Blake Smith in The Ideas Letter:
Michael Denneny, the recently deceased co-founder and co-editor of the pioneering gay magazine Christopher Street , gay newspaper New York Native , and the gay publishing line at St. Martin’s Press, Stonewall Inn Editions, began his recently published collection of essays On Christopher Street with a quotation from his mentor, Hannah Arendt:
“Only in our speaking with one another does the world, as that about which we speak, emerge in its objectivity and visibility from all sides. Living in a real world and speaking with one another about it are basically one and the same.”
Denneny’s career as a gay cultural activist was a way of putting into practice Arendt’s thought as condensed in this citation. Across writings collected in On Christopher Street, which range in date from the beginnings of the magazine in 1976 to just before his death last year, he grounded his view of gay culture and politics in her work. Yet the importance of her example for their emergence—and of her philosophy to a key moment in the rise of what we now call “identity politics”—remains almost totally ignored in the field of gay history and in the ever-growing number of academic and popular reappraisals of Arendt. It is hardly known that her thinking and milieu were vital elements in intellectual matrix of the American gay movement.i
From academic and popular genealogies of gay identity and gay politics, whether written by progressive academics or conservatives pundits like Jamie Kirchick or Chris Rufo, readers could be forgiven for mistakenly believing misunderstanding that it was “radical” post-structuralist thinkers like Michel Foucault and Judith Butler who supplied that movement’s theoretical legitimation, resisted all the way by “mainstream” “assimilationists” (who are often portrayed by defenders and critics as anti-theoretical voices of “common sense”). Such genealogies misunderstand Foucault (who was much closer to the positions of Arendt and Denneny, an early champion of his, than to Butler and today’s “woke” activists)ii—although this is a subject for another essay. Moreover, they obscure the deep, and deeply Arendtian, thinking behind the cultural and political work that brought gay male life towards the center of American consciousness.
More here.