Friday, September 13, 2024 @12-1:30 pm PST
Buchanan Tower 225
A Tobin Distinguished Lecture in Queer and Trans German Studies:
In Search of Lost Time: Primitivist Homomythopoetics and the Self-Invention of the White Gay Man
Primitivist homomythopoetics––the creation of a white gay male subjectivity constructed, poetized, out of myths about Others considered primitive, stuck backwards in time––was an essential part of white gay men’s self-invention. Projections of past and future utopias enabled white gay radicals to form subjectivities and communicate their political ideas. As political contexts shifted, primitivist homomythopoetics proved remarkably resilient and consistent, able to adapt itself both to biological theories of racial hierarchization and twentieth century cultural relativisms which rejected biological racism and racist pseudoscience.
Primitivist homomythopoetics both created and limited the potential solidarity of white gay male politics. It made white gay men conceive of themselves as part of a millenia-long struggle against oppression and encouraged racist and mistaken first-person identification with racialized Others that complicated white gay men’s relationships with their political organizing. Focusing on two sites already determined by social histories to have been productive and important sites of this subject formation process, the Weimar Republic and California in the ‘long 1960s,’ this talk excavates the history and function of primitivist homomythopoetics.
This event will be hybrid, and you can register to attend online here!
Bio:
Ben Miller is a writer and historian. He completed his PhD summa cum laude in 2024 at the Graduate School of Global Intellectual History at the Freie Universität Berlin. He has been published in Radical History Review and is co-editor of a forthcoming special issue of the journal Global Intellectual History. He is co-host of the hit podcast Bad Gays and co-author of Bad Gays: A Homosexual History, teaches regularly at the Freie Universität, and is a member of the board of the Schwules Museum Berlin. He is currently the Kenneth Karmiole Fellow at the UCLA Libraries working on his next book project, a biography of the fashion designer Rudi Gernreich that doubles as a new history of the transatlantic transit, and eventual failure, of the counterculture.