Bodies Bodies Bodies

You’re not like other women. That much you want everyone to know.

Well, clearly you are a lot like other women. Blending in pretty well against any in your age group, income bracket, class background, and location deep in the Klein blue corners of America. How many times have you gotten your morning commute matcha order mixed up with a woman in about the same dress, heading to the same skyscraper, to do more or less the same email job? Even if your name is Theresa and hers is, like, Marigold or something. ANNOYING!!

But no matter. Like Marigold and like your friends, you are fulfilled in all the relevant categories, save the most innate and primal: heterosexual coupling. It’s so like a movie, isn’t it? And not like a good one, but like a Hulu movie you instantly forget about yet have to live all over again. You feel like you’ve run the gamut of eligible males in the whole goddamn city. And again, like the girls, you hold true to one very important dealbreaker: no MAGA. You mean it, too. No Trumpers, no conservatives, no apoliticals, and certainly no “moderates.” You’re all about progressive values and human rights. You want to be with men who are the same. You don’t want to be like the people in the Hulu movie, you want to be like the people in the antidepressant ads.

Still, you’re different! Not because you’re ambivalent about Israel and sometimes about open borders, but because you know it’s not the best look to make politics the biggest part of your personality. Like even in friendship it’s such a fucking bummer. Hearing the same opinions expressed over and over again in the same way. So you dial it back. Moreover, you keep an open mind. Let politics wait until the right moment.

But the wrong moment keeps sneaking up on you. One man after another falls against your standards. But you wonder, are you too lax in enforcing them? No, it is the men who are wrong, and who are getting better at concealing it. You’ve heard this too, alas, from other women, the dread of having to go on a date, let alone forge a bond, with a “closeted” Trump supporter. That doesn’t sound right, does it? Suggesting not only advanced male cunning, but a belief that their present level of ostracism is insufficient. And in the waining days of Pride Month, no less!

And yet, the thought persists. It’s a strange phenomenon. You can’t quite let it go. They keep coming to you, and maybe you can put it to work, finally get some use out of that Anthropology minor and your binges of Queer Eye and Drag Race. So far, in fact, you’ve met enough of them to discern three core types.

The first type you’ve noticed is the Rock Hudson. Outwardly there is nothing about him that offends or which otherwise causes him to stand out. By all appearances he is the supreme ideal of modern masculine virtue. He dresses well, he works out, he’s courteous to the wait staff, he is consistent in his actions, he’s neither too sensitive nor too assertive. His tastes are neither too arcane nor too vulgar. He has a job and a passport. In him, you find all your inner-conflicts reconciled; your neuroses soothed. You’re ready to ghost your therapist. You introduce him proudly to Mom, he gets on with your gender nonconforming brother, you secretly hope he asks Dad for your hand in marriage. Shame about that one thing making all this a fantasy. It asserts itself gradually, in his word choices, his media diet, his Staten Island upbringing that stubbornly resists the civilizing effects of Murray Hill. More importantly in what he doesn’t do: acquiesce politely to your views.

Like Rock Hudson, this modern man is in truth the untimely man, only now he is behind the time. He clings to an idyllic conception of society where bipartisan couplings were actually possible. Something you cannot accept in this age of feminine ascendency, in which it is natural that worthy men should not bother themselves with the burdens of political independence or intellectual refinement. It baffles you that so stately an example as Tim Walz has no appeal to him at all. You want to break it off now, but you hold off. In part for the sake of appearance but also for the catharsis. Having him momentarily near is actually better than perceiving him in the abstract; you let your contempt simmer like butter in a frying pan, gazing at him while he pours you another glass of rosé, handles the poop bags while you walk the dog in Central Park, or while he drifts to sleep in post-orgasmic quietude.

The second type is the Liberace. He is no more sophisticated in his politics than the Rock Hudson. He’ll have nothing to offer about any policy and has no concept of the future. He may not have even voted for a Republican. Yet his awareness is far sharper, and for a more prurient purpose. Not a MAGAesthete as such, he may never have listened to The Perfume Nationalist or read anything from Passage Press. Instead he intuits by his own lights the MAGAesthete’s taste for open-secretiveness. Trump support is the ultimate transgressive thrill, and he makes it an art in exhibiting it. If the Rock Hudson is the character in a Wildean drama, this type is the dramatist. He presents his Trumpism with a fine knowingness, like an oily residue on the skin maintained for some obscure holistic purpose. He brandishes a candelabra hither and thither. He sashays in a cape sequined with red, white, and blue rubies. None of this will be lost on everyone in your friend group. They won’t say anything, of course, because (a) they are Good Friends and don’t want to intrude; (b) surely you must know; and (c) it’s not their problem anyway.

Nope. You will be more or less in the dark, blinded by a toxic compound of physical attraction, desperation, and social privilege. Much like above after having exhausted your options. The good news is that it’s going to work this time. The Liberace will always make it work. Anything to prolong the secret. Pushing the revelation until one of you is on your deathbed. He may tell you he regrets it, he always regretted it. And for once he’ll be honest; because secrets are toothless without shame.

Last is the Warhol. Though he is the most “out” of the closeted Trumpists, he is also the least threatening as a result. It is not so much that he is unattractive (though he might be) as he is detached from anything like sincerity. He may wear a MAGA hat or a US flag-printed t-shirt to a rooftop party. He may voice objections to abortion and sympathies for ICE officers and sustain arguments from those premises. He may be seen flipping through a tattered copy of Sun and Steel. But like his namesake there is a performative and voyeuristic quality to all of his actions. Camp with heterosexual characteristics, like Anton LaVey, Abercrombie & Fitch catalogs, and Camille Paglia. It’s like he was a hipster in an earlier life and hasn’t quite washed himself of those obnoxious affectations; he just traded one trucker hat for another.

Because also like his namesake, the dutiful Catholic boy, he evinces no substantial conflicts with the prevailing orthodoxy. He takes as models committed Republicans like Vincent Gallo and Peter Steele, or more theatrical types like Sam Hyde, Gavin McInnes, and Kanye West before his total breakdown. Indeed, you appreciate him because you only need to regard him as proof that you are still tolerant of other kinds of people. Provided you don’t have to see them very often. And they, more importantly, keep a respectable distance from you.

Not that you are any less performative. For you find that you don’t hate any of these types as much as you let on in the group chats. Actually you appreciate them for the necessary roles that they each play. Every dominant order needs malcontents to validate its dominance, just as a conquering army needs cannon fodder and the mechanic’s garage needs Hustler centerfolds. They are bodies serving their purpose. For any of them to possess something approaching a sincere belief is beyond your comprehension. As far as you know, they all seek forgiveness, ultimately and sensibly, as Mamdani voters. And maybe one day they’ll be absolved.

For it can’t be that they are really against you; that their secrecy has a deeper purpose. One that seeks a vibe settlement after embracing the vibe shift, through which the ideology that will eventually coagulate as post-Trump MAGA becomes the new lesser of two evils; a secrecy that is strategic in the execution of the new queer agenda.

I mean, it could be worse. Just ask the women who’ve caught feelings from men who can visualize the soon-to-be greater evil a little too well. What? It’s happened before. Just not in a while.