The Tyranny of Virtue by Robert Boyers

Author:Robert Boyers
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2019-09-23T16:00:00+00:00

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I. The essayist Thomas Chatterton Williams has lately had much to say about the addiction to binary thinking in discussions of identity: “Indeed, to be black (or white) for any significant amount of time in America is fundamentally to occupy a position on the mongrel spectrum—strict binaries have always failed spectacularly to contain this elementary truth.” Elsewhere, in the same essay (“Black and Blue and Blond”), Williams writes: “What I do know is that I used to not just tolerate but submit to and even on some deep level need our society’s dangerous assumptions about race, even as I suspected them to be irredeemably flawed.” That need kept him, he says, from relating even to his own family members “as distinct and irreplaceable people, not bodies or avatars or sites of racial characteristics and traits.”

II. Mark Dery, the biographer of the book artist Edward Gorey, somewhat resents the fact that Gorey was casual about his homosexual identity, and regards someone who can downplay his sexual orientation as “blithely entitled.” And yet Dery also speculates that Gorey was perhaps onto something when he rejected “the whole business of constructing identity . . . around sexuality.” Dery also quotes a friend of Gorey’s, who tells the biographer that people like Gorey “just see it in a whole different way. Being gay is not the center of their lives. . . . Ted never struck me as closeted; he was just who he was.” “That’s the correct answer,” writes Joan Acocella in a review of the Gorey biography. I wish I could be as sure as all that.

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