This morning, while walking the dog, I looked down to see two earthworms, whom the dog and I had startled, suddenly abandoning their copulation—like two shoelaces untying themselves—and retracting into the earth. I logged out of Twitter last week, hopefully for a while. The trigger was punditry about Pete Buttigieg, the gay nerd candidate for President. He recently had a surge in polls and fundraising. Pundits were using his successes against him in a way that reminded me of old-school attacks on gays: he was being cast as a narcissist, seducer, and chameleon—as someone who could render his sexuality visible or invisible at will, on the one hand, and as someone whose accomplishments could be dismissed by exposing them as compensations of some kind, on the other. His public gayness was being discredited by revelation of his secret gayness. If he was so comfortable with being openly gay, one of the lines against him ran, why did he keep saying that his being gay needn’t affect how voters see him?
Undoing
Undoing
Undoing
This morning, while walking the dog, I looked down to see two earthworms, whom the dog and I had startled, suddenly abandoning their copulation—like two shoelaces untying themselves—and retracting into the earth. I logged out of Twitter last week, hopefully for a while. The trigger was punditry about Pete Buttigieg, the gay nerd candidate for President. He recently had a surge in polls and fundraising. Pundits were using his successes against him in a way that reminded me of old-school attacks on gays: he was being cast as a narcissist, seducer, and chameleon—as someone who could render his sexuality visible or invisible at will, on the one hand, and as someone whose accomplishments could be dismissed by exposing them as compensations of some kind, on the other. His public gayness was being discredited by revelation of his secret gayness. If he was so comfortable with being openly gay, one of the lines against him ran, why did he keep saying that his being gay needn’t affect how voters see him?