We Want Everything

Perverts by Kay Gabriel. Nightboat Books, 120 pages. 2025.

Queer theory, at least in its elite American form, is in its flop era. Though it emerged in the early 1990s as a scholarly field concerned with the social construction of sexuality and gender, it has drifted very far away from the sex-gender system. It is now deployed mostly in relation to “normativity” in ways that, ironically, promote distressingly banal understandings of what queerness is supposed to look like and what kinds of stories queer histories and theories are supposed to tell. More often than not, it describes navel-gazing autotheory that, misapprehending techniques designed to recover the lives of people written out of literature and archives, instead uses them to describe, often in wretched prose, the lives of affectless professors with mortgages.

The fruit is sour because the branches are rotting: the humanities departments where queer theorists have trained and worked have been experiencing brutal austerity for more than a decade. Are we to imagine that these departments will continue to provide homes for the kinds of scholarship now routinely denounced by the state as “gender ideology” and used as justification for further funding cuts? The brunt of this ongoing and intensifying crackdown—the generalized anti-intellectual offensive with which it began and the politicized, censorious defunding that continues apace—has already been felt most strongly in the kinds of underfunded public institutions, both in the United States and abroad, that have historically been absent from the dominant queer scholarly conversation.

Matt Brim, who teaches at such an institution, demonstrates in Poor Queer Studies that “the field cannot be separated from the large-scale institutional production of racialized class stratification . . . queer studies has been a vector for upward professional mobility for faculty” at elite institutions, while poor ones have remained outside the loop. Queer theory’s practitioners once pretended to be Robin Hoods redistributing the resources of the academy, but as Brim trenchantly points out, Robin Hood stole to give to the poor, not to himself, and wasn’t paid to do so.

Indeed, what the right describes as a terrifying campaign to undermine the American family (I wish!) has often merrily complied with its own destruction. When the esteemed queer theorist Annamarie Jagose was appointed dean of the faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Sydney in Australia, for instance, she almost immediately began helping pour gasoline on the bonfire of the humanities, presiding over sweeping cuts. Then, she responded to protest against her in an official university email communique, musing on the “complexities of the interpellative moment that hails into being what it purports only to recognize,” declaring chants that used only her first name to be “insinuatingly gendered” by the “all-knowing, hermeneutically suspicious position of the protestor.” The emperors are naked.

There is, of course, still brilliant queer theory and scholarship being produced—but most of it does not arise from the elite institutions that are uniquely complicit in the ongoing destruction of the world. Go figure. Maybe the edifice of elite gay and lesbian studies and the queer theory it became—from praising the ancient Greeks all the way through to arguing that queerness is inherently revolutionary—was an attempt to get away from the fact that what we’re actually talking about when we talk about queer life is sodomy and sex change, both of which are material facts and neither of which is particularly conducive to class advancement of the kind that elite institutions are set up to confer. Indeed, as Jules Gill-Peterson has pointed out in these pages and elsewhere, transition confers material loss, and distancing oneself from transition can confer material benefit. Queers approach sex/gender in ways that mark us for material disadvantage. Bad queer theory makes that into a romance, and I read it like Bette Davis listening to a car radio: detesting cheap sentiment. Cheap sentiment emerges when the truth—desire—becomes too expensive.

Perverts, a slim volume of poetry by Kay Gabriel addresses itself to the expensive truth. Gabriel, who is also an organizer both of socialist politics and of parties, announces her immodest goals on the first page: this is “an epic poem stitched together from the dreams of / friends or strangers, delegates / of the dream assembly / who writes an epic poem in the 2020s?” “Perverts,” a six-part poem, forms the book’s first section, and is followed up by a second poem entitled “Trannies, by Larry Kramer.” In both sections, queers dance, dream, and fuck—“mostly fuck: they’re very proficient, / Their insides are ribbons of satin.” The text explodes with a collective sense of humor that owes as much to the Borscht Belt as it does to club kids. “In Eric’s dream, Liza Minnelli’s playing / Hillary Clinton on SNL / she does jazz hands and says WAR Crimes”—I mean, come on.

In this epic, “a pervert’s as good as a doctor”—and everyone is dreaming of what Grace Paley once called “enormous changes at the last minute.” Gabriel’s perverts yearn for sex, sex change, and socialist revolution in equal measure. It is a plenary session on acid. If desire is the space between what we have and what we want, then dreaming our way toward what we want becomes actionably important, part and parcel of a “revolutionary grammar.” Pervert dreams are “gaggy, theatrical, / and full of lessons, nightly / Lehrstücke.” Lehrstücke, a form of theatre named into being by Bertolt Brecht, breaks down barriers between performers and audiences: learning occurs through participation. Here, the audience of perverts, generously configured to include the reader, is invited to dream with the epic’s characters. Gabriel asks if her Lehrstücke come “from Jack Spicer’s Martian, the one who / rearranges the mental furniture.” Her Martians are earthbound perverts, her friends and comrades, and together, they dream with and rearrange us. These dreams emerge from a “New / York Yiddishkeyt” socialism of the kind that raised Paley. They are dreams of “a mass / meeting of the Left, an old-school / gym or auditorium” where David Harvey causes a rift and is then brought home to bed while his host has a Grindr date on the veranda. Old Left? New Left? Gay Left? All of the above. Gabriel’s tear encompasses decades of hoped-for social and political change.

A pervert’s dreams are, unsurprisingly, often about sex. These are dreams “where a bi boy makes good on his promise / and, thank God, really lets you have it / Breaking down the dream, we arrive / at infrastructure: how it ‘sets agendas, / produces isolation, enables / cooperation’ that some people / have and others need, including to be adored, / including to be schtupped . . . / or just to be regarded fuckably.” Sex is infrastructure, and in Gabriel’s vision, infrastructure should be publicly owned and produced by collective means. I’ve always liked Angela Zimmerman’s riff on Heidegger’s “dichten” to argue that history, theory, and poetry are more deeply interrelated than we might assume. People dreaming one another into being and then fucking: Perverts is a kind of queer theory or at least a series of arguments about the relationship between language and sex and gender.

In more ways than one, Perverts recalls Larry Mitchell’s The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions, originally published in 1977. A ribald, fairy-tale-like manifesto, it offered gay liberationists a historical myth around which they might orient a politics of outrage and camaraderie. The book imagines “the faggots” as an eternal community of something-other-than-men, living in the interstices of empire between revolutions, sleeping around and attending to the fabulous fires of community and refusing to let the lights go out. “The faggots,” Mitchell writes, “have never been asked to join the vanguard” because they “do not know how to keep a straight face . . . are too quick to believe that the revolution had come and so too quick to celebrate. The vanguard demands that the revolution go on forever and so demands that the celebration only be planned, never enacted.” Gabriel’s perverts, on the other hand, celebrate before the revolution has come—while still working diligently to plan it.

Gabriel’s dreams echo her political writing. Three of her axioms I am always quoting: “politically effective people are not always as we imagine them”; “the task for people who care about the political success of both trans people and the working class is to manifest the political coalition that the right is already attempting to neutralize”; and “faggots are women.” In a 2020 essay called “Gender As An Accumulation Strategy,” Gabriel lays out her theoretical links between trans politics and a revolutionary horizon, aiming

to throw us back into the here and now of foreclosed configurations of human life and the struggle over their liberation . . . In view of a politically urgent hedonism, the question becomes: what would it mean for gender to function as a source of disalienated pleasure rather than an accumulation strategy?—a question that, mobilised in practice, helps us to engage the world at every relevant scale.

Politically urgent hedonism aims at making sex/gender an engine of pleasure and not accumulation. Perverts adopts the same objective. For Gabriel’s comrades, fucking and organizing are equally important. They organize “a defund-to- / abolish trajectory,” maintaining through dreams a political horizon that only becomes more necessary the more difficult it is to imagine. This is not the hedonism of “peak gay sluttiness,” of marketing managers and their G-timers on Fire Island. Hedonism is politically neutral; Gabriel imagines how it might help enact something beyond itself.

In the second section, Trannies, by Larry Kramer, Gabriel continues to operate in the speculative mode. Here, she imagines that “in 1978, Larry Kramer wrote the novel Trannies, / . . . a realist depiction of the modern bourgeois transsexual, / all four or five hundred of them.” The novel Kramer actually wrote, Faggots, populates New York discos and Fire Island parties with clone-era homosexuals who dance and screw while Kramer’s stand-in narrator, on the hunt for true love, watches with disapproval. Gabriel uses the gag of Kramer writing Trannies instead to explore “non- / empirical faggots, faggots not of this / world but the next.”

Faggots is an easy novel to make fun of: a toilet-obsessed tale of gays partying away their potential nobility. Straight society—aided by Kramer, a self-styled and self-obsessed Cassandra—subsequently recast the novel as a wise prediction of AIDS, as if that disease were a morality tale rather than a catastrophe of epidemiological bad luck and governmental neglect. Kramer, who decried “various queer and gender theories I came to quickly realize as relatively useless for a people looking to learn about our real history,” thought we should study great and powerful past gays to inspire future gays to be Great Men. This was premised on the idea that gays are “better than other people,” to quote his infamous 2004 speech “The Tragedy of Today’s Gays,” which goes on to accuse gay people of bringing AIDS upon themselves—a premise shared by Ronald Reagan.

Perhaps this extreme example points to something sinister lurking in the edifice of elite-institution queer theory. Kramer and the “normativity” crowd would be equally horrified by this assertion, but their project is actually somewhat similar: an attempt to make queer people better than other people, to identify people as revolutionary or important due to a historically contingent sexual identity rather than thinking sex/gender as one of the systems we need to organize to defeat. Gabriel gets this, which is why Trannies is brilliant, ending as it does with a shift of the question of desire and transsexuality into the proverbial chaser having sex with a doll “in an anonymous café on Nostrand Ave., / …which first opened its / doors in 1979, when Kramer partied despite / himself,” and the desired doll interrogating not her desire but her having been desired, which is of course part of her desire. “A sex change is not / a canticle. It’s not a canto.”

Poetry, in other words, is not sufficient to enact material change in the world—and yet. Larry Kramer, the poem concludes, wasn’t “even an edge case…/But do you think he considered the idea? / If he did, maybe the thought passed through him / with a shudder, like you might imagine closing a / window on your hand, or maybe he felt a tug / in his groin, like a kid smoking his / first cigarette and thinking, wow.”

Perverts, all of it, is about that tug in the groin: the first-cigarette feeling of a vision of how things could be. Pankaj Mishra, in his recent evisceration of the United States’ complicit and terminal intelligentsia, ends by urging young writers and thinkers to turn away from liberal Cold War-era institutions that have long praised dissidence while making actual dissidence impossible and “assume the usual condition of writers elsewhere: a bitter but spiritually liberating powerlessness.” Queers, no better than anyone else, should listen in. Gabriel already has. Down with respectability, down with being Great Men like the Greeks or ethically superior to gender. We want things, and we get in trouble for it: but we cannot be robbed of our desire. We want sodomy and sex changes. We want everything because we’re perverts.