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Inversion: Gay Life After the Homosexual
Today’s world of PrEP, Pride parades, and gay marriage eclipses the wildest dreams of the sexual revolution. While it was formerly deviant to promote gay lifestyles, it is now ‘problematic’ to suggest that not all departures from the norm are in the homosexual’s best interest. Amidst this excess, a new wave of discontent rises among the once-keenest proponents of sexual progress: gay men.
What happened in the transition from inversion to homosexuality, gayness, and queerness? Why do some gay men lament the freedoms afforded to them by sexual and social acceptance? Bold and daring, the essays in Inversion reflect on the vicious cycle of debasement, acceptance, sacrifice, and liberation that homosexuality has been stuck in for longer than it wishes to acknowledge.
As gay culture fails to confront its history, it adopts hollow narratives of struggle. Some gay men fear losing their freedoms, some advocate for sexual restraint, while others, lost in the ever-expanding LGBTQIA+ ‘community,’ continue to make maximalist ideological demands of those outside. These responses mark a fracture in gay life. If there is some essence to homosexual desire, how is it being served by today’s gay culture and queer politics? Has the gay man — homosexual, queer, or inverted — rendered himself obsolete?
Bringing together contributions by eleven leading thinkers, theorists, and critics who examine the consequences of pink-washing history, denial of sexual realities, and the memetic nature of desire, Inversion reclaims homosexuality’s lost depth in an era of profound discontent.
Fearless in its critique and challenging in its proposals, Inversion considers the cultural and political aspects of gay life after homosexuality as it battles with queerness and the allure of a reactionary return, pharmacologically fueled sexual degeneration, and existential dread.
What happened in the transition from inversion to homosexuality, gayness, and queerness? Why do some gay men lament the freedoms afforded to them by sexual and social acceptance? Bold and daring, the essays in Inversion reflect on the vicious cycle of debasement, acceptance, sacrifice, and liberation that homosexuality has been stuck in for longer than it wishes to acknowledge.
As gay culture fails to confront its history, it adopts hollow narratives of struggle. Some gay men fear losing their freedoms, some advocate for sexual restraint, while others, lost in the ever-expanding LGBTQIA+ ‘community,’ continue to make maximalist ideological demands of those outside. These responses mark a fracture in gay life. If there is some essence to homosexual desire, how is it being served by today’s gay culture and queer politics? Has the gay man — homosexual, queer, or inverted — rendered himself obsolete?
Bringing together contributions by eleven leading thinkers, theorists, and critics who examine the consequences of pink-washing history, denial of sexual realities, and the memetic nature of desire, Inversion reclaims homosexuality’s lost depth in an era of profound discontent.
Fearless in its critique and challenging in its proposals, Inversion considers the cultural and political aspects of gay life after homosexuality as it battles with queerness and the allure of a reactionary return, pharmacologically fueled sexual degeneration, and existential dread.
456 pages, Paperback
Published November 12, 2025
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
February 5, 2026
Yotam Feldman, from "Twilights of Homosexuality": "Mishima and Pasolini both discovered the fascist horizons of perversion. It is no accident that this happened to them at the same point in history when their cultures were gasping in the void — that is liberalism, or tolerance — which was threatening to devour all aesthetic values. Pasolini approached the void with revulsion, admitting the need to face the present and look the monster in his eyes. Mishima did the same, by becoming immersed in his present moment to give himself over to this monster. Both acts of realization are tragic and end in martyrdom: Mishima’s ritual death was carefully planned, while Pasolini foresaw his own murder, turning it, in a way, into an act of suicide.
The realities the two men saw were not so different from the realities of our present world, again thrown into a panic of sanitization and misleading tolerance. Our world, too, stirs animosity and violence under the veil of total freedom and indifference. But there is one significant distinction: after the twentieth century, no one can reasonably imagine the slightest possibility of cultural redemption through politics, as both Pasolini and Mishima in their ways did. Today, instead, the homosexual who travels alone needs a different attitude — he needs to become accustomed to a life in a world devoid of faith and love."
The realities the two men saw were not so different from the realities of our present world, again thrown into a panic of sanitization and misleading tolerance. Our world, too, stirs animosity and violence under the veil of total freedom and indifference. But there is one significant distinction: after the twentieth century, no one can reasonably imagine the slightest possibility of cultural redemption through politics, as both Pasolini and Mishima in their ways did. Today, instead, the homosexual who travels alone needs a different attitude — he needs to become accustomed to a life in a world devoid of faith and love."
January 1, 2026
[Lengthier review/summary/notes at some point]
Enjoyable, thought-provoking read! Humorous and cynical. A great examination of various sorts of "queer theories" and the nature of "the homosexual", from the perspective of almost a dozen gay men of differing philosophical backgrounds. I'm excited for the continual breakdown of whatever liberal slush -- the "reductive aesthetic stencil of blue hair" -- we're living in.
There is a struggle for the soul of the gay: he is either a transgressor, relegated to the outer shadows of society, outcast yet touching greater realities (for better or for worse) that his society cannot see, or he is a perfectly normal and unremarkable bourgeois human, probably a “dog dad” in a house littered with rainbow-colored #pride items.
Love is Love, or it isn’t. What even is “the LGBT community”? What, other than the broadest brush of language manipulation, could tie a dude in San Fran who enjoys buggery to an asexual woman in Providence?
-
Well-timed reading on my part, as I finished up Ivan Illich's Gender through the course of reading these essays, which turned out to be a welcome companion. Illich enjoys placement in a footnote in the introduction, noting his prescience on the matter of modern man as genderless producers, and elsewhere trails of his thought can be found, e.g. even explicitly in Moulton's essay Towards a Gay Art of Suffering, in a discussion the pathologization of man and the shift in purpose of modern medicine.
Enjoyable, thought-provoking read! Humorous and cynical. A great examination of various sorts of "queer theories" and the nature of "the homosexual", from the perspective of almost a dozen gay men of differing philosophical backgrounds. I'm excited for the continual breakdown of whatever liberal slush -- the "reductive aesthetic stencil of blue hair" -- we're living in.
There is a struggle for the soul of the gay: he is either a transgressor, relegated to the outer shadows of society, outcast yet touching greater realities (for better or for worse) that his society cannot see, or he is a perfectly normal and unremarkable bourgeois human, probably a “dog dad” in a house littered with rainbow-colored #pride items.
Love is Love, or it isn’t. What even is “the LGBT community”? What, other than the broadest brush of language manipulation, could tie a dude in San Fran who enjoys buggery to an asexual woman in Providence?
-
Well-timed reading on my part, as I finished up Ivan Illich's Gender through the course of reading these essays, which turned out to be a welcome companion. Illich enjoys placement in a footnote in the introduction, noting his prescience on the matter of modern man as genderless producers, and elsewhere trails of his thought can be found, e.g. even explicitly in Moulton's essay Towards a Gay Art of Suffering, in a discussion the pathologization of man and the shift in purpose of modern medicine.
December 28, 2025
It’s telling that there is no mention of romantic love anywhere in Inversion’s near 500 pages. Indeed any hint at emotional warmth is quickly shunned for an empty “transgression” — lacking any transcendent ideal. I suspect many of the gay male critics in the collection could very well resolve their inner turmoil through a simple combination of the — troublingly “biopolitical” — interventions of sunlight, cardio and tender affection.
My review in UnHerd: https://unherd.com/2025/11/meet-the-n...
My review in UnHerd: https://unherd.com/2025/11/meet-the-n...
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews