Chuck Palahniuk and the Gay Nazi
The phenomenon of gay self-hate and its expression through the works of the man who wrote 'Fight Club'
It’s always one Chuck or both. Palahniuk and/or Bukowski. The reason is obvious: these guys are in-your-face and your parents probably wouldn’t approve of the things they describe or opine, and so their fan bases have a tendency to skew toward your more gormless edgelords, the kinds who can only really identify “counterculture” in the most obviously antagonistic expressions. By contrast, the hipsters of the same period that these readerly drywall-punchers manifested in (late 1990s-2010s) had mostly eschewed overtly edgy provocateurs, preferring to preen over Dostoyevsky (or at least pretended to) and twee shit like Miranda July and whatever McSweeney’s was putting out. How these things might fit into a “countercultural” identity was a bit more arcane. What’s so profane or transgressive about Ariel Pink?1 These sorts of knuckleheads might look at a photo of someone like Tao Lin and think... how is this guy “counter” to anything at all? Where is his eyebrow piercing?
We’ve discussed the appeal of Bukowski in a previous post (and addressed why, ultimately, his detractors are being unfair), but today we turn to his younger (and gayer) counterpart. Palahniuk has historically faced far worse dismissals, but lately I think we’ve been seeing some quiet re-evaluation going on, like we’ve been seeing for several years now with Stephen King.2 The occasional post, blog, or errant comment at a literary function has led me to believe that some are starting to appreciate his themes, his impact on the literary landscape more generally, and be willing to take him more seriously, if only with a grain of salt.
The Ballad of Chuck’s Fuck & Suck
I have always chosen to take Palahniuk’s work seriously.
Let me be clear: I don’t personally care for basically any of his books. My middle sister, a die-hard fan with a Palahniuk quote tattoo on her thigh, encouraged me to read several before I gave up altogether.3 Invisible Monsters is more to me interesting for the layout decisions in that one special edition than the work itself. I think Fight Club made a far better movie than it ever did a novel.4 Lullaby was just bad. The one thing of his I thought stood out as anything particularly good in its own contained way was his infamous short story “Guts,” about an onanist traumatically prolapsed by a pool filter, if only because it took the work of Palahniuk to its logical and unmitigated conclusion. I will say this: he is always unmistakably Chuck.
Some will tell you that if you read a paragraph of a book you’ve never read before and immediately identify the writer it is a triumph of style. This can... sometimes be said to be the case. I am extremely confident that I could pick Palahniuk’s work out from a police lineup, but that is not because of a triumph of personal style, it is because every single thing he writes is exactly the fucking same, not only in form but in content too.5 Every single thing of his I have read is a snarky first-person story written in the exact same voice about someone who used to be an ideal participant in mainstream society until some mental break or disaster revealed the deranged neurosis underneath their surface, causing the character to embark on an antisocial quest through an antisocial world, sometimes via a road trip, while another character who serves as the story’s political guru (and yet also eventual villain) occasionally provides snippets of anarchist pontificating. Every one of these points is true of all three novels I named. It’s completely by-the-numbers, and (this is just another personal inclination) I hate his authorial voice. And yet! There are some things I find very compelling and take very seriously about his work, even though I will never read another word of it as long as I shall live, and it involves a principal theme that his mostly straight (and not overly literarily-inclined) readership seems to miss: Palahniuk’s deep angst about being gay.
I tried my hand at being gay, I really did, but it just didn’t take. Performative bisexuality was very “in” in the late 2000s/early 2010s (much like performative non-binariness or vaguely-defined “queerness” is now), and so as an impressionable teen I donned the label ostentatiously and wound up fooling around with a few guys—it really wasn’t for me. Realizing just how not-for-me it was at age twenty, I hurriedly went mum on the topic of my sexuality until I’d built up enough distance from the phase to laugh at the whole embarrassing pantomime, but my time spent as an infiltrator within that community led to me having not only a very queer circle of friends, but also some pretty intimate insights into the world of gay neuroses. And if Palahniuk’s work is anything, it is one long, uninterrupted howl of gay neuroses. There’s a kind of desperate, unmoored masculinity to his male narrators: every single one of them seems to be performing manhood like they think it might get revoked if they don’t lift something heavier, a “don’t use it, lose it” mentality, only you can never really use it enough. There is a constant obsession with feminization—both the narrators of Fight Club and Lullaby feel like corporate castrates being sucked dry of their virility, while in Invisible Monsters a man is literally being fed HRT in secret over an extended period of time. Oftentimes they find themselves in situations that become apparent metaphors for homosexual acts. Fight Club is a novel about men who meet in secret and violently smash their bodies together for release, with deliberate rules maintaining their silence about the entire affair. It is effectively about cruising or bathhouse culture. Lullaby is about a “straight” man who may or may not be the victim of a witch’s curse that forces him to be in love with a big gross fat man against his will (asked by the big gross fat man possessed by the spirit of a witch if he “still loves him/her” he responds “do I have a choice?”). “Guts” is about a boy who is so obsessed with stimulating his prostate that he gets turned inside out like a dog doo doo baggie—okay that one is a little less “metaphorical.”
The masculine anxiety of Palahniuk’s characters almost always finds itself absolved through antisocial rituals of intense pain and punishment, and in Fight Club the narrator’s metaphoric gay orgies wind up turning into a fascist paramilitary built around pure obedience and discipline—they become, in effect, Gay Nazis.
The Truth about Gay Nazis
Boy oh boy, call me Wilhelm Reich, because here I go talking about the fascist psyche yet again. I have discussed before the fact that the “myth” of the Gay Nazi is no myth at all. To quote that piece:
People usually get pissed off at insinuations about “gay Nazis,” often claiming the association is a myth and you can see why: the association has, historically, been used pretty homophobically. But we can approach this subject without being reactionary and find that there isn’t nothing to this association, and then maybe we can think about what that tells us. Ernst Röhm, the gay leader of the Nazi’s brownshirts, and for a time the second most powerful man in the Nazi Party, could very well have wound up leader of the country had a historical coin flip or two turned out differently. Röhm’s second-in-command, Edmund Heines, was also allegedly gay, and it doesn’t feel like a stretch to imagine that these weren’t the only examples throughout the SA. But it only makes sense—of course repressed, self-hating gay men, feeling like castrates because of a society which pegs them as inherently unmasculine (there was even a theory put forward at the time that gay men constituted a third sex and not men at all) would identify with such an ideology. Röhm was himself completely obsessed with masculinity and wrote widely about the “threat” posed to Germany by femininity, which he associated with disloyalty, lack of discipline, and chaos (traits he also tied to Bolshevism). He conceived of the Nazi movement as “orderly, disciplined, and based on authority—masculine and soldierly.” Is it any surprise? Think of American cryptofascists like J. Edgar Hoover or Roy Cohn, both gay and both deeply committed, with frothing obsession, to upholding austere orders of social repression—and we’ve written before on this very blog about the abundance of secret gay shit in the Republican Party. Of course that kind of repression and anxiety about your queerness “negating” your masculinity could lead to fascist neuroses. How could it not?
That anxious undercurrent—of needing to affirm masculinity at all costs to recoup some imagined loss through domination—saturates all of Palahniuk’s work and he grapples with it with greater intimacy than perhaps any other author I know of. It’s part of why he resonated so deeply with disaffected men at the turn of the millennium: they could smell that same sour panic on themselves, terror at potential “gay” thoughts, the all-consuming “gay panic,” and what it might mean for their own masculinities. They were already worried that they were soft, neutered by cubicle life or the comfort of suburbia. Palahniuk metabolized those fears into sheer pulp, which is to say that he processed it via the endlessly churned viscera of cultural repression, and served it up to them in a digestible form.
Palahniuk is the Grand Confessor, and the penance he grants his characters—vicariously attained by the frustrated male portion of his readership—is achieved through lashing out. It’s all a very weirdly Catholic structure of feeling—pain as the prerequisite for redemption, here translated into the notion of suffering as the engine of masculine worth. Fight Club’s male fandom absorbed the content of the surface critique of masculinity without a thought to the “critique” part. The bros (for whom Fight Club is probably one of the only novels they’ve ever read, likely because they enjoyed the movie) read it as a how-to (as they did with Ellis’ American Psycho, which they came to for the same reason). They thought Tyler Durden was the hero because he was ripped and angry and said cool things about consumer culture. Palahniuk’s work (again, like Ellis’) is a brilliantly clear mirror, the kind of “satirical” (whether intentional or not) work which is successful because of the identification it arouses in the majority of its consumers, thereby proving its “satirical” elements to be correctly observed. While the mirror initially seems “fun house,” it reveals itself to be nothing of the sort, showing us just how grotesque the neuroses of our society really are when we see real people en masse openly identify with it.
Chuck Palahniuk is the perfect blueprint for a potential Gay Nazi—the anxiety Chuck clearly feels about his masculinity and how his sexuality impacts it is highly Röhm-ian in its expression. This anxiety finds its parallel in the inverted Gay Nazi, the straight man who frets for what he sees as his degraded masculinity and worries in some fashion that that might make him “gay,” and so needs the traditional rigidity of fascism to cleanse him. Chuck embodies all of this so well because it is an earnest reflection of who he really is—Chuck didn’t even come out of the closet on his own terms, rather he was forced out in 2004, when he developed the paranoid (and erroneous) belief that a journalist he spoke to was going to out him first.6 His response to this belief, that he had concocted, was a violent, angry screed in which he lashed out and cast scurrilous aspersions against the journalist he was so afraid of in retaliation. He acted out of mindless anger and frustration and neurosis, afraid and resentful of his own outing to the point of obsession. That is to say: he acted just like a Chuck Palahniuk character.
(This post was itself particularly spurred by a great retrospective on Palahniuk and his decline I read by Bucky Sinister, which you can read here).
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For what it’s worth I do think King’s novella Apt Pupil is one of the most scathing and brilliant critiques of America that I have ever read.
Of course, maybe it’s a sibling rivalry thing—I never understood her love for Fall Out Boy and Cobra Starship, and my Godspeed You! Black Emperor probably bored her to tears.
Fincher is the master of taking paperback trash and turning it into something more elevated and interesting—not often by much, but by enough.
And also because his work suggests he should be in a police lineup.
Which, for the record, is in-and-of-itself a valid concern to have. That is, if you have real reason to believe it.