Public intellectuals have to be able to speak English. But the more they’re revered, the worse their accents, diction, and prosody are.

1. ŽIŽEK!: Truly Nº 1 with a bullet is Slavoj Žižek, a madman with a speech impediment and hačeks by the barrel. Even more baffling is his ability to understand German questions and answer them in English (once in a blue moon, he can utter a German sentence).

2. Jean-François Gariépy: Hands down the worst pea-soup accent I’ve ever heard, and I grew up around subliterate Acadians. Of course he can’t pronounce “development” (none of them can, not even sitting prime ministers), but worse is his inability to pronounce even simple, essential words like “idea” (“aiii·dee”). His writing is also chock full of French interference, and he turned down my paid help to unfuck such writing.

   Americans add insult to injury by acting, first, as though they cannot even read the name Gariépy (former typesetter Jim Goad couldn’t reproduce it correctly, even working from real rendered text and after two tries [“GARLEPY”; “GARIEPY”]), then further acting as though “Gariépy” is hard to pronounce. You just say every letter.

3. Yuval Harari: Also mispronounces seriously important words. (From a single appearance on Sam Harris: apex; cause; chasm; coöperation; thought.)

   Nobody wants to tell a bestselling gay Israeli that his accent is an abomination, but that just means he hasn’t met me yet. (I asked his agency why he hasn’t made any efforts to improve. [They later responded with the expected fluency: “Thanks for your E‑mail – we took it to our attention.”])

4. Evgeny Morozov: Afflicted with the Slavic inability to distinguish [i]/[ɪ] and other tense/lax vowel minimal pairs. (His response years ago: “Do you think I’m really that stupid to get rid of my accent? That’s the only thing that got me where I am!”)

5. Alexander Bard, a Swedish former dance musician who does not per se want to be understood; what he wants is to steamroll(er) you with brute speed. That’s among the more deplorable intellectual habits, joining forces with failing to define terms of art as one goes (cf. Layne Norton on Joe Rogan).

   Bard is a special case, in that he insisted, on the Aron Flam secondary podcast and in messages, that a “Scandinavian accent” exists. Well, it does, but it’s still deficient, notably in the habit, familiar from Abba, of devoicing [z]/[ʒ] to [s]/[ʃ] in nearly all cases. (“Walking through an empty house, tearss in my eyess: Here iss where the story endss. This iss goodbyyye.”) Bard isn’t just a poor communicator but an arrogant bastard, so I kept notes of his mispronunciations:

   • Abrahamic

   • alienated

   • atheist

   • banal

   • chieftain

   • circuit

   • colours

   • contribute

   • distributed

   • hierarchical

   • hypotheses

   • Job

   • Jung

   • libido

   • matriarch, patriarch (Bard argued vociferously about these two, and remained in the wrong)

   • Portugal

   • totalitarian

   • Yiannopoulos

Honourable mention: Glenn Greenwald speaking Brazilian Portuguese (YouTubé).

The best identifiable gay comment(at)or on identifiable gay Web sites, Sydney Rugby Jock (on RealJock [q.v.]), provides reliably trenchant observations. (Edited. Links elided. Emphasis added.)

1. Gay culture has greatest influence on the most vulnerable, which is primarily gay men who have little to no supportive family or lack a strong platonic gay friends circle….

   [I]t is a symptom of a malaise which is caused by a culture which, broadly speaking, strongly reinforces being promiscuous (to be a “real gay man”), which results in only those who have supportive friends and family, are financially secure, and are strong-minded enough to resist the pressure that many gay men are exposed to when coming out, which often sticks with them into later life.

2. On the topic of an intentional HIV infection, or at least a passively permitted such infection:

   [It] makes me wonder why we now have developed a mental immunity to issues around sexual health…. [T]he major consideration should be about the willingness of gay men to not pay the level of attention to sexual health that used to be commonplace when I was of the same age. Scotland has a well funded sexual-health-information program for GBLT [sic] persons, so these young people theoretically should have been knowledgeable about what to do when a condom is damaged, namely get on PEP. The fact that these victims were diagnosed means they do know about testing. So what is going on with AIDS councils and their unwillingness to engage in education about stealthing and their advocacy of blind trust?

   [The Undetectable = Untransmittable (U = U) campaign] has increased suspicion of those who are undetectable[. N]o health agency, nor media coverage of the issue, mentions that the science is clear but that trusting someone based on their word that they are of any status, including claims of undetectable, is dangerous – just because they perceive it will cause stigma. […]

   I am talking about gay communities’ continuing culture of peer pressure for young people to be highly sexually engaged in as many sexual encounters as they can get. Yes, some want that, but many feel pressured and empty while doing that and [they] only do so because they are wanting to belong…. [G]ay men [need to] receive positive messages for choosing not to do random hookups[;] those who choose to define their own sexual morality [must not] get shouted down as self-hating and [be] given the same support for their choices as the messages [promoting] more promiscuity.

3. We must accept that there are limits on what can be done to counter homophobic rumour-mongering, but of what we can do calling out homophobia isn’t the most effective one…. [W]hy don’t we look at our attitudes, which, in the spirit of mocking old negative stereotypes, can actually reinforce them? Daddy/son relationships is a prime example.

   I am not judging people who are adults having sexual relationships with an age gap, but why do we feel the need to have so much historical amnesia as to not recognize that the label could be anything else – perhaps even being bold enough to be something unambigiously clear that it is about relations between an older and young adult.

Steven Page:

What song would you like to have played at your funeral?

“Popcorn” by Hot Butter, hands down. I’ve already decided that and it’s in my will. I think that if someone’s coming to my funeral, I want to make them feel the way “Popcorn” makes them feel. Remember the good times.

For John Peel, it was “Teenage Kicks.”

Buddies is the rereleased AIDS drama from circa 1985. It’s quite terrible, except inasmuch as, like Parting Glances, it offers a view of pretty nice Manhattan apartments in the 1980s.

Rather oddly, the main nebbish is a typesetter. (ParaGraphics, a type house, is credited.)

Of course the “subtitles” are complete shite, and banged out in Arial, equally obviously.

Of 161 books substantively read in 2018: Provocations by Camille Paglia (inevitably); The Gift by Lewis Hyde (q.v.).

I remember, some years ago, walking through Yorkville of a Saturday late morning. I espied, from some distance, the most enduring automotive silhouette, that of a 911 (in pristine butterscotch) outside the Suction Cup.

The driver was consistent with demography in that he was a man in his early mid-60s, though cast against type in that he was trim and nicely turned out.

By now I was passing the front staircase. Not quite a grand one, but making the best of it was a fair man in his 20s, with a great cut of hair that matched the car and what I remember as an expensively understated tan bomber jacket that was small increments removed from a Rickson collectible straight out of Pattern Recognition.

The older I get the more avuncular I get, but even as the young man and I looked at each other we silently transmitted shared knowledge of what was going on. And what was going on was not a May/December romance or a kept boy but an arrangement that could be rewarding for both. The young man gets to grow up a bit faster; the old man has a beautiful creature to call his own, on whom he bestows not just haircuts and apparel but wisdom, calm, and generations of accumulated knowledge.

But, like hounds with short lifespans, such boys must themselves grow up and leave the nest. When they leave, they leave their eldergays left bereft. These young men, God willing, later become eldergays themselves and carry on our societal role as transmitters of culture.