Queering Martin Buber: Harry Hay's Erotic Dialogical.

What, if anything, does Martin Buber's dialogical philosophy have to do with Eros? Perhaps surprisingly, given the intensity of the encounter with the Other and its possible situation within an intimate relationship, the mature Buber says very little. Though Eros does receive some attention in earlier discourses, there is little in the later Buber to account for the positive potentialities of sexuality, desire, or the erotic more broadly. (1) This is a significant lacuna for at least two reasons. First, the mere absence of "positive" Eros--Buber speaks more of "degraded" Eros than of redemptive Eros--implies a negativity, perpetuating the dichotomization of body and spirit and the concomitant denigration of the physical/sexual in dualistic post-Pauline Western theological and philosophical discourses, a tendency that Buber himself critiques. (2) Second, the seeming omission of Eros leaves questions of sexual ethics, sexual difference, gender, and sexual/gender justice unaddressed, leaving Buber's thought to speak only indirectly to those concerns.

Remarkably, a figure little known to the philosophical world, but better known as an early gay activist, developed a quasi-dialogical philosophy remarkably like Buber's, even though he was apparently unaware of Buber's work. That figure is Harry Hay (1912-2002), who was both the founder of the first "homophile" organization in the United States (and thus a founder of the contemporary American LGBT movement) and, later in his career, a theorist of distinctly gay male modes of consciousness, which he believed to hold revolutionary potential. Hay was not a rigorous, scholarly philosopher like Buber; his work is often erratic and not fully thought through. Moreover, his later writings, which developed his dialogical philosophy, have been less influential than his early and world-changing understanding of gay people as a persecuted minority group, an idea he adapted from mid-twentieth-century American communist organizing. However, what Hay does successfully is place the erotic at the center of the dialogical, in what he calls "subject-SUBJECT consciousness" (the capitalization is his), which is the specific province of gay men, who experience their erotic attraction to someone whom they see as "like me," possessing the same kind of subjectivity as they possess. Hay argues that heterosexual, patriarchal relationships inevitably involve the subjugation of the Other, either as female sexual object or as male competitor for female attention. Subject-SUBJECT, however, is a form of consciousness that transcends these dualisms and their attendant hierarchies.

This essay proposes reading Buber and Hay together--to queer Martin Buber, as it were. First, I discuss the place of the erotic in Buber's thought and juxtapose Buber with Hay's subject-SUBJECT consciousness, situating it within Hay's overall philosophical program of queer "fairy" difference. (3) Next, I explore two productive differences between the two systems: first, the relationship of the erotic to the ethical and, second, the different modes of revelation that the dialogical encounter brings about. Finally, I propose that Buber and Hay can complement each other. Buber universalizes Hay beyond his essentialist presentation of sexuality, while Hay's inclusion of eroticism is an important contribution to and update of dialogical philosophy. While Buber has much more space for spiritual consciousness than does Hay, he spends very little time on desire as a source of knowledge. Hay affirms the centrality of Eros for philosophical and political thought and provides a useful complement to Buber. Reading Buber and Hay in this way offers an approach to a nonhierarchical and sex-positive erotic ethos in the context of dialogical thought.

A helpful starting point is to observe that secularized notions of redemption are embedded within both Buber's and Hay's philosophical programs. In a sense, each is inquiring into what accounts for the gap between how we are and how we believe we ought to be. Formerly, this was a theological question, answered with religious claims about the fallenness of human beings or the competing inner drives of the yetzer bara and yetzer batov. Yet even after the decline of supernatural accounts, the psychological sense of falling short remains--not necessarily of any objective moral order but perhaps simply of our own hopes and expectations. For Rousseau and for Marx a century later, the source of the moral shortfall lies in the corrupting influence of society. For Marx, it is alienation that causes the human to become, in a sense, less than human. Disconnected from one's own labor, the human subject becomes incapable of authentic relationships. The existentialist philosophers who influenced Buber explored this alienation as a fundamental aspect of human experience.

The dialogical philosophers of the twentieth century proposed what some have argued is a return to the theological: a possibility of redemptive revelation in relationship with the Other. (4) This theme occurs, with variations, in Buber, Emmanuel Levinas, Franz Rosenzweig, and Jacques Derrida and suggests that a recovery, or perhaps a realization, of the human capacity for authenticity is possible, even in an alienated social context, with a shift in the relationship to the Other. This view forms the beginning of our investigation here.

As a "communalist" (in Gustav Landauer's formulation) and "religious socialist" (in his own), Buber adopted the Utopian approach of thinkers who preceded Marx (Henri de Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier, and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon) and the generally Marxist notion of alienation. But, in the words of Judith Buber Agassi, Buber "saw dialectical materialism as voiding the human ability to be a moral force" and proposed the remedy for alienation not solely in terms of economic or societal transformation but in relating to one another in a fundamentally different way. (5) The problem is ontological and ethical, not solely political and economic. A human being, says Buber,

wants to be confirmed in his being and his existence by his fellow
human beings and he wishes them to make it possible for him to confirm
them... not merely in the family in the party assembly or in the public
house, but also in the course of neighborly encounters, perhaps when he
or the other steps out of the door of his house or to the window of his
house and the greeting with which they greet each other will be
accompanied by a glance of well-wishing, a glance in which curiosity,
mistrust and routine will have been overcome by mutual sympathy; the
one gives the other to understand that he affirms his presence. This is
the indispensable minimum of humanity. (6)

For Buber, there is an inevitable collapsing of the You into the It by the operation of the materialization and instrumentalization process: "As soon as the relation has been worked out or has been permeated with a means, the Thou becomes an object among objects." (7) Often, this permeation is instant: we encounter a store clerk and regard her as a clerk, an It, rather than as an individual, a You. In other cases, this takes time, for example, as one begins to regard even one's loved ones instrumentally. Even the I of I-It comes to be seen in an alienating perspective. (8) From the perspective of I-It, I am a list of characteristics: man, Jew, queer, scholar, writer. For Buber, this causes alienation. (9)

The alternative is I-You consciousness, which regards the Other as a "whole being" in "direct relation." (10) The You cannot be totalized, described, or reduced to characteristics. Notwithstanding its dialogical basis, I-You is a relationship that transcends conventional understandings of subject and object. In Buber's speculative musings on "primitive man," he suggests that the firm distinction between subject and object is the dawn of I-It consciousness. In contrast to his famous iteration of the quasi-mystical relationship with a tree--in which the tree in itself, rather than the characteristics of the tree, is apprehended--Buber writes that "whenever the sentence 'I see the tree' is so uttered that it no longer tells of a relation between the man--I--and the tree--Thou--but establishes the perception of the tree as object by the human consciousness, the barrier between subject and object has been set up. The primary word I-It, the word of separation, has been spoken." (11) Indeed, for Buber, the I itself is constituted according to the nature of its relation. (12) If I approach another person as an object, my own I is, in that moment, the I of an I-It pair. If I approach another person as a You rather than an It, my own I is, in that moment, the I of an I-You pair, which is ontologically and psychologically different. Because you are, I simply am. I am not male, white, gay, Jewish, just as you are not alike or different in finite characteristics. Characteristics are of the world of It.

Where, in this framework, is the erotic? As I have said in the introduction, the erotic seems to be an ideal site for the I-You experience. Yet there is but one overt reference to Eros in I and Thou itself, where Buber states that "he who loves a woman, and brings her life to present realization in his, is able to look in the Thou of her eyes into a beam of the eternal Thou. But he who eagerly desires 'ever new subjugation'--do you wish to hold out to his desire a phantom of the Eternal?" (13) An erotic relationship may be a site for an authentic I-You relationship or a site for "ever new subjugation." But there is nothing distinctive about Eros that makes it particularly ethically or ontologically significant, and even the moment that Buber describes is one of a gaze, rather than of physical contact or intimacy.

Two of Buber's earlier works contain more sustained explorations of the role of Eros. He begins the first, his 1929 essay "Dialogue," by explicitly disclaiming that the dialogical relationship he wishes to explore has much to do with the erotic at all:

In its highest moments dialogue... is completed not in some "mystical"
event but in one that is in the precise sense factual, thoroughly
dovetailed into the common human world and the concrete time-sequence.
One might indeed be inclined to concede this as valid for the special
realm of the erotic. But I do not intend to bring even this in here as
an explanation. For... the erotic is in no way, as might be supposed,
purely a compressing and unfolding of dialogue. Rather do I know of no
other realm where, as in this one... dialogue and monologue are so
mingled and opposed. Many celebrated ecstasies of love are nothing more
than the lover's delight in the possibilities of his own person which
are actualized in unexpected fullness.
I would rather think of something unpretentious yet significant--of the
glances which strangers exchange on a busy street as they pass one
another with unchanging pace. (14)

In other words, while the erotic might be supposed to be the "special realm" of the dialogical encounter, in fact the dialogue and monologue are as much commingled in it as elsewhere, and often the rhapsodies of the lover are essentially narcissistic: like Romeo in Romeo and Juliet, the lover is more in love with being in love than with the actual beloved.

Later in the same essay, Buber poetically names objectifying erotic encounters as "lame-winged Eros" and dialogical erotic encounters as the "soaring Eros of dialogue." It is worth quoting this passage at length:

The two who are loyal to the Eros of dialogue, who love one another,
receive the common event from the other's side as well, that is, they
receive it from the two sides, and thus for the first time understand
in a bodily way what an event is.
The kingdom of the lame-winged Eros is a world of mirrors and
mirrorings. But where the winged one holds sway there is no mirroring.
For there I, the lover, turn to this other human being, the beloved, in
his otherness, his independence, his self-reality, and turn to him with
all the power of intention of my own heart. I certainly turn to him as
one who is turning to me, but in that very reality, not comprehensible
by me but rather comprehending me, in which I am there turning to him.
I do not assimilate into my own soul that which lives and faces me, I
vow it faithfully to myself and myself to it, I vow, I have faith. (15)

Buber then provides a litany of ways in which "erotic man" can in fact be the most objectifying of all, in a catalogue that would sit well in a contemporary television drama:

He stamps around and is in love only with his passion.... One is
wearing his differentiated feelings like medal-ribbons. One is enjoying
the adventures of his own fascinating effect.... Enraptured at the
spectacle of his own supposed surrender.... Collecting excitement....
Displaying his "power."... Preening himself with borrowed vitality....
There are some who stipulate to the object they propose to devour that
both the doing as a holy right and the suffering as a sacred duty are
what is to be called heroic love. (16)

In contrast, Buber concludes,

Only he who himself turns to the other human being and opens himself to
him receives the world in him. Only the being whose otherness, accepted
by my being, lives and faces me in the whole compression of existence,
brings the radiance of eternity to me. Only when two say to one another
with all that they are, "It is thou" is in the indwelling of the
Present Being between them. (17)

There is much worthy of note in these excerpts. First, notice that while there are many forms of "lame-winged Eros," there seems to be only one of "soaring Eros," and that one form of Eros is itself not very different from the usual I-You dialogical relation, except that it happens to take place in the context of Eros. Eros, in a sense, drops out of consideration, except insofar as it is a particularly perilous area of human interaction. Certainly, Eros is not particularly useful as a site of I-You; on the contrary, it is particularly fraught with dangers of objectification and narcissism ("mirroring"). This point doubtless resonates today, but Buber has almost nothing positive to say about the erotic--only that it sometimes may be as good as other forms of interaction. Indeed, Maurice Friedman is not wrong to call this view an advocacy of "sublimation," which hardly seems like an affirming approach to sexual expression. (18) It is, as Friedman also notes, closer to the traditional Jewish conception of yoking the "evil inclination" and forcing it to do good.

Second, and as an important point of difference between Buber and Hay, the alterity of the Other is central here. As we will see shortly, Hay believes that it is the revelation of the similarity of the Other--that he is "like me"--that enables a transcendence of the binaries and dualisms (male/female, self/other) that haunt Western consciousness. Buber, however, having already rejected the monism of his earlier mystical writing, here says that the highest form of Eros is when the "otherness, accepted by my being, lives and faces me." Unlike Buber's appealing list of the foibles of "erotic man," this point seems more distant from contemporary consciousness; for Buber, the best sex is when your partner is the Other. Finally, one cannot help the grammatical masculinity of Buber's erotic partner. This is a function of linguistic custom, of course, and does not suggest homoeroticism--though it is certainly "queer," in the wider sense, to read a male philosopher rhapsodizing about the love of a male partner. It does, however, point to a desexualization of the erotic in Buber's presentation of it. What kind of love does Buber mean when he says, "When I, the lover, turn to this other human being, the beloved, in his otherness, his independence, his self-reality"? Clearly, this Eros is more like agape: a love that may be passionate but is not sexual or even related to the sexual.

The second account of Eros in Buber's early work is in the 1926 lecture "Education." There, Buber rejects the dichotomy between the "old" view that education was about "will to power" (i.e., forcing the student's submission to tradition and values) and the "new" view that education is about Eros. "In fact, the one is as little a principle of education as the other," he says. (19) Buber observes that Eros--which he defines as "not 'love,' but Eros the male and magnificent"--often appears in the educational relationship between teacher and student but that "however mightily an educator is possessed and inspired by Eros, if he obeys him in the course of his educating then he stifles the growth of his blessings." (20) In fact, the educator is called to a "lofty asceticism" since, unlike a partner in love, the teacher does not choose his or her students and must approach them all equally. (21) Strikingly, Eros does appear here to be sexualized, masculinized, and ethically problematized. It is unclear whether Buber is discussing an actual sexual desire for the student or a more platonic love; describing Eros as "male and magnificent" suggests the former. Either way, the teacher is called upon to transcend Eros and enter a dialogical relationship with the student.

In the same way, Buber continues, a right dialogical relationship may emerge from other human encounters, first in the case of violence and second in the case of sex:

A man belabours [i.e., hits] another, who remains quite still. Then let
us assume that the striker suddenly receives in his soul the blow which
he strikes: the same blow, that he receives it as the other who remains
still. For the space of a moment he experiences the situation from the
other side. Reality imposes itself on him. What will he do? Either he
will overwhelm the voice of the soul, or his impulse will be reversed.
A man caresses a woman, who lets herself be caressed. Then let us
assume that he feels the contact from two sides--with the palm of his
hand still, and also with the woman's skin. The twofold nature of the
gesture, as one that takes place between two persons, thrills through
the depth and enjoyment in his heart and stirs it. If he does not
deafen his heart he will have--not to renounce the enjoyment but--to
love. (22)

The juxtaposition here is jarring. A sexual encounter is a potential context for a dialogical relationship, but no more so than a violent encounter. In both cases, the decentering awareness of the Other--Buber says this is no mere empathy but "the complete presence of the reality in which one participates"--enables the act to give birth to the ethical. (23) Buber continues,

I do not in the least mean that the man who has had such an experience
would from then on have this two-sided sensation in every such
meeting--that would perhaps destroy his instinct. But the one extreme
experience makes the other person present to him for all time. A
transfusion has taken place after which a mere elaboration of
subjectivity is never again possible or tolerable to him. (24)

As we will see, the dialogical moment has a similarly transformational capacity for Hay. But once again, notice how the erotic encounter (depicted in heterosexual terms and from the male perspective) is merely one possible ground for a dialogical awakening. It is not different from the teaching moment or even from the moment of violence. Moreover, Buber implies here that the transcendent dialogical moment is actually opposed to the sexual "instinct" itself. Desire is inherently "one-sided"; the revelation of the two-sided nature of the encounter is an anomaly, almost a moment of grace.

These two texts, and the sole brief mention in I and Thou, suggest that Buber is keenly aware that sexuality can be an occasion for either authentic relationship or exploitation, but they also suggest that Buber does not regard sexuality as particularly conducive to the dialogical relation. Indeed, sexual desire is orthogonal to dialogical relation. And the erotic seems irrelevant to one's identity, power, ethics, or spiritual life.

Not so with Harry Hay. Well beyond the work that I will discuss here, Hay was a remarkable figure in LGBT history. Beginning in 1948, Hay came to understand homosexual persons as members of a persecuted minority, in the terms he had learned from his Communist Party organizing, rather than simply individuals with a particular predilection (or neurosis). (25) This was to be his most important contribution, as it led to the conceptions of contemporary LGBT political identities that would eventually make history. In his understanding of homosexuality as a potentially benign sexual variation, Hay drew on nineteenth-century thinkers such as Edward Carpenter, Richard Kraft-Ebbing, and John Addington Symonds, as well as on twentieth-century figures such as Magnus Hirschfeld. But Hay was the first in the American context to identify homosexuals as a persecuted minority group, and the organization he founded in 1948, the Mattachine Society, was the first gay-rights organization in America, formed at a time in which being simply rumored as gay was enough to cause one to be fired, imprisoned, or psychologically tortured.

Over time, however, Mattachine attracted more moderate figures, who pushed for mainstream acceptance and who regarded the association with communism as a serious liability in the 1950s. (Hay testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1955.) Before long, Hay was pushed out of the organization he had helped found. In the wake of the Stonewall riots, meanwhile, Mattachine--which had disseminated leaflets begging the gay community to calm down and not cause trouble--came to be seen as an ineffectual organization of repressed gay men.

It was in the 1970s that Hay's second major phase began. Now living among Native American communities in New Mexico--Hay and his partner, John Burnside, were active in Native American organizing at the time--Hay became inspired by the spiritual revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s. Gone was the trimmed, neat, communist Harry Hay of the 1950s, and in his place was a wild-haired, vividly attired prophet of gay difference. Yet his primary concerns remained continuous with his earlier work; he was interested in what, if anything, made homosexuals distinct as a group, apart from their sexual behavior--what made them, in Hay's words, "a separate people." (As I have discussed at length elsewhere, the question of whether LGBT people are basically the same as everyone else ["love is love"] or different in relevant ways remains a point of contention within the LGBT community today. (26)) In 1980, Hay, along with others, convened a Spiritual Conference for Radical Faeries to create a kind of gay counterculture that would articulate a vision of distinctly gay community. The Radical Faeries, as they are now known, still exist today, with many leading queer artists and thinkers (including composer John Cameron Mitchell, queer theorist Michael Warner, actor Alan Cumming, the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, and others) and "sanctuary" communes around the world.

But if gays are "a separate people," what makes them distinct? At first, Hay had drawn on nineteenth-century conceptions of gay people as an intermediate gender who combine elements of masculine and feminine. But in the 1970s, he began to critique binary thinking and to move to a different view of gay people as transcending the binary entirely. According to Hay's biographer, Will Roscoe, his influences included a rather fantastic esoteric volume by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier entitled The Morning of the Magicians, which proposes a nonbinary understanding of human consciousness. (27) Roscoe also notes that Hay was impacted by the emerging neuroscience of the two-hemisphered brain and by E. O. Wilson's sociobiological theory of the evolution of homosexuality. (28) Most importantly, Hay drew on his many contacts with Native American communities: Hay participated in Hopi rituals, pan-tribal Native American dances, and even met Wovoka, a "two spirit" Paiute sage. (29) As is now better known, many such communities (157 of which have now been identified) have traditions of third-gendered persons, some of which imbue people we would identify as LGBT with shamanic roles because they transcend conventional dualisms of male and female and consequently enter the zone of the sacred. (30) (This is not only a Native American notion; examples range from the shamans of Siberia to the male isangoma of the Zulu. (31)). Building on these traditions, the contemporary gay spirituality movement has sought to articulate distinctive roles for gay men as healers, bridge builders, and, in general, people able to integrate--or in Hay's presentation, transcend--masculine and feminine. (32) In Hay's words, "third gender people were and are those who were assigned responsibilities for discovering, developing, and managing the frontiers between the seen and the unseen, between the known and the unknown." (33) The transcendence of the conventional subject-object relationship is, in a sense, the initiatory experience that inculcates nonbinary thinking more generally.

Like Buber, Hay claimed that ordinary human interactions--in Hay's case, governed by heterosexuality and the patriarchy--are colored by a binary, subject-object relationship. Men regard both women as objects to be possessed and other men as objects to be dominated. (34) As with Buber's I-It consciousness, this objectifying process expands beyond interpersonal relationships into binary thinking in every aspect of Western culture: science, nature, communities--even, in a charming bit of self-reflection, parliamentary procedure. (35) Thus objectification is the problem that both Buber and Hay set out to solve.

Hay's solution is called subject-SUBJECT consciousness. For Hay, subject-SUBJECT consciousness is, as with Buber, first glimpsed in relation--but in this case, a special relationship (actual or yearned for) with "ANOTHER--just like me." (36) In contrast to heterosexual males thinking of females as objects, Hay perceives the friend "as subject in exactly the same ways I perceived myself as subject." (37) When this relationship is actualized, "we two Fairies knew--through that flashing Arc of Love--the tumult of subject-SUBJECT Consciousness... in ourselves and simultaneously, in each other... SUBJECT--TO SUBJECT" (38) Hay claims that the fairy's desire for another male--as opposed to desire for an Other that can be objectified--gives the fairy an insight into how a nonobjectifying, nonhierarchical relationship may be formed. In his early writings, Hay was clear that what subject-SUBJECT consciousness would actually come to mean had yet to be fully articulated and would be the product of group consciousness and discussion over a period of time. But essentially, subject-SUBJECT consciousness occurs when we see that the "OTHER... with whom we seek to link, to engage, to see into, to merge with... is another LIKE ME... is SUBJECT--LIKE ME!" (39)

Note that fairies are not effeminate men; in Hay's conception, they transcend the male/female binary. Hay's example of this is homegrown and yet provocative: bullies told fairies that they threw balls like girls, but, Hay asks, "Did you ever ask the girls back then if they thought you threw a ball like them? They'd have straightened you out in nothing flat! They'd have told you [that] you didn't throw a ball like a girl--built like something other. You were not a feminine boy, like the boys said, you were OTHER." (40) Written in 1980, before the mainstreaming of queer and transgender questioning of the gender binary, this statement is remarkable. It rejects gender binarism and refuses the deeply problematic, misogynistic, and essentializing-of-women claim that gay men are somehow feminine and that, as a consequence, femininity is something that can be essentially defined as having certain characteristics. Moreover, Hay restricts his theory to gay men, declining to pontificate about women's experiences, but unlike Buber, he does so explicitly, stating that "women have not as yet shared with us She whom they perceive in themselves." (41) Hay was to evolve on this point: in 1983, he would write that "women like Friedan, and Millett, and Brownmiller, and Morgan, and Rich and Daly, and more recently MacKinnon have all together made it quite clear that even so elemental a concept as what it means to be a gender requires re-thinking everything that is known in order to discover the way in which--for instance--gender intersects with every social process." (42)

Perhaps surprisingly, nowhere in Hay's oeuvre does he cite Buber or suggest any familiarity with him. According to Roscoe, Hay was unaware of Buber, at least in 1976, when subject-SUBJECT consciousness was being developed, though it is possible that Buberian thought had found its way into pop-cultural materials with which Hay was familiar. (43) It is possible that writers of New Age texts such as The Morning of the Magicians were aware of dialogical philosophy, but it is more likely that they were influenced by Romanticism, esotericism, theosophy, and transcendentalism, with their attendant adaptations of Buddhism, Advaita Vedanta, and other dharmic philosophies, that posit various forms of consciousness that transcend subject-object dualism. (44) Perhaps the best account of Buber's secondary influence upon Hay comes from a quip by Robert Wood about "I and Thou, whose poetic character gives it the status of something like Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet." (45) This seems right; Buber's I and Thou was part of a general Zeitgeist about dichotomies and how to overcome them. Hay was influenced by this general trend. As for direct influence, however, there is no evidence of it. Juxtaposing Buber and Hay will be up to us.

How might such a reading proceed? As we have seen, Buber and Hay both describe a revelatory experience involving an encounter with another person, which generates a set of ethical obligations. As we will now see, these accounts of revelation may productively be read together, with each filling in the gaps of the other.

First, it is of note that both thinkers frame the formative encounter in quasi-religious terms. Sometimes, both Buber's and Hay's models of consciousness are reduced to an intense one-to-one experience or something of the sort. Yet Buber is at pains to point out that I-You is not an experience but a recognition of a reality that transcends time and space. (46) Indeed, the occasions for such recognitions may be extremely unpleasant, such as the violence in the passage from "Education" discussed above. Thus, rather than imagine an I-You encounter as some intense conversation or sexual union, it is useful to see it instead as a recognition of an already-existent reality. We see things as they are, in the physical world. We see ourselves and the Other as coconstituted in the nature of our relation. The knowing of the eternal You is a rejection of the ecstatic mystical conception of the Divine, which Buber sees as fundamentally escapist, and a redefinition of the ultimate within the "real"--that is, the embodied and the ethical.

For Hay, subject-SUBJECT consciousness is also a way of seeing but, crucially, a way of seeing engendered by a specific erotic experience: "Then came that second shattering day... when I first met that OTHER. And suddenly--between us--that socially-invisible Arc flashed out and zapped into both our bodies total systems of ancient knowledge." (47) As with Buber, a particular encounter leads to a generalizable knowledge. Yet in Hay, unlike in Buber, subject-SUBJECT is more of an experience that generates knowledge: an erotic experience.

In both cases, Buber and Hay describe the revelation of ethics in terms redolent of religious experience, albeit in somewhat different modes. Buber, as is well known, began his philosophical career as a mystical monist, anthologizing testimonies of mystical union and writing an early philosophical dialogue on nonduality. (48) Yet Buber came to reject unitive mysticism, with a formative moment being a time when he valued his own personal ecstatic experience over the needs of another person, with disastrous results. Buber did not reject mysticism, though, so much as transpose it to the interpersonal realm. The I-You revelation is a revelation, after all, with the attendant profound and ego-shattering characteristics. It is a kind of dialogical mysticism. Hay, in contrast, describes a kind of dialogical shamanism, perhaps as a result to his living among Native American groups and being formally initiated into one of them. Where Buber's revelation takes one to the "Eternal You," Hay's is instead a kind of experiential knowledge. (49) Both transpose religious language into the ethical.

An important difference between Buber and Hay is that, broadly speaking, Buber is universalistic, while Hay is particularistic. I-You is available to anyone, regardless of background or characteristics; indeed, it is defined as a relationality outside time and space that transcends all characteristics. (50) Further, Buber is wide ranging in his sources; grounded in Judaism, he nonetheless mounts sustained engagements (especially in books subsequent to I and Thou) with Christianity, Buddhism, indigenous religions, and various cultures and philosophical traditions. Hay, though, aims not to articulate a universal philosophy but to make gay men more aware of the specific gifts of seeing through a "gay window." It is not clear how, or if, fairies will teach heterosexuals to transcend their tendency to objectification, and in any event, the experience of subject-SUBJECT seems explicitly limited to them.

The problem with any philosophy of distinctiveness, such as Hay's, is essentialism. (51) In the case of feminism, for example, difference politics affirms diversity and the importance of multiple voices; this was one of the contributions of Carol Gilligan's seminal 1982 volume, In a Different Voice. Yet postulating a form of alterity ends up essentializing precisely those voices who possess it. How far is it, really, from Gilligan to Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus and similar pop-cultural artifacts that purport to explain the essential "differences between the sexes"? Obviously, one is subtle, reflective, and refined and the other is not, but both attempt to settle upon a set of characteristics that are essential to women. But essentialism is inherently problematic. First, essentialist categories are overdetermined and tend to mistake culturally contingent phenomena for inborn, essential, transhistorical, or otherwise nonconstructed ones. Racist essentialisms projected onto African Americans, for example, confuse historically contingent phenomena (educational disparities and legacies of white supremacism) with a historical ones (biological nature). This is true even of the groups favored by such essentialisms. For example, Charles Murray's racist-essentialist book The Bell Curve concludes that African Americans are less intelligent than white Americans on the basis of standardized tests--and also that American Jews are the smartest group of all. But The Bell Curve is willfully oblivious to the cultural specificity of such tests, the continued impact of white supremacy on educational opportunity, the traditional Jewish emphasis on certain types of education, and American Jewish immigrant values, all of which contribute to Jews performing well on such tests. Essentialisms almost always miss proximate historical circumstances that do a better job of explaining present phenomena.

Second, the end result of such essential categories is more marginalization. Formerly, women were child rearers, compassionate, and ill-suited to rational thought. Now, they are wise, or intuitive, or peacemaking, or whatever other characteristic--but what about those who are not? The moment some characteristics are posited as essential to a given identity, those who share that identity but not those characteristics become somehow deviant, inferior, or, worse, not in touch with their essential selves. What was supposed to be a liberating move--defining an oppressed group's essential nature as against the dominant group--ends up oppressing more, by marginalizing those in the oppressed group who don't fit the nature placed upon them. And who decides? Once again, those with the power to do so. Intersectional postfeminist discourses such as womanism have shown that women defining such terms are themselves privileged by race, class, education, geography, and any number of other factors. Likewise in queer communities, where supposedly essential aspects of gayness tend to be determined by white, relatively wealthy, relatively well-educated elites.

And likewise in Hay. In Hay's wake, the gay spirituality movement has attempted to elucidate the special gifts of being gay: intuition, transcending gender binaries, camp sensibility, a predilection for mysticism, and any number of other qualities. (52) Yet it is manifestly the case that many, probably most, gay men do not display these qualities. Why? Well, we are told, they are not really gay; they are hetero-imitative; they fail at being gay. Surely, there are good reasons to be critical of mainstream gay culture--but on what grounds is it less "authentically gay" than any other? Meanwhile, Hay's condemnations of all heterosexual men as necessarily objectifying women may be understandable as a literature of the oppressed but are, to put it charitably, counterfactual. And Hay offers no real hope that "our subject-Object brothers and sisters [are] going to begin to sit up and take notice," given how hopelessly mired they are in dualistic thinking. In an age of intersectionality, in which activists in particular are interested in forging broad antioppression coalitions, such rhetoric is actively unhelpful--particularly as it reinscribes the very dualisms that Hay purports to undermine.

Hay, in other words, needs a dose of Buber. I propose that we read Hay through the lens of a philosophical discourse of which he was apparently unaware and see him as emphasizing the unique role played by Eros in the development of dialogical consciousness. Buber, Rosenzweig, and Levinas each have more thorough, less essentialistic, and less problematic constructions of intersubjectivity than Hay.

Unlike these thinkers, though, Hay connects the dots between the dialogical perspective and erotic, gendered experience. The erotic, as Audre Lorde forcefully points out in her masterful essay "The Use of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power," is not merely incidental to humanity. It is "a considered source of power and information within our lives." (53) And thus, it is a problem that Buber's Eros is disembodied and relatively diminished in importance. Notably, one of the clearest expositions of the I-You relation comes when Buber contemplates a cat. (54) The cat looks back at Buber, without human subjectivity of course, and seems to ask whether it is seen as an object or as a subject. It "responds" not in mutuality but with its own separate moral significance. Hay's transcendent consciousness arises when one encounters a subject "like me" with an individuality to which I may relate. Buber's transcendent consciousness arises without that mutuality. (55) Buber regards a tree, a horse, and a cat in ways that the objects of his regard obviously do not relate to him. Stemming from the ethical nature of the I-You relation, it may inhere in any relation in which the I is the I that is responsible for the Other--even if the Other is not human. It also may be revealed, as we saw earlier, in nonmutual human relationships, such as those between teacher and student.

In Hay's formulation, however, ethics are generated by desire. Hay yearns for the friendship of one who is "like me" and in so doing realizes that he does not want an object but another subject. The erotic yearning is not incidental or antithetical to the realization of ethics but generative of it. Unlike Buber, Hay does not suddenly see himself in ethical relation to the Other but in erotic relation. It is in understanding the Other as subject that the revelation of subject-SUBJECT consciousness takes place--and here, "subject" means the caring subject, thinking subject, feeling subject that is "like me." Love, Buber says, is the responsibility of an I for a You, but for Hay, it seems safe to say that love is the realization that the "object" of desire is actually another subject, another I. (56)

As Lorde writes, and as Judith Plaskow translates into Jewish idiom, liberated sexual expression teaches liberation in general. (57) The erotic is a positive theological value. Lorde writes that "the erotic offers a well of replenishing and provocative force to the woman who does not fear its revelation, nor succumb to the belief that sensation is enough." (58) So too to the fairy, of whatever gender or sexual identity. Hay's zaps and flashes are sexual charges, and they inform his experience. They teach interdependence and intersubjectivity. Does not Hay, read together with Buber, bear out what Lorde says when she writes that "the erotic is the nurturer or nursemaid of all our deepest knowledge"? (59)

Hay, by linking Lordean eroticism with a Buberian dialogical ethic, brings Eros back into the dialogical. As Jeffrey Kripal and others have discussed at length, discourses of the mystical are often displaced discourses of the erotic. (60) This is as true for relational, dialogical mysticism (or postmysticism) such as Buber's as it is for unitive mysticism such as the cases Kripal investigates, the mysticisms Buber rejected, and the Sufi case to which Hay alludes. Returning the erotic to a central place in dialogical mysticism while leaving behind the essentialist restrictions in Hay's original formulation offers the possibility of an embodied and eroticized philosophy of relation, richer and more resilient than Buber's rather disembodied one.

There are many gateways into the dialogical: a philosopher contemplating his cat, a moment of religious ecstasy, and also an erotic encounter with another fully human person not reduced to characteristics but encountered in her or his alterity, in embodied individuality. The addition of this third occasion is not trivial but potentially revolutionary, at least in political terms. After all, there are more potential erotic explorers in the world than there are philosophers with cats.

By way of conclusion, it is perhaps worth offering a remark about how the place of Eros impacts the realization of Buber's and Hay's utopian visions. To return to the themes discussed in the beginning, both Buber and Hay insist that ordinary human interactions are alienated ones. We are not our true selves when I regard you as an It. I fall into subject-object thinking, a false dichotomy that flattens and constrains the depth of our shared experience. Whereas, if we shift from I-It to I-You, both of us as individuals and God as the eternal You are suddenly present in a way we were not before. Likewise subject-SUBJECT consciousness: if I see that you are "like me," a person with subjectivity of your own, there is a possibility for connection, for truthfulness, and for faithfulness to our own subjectivities. Ended is the domination and oppression of either/or.

This is, indeed, a millennialist vision: our present social reality is fallen, but it may somehow be redeemed. (61) But to build a world constituted by I-You relations does not require an external messianic incursion or other supernatural event. Per Buber, Utopia "must always be the moment's answer to the moment's question, and nothing more." (62) Hay has a more traditional, political vision of the future, yet as a precursor, a personal transformation is required: "Fairies everywhere must begin to stand tall and beautiful in the sun.... Fairies must begin creating their new world through fashioning for themselves supportive Families of Conscious Choice within which they can explore, in the loving security of shared consensus, the endless depths and diversities of the newly-revealed subject-SUBJECT consciousness." (63) In other words, for Hay, radical Utopian change will take a while, and in the meantime, we must create communities and sanctuaries apart from the dominant culture; such fairy sanctuaries still exist today. Buber, of course, embraced a similarly communal context that would engender such moments: the kibbutz.

But implicit in the Utopian project is the assertion that our ordinary modes of human interaction are deeply flawed. Is that necessarily so? As Plaskow observed, it may be a uniquely male--and straight male--perspective. What, intrinsically, is objectified or alienated about ordinary discourse such that, for Buber, only a small segment of human interaction may be seen as truly relational and thus involving the I subject in its richest form? We are trapped, Buber writes a half century before the digital revolution, in "shadowy solicitude for faceless numbers." (64) And likewise for Hay, with "Bully Boy" and his sexual objects. One wonders whether these are truly ontological concerns or whether they are psychological ones, perhaps products of queerness, Jewishness, and the marginalization imposed on each.

Whatever their origins, these millennialist Utopian dialogical philosophers are better than the sum of their parts. Buber provides a fuller, richer, and more generalizable account of the dialogical encounter, situating Hay's polemical call within a larger philosophical context. Hay, in turn, offers both a queer reembodiment of Buber--especially read through Lorde--and a political-pedagogical framework for transformative, liberating consciousness to develop. Read within a hospitable philosophical context such as Buber's, Hay's erotic dialogical philosophy might indeed offer the possibility "to invent new rhyme and reason and ritual" for those who choose to hear the call. (65)

NOTES

(*) An earlier version of this paper was presented in September 2012 at a conference, "Radically Gay: The Life and Legacy of Harry Hay," at the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the City University of New York. Many thanks to Samuel Hayim Brody, Sam Berrin Shonkoff, Richard Schneider, Toby Johnson, Will Roscoe, Daniel Hurewitz, Nicholas Mendoza, Shaun Halper, and Michael Kelly.

(1.) For an example of such an early discourse, see Buber, "Education."

(2.) See Buber, "People Today," 10. Maurice Friedman has proposed that Buber has a "positive" attitude toward sexuality (Friedman, "Sex in Sartre and Buber"). I discuss this claim below.

(3.) My primary source will be Hay's "Toward the New Frontiers of Fairy Vision: Subject-SUBJECT Consciousness." This text, dated July 5, 1980, is perhaps the clearest iteration of subject-SUBJECT consciousness and was written in the wake of the first Radical Faeries gathering. References here are to the revised version in Hay, Radically Gay, 254-64.

(4.) See, for example, Moyn, Origins of the Other, but see Charme, "Two I-Thou Relations."

(5.) Buber Agassi, "Buber's Critique of Marx," 231. Martin Buber rejected Soviet socialism and, in his political writings, advocated a Utopian socialism in which autonomous, self-governing communities such as the kibbutzim invent new forms of social life. See Di Cesare, "Martin Buber"; Buber Agassi, "Buber's Critique of Marx"; Mendes-Flohr, "Desert Within"; and Susser, "Anarcho-federalism."

(6.) Buber, "Distance and Relation," quoted in Mendes-Flohr, "Desert Within," 219.

(7.) Buber, I and Thou, 17.

(8.) Buber, I and Thou, 72.

(9.) As an aside, Jewish feminist theologian Judith Plaskow has critiqued this aspect of Buber's project as itself privileging the male perspective "that we human beings spend most of our lives in the It-world" ("Jewish Theology," 68).

(10.) Buber, I and Thou, 12.

(11.) Buber, I and Thou, 23.

(12.) Buber, I and Thou, 62. On how love of the Other constitutes the self in Buber, see Oppenheim, "Loving the Neighbor."

(13.) Buber, I and Thou, 106.

(14.) Buber, "Dialogue," 4-5.

(15.) Buber, "Dialogue," 34.

(16.) Buber, "Dialogue," 35.

(17.) Buber, "Dialogue," 35.

(18.) Friedman, "Sex in Sartre and Buber," 93.

(19.) Buber, "Education," 93.

(20.) Buber, "Education " 94.

(21.) Buber, "Education," 95.

(22.) Buber, "Education," 96.

(23.) Buber, "Education," 97.

(24.) Buber, "Education," 97.

(25.) See Aptheker, "Queer Dialectics/Feminist Interventions," 12-15. Ironically, Hay had to resign from the Communist Party USA when he made his homosexuality known.

(26.) See Michaelson, "Queer Theolog;"

(27.) The book includes conceptions of Atlantis-like civilizations who possessed secret knowledge and wisdom. While it seems unlikely that Hay took these myths literally, they may have informed his conception of third-gender people as possessing ancient, sacred roles. See Hay, "Radically Gay, 184-86.

(28.) Hay, Radically Gay, 142-44.

(29.) Hay, Radically Gay, 17-33.

(30.) See Roscoe, Changing Ones, 222-47. Cultures with such constructions include the Zuni, Omaha, Sioux, Iban, and Hidatsa.

(31.) See Conner, Blossom of Bone, 40-43; and Greenberg, Construction of Homosexuality, 40-56.

(32.) See Connor, Blossom of Bone; Johnson, Gay Spirituality; and Thompson, Gay Spirit.

(33.) Quoted in Thompson, Gay Soul, 20.

(34.) Hay, Radically Gay, 259. See Aptheker, "Queer Dialectics/Feminist Interventions," 16-17.

(35.) Hay, Radically Gay, 260-61.

(36.) Hay, Radically Gay, 257.

(37.) Hay, Radically Gay, 257.

(38.) Hay, Radically Gay, 258.

(39.) Hay, Radically Gay, 259.

(40.) Hay, Radically Gay, 260.

(41.) Hay, Radically Gay, 261.

(42.) Hay, "We Are a Separate People," quoted in Aptheker, "Queer Dialectics/Feminist Interventions," 19-20.

(43.) See Hay, Radically Gay, 187-88n3.

(44.) See Michaelson, Everything Is God, 78-82; and Gleig, "Enlightenment after the Enlightenment."

(45.) Wood, "Dialogical Principle," 83.

(46.) Buber, I and Thou, 33.

(47.) Hay, Radically Gay, 3.

(48.) See Buber, Ecstatic Confessions; and Buber, Daniel.

(49.) Buber, I and Thou, 75.

(50.) Buber, I and Thou, 33.

(51.) For a back-and-forth dialogue on this point, see Michaelson, "Non-essentialist Harry Hay"; and Sadownick, "Harry Hay."

(52.) See McCleary, Special Illumination. Examples of the genre include Conner, Blossom of Hone; Johnson, Gay Spirituality; and Thompson, Gay Spirit.

(53.) Lorde, "Use of the Erotic," 75-79.

(54.) Buber, I and Thou, 66-67.

(55.) Buber, I and Thou, 131.

(56.) Buber, land Thou, 15.

(57.) Plaskow, Standing Again at Sinai.

(58.) Lorde, "Use of the Erotic," 75.

(59.) Lorde, "Use of the Erotic," 76.

(60.) Kripal, Roads of Excess.

(61.) See Landes, Heaven on Earth; and Weissinger, Oxford Handbook of Millennialism.

(62.) Buber, Paths in Utopia, 134. See Brody, Martin Buber's Theopolitics.

(63.) Hay, "Frontiers," 7.

(64.) Buber, Paths in Utopia, 24.

(65.) Hay, Radically Gay, 8.

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CONTRIBUTOR

Jay Michaelson is an affiliated assistant professor at Chicago Theological Seminary, where his work focuses on the intersection of queer studies and Jewish theology. His scholarly publications include "Queering Kabbalistic Gender Dimorphism," "Hating Law for Christian Reasons: The Religious Roots of American Anti-lawyerism," and "Chaos, Law, and God: The Religious Meanings of Homosexuality." His books include Everything Is God: The Radical Path of Nondual Judaism (Trumpeter, 2009) and God vs. Gay? The Religious Case for Equality (Beacon, 2011). A book based on his doctoral dissertation, Jacob Frank: From Jewish Antinomianism to Esoteric Myth, is presently under review. He holds a PhD in Jewish thought from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, a JD from Yale Law School, and nondenominational rabbinic ordination.

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Date:	Dec 22, 2018
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