Rick Powell

“There is no unthreatened, unthreatening conceptual home for the concept of gay origins. We have all the more reason, then, to keep our understanding of gay origin, of gay cultural and material reproduction, plural, multi-capillaried, argus-eyed, respectful, and endlessly cherished.” —

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

I was a big fan of Coates when he was writing and blogging for the Atlantic, where he often had a fruitful back and forth with Andrew Sullivan, but was cool to his evolution as one of the voices of what I would call bleak racial essentialism. I was also not nearly as impressed with Between the World and Me as everyone else on the left was, perhaps ... See more

How can a work rediscover its solidity, its fruitfulness, its fragility, its own density or possible opacity, in short, its problematic virtues?

ekphrasis ⁠

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