In 2010, a full half dozen years prior to the onset of the Trump Era, I published an essay on what I called then a “kind of Rosetta stone” article from 1977 in the Village Voice newspaper that was a raw exchange between the playwright Tennessee Williams and the beat poet and philosopher William Burroughs.
One might wonder why such an ancient find would be considered important today. Yet it remains seminal in terms of how American culture turned in the 1970s into the kind of nihilistic morass that the current Trump administration represents from its Epstein side to its current foreign policy side.
The Williams–Burroughs exchange provides a key to understanding how a countercultural movement that began as a powerful force for affirmation and social transformation could, within less than a decade, be redirected toward patterns that would contribute to its own crisis.
The early years following Stonewall represented a moment of extraordinary possibility. With the collapse of long-standing barriers, homosexuals were suddenly able to live openly and to bring their creative, emotional, and intellectual capacities into the public sphere in unprecedented ways.
There was every reason to expect that this would lead to a flowering of contribution—a deepening of the very qualities that had, historically, allowed homosexual individuals to shape culture in humane and transformative ways.
But that is not what happened. Instead, the countercultural ethos that swept through American society in the late 1960s and 1970s took hold within the emerging gay communities with particular intensity. The language of liberation became intertwined with a culture defined increasingly by excess—by the pursuit of unrestrained sexual experience, by the widespread use of drugs, and by a turning away from sustained creative and professional endeavors.
The contrast between these two perspectives was captured in a conversation published in the Village Voice in May 1977. At the time, the cultural shift toward excess and detachment—particularly in urban gay communities—was already well underway. The exchange between Williams and Burroughs revealed, in stark terms, the philosophical divide at the heart of that shift.
Burroughs asserted: “Do what thou wilt is the whole of the law… Nothing is true, everything is permitted.”
Williams responded with hesitation, attempting to introduce a qualification: “Provided you want to do the right thing.”
But Burroughs rejected that premise outright: “If you really want to do it, then it’s the right thing.”
When Williams pressed further—asking whether this amounted to an amoral position—Burroughs answered plainly: “Completely.”
This exchange is more than an intellectual disagreement. It is a line of division.
On one side lies a view of identity grounded in meaning, responsibility, and relationship—a perspective that recognizes desire, but does not treat it as self-justifying.
On the other lies a view in which desire alone becomes the measure of truth—where the act of wanting is sufficient to define what is right.
The consequences of these two perspectives are not theoretical. They shape behavior. They shape culture. They shape outcomes.
In the decades that followed, the latter view—“everything is permitted”—gained significant influence within certain segments of American culture, particularly in urban environments, like Trump’s New York, where commercial and social structures reinforced it.
The results were profound. Patterns of excess became normalized. Boundaries eroded. And the conditions emerged in which the AIDS epidemic would later spread with devastating speed.
I wrote in 2010, “Nothing more clearly marks the departure from an earlier sensibility—the one represented by figures like Roosevelt and Williams—than this shift. It is the difference between a vision of identity that contributes to the shaping of a more humane world, and one that, in its most extreme form, becomes detached from any larger purpose.”
Who would have seen even in 2010 how the ethos of this brand of nihilism and unrestrained hedonistic excess would wind up in the White House, running America into the ground as it has.
Democracy and the rule of law do not come outside of a moral framework that some may claim is their right to “freedom.” On the contrary, it teaches that true freedom is a carefully curated commitment to socially shared values not alien to an almost native sense of what’s right and what’s not.
