Thomas Talks
Essays and Video Commentary. On Identity, Culture and the Politics of Meaning
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Paradise
Deconstructing Pride · Essay Four
Paradise
Lost?!
Gay Culture and the Promise of Sexual Liberation
Gay culture promised freedom from shame, restraint, and fear, yet increasingly turned sexuality into something to display, rank, manage. The old world of nightlife gave way to apps, pornography, and chemically manufactured intensity.
The question is whether liberation made sex freer, or replaced old restraints with performance, pressure and fear.
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Essay Three
The Sentimental
Deconstructing Pride
The Sentimental
Exhibitionist
Gay Culture on Social Media
From the Collection
The sentimental exhibitionist posts his body and his feelings with equal fluency, arranging them so that the feelings justify the body. What follows is presented as healing. That it also happens to be a revenue stream is not considered a contradiction.
The essay follows the logic of the display: the grievance that licenses it, the language that protects it, and the machinery that distributes it. What remains when the private sphere becomes a performance?
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Introducing “The Sentimental Exhibitionist”
Thomas Talks
Intro: Deconstructing Pride
Foreword
Pride and other Problems
A foreword to the essays — what they are about, why they were written, and what they ask of the reader. It begins from the suspicion that something in the public language of identity has gone flat, and that distinctions worth preserving have been lost.
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First Essay
Homosexuals and Gays
The words “homosexual” and “gay” are now used as if they meant the same thing, but they name different realities. Sex is not identity, and the loss of that distinction has allowed gay culture to become trapped in victimhood culture, which is flattening.
Read the essaySpecial video row
Gays &
Gangstalking
Gangstalking
Gays & Gangstalking
Deconstructing Pride · In Progress
Tolerance. Acceptance. Glorification!
Greater tolerance was driven less by moral progress than by prosperity, security, and the broad softening of life that came with them. The 1990s translated that tolerance into mass-cultural acceptance. What came later was something else: the glorification of homosexuality as a collective moral identity — and that is where something important was lost.
The essay begins with the hysteria around Heated Rivalry — the eager, grateful, strangely relieved praise — and asks what larger thing is being celebrated.
Some thoughts
Note on “Homosexuals and Gays”
Heated Rivalry
Introducing “The Sentimental Exhibitionist”
Intro: Deconstructing Pride
The Darkness of the Gay World
Other Voices
Thomas Jung
About Me
Thomas Jung is a writer from Germany, living in the Netherlands. He came to writing late, after years of thinking in private and gradually realizing that the private irritation was not only private. His essays begin with experience: a memory, a scene, an irritation, a phrase overheard, a public ritual that feels slightly false. From there they ask how private experience relates to the world around it, and to the dominant ideas that claim to explain it. The question is not simply what happened, but whether another meaning can still be found once the slogans have done their work.
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