1. This twitter thread from yesterday is already a classic, one of the all time greats. It also raises an interesting question: how do conservatives reconcile their exaltation of ancient Greece & Rome (where same-sex practices were accepted) with their homophobia? 
2. One way to reconcile celebrations of ancients with homophobia is to recontextualize ancient relationships in way Peg does. Harmodius and Aristogeiton weren't gay, they were just close male friends, liked to do some camping & wrestling, oil each other up, nothing to see here.
3. Another form of recontextualizing is pseudo-history. I remember an evangelical Christian telling me once that all the gay stuff started only in the late, decadent period decline, that when Rome was a young Republic they were all as straight as a rod.
4. The conservative cognitive dissonance on this issue allows for sly humor. Guy Davenport, great translator of the Greeks, wasn't a conservative but did write a lot for National Review, & often used classics to make winking allusions to same sex love. This from 1977.
5. The followers of Leo Strauss have the most interesting strategy of containment: Strauss upheld not just that the ancient Greeks philosophers were the wisest of men but replicated Socratic pedagogy of older mentor charming young ephebes.
6. Straussian pedagogy was homosocial tiptoeing near the homoerotic. Straussian hermeneutics with its sharp distinction between exoteric (myths for the mob) and esoteric (dangerous truths for the philosopher) paralleled the functioning of the closet in homophobic societies.
7. The career of Harry Jaffa & Allan Bloom, two major Straussians who were once close friends and became bitter foes, shows the different forms Straussian containment of the homoerotic can take.
8. It seems wrong to speak of Bloom, as some do, as a kind of gay hero. He never identified as gay, never left the closet, never publicly supported gay rights, in fact mocked cultural gayness androgyny in Closing of the American Mind.
9. Bloom was, in some ways, one of the last pure examples of the conservative closeted man: engaging in same-sex love in private, but publicly upholding normative masculinity and aligning himself with cultural conservatives.
10. But Bloom's discrete closeted homosexuality was too much for his former friend Harry Jaffa. In a scathing review of Bloom's Closing, Jaffa upbraided Bloom for not being more explicitly anti-gay & not realizing that AIDS was the curse of God & nature.
11. But Jaffa's scotched earth homophobia was still compatible with the Socratic pedagogy, so long as any homoerotic impulses were sublimated (in his case by strenuous bike riding). Here's his tribute to a fallen student.
12. For more on all this, here's a podcast where @willwilkinson talk about Strauss, Jaffa, and the attempt to fuse exaltation of the ancients with homophobia (and how all that relates to GOP anti-democratic extremism). jeetheer.substack.com/p/podcast-the-…
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