I shouldn’t have said such a thing. It probably reveals an unacceptable remainder of homophobia. The comment was made with the expectation that it would be read by only a very small circle of people who already know that I have an extraordinarily high regard for Foucault. As the comment of mine below it reveals, I simply don’t find the reading of Foucault that suggests he embraced liberalism, in any way, persuasive in the least. In fact, I am persuaded this way in large part because I think the presentation by Miller of the Foucault who “lived dangerously” in the San Francisco bath house culture simply doesn’t allow such an interpretation. I agree with Scollier’s comment that Foucault did not seem eager to be a gay intellectual. I have suggested elsewhere that he may very well have seen gay marriage as unacceptably bourgeois and a concession to a society dominated by malthusian coupling. But those allowances don’t excuse the comment. In fact, if anything, they suggest that in semi-private discourse, I am more comfortable in showing the remainder referred to above.

I don’t know from Old, but calling someone a “fist-fucker” — unless there is some rather elaborate “signifying monkey” thing going on — feels just a touch homophobic. Idiotic in any case. Foucault, as we know from one of the only good books on him, was not exactly eager to be considered a “gay intellectual.”