Pierre D'Alancaisez and Amir Naaman, "Inversion: Gay Life After the Homosexual" (Verdurin, 2025)

Dec 17, 2025

Pierre d'Alancaisez, a London-based critic and curator, and Amir Naaman, an accomplished writer and editor, explore the complexities of gay life in today's world. They discuss the evolution of terms like 'homosexual' and 'queer' and question the implications of modern sexual freedoms. The guests delve into the cultural shift brought by gay marriage and dating apps, the discontent among some gay men, and the impact of institutionalized queer art. Their conversation challenges prevailing narratives, urging reflection on the future of gay identity.

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INSIGHT

Deliberate Diversity To Reopen Debate

The editors deliberately solicited taboo and heterogeneous perspectives to reopen discussion about gay life.
They asked contributors to include self-critique to prevent simple culture-war polemics.

ANECDOTE

Bookshop Backlash Taught Boldness

Amir recounts running a Berlin bookshop that hosted controversial talks and drew backlash after covering figures like Julius Evola.
That experience taught him to ask difficult questions despite fear of public reaction.

INSIGHT

Gay Men As Cultural Test Subjects

Gay men's recent cultural role has made them both pioneers of sexual liberation and test subjects for broader social shifts.
This double role explains why gay culture now feels both assimilated and culpable in modern consumerism.

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With contributions by Blake Smith, Roger Lancaster, David Moulton, Stephen Adubato, Amir Naaman, Ran Heilbrunn, Pierre d'Alancaisez, Travis Jeppesen, Oliver Davis, Yotam Feldman, and Marcas Lancaster.

Today's world of PrEP, Pride parades, and gay marriage eclipses the wildest dreams of the sexual revolution. While it was formerly deviant to promote gay lifestyles, it is now 'problematic' to suggest that not all departures from the norm are in the homosexual's best interest. Amidst this excess, a new wave of discontentment rises among the once-keenest proponents of sexual progress: gay men.

What happened in the transition from inversion to homosexuality, gayness, and queerness? Why do some gay men lament the freedoms afforded to them by sexual and social acceptance? Bold and daring, the essays in Inversion: Gay Life After the Homosexual (Verdurin, 2025) reflect on the vicious cycle of debasement, acceptance, sacrifice, and liberation that homosexuality has been stuck in for longer than it wishes to acknowledge.

As gay culture fails to confront its history, it adopts hollow narratives of struggle. Some gay men fear losing their freedoms, some advocate for sexual restraint, while others, lost in the ever-expanding LGBTQIA+ 'community, ' continue to make maximalist ideological demands of those outside. These responses mark a fracture in gay life. If there is some essence to homosexual desire, how is it being served by today's gay culture and queer politics? Has the gay man - homosexual, queer, or inverted - rendered himself obsolete?

Bringing together contributions by eleven leading thinkers, theorists, and critics who examine the consequences of pink-washing history, denial of sexual realities, and the memetic nature of desire, Inversion reclaims homosexuality's lost depth in an era of profound discontent.

Fearless in its critique and challenging in its proposals, Inversion considers the cultural and political aspects of gay life after homosexuality as it battles with queerness and the allure of a reactionary return, pharmacologically fueled sexual degeneration, and existential dread.

Pierre d'Alancaisez is a critic, curator, and researcher interested in the changing role of art and its social institutions. His writing has appeared in The Critic, ArtReview, The Spectator, and Compact.

Amir Naaman worked as a mailman, a cook, a bookseller, a comics publisher, a house painter and is now a personal trainer at the gym. His first novel The Hummingbirds, a homosexual horror story, was published in 2020.

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