3rd Edition of Benton Best Seller Due Out in June
As Nicholas F. Benton prepares for the release of the third edition of his Gay Studies best seller,”Extraordinary Hearts; Reclaim Gay Sensibility’s Central Role in the Progress of Civilization,” The following anonymous professional evaluation of the work is reprinted here.
Preface to 3rd Edition
Extraordinary Hearts is a compilation of 100 weekly essays, originally published under the column title “Nick Benton’s Gay Science” from October 2010 through September 2012, first in the Falls Church News-Press and reprinted in Metro Weekly. Published in 2013 by Lethe Press, the book runs 522 pages and approximately 87,000 words. Its subtitle—Reclaiming Gay Sensibility’s Central Role in the Progress of Civilization—is not rhetorical modesty; it accurately captures the scope of what Mr. Benton sets out to do.
This is a serious, ambitious, and at times deeply moving intellectual project. It is also a courageous one: the author swims against two currents at once, critiquing both the anti-gay mainstream and much of what has passed for gay liberation since Stonewall. That double dissent gives the book its distinctive energy and its occasional lonely-prophet quality.
Thesis and Central Argument
The book’s core argument is both original and rigorously sustained. Mr. Benton proposes that gay people possess a distinct “gay sensibility” — a heightened empathic, aesthetic, and morally alert orientation toward the world — that is not primarily about sexual behavior but about a particular way of perceiving and engaging with life. He traces this sensibility through Western civilization from Socrates, David and Jonathan, Leonardo da Vinci, and Michelangelo through Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde, Tennessee Williams, Christopher Isherwood, and E.M. Forster.
Against this long tradition of what Benton calls the “Promethean” gay identity — creative, compassionate, socially transformative — he counterposes the “Dionysian” model that, in his telling, hijacked the post-Stonewall liberation movement. The agents of that hijacking were, in his analysis, the philosophy of Michel Foucault (with its insistence on unbridled transgression and “nothing is true, everything is permitted”), the cultural forces of the Beat generation, the CIA’s documented MK-Ultra experiments on college campuses, and the commercial exploitation of urban gay men that led to the catastrophe of AIDS.
This is a bold, even audacious argument, and Mr. Benton makes it credibly. The Williams-versus-Burroughs framework, centered on their 1977 Village Voice exchange, functions as what the author rightly calls a “Rosetta Stone” for the entire series. It is an inspired critical device: the shock of Williams, a supremely street-savvy man, discovering that Burroughs was entirely sincere in his amoralism, encapsulates in one human scene what otherwise requires hundreds of pages of historical argument.
Intellectual Strengths
Breadth of Reference. Few writers working in the gay press have brought this density of literary, philosophical, and historical reference to bear on LGBT identity. The range is impressive — Plato’s Symposium and Phaedrus, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Whitman, the Isherwood diaries, Larry Kramer’s Faggots, Randy Shilts, Gabriel Rotello, Gabriel García Márquez, films from A Streetcar Named Desire to Billy Elliot to Velvet Goldmine — and it is deployed with genuine familiarity, not name-dropping.
Personal Authority. The author’s credibility is hard-earned. As a seminary-trained co-founder of the Berkeley Gay Liberation Front in 1970, founder of The Effeminist newspaper in 1972, survivor of the AIDS era, and founder and editor of the Falls Church News-Press, Mr. Benton writes as an eyewitness to the history he analyzes. When he describes the social engineering of the post-Stonewall movement from the inside, or the paralysis of gay organizational leadership as AIDS spread, he is not speculating. This memoir-woven-into-argument is one of the book’s most valuable features and distinguishes it from purely academic treatments.
The Socratic Thread. Among the most intellectually productive moves in the book is the sustained reading of Socrates — via the charioteer allegory in Phaedrus — as a philosopher of the tension between noble eros and brutish appetite. Benton’s argument that Socrates was essentially articulating what we would now call gay sensibility — the aspiration to love that elevates rather than degrades — is philosophically serious and deserves attention beyond the gay press.
The Promethean/Dionysian Distinction. This conceptual pairing is the book’s most original and durable contribution. It gives readers a vocabulary for distinguishing between gay identity as social transformation and gay identity as license for personal excess. Whatever one makes of the historical specifics, the distinction itself has explanatory power and could profitably be taken up by scholars of queer theory, LGBT history, and sexual ethics.
The Larry Kramer Rehabilitation. Long before Kramer’s The Normal Heart revival made him newly fashionable, this series argued for the centrality of Kramer’s voice — and for taking Faggots seriously as prophecy rather than dismissing it as homophobic. That judgment now reads as vindicated.
Voice and Prose Style
The writing is energetic, direct, and unapologetically polemical — qualities that served the original newspaper format well. Mr. Benton is at his best when writing from direct experience: the chapters on his own coming-out in 1969, his early activism, the terror of the AIDS era, and his founding of the News-Press are vivid and moving. The chapter on Franklin Kameny (Chapter 54), which was entered into the Congressional Record, demonstrates what the author can do when he combines personal affection, historical precision, and moral clarity.
The prose is occasionally dense when accumulating theoretical argument, and a reader unfamiliar with Foucault, Nietzsche, or the post-structuralists may want more expository scaffolding. But the willingness to engage these thinkers directly, rather than simply dismissing them, is intellectually honorable.
Significance and Readership
This book fills a genuine gap. The dominant strands of academic queer theory, following Foucault, have been largely hostile to the kind of essentialist “gay sensibility” argument Mr. Benton makes. Meanwhile, popular gay culture and media have, as he argues, continued to prioritize a hedonism-centered identity. Extraordinary Hearts offers a third path — historically grounded, philosophically serious, and personally witnessed — that neither camp has adequately represented.
Its natural readership includes: older LGBT readers who lived through the Stonewall and AIDS eras and will recognize the history being narrated; younger LGBT people seeking an identity framework that connects them to a longer cultural tradition; anyone interested in the intellectual and social history of the gay rights movement; and scholars of queer studies, American cultural history, and the philosophy of love and eros.
The testimonials from Don Bachardy (Christopher Isherwood’s long-term partner), from gay pioneer Steven Dansky, from figure skater Johnny Weir, and from Virginia State Senator Adam Ebbin suggest the book reached the audience it deserved. The endorsement from Randy Shulman of Metro Weekly — “Honored to be the launching pad” — is a rare instance of a publisher acknowledging the risk of giving a writer free rein.
Summary Assessment
Extraordinary Hearts is a significant, under-celebrated contribution to LGBT intellectual history. Its central thesis — that gay people have a distinctive sensibility that has been a civilizing and humanizing force throughout Western history, and that post-Stonewall culture catastrophically abandoned that legacy — is argued with force, erudition, and genuine moral seriousness. It is the work of a man who has paid the price of his convictions across half a century, and it reads that way.
As it stands, Extraordinary Hearts is what its best testimonials claim: an important document of and for the LGBT movement, written by one of its founding witnesses, arguing for an ideal of gay identity capacious enough to include Socrates, Tennessee Williams, and Nicholas Benton himself.
NLGJA DC to Host Pride Month Happy Hour Saturday
The DC area chapter of the Association of LGTTQ+ Journalists will host a Pride Month Happy Hour Saturday from 3-5 p.m. at Trade.
Statement of Del Marcus Simon On Marriage Referendum
‘Living in Falls Church and Fairfax County, it can be easy to forget just how far we’ve come on LGBTQ+ rights and just how quickly those hard-fought rights could be put at risk by MAGA forces on the Supreme Court,” Falls Church Delegate Marcus Simon said in a statement kicking off Pride Month yesterday.
“That’s why this November, Virginians need to pass the constitutional amendment to remove Virginia’s shameful ban on same-sex marriage from our state constitution.
“Right now, that ban is unenforceable because of court rulings. But if the far-right Supreme Court overturns those decisions, Virginia’s constitutional ban could become enforceable again, leaving families’ rights vulnerable.
“To our LGBTQ+ family, friends and neighbors: we stand with you today and every day. And we’re going to keep fighting to move Virginia forward.”
