Day: December 6, 2023

My generation was one of the first to come across gay people in TV series and books without having to look for them. We didn’t have to go to specialized bookstores or video stores. During my childhood I saw that television included homosexual characters as an emblem of modernity in the Spain of get-rich-quick culture and gay marriage. In less than 20 years, that representation has spread as wide as the market’s imagination. On streaming platforms there are gay Christmas romantic comedies, gay Nordic dramas, and movies based on gay novels in which gay English princes marry the bisexual son of the president of the United States. As you might expect, all of these stories that I watch and read avidly are deeply unsatisfying in their desire to shoehorn the gay into contemporary (Western, capitalist) life.

Is that what we wanted? The late LGBTQ+ activists Paco Vidarte and Shangay Lily would answer no. There are efforts to find an identity that escapes this assimilation, such as the recent book Maricas malas (Bad Gays) by Christo Casas. It looks for subjects who have escaped this representation and maintained their dissidence. The key is whether that dissidence is something that can be debated in moral terms or whether it sometimes becomes aesthetic posturing. That is to say, can you want to be a “good bad gay?” A city-dwelling gay white man with a university education, like myself, can hardly be a dissident. And dissidence sometimes becomes an image that the market takes advantage of. Casas’s criticism of the figure of the “good gay” seems logical and inevitable to me. They are the ones who fit into the representation and who fill the diversity gap with their replicas of heterosexual privileges. But there are already cultural products that recreate types of “LGBTQ+” profitably, and in which diversity inevitably becomes an advertising claim, no matter how elaborate the script is or how well the characters are drawn: see Pose or Euphoria.

Instead, I find the strategies in a series of works that put forward stylistic rather than thematic forms more agile to escape from what is assimilated. The work of Chilean writer Pedro Lemebel, for example, presents dissidence as an almost dialectical form of speech. The cult novel The wretched life of Juanita Narboni, by Ángel Vázquez, does something similar, from the Tangier of the first Franco regime, and using the voice of a bitter spinster. The possibilities are many, but they all have some aspects in common. In 2005, Contra Natura (Against Nature), by Álvaro Pombo, a cruel and acidic novel about homosexuality(ies), was published in Spain. His characters are characterized by fundamental inequality: age, beauty, education, and class separate them. Although the cycles of desire bring them together, it soon becomes clear that these inequalities shape their own gay experience. And this issue explodes any notion of community. Multiple digressions and complex syntax mimic that frustration in a convoluted dance of wills and lustful inevitabilities. The conclusion is effective: for Pombo, homosexuality is multiple, inevitable, and insufficient. It is marked by all of the above but never goes away.

Accordingly, the author announced on television his rejection of gay marriage legislation, in the midst of debate at the time. Although at that time it meant aligning himself with reactionary positions, the writer was motivated by a vision similar to what Christo Casas defends today. For Pombo, homosexuals could not enter the family circle since their status that goes “against nature” was not only a legal issue, but a fundamental axis of their own definition. Marriage would become a fiction, a state deception that sought to “cover up” the homosexual. Although Casas criticizes this same strategy — although he indicates that gay marriage should be a right as long as heterosexual marriage is a right — the alternative identity he proposes seems to settle on dissidence as a sufficient category. And I suspect, as I said, that even that dissidence will end up being integrated (tamed and sanitized) at some point, if it is not already being integrated.

Sixty years before Pombo, Jean Genet invented another style to avoid the moral definition of identity, of which perhaps the best example is the recently republished, uncensored, The Thief’s Journal. This hyperbolic autobiography defends an anti-bourgeois form that shuns easy reading. Even in the times when homosexuality was illegal, he was aware that form had to intervene in the relationship between race, sexuality, and class. Genet wrote against the grain of the novel as a genre, to blur and destroy any similarity with it. Its wild explicitness is actually a matter of style, not theme.

James Baldwin insisted on this in Giovanni’s Room, a work in which homosexuality is a relevant issue because it poses a risk to the social position of its protagonist. The examples multiply: Tea and Sympathy, Vincente Minnelli’s film in which not a single homosexual appears, is perhaps the most radical example that gayness does not need to be seen to constitute a form. And at the end December, director Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn will be released, a movie in which she seeks to treat seduction as a class issue. The form may be a way of working with “gay stuff” based on its contradictions, since it seems to have no salvation as an identity taking on the market.

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By Aziz El Yaakoubi and Vladimir Soldatkin
RIYADH (Reuters) – Russian President Vladimir Putin and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman discussed further cooperation on oil prices on Wednesday as members of OPEC+, a Kremlin spokesperson was quoted as saying.

A Saudi account of the meeting said the crown prince praised joint coordination between the two countries “that helped remove tensions in Middle East”.

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov, quoted by Russian news agencies, said cooperation would continue within OPEC+, which includes the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and allies led by Russia.

The meeting took place after a fall in oil prices despite an OPEC+ pledge to cut output further.

“We talked again about cooperation in OPEC+,” Interfax news agency quoted Peskov as saying. “The parties agree that our countries bear a great responsibility for interaction in order to maintain the international energy market at the proper level, in a stable, predictable state.”

Putin, who has rarely left Russia since sending troops into Ukraine in February 2022, had also been expected to discuss Ukraine and the conflict in Gaza.

The Saudi Press Agency quoted the crown prince as saying: “We share many interests and many files that we are working on together for the benefit of Russia, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the Middle East and the world as well.”

In remarks at the beginning of their talks, shown earlier on Russian television, Putin thanked MbS, as the crown prince is widely known, for his invitation. He had originally expected him to visit Moscow, “but there were changes to plans”.

Their next meeting should take place in Moscow, he said, and “Nothing can prevent the development of our friendly relations.”

Russia’s defence ministry had earlier shown the Kremlin chief’s Ilyushin-96 aircraft flanked by Sukhoi-35S fighter jets on its flight from Russia to the United Arab Emirates.

Putin’s delegation included top oil, economy, foreign affairs, space, nuclear energy officials and business leaders.

At his first stop in Abu Dhabi, President Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan welcomed his “dear friend”, while a fly-past of UAE jets trailed the colours of the Russian flag.

“Our relations, largely due to your position, have reached an unprecedentedly high level,” Putin told him. “The UAE is Russia’s main trading partner in the Arab world.”

Putin said Russia and the UAE cooperated as part of OPEC+, whose members pump more than 40% of the world’s oil, adding that they would discuss the Israeli-Hamas conflict and Ukraine.

His first face-to-face talks with MbS since October 2019 came days after an OPEC+ meeting was delayed over disagreements – superseding what should have been an MbS visit to Moscow.

Putin’s last visit to the region was in July 2022, when he met Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in Iran. The Russian president was due to host his Iranian counterpart Ebrahim Raisi in Moscow on Thursday.

CLOSE RELATIONS

Putin and MbS, who together control one-fifth of the oil pumped each day, have long enjoyed close relations, though both have at times been ostracised by the West.

At a G20 summit in 2018, two months after the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in a Saudi consulate, Putin and MbS high-fived and shook hands with smiles.

MbS has sought to reassert Saudi Arabia as a regional power with less deference to the United States, which supplies Riyadh with most of its weapons.

Putin says Russia is locked in an existential battle with the West and has courted allies across the Middle East, Africa, Latin America and Asia amid Western attempts to isolate Moscow.

Both MbS and Putin need high prices for oil, the lifeblood of their economies. The question is how much of the burden each should take on to keep prices aloft – and how to verify their contributions.

Last month, OPEC+ delayed a meeting by several days due to disagreements over production levels. The Saudi energy minister said OPEC+ also wanted more assurances from Moscow that it would make good on its pledge to reduce fuel exports.

Relations between Saudi Arabia and Russia in OPEC+ have been uneasy at times. A deal on cutting exports almost broke down in March 2020, but they managed to make up within weeks and OPEC+ agreed to record cuts of almost 10% of global demand.

(Additional reporting by Yomna Ehab in Cairo; Editing by Alexander Smith, Ron Popeski and Lisa Shumaker)

Disclaimer: This report is auto generated from the Reuters news service. ThePrint holds no responsibilty for its content.