Introducing "Friends and Enemies"

Another Substack? Yes! And it will be good, I promise.

Beer, mezcal, cigar, pencil, notebook, Memoirs of Hadrian, and Zero at the Bone (photo taken by the author in Rome, March 2024)

Thank you for your interest in my latest project, Friends and Enemies. If you’ve already signed up to receive these posts, you probably have some sense of my political and literary preoccupations—whether you’re a Know Your Enemy listener, a Dissent-nik, or share my abiding interests in the broad universe of American letters (gay, straight, and otherwise), not least its gossip and personal rivalries, in the second half of the twentieth century. Still, I wanted to let readers know what I’ll be doing with Friends and Enemies, and what kind of posts you can expect.

Subscribers will receive at least two items every week: First, on Mondays, a feature I’m calling “Personal Archives,” where I treat you to glimpses into my ever-growing collection of first edition, rare, and simply beautiful books, as well as literary ephemera—letters, postcards, and more. As the “personal” in the title indicates, this collection grew out of my own obsessions, so expect a lot of Christopher Isherwood, W.H. Auden, Edmund White, Gore Vidal, the “New York intellectuals,” and a few of the rightwing intellectuals I’ve long read and pondered. But there also will be posts about, say, some of my favorite dust jackets from the 1950s and 60s. In all cases, you’ll not only get to see interesting and fetching images; I’ll also offer historical context or a telling anecdote related to the author, book, or document in question, drawing on the author’s diaries, a rival writer’s memoirs or letters, or whatever seems relevant to help you understand why I care about it, and why you should, too. The first of these will drop this coming Monday morning, April 8, and it’s a great one: I’ll be sharing both images of, and a transcription of a lengthy, handwritten private letter of Midge Decter’s from 1987 that purports to explain why her infamous 1980 Commentary essay about Fire Island, “The Boys on the Beach,” was not homophobic.

Second, on Thursdays, I’ll send out a weekly dispatch called il mio quaderno—Italian for “my notebook,” since I decided to start Friends and Enemies during my latest sojourn in Rome. This will be original writing from me you can’t get anywhere else: a mini-essay or running commentary on a few related news items; reviews of books I’m reading and thinking about, new or old; a highly informed take about what’s going on with U.S. right, especially we head toward the election this fall; and more. Where I hope to depart from just having a typical “column” is that I want this writing to both reflect all the reading I do but rarely get to share outside of conversations on Know Your Enemy and to be more provisional, more eclectic, nerdier, and a bit cheekier—in short, more fun—than most editors would let me get away with. The first installment of il mio quaderno will be a short essay on the brilliant poet and Yale Divinity School professor Christian Wiman, his place in the American religious firmament, and what his work can teach us about the state of our souls. That will be published on Thursday, April 11.

If all this sounds interesting to you, please do share this with family, friends, and, yes, even enemies—I’d appreciate it. Right now, all my posts will be free, though I will turn on the paywall in the near future, so there’s no better time than now to introduce the discerning readers in your life to Friends and Enemies.