Sublime

three major trends in queer communication networks between the 1930s and 1970s:

Queer, amateur: these are mutually reinforcing terms.

Taking over identity-conferring messages from different others invariably creates a jigsaw puzzle whose pieces don’t quite match up. That’s why we are perfectly capable of having a dialogue with ‘ourselves’. I can be angry, pleased, or disappointed with ‘myself’, because the ‘I’ that is judging ‘me’ is based on a different identification from the ‘

You and I may not be polyglot pilots or undercover agents, but we all contain multitudes—every person has encoded multiple peer groups. These codes take turns guiding us, activating in situations that cue them.

oftentimes when folks think about existing in groups, their self sort of gets lost. But, actually, caring for yourself—and, maybe, reinventing the individual narrative that has been so Americanized into something that’s going to contribute to the group’s care—is what I’m getting at.

one in which he emerges as less an innocent straight boy corrupted by tech savvy queer predators than as an equally tech savvy, ambitious, sexually flexible, self-interested, and even cynical entrepreneur.

The queer network has a longer history.