Essays and Video Commentary. On Identity, Culture and the Politics of Meaning

New essays by email

Almost there — check your inbox to confirm.

No noise. One link. Unsubscribe anytime.

Thomas Jung

Thomas Talks

Intro: Paradise Lost?!

New Essay

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.

Read the essay
Essay Three

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?

Read the essay

Thomas Talks

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.

Read the foreword
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 essay

Special video row

Gays &
Gangstalking

Gangstalking

Gays & Gangstalking

Upcoming Essay

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.

Video notes on the essays — short, direct, unscripted.

YouTube →

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

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.

Read more →