understanding that Big Gay exists. Focus just on these two women: there is of course no reason at all to detect any actual homosexual longing between these two, other than the only one that matters anymore, which is that the most annoying people in the world have wishcasted the pairing together, “shipping” the two actresses, taking to social media to declare that they love each other and if you express doubts about that claim you may as well have personally tied Matthew Shepard to that fence.

But, no. I hereby express my doubts about this focus-grouped, Astroturfed theoretical gay pairing; apologies to the X users with anime avatars who are currently photoshopping images of the two of them scissoring on the Yellow Brick Road. I do not in fact detect any particular homoeroticism between them. Maybe, behind the scenes, there’s some real passion going on, I don’t know. But a press tour is a press tour and if you read any actual human emotion into it, you are a mark. Are they fucking? That’s my question. Are they fucking? That would be, you know, something. That would be actually gay. I would not necessarily call it homoerotic, because fucking is not necessarily erotic - these days fucking usually isn’t - but it would be gay. But the kinds of people who go wild for this shit are not so keen on gay sex, right, only on “gay” as a kind of vague aether that permeates the universe like the fucking Force from Star Wars. It’s amazing, the number of people out there who love everything about queer life except for queer sex, who would prefer that sex and sexual orientation live in entirely different zip codes, that they exist as non-overlapping magisteria; it’s so much safer that way. Who wants gay sex polluting their enjoyment of the abstraction that is Being Gay?

That is what gay love is, now, in the collective imagination of American commerce: a set of identity relations projected onto bored and indifferent celebrities who will half-heartedly play along with the idea because doing so moves units and, anyway, what does it cost them? The more that sexual orientation slouches to the point of pure abstraction, the less effort it takes. Anyone and anything can be gay, now, because gay is just a set of pompous liberal cultural signifiers that have no earthly material relation to homosexuals.

It’s a real drag, being someone who believes very strongly in the equal rights, value, and dignity of gay life and gay love in a period where gay culture amounts to a bunch of Disney Adults peppering their online presence with 24-hyphen font declarations of their various orientations and identities but who otherwise seem offended by the fact that human beings live in fleshy corporeal hormone-laden bodies. I was reading Reddit at some point awhile back and somebody said “I basically define my sexual orientation as Steven Universe,” and I thought to myself, brother, I believe you. And honestly, god bless. God bless those for whom one’s sexual preference is a statement of sexlessness. You’d just prefer, you know, if that wasn’t the dominant voice in the culture. The internet was supposed to let a thousand subcultures bloom, and bloom they have, in much the same way that algae blooms in a beautiful lake and kills all the fish. As ugly and bigoted as right-wing identity politics are, its advocates have always had this point correct: that when you valorize marginality as such, then you end up with the people who are the most vocal about being marginal making the law. Not the most marginal, but rather the ones who talk the most about marginality. And in LGBTQ culture, that’s meant that the most juvenile Funko Pop collectors within the coalition have colonized the entire cultural space. Hope you like Dr. Who!

Bowen Yang is in the Wicked movies, and he’s kind of a savvy, sardonic avatar of modern gay celebrity, one who has draped his particular self-presentation of a charming and derisive queen with an arch sense of knowingness that helps create a little distance from the sassy dickless gay best friend stereotype. Which is cool. Still and all, because of the dictates of modern Hollywood - because sexlessness has become a generically advantageous characteristic in celebrities, not just gay ones - Yang is as good of a symbol as any of this brave new world of gay identity shorn from gay desire, where the old stereotype of the predacious, lecherous gay guy has given way to, well, whatever this is. I don’t have any beef with Yang himself; all of this, obviously, is the result of the commodification of gay culture which was itself the Faustian bargain struck in the effort to secure basic gay rights. But, still, if you’re a gay celebrity and a lot of straight women refer to you as their “gay boyfriend,” it’s not a compliment. No doubt that’s a profitable place to be, but it’s still not a compliment.

“The modern gay rights movement and increasing social acceptance of LGBTQ people have come at the cost of deradicalizing that movement and rendering gay culture sexless and unthreatening” is an old argument; I was probably making it 15 years ago. And, yes, it’s true - something was lost when people began to think of Bert and Ernie as queer icons, when the assertion of gay rights became inherently an assertion of gay harmlessness. (I think it was June Thomas who asked, wisely, “Does Ernie suck Bert’s dick?”) But that battle was over in the Obama administration. What I’m depressed about now isn’t that contemporary gay culture has gone from Tom of Finland to Tom’s of Maine, which happened sometime around the ascendancy of Clay Aiken. And it’s not even so much that, these days, the louder the demand for LGBTQ representation, the more that representation is of the “Lando is pansexual” variety, just real enough for a clickbait headline and the satisfaction of a particularly entitled quadrant of consumer who think that being pandered to is the same as being liberated. What bums me out is that all of this exists alongside frank discussion of gay sex that has never been more unapologetic, direct, and public, and yet also never less sexy.

After all, you may very well be saying “Sexless? Freddie, they advertise gay gangbangs in the programs of middle school productions of You’re a Good Man Charlie Brown now.” New York declared the summer of 2025 as “Peak Gay Sluttiness,” describing a true Renaissance of the kind of casual and repetitive rutting that’s the inevitable outcome of making men both the Gatekeeper and the Keymaster of sexual intercourse. The existence of that sort of thing was not really a secret, although New York’s piece was sufficiently prurient that a few older liberationist types grumbled about it setting the movement back. (The movement, I’m afraid, is at this point primarily about keeping donations flowing to organizations that make Google Doodle-style wall art proclaiming the equal dignity of asexuality and don’t do much else, but nevertheless.) Still, a big-time magazine telling the straights about conga lines of femmes snorting adrenochrome at the Javits Center had a way of capturing a moment. And, look, maybe Yang would respond by saying “Sexless? Honey, I’ve been passed around Fire Island like a damp joint at a Dave Matthews concert.” And maybe he has!

But this is part of the point, right - that gay culture has been bifurcated into these two weird extreme tendencies, between Hallmark Channel Ken doll genital-free innocuousness and meat-market desensitization. These are, of course, two equally dehumanizing visions. On one hand you have the mass-market version, the network-sitcom vision of gay men as harmless stuffed animals, affectless, impotent little cuddle objects whose entire emotional landscape revolves around brunch and “yaaaas queen” culture, the kind of neutered mascots straight audiences can love because there’s nothing there to threaten them. And on the other end you have the joyless sexual exhaustion of what passes for “liberation” in certain corners, an endless circuit of meaningless hookups, pharmacological numbing, and pornified compulsions that are somehow treated as radical even though everyone involved looks miserable. The middle - the space where sex is allowed to be joyful, where cultural production is allowed to be vital, where being gay is not a marketing demographic or a pathology - is barely legible in public understanding of gay culture. And that absence tells you everything about what this country demands from its minorities: be cute and safe for us, or destroy yourself quietly out of sight. That some within gay culture seem to enthusiastically play to this binary makes it more depressing.

Of course, out there in real life, most gay people are living outside of this binary without even being aware of its existence. And maybe it would be best to just ignore the media spectacle and the cultural stereotypes. Unfortunately, there has never been a period of human existence when more people have based their own self-conception on the broad caricatures of others - such are the wages of “identity” - and gay people have always been uniquely vulnerable to public opinion.

Listen, I’m a fan of depravity, philosophically. I’m not much of a pervert, but I support perversion as a concept. Consensual behavior between adults, cool cool cool. I am not “trad,” whatever that means, and I’m not offended by statements of large-scale gay promiscuity like the aforementioned New York essay. I hope the gays daisy chain each other from the Stonewall Inn to David Geffen’s twink ranch on Fifth Avenue for next year’s Pride, knock yourselves out. But if they do, let it be spontaneous, immediate, and an emergent product of the moment. There’s something so robotic to modern promiscuity, so obligatory, and since gay men are the most dedicated participants in sexual promiscuity - please save your emails to GLAAD, let’s be adults here - there’s something uniquely joyless about these various references to endless gay fuck weekends and orgy season in P-Town. I am far, far from the only person to have read that piece and found something dead-eyed and vacant about it all, something utterly devoid of humanity, which is to say, devoid of actual sex, which in the human world is not fundamentally the exchange of fluids but rather the exchange of vulnerability.

The problem with regular gay group sex is not the “gay” nor the “group” but rather the “regular” - the problem is that these sex parties are to be expected. They are literally scheduled; they are predetermined. They are pro forma. I’m sure the orgasms don’t disappoint. But there’s nothing erotic about going to Anonymous Dick & Hole Costco and walking out having received an economy-sized dose of anonymous sex. Because there was no mystery, there was no risk. What you prearrange on Sniffies, you do not worry over, and that which you do not worry over, you cannot be surprised by, and surprise is the heart of seduction.

And this is where the sadness extends well beyond gay culture and into the romantic and sexual battlefields of the 21st century, writ large: I’m afraid that eroticism, like romance and seduction, cannot exist without risk. Those virtues cannot exist without uncertainty. And what the modern perspective on sex and love insists on is that uncertainty is indistinguishable from danger, from physical danger. The Zoomers believe that it’s deeply immoral to approach a stranger on the street and ask them out, among other scary stories; that they are also the loneliest, most unsatisfied generation one can imagine has been pointed out by many people, many times. The point is not ultimately that the street is some sort of sacred space, nor even that the act of asking someone out must be an aggressive one, but that not knowing the outcome of an exchange in advance is an unfathomable, unbearable conundrum to them. That, ultimately, is the source of this fear, this all-pervading, all-conquering fear that the 20-somethings have inculcated in the world of human sexual and romantic relations: the idea that they might engage in an interaction with another human being without knowing what that person wants and doesn’t, or even worse, without fully knowing what they themselves want, and must thus confront an unknowable, chancy, risky immediate future.

As the older among you are aware, of course, that indeterminacy, that unknowability, that risk, is the heart of attraction, of seduction, of the erotic. Not knowing is what’s sexy. This, among a billion other reasons, is why you will never actually be satisfied with an AI “partner” - because if they can’t say no, there is no validation in their saying yes, no knowledge that another thinking breathing being has looked you over, heard your invitation, and against the odds, accepted it. Hey folks, here is a bit of basic wisdom that should be available to every human being to walk the earth but somehow isn’t: the fear that attends asking someone to like you back is the exact same emotion as the pleasure you feel when they say yes. They are inextricable; they are one and the same. But it only feels as good as it does because that chance, that moment, might slip away and bob off into the sky forever out of your grasp; they’re called “butterflies” for a reason. That’s not to say that there aren’t other kinds of sexiness. Like many other people in happy and stable long-term relationships where the other partner long since looked me over and said “Yeah, he’ll do,” I still enjoy moments of surprise and passion with my girl. But if she had not once upon a time given me a look that perfectly combined “get a load of this dumbass” with toothy and joyful acceptance, when I made my clumsy, cheerful first move, there would be no relationship in which to keep the fire burning. She could have said no, but she chose to say yes. If that were not true, nothing about it could have ever been sexy.

To enjoy the things that are most enjoyable in life you must risk the experiences that are the most painfully awkward and embarrassing. We are all always asking each other for consent, in one way or another, and the asking is the romantic act. We can of course say no, or withdraw our consent whenever we want to, but then saying no can hurt too; that is human life, where regret can lie on both sides of every decision. This is why deciding is exhilarating and exhausting. What I am certain of is that figuratively turning your red light on to everyone and everything is spiritually closer to abstinence than it is to the uncertain, hesitant, risky gamble that is asking someone, hey. how about me? Sexlessness and totalizing promiscuity both eliminate the chance for rejection and thus both forbid the very emotional energy in which the erotic resides. And the way the kids these days have built their entire romantic lives around avoiding that moment, that moment of uncertainty where you feel like you’ll live or die based on the answer of the other person, that rush of pregnant and beautiful fear…. God, those poor fucking kids, to never feel those things.

“It’s so easy to get everything,” says a gay man quoted in the New York article. “It does feel like society and, like, capitalism are telling us, ‘Have sex!’”

But you can see the quiet dissatisfaction burning on the page here: we don’t, after all, want society or capitalism to agree to have sex with us. That is not whose blessing we’re looking for. When we seek out sex, we seek it from other human beings, and that human beings often say no but might say yes, yes in this moment, yes to us, is the one truly, eternally, unalterably sexy aspect of the human experience.