A review by ralowe
What Do Gay Men Want?: An Essay on Sex, Risk, and Subjectivity by David Halperin

3.0

this is by far the most charming entry in the antirelational metaphysics turn of recent queer theory. it is the most amenable when thinking about risk in terms of the material particularities one has to negotiate in safe sex practices. i lose my patience when it all turns into a discussion of the productive interventions the abject can stage against state hegemony qua compulsory heterosexuality. it's irritating because it is always a productivity "to come," and halperin is plenty polite here in and of itself. i have difficulty with what comes up for me as an idiotic opposition between material and metaphysical death. sure genet was able to show us the power of transvaluation, spit-to-roses, but it still sucks to get spit on. people continue to get spit on. people continue to die. you can call me kant but dying still sucks. reading all this anitrelational drama is like taking schindlers list to represent the holocaust. schindlers list purports to provide a tale of human triumph in the midst of death, a tale of moral triumph celebrating the tenacity of the human subject over ultimate adversity and evil. too bad you can't exactly represent the holocaust. it defies representation. so its defining moment of moral transcendance rings hollywood and fake. a more effective portrayal of that moment of infinite possibility amdist adversity and evil would come in inglourious basterds which wisely opts not to be an ethnographic document of the holocaust at all. the productive possibilities it discovers are when it tries not to be an intervention of history but of its representation in cinema. queer antirelational strategies focus on the rosy side of the ambivalent subject of survivorship. sure we want survivors to survive, but what gets lost is how despicable a predicament it is to be in a circumstance that one must have to survive in the first damn place. of the anirelational set, halperin is by far the most polite and the least insensitive and ablist. he's a good writer.