Arendt, Michael Denneny, and the Origins of Gay Cultural Activism

03-03-2024

Roger Berkowitz

Blake Smith writes about Arendt’s influence on Michael Denneny, her former student and one of the first and most influential gay cultural activists of the 1970s. Denneny died last year (the New York Times Obituary is here). I met Michael once, with Charles Hollander in Hyde Park, the place both of them met Arendt as her students. Our correspondence largely concerned Arendt’s Greek translations. Michael recalled a translation Arendt had made for him at dinner one evening of the final lines of Antigone, where the Chorus reflects on Creon’s lessons after his decisions have led not simply to Antigone’s death, but also to the death of his son and his wife. In Robert Fagle’s rendering, which follows the standards and is true to the Greek, the chorus sings:

Wisdom is by far the greatest part of joy,
And reverence toward the gods must be safeguarded.
The mighty words of the proud are paid in full 
With mighty blows of fate, and at long last
Those blows will teach us wisdom.

As Denneny recalled Arendt’s translation, the great words of the proudly confident answer back the hammer-blows of Fortune. Arendt thus gives agency to men rather than to fate. For Arendt, human speech and action are what bring wisdom, finally, in the end. 

Our happiness depends
On wisdom all the way.
The gods must have their due.
Great words by the proudly confident
Answering back the hammer-blows of Fortune
Bring wisdom, finally, in the end.

Arendt’s translation doesn’t follow the Greek. But it does capture something that Denneny found essential in Arendt, that “public words come first, and partly in the old Quaker sense of Speak truth to power.” With that in mind, Denneny offered his own version of the final lines of Sophocles play:

Wisdom is the first and greatest part
Of happiness; the gods’ portion
Must never be dishonored.  Great words
Answering to the heavy blows of the overproud
Teach wisdom in old age.

Blake Smith is alive to this Arendtian influence on Denneny and draws from it lessons about “diversity and debate” that teach us about the limits and possibilities of identity politics. Smith is interested in the ways that Denneny finds in Arendt an argument for the power of minorities to resist totalitarianism and to contribute to democratic plurality. He writes:

In her account, minorities are important not insofar as they are internally unified groups engaged in the play of countervailing interests and powers, but rather insofar as they are internally heterogeneous groups whose very diversity offers a sort of school in which citizens learn how to have judgment: the capacity to express and exchange ideas without appeal to fixed rules. Differences within “our own groups”—our everyday experiences of debates with other people “like us” in the spaces of our associational life (synagogues, union halls, gay bars, etc.) prepare us for the still more challenging experiences of disagreement in our wider political life, where we cannot necessarily trust that our interlocutors share our identities, experiences, and goals.  

Smith’s recuperation of Denneny’s work and Arendt’s influence upon his early thinking about gay activism is important. He  writes:

Michael Denneny, the recently deceased co-founder and co-editor of the pioneering gay magazine Christopher Street , gay newspaper New York Native , and the gay publishing line at St. Martin’s Press, Stonewall Inn Editions, began his recently published collection of essays On Christopher Street  with a quotation from his mentor, Hannah Arendt:
  

“Only in our speaking with one another does the world, as that about which we speak, emerge in its objectivity and visibility from all sides. Living in a real world and speaking with one another about it are basically one and the same.” 

Denneny’s career as a gay cultural activist was a way of putting into practice Arendt’s thought as condensed in this citation. Across writings collected in On Christopher Street, which range in date from the beginnings of the magazine in 1976 to just before his death last year, he grounded his view of gay culture and politics in her work. Yet the importance of her example for their emergence—and of her philosophy to a key moment in the rise of what we now call “identity politics”—remains almost totally ignored in the field of gay history and in the ever-growing number of academic and popular reappraisals of Arendt. It is hardly known that her thinking and milieu were vital elements in intellectual matrix of the American gay movement.

From academic and popular genealogies of gay identity and gay politics, whether written by progressive academics or conservatives pundits like Jamie Kirchick or Chris Rufo, readers could be forgiven for mistakenly believing misunderstanding that it was “radical” post-structuralist thinkers like Michel Foucault and Judith Butler who supplied that movement’s theoretical legitimation, resisted all the way by “mainstream” “assimilationists” (who are often portrayed by defenders and critics as anti-theoretical voices of “common sense”). Such genealogies misunderstand Foucault (who was much closer to the positions of Arendt and Denneny, an early champion of his, than to Butler and today’s “woke” activists)ii—although this is a subject for another essay. Moreover, they obscure the deep, and deeply Arendtian, thinking behind the cultural and political work that brought gay male life towards the center of American consciousness. 

Perhaps more than anyone in the critical decades of the 1970s and 80s, Denneny helped to build a gay literary and intellectual “world” against a homophobic mainstream amid the catastrophe of the AIDS crisis. He was inspired throughout by his interpretation of Arendt’s philosophical writings alongside her earlier activism in Jewish relief organizations amid the disasters of the 1930s and 40s. His vision — so crucial to the creation of modern gay identity in the United States — owed much to her unique understanding of Zionism as a struggle to build a new “world” for modern Jewish life in its diversity. He read her later theoretical work through the prism of her earlier political engagement and translated both for the needs of American gay men. 

Like Arendt, Denneny came to argue that the best hope for the survival of human freedom lay not in traditional ideas of abstract, universal human rights enshrined in texts and protected by official institutions (that is, in the historical mode of political liberalism), but rather in specific minority communities devoted to creating new practices, pleasures and identities, in a spirit of political engagement that could serve as a model for other groups. In that sense, gay liberation — as an exemplary model of collective freedom to forge new ways of being together — mattered deeply to straight people. And, in a vital lesson for our current moment, when defenders of “diversity” and advocates for the free exchange of opinion so often seem to be locked in opposition as our liberal democracy implodes, Denneny echoed Arendt in urging us to see diversity and debate as inseparable elements of the “world,” equally vital to the free expression of our identities and to preservation of our collective political life.