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The pleasures of identity | Grand

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“In a better world, [Edmund White] would have been a professor in Gay Studies”: Blake Smith and Tae-ho Kim in conversation 07.18.2024 by Ben Shields Blake Smith is one of the premier public intellectuals in America. Even if that title had the same meaning or prestige today as it did in the twentieth century, his work on Substack as well as at Tablet magazine, where he is a contributing writer, would still be right up there: from Susan Sontag’s fiction to Foucauldian biopolitics and the Zionism of Hannah Arendt, he expands our thinking in every area. While his range of interests rivals any critic in recent memory, the throughline in his body of work is his gayness. Particularly of late, with provocative pieces on Robert Glück, John Ashbery, Larry Kramer, and Garth Greenwell, he’s set his sights on gay men’s literature, as well as queer theory. This spring, Smith and his colleague Tae-ho Kim published a critique of what they see as the homophobic (not to mention paranoid) elements of que

Blake Smith is one of the premier public intellectuals in America. Even if that title had the same meaning or prestige today as it did in the twentieth century, his work on Substack as well as at Tablet magazine, where he is a contributing writer, would still be right up there: from Susan Sontag’s fiction to Foucauldian biopolitics and the Zionism of Hannah Arendt, he expands our thinking in every area. While his range of interests rivals any critic in recent memory, the throughline in his body of work is his gayness. Particularly of late, with provocative pieces on Robert Glück, John As

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