The suspicious suspect

part 2 of my series on incest porn

Read Part 1 here.

In his gorgeous eulogy of the Edmund White, Adrian Nathan West says that White often teased him, a heterosexual, about his interest in “all these fag writers.”

“He had,” West writes of his friend, “what I’ll dare call a queeny inclination to overintuit sexual motives; that was common among gay people well into the late ’90s, and maybe I’m just old now, but it seems mostly to have disappeared.” West goes on to explain that the subject choices of John Rechy and Alan Hollinghurst (“all that I am not”) were more or less coincidental: “it would later be Spanish viticulture, the Austrian Antiheimatroman, Brazilian jiu-jitsu…”

This anecdote comes to mind as I begin the first entry in my series on incest porn. I had initially decided to start by explaining myself—by laying down my cards, stepping into the confessional, clocking my own T. Unlike West, I can’t blame coincidence for my fascination with the subject. On the prevalence of the “[overintuition]” of “sexual motives” among gay people, we disagree: in my opinion, this has not yet faded away, at least not among my cohort of Millennials. I suspect that this tendency is an example of a defense mechanism that has evolved into a sensibility; of a minority’s culture taking seed in the ashes of repression. If you’re anything like me, from a very young age you zeroed in on any possible hint of queerness or acknowledgment thereof, particularly by straight people, whose benign attention could sometimes imbue it with an almost radicalizing legibility. This tendency—to seek fire in the smoke—can make you appear paranoid to those with no reason to concern themselves too much with blending in, but then again rule-breakers often know the handbook better than anyone else.

My point is, to the tune of “hurt people hurt people,” that the suspicious suspect.