The Hedonistic Death Drive of “Queerness”

The second election of Donald Trump to the presidency is a propitious moment to evaluate the state of conservatism in the United States. Trump was carried back into office in significant measure by a broad reaction against the perceived extremism of woke cultural politics, especially on matters related to gender and sexuality. It is, perhaps, an appropriate time to ask just how well conservatives understand the threat of the cultural Left’s attack on the traditional understanding of human sexuality.

A significant number of conservative public figures who claim opposition to the woke agenda on sexual matters give evidence of being blinded to the full danger of that radical movement. Republican Congresswoman Nancy Mace, for example, is highly critical of the transgender movement, but she has made it clear that she strongly supports same-sex marriage. The writer Batya Ungar-Sargon has expressed this view as a general principle, arguing that Trump-voting conservatives distinguish what they see as the dangers of the radical sexuality movement (the “nihilistic pro-transitioning-children elite”) from the moral conservatism of a “pro-marriage, whatever your orientation side.” In this vision, the construction of a pro-homosexual Left and an anti-homosexual Right is completely distorted — or “nonsense,” as Ungar-Sargon puts it.

It has been argued instead that even the Christian portion of the American Right is fundamentally supportive of same-sex marriage and other elements of a purportedly moderate-conservative effort to recognize homosexuality as a legitimate structure for long-term relationships and social institutions.

Evidence shows that the view of same-sex marriage championed by Mace and Ungar-Sargon is much more common in conservative circles than it was only a decade ago. Recent Pew survey data reveal that nearly half of all Republicans agree that same-sex marriage is a good thing for society. There is variation within the ranks, of course. Only a third of self-described conservative (as opposed to moderate) Republicans agree, though perhaps “only” is the wrong term — it is, after all, a full one in three. Among young (age 18-29) Republicans, the situation is predictably and significantly more affirmative on same-sex marriage: nearly two-thirds of them see it as a good thing.

But is it true that a meaningful moral distinction can be made along the lines Mace, Ungar-Sargon, and many others draw between supposedly perfectly normative same-sex marriage and the beyond-the-moral-pale effort to change the gender and sex of children through surgery and drugs?

A little attention to key terms in the vocabulary of the modern LGBTQIA+ movement is instructive. Most are aware that the term queer has been appropriated by this movement, cleansed of its formerly pejorative cast as an insult, and actively and positively accepted as descriptive of the movement’s attitude toward sexuality. Queerness is the noun form, and it has been the object of a considerable scholarship.

In its most popular definition, queerness alludes to sexual identities that are outside the heterosexual identity of the vast majority of the members of every human society that has ever existed. The entirety of the ever-growing LGBTQIA+ spectrum exists within queerness, in this framework, whether lesbian, gay, trans, or any of the other myriad categories of non-heterosexual sexual identity. But the differences among the positions are much discussed by some. A great deal, it is said, distinguishes a lesbian couple from a trans woman engaged in a polyamorous relationship with three other trans people. The category of queerness can be more or less heterogenous, and in this case, it is significantly so, these folks would assert.

Queerness can also be understood as more than just a broad aegis under which to group everything that is not heterosexual. There is, in the view of many in the LGBTQIA+ world, a spirit that animates this kind of thinking about sex and sexual identity. In this view, queerness amounts to a full-blown understanding of the deepest meaning and purpose of human life. Prominent academic queer theorist Lee Edelman fully and clearly develops this case in his book No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004). An exploration of Edelman’s argument sheds much light on the deepest nature of the homosexual effort to transform human society.

No Future opens with a discussion of the political criticism of a 1997 public-service ad President Bill Clinton did with his wife and daughter in support of a group called Coalition for America’s Children. Critics argued that the Clintons were attempting to profit from the unquestioned politics of “the Child” and “the Future.” Those critics insinuated that this was a shady move precisely because such an ad is virtually guaranteed to win the Clintons political capital, as no one could conceivably oppose children.

Not so fast, Edelman inveighs. He wants — and he wants queerness — to “take the other side.” “Queerness,” he writes, “names the side of those not ‘fighting for the children’” and figures “the place of the social order’s death drive.” It represents “resistance to the viability of the social.” Translated: Queerness rejects society itself. Queerness has an enemy, Edelman informs us, and he calls it “reproductive futurism.” This is the idea that it is a morally good thing that the human race continue to exist, which entails a strong moral valuation of procreation and the raising of children. From the view of queerness, this cannot be defended. It is nothing more than a “Ponzi scheme,” which, by Edelman’s logic, inevitably fails, even if only at the point at which our sun exhausts itself. Reproductive futurism should, therefore, be rejected, along with the hope that drives it.

Queerness, on the other hand, is preferable to reproductive futurism because it “promises…absolutely nothing.” What does it offer? The full embrace of an anti-social and anti-natal hedonism. This is, at bottom, the meaning of this non-heterosexual logic.

Edelman uses a classic of English-language literature to illustrate his point. In a chapter dedicated to a reading of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, Edelman opposes Tiny Tim, the physically disabled child of Ebenezer Scrooge’s clerk Bob Cratchit, to Scrooge as representatives, respectively, of the natalist world oriented toward the future and the queer ethic. Edelman begins with gratuitous insults directed at the faith of Christians. He recounts the episode in the novel in which the boy expresses hope that, by attending church with his family on Christmas Day, he will give their fellows in the faith a concrete spur to “remember…who made lame beggars walk, and blind men see.” Edelman’s response to Tiny Tim is viciously anti-Christian: “Very pleasant indeed. And more pleasant by half than remembering, instead, who made lame beggars lame (and beggars) and who made those blind men blind.”

If this were not sufficient to alert the reader to his level of hostility to Christianity, Edelman makes it still clearer elsewhere. He expresses his objection to “the season in which, throughout the West, we are ordered, each and every one, to attend to the birth of the Child.” He (correctly) connects natalism, fertility, and the abundance of life with the Christian faith, Christ the Innocent Babe with all innocent babes, the redemptive making new of all things by God incarnated with the renewal of human life represented by each newborn. He connects them, and he rejects them, violently, absolutely.

In order to sustain what position? That of the unrepentant Scrooge in his fallen state at the outset of the novel. This Scrooge, Edelman writes, is given to us by Dickens to despise because he is “stingy, reclusive, and anticommunitarian.” He is “the dreaded pedocide” who would consign Tiny Tim and all new life to annihilation through his inability to love anything other than his bank balance.

The selfish, humanity-hating pre-conversion Scrooge is not merely an object to contemplate, Edelman asserts; he is our model. Why, Edelman asks, can Scrooge not be left to his own choice regarding Christmas — and, by implication, regarding participation in the reproduction of society in all its forms? His nephew tells Scrooge, after being told to let Scrooge keep Christmas his own way, that he does not keep it at all. Scrooge’s response, which Edelman celebrates, is “Let me leave it alone, then.” The “obligatory investment in the social” is to be rejected ferociously, Edelman says, and he follows the unrepentant Scrooge completely here. Scrooge is “a textbook-perfect example of the death drive according to Freud,” desiring a “return to the icy, inert immobility of a lifeless thing.”

There is no ambiguity here. When Dickens describes the coldness of Scrooge’s heart, Edelman cheers with approval. In his reading, the anti-social miser’s being turned back to the warmth and love of social life is the homosexual being forced to become heterosexual, with homosexuality here neatly equated with embrace of the death drive. What, for most of us, is a happy conclusion to the story, when Scrooge is redeemed by becoming Tiny Tim’s “second father” and thereby assuring that the child will not die, Edelman sees as an egregious assault on Scrooge’s “intolerable narcissism that futurism projects onto those who will not mirror back its own imaginary form.”

Scrooge’s “pedocide” thus extends far beyond his lack of concern for the Tiny Tims of the world. He rejects all of society and its human bonds, including, of course, that of marriage, which he has purposefully evaded. And this is not, according to Edelman, simply because Scrooge has been too occupied with making money. The only other human with whom Scrooge has pursued any non-transient contact is Jacob Marley. If you have followed Edelman’s logic thus far, doubtless you can guess where this is going. We are to read Scrooge and Marley as a homosexual pairing, though one in which no love is present. All that unites them is their pursuit of the kinds of purely carnal, anti-spiritual, and anti-reproductive sexual contact at which, Edelman insists, the homosexual excels. Edelman tells us that it is “anality” that dominates “in the text’s depiction of that partnership.” Based on what evidence? He cites Marley’s ghost, in its “lament” that “in life…he never allowed his spirit…to rove” — and here he directly quotes Dickens — “beyond the narrow limits of our money-changing hole.”

Perhaps we ought not to take all this too seriously. It is doubtless morally offensive. But how many people are reading writers like Lee Edelman? More than you are likely to predict. Courses in universities on queer theory have proliferated in recent years — in literature, women’s studies departments, and elsewhere in the humanities and social sciences.

The readerly reach of No Future, though, is not the point. The principles on which such work is mounted — what Edelman defines as “queerness” — are, at present, everywhere. The claim that what he describes as the nature of queerness (that it is nihilistically anti-natalist) is found only within the pages of books like his and not in the real world can be countered simply by looking at that real world. Look, for example, to the gay-pride events in your area, and the increasingly straightforward way in which they present homosexual life — in the spectacle of men leading one another on leashes, parading about in shackles as statements of their sexual freedom — as the inverse of traditional American familial life and relations. Look to the Drag Queen Story Hours at local public libraries or schools that have been in the news in recent years. The people leading them openly wear the garb of demonic figures, and they twerk with buttocks exposed while children sit only feet away. Look to the Senate staffer who filmed himself engaging in homosexual intercourse in a Senate hearing room and characterized criticism of this act — with support from major gay media outlets such as The Advocate and Out — as an “attack” on “who I love” in pursuit of “a political agenda.” Look to the Atlanta homosexual power couple (one was a banker, the other a government employee) who adopted two young boys from a Christian special-needs adoption agency and systematically subjected them to a horrific campaign of rape for years, sending videos of their crimes to a pedophile network and selling sexual access to the boys. They were convicted of aggravated child molestation, aggravated sodomy, and sexual exploitation of children and sentenced to more than 100 years in prison for these crimes, though the mainstream media have been strangely reticent to report on the case.

The view of queerness and its implications for futurism presented by Edelman is not merely theoretical. It is realized in what writers in this sphere might well refer to as lived queerness. On this, the data are very clear. Despite what Mace and Ungar-Sargon would like to believe — and would like the rest of us to believe as well — any evidence of a strong commitment among homosexuals to a traditional familial ethic is next to nonexistent. Homosexuals as a group broadly live according to the anti-reproductive futurist perspective championed in Edelman’s work. Only a very small minority, perhaps 15 percent or so, of homosexual couples have children, and an even smaller percentage of these are homosexual male couples. In homosexual male “marriages,” children are present in less than ten percent, while in homosexual female “marriages,” they are present in barely one in four. The comparative figure for heterosexual married couples is nearly 60 percent living with children.

Nancy Mace, Batya Ungar-Sargon, and other “conservative” figures who imagine that homosexuality as a practice can effortlessly be included in a traditional culture of family and sexuality should be asked how they square those claims with the worldview described here, which is hiding in plain sight.

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