The appeal of the queer right

Robert Tobin was an astute reader of texts. In Peripheral Desires: The German Discovery of Sex, he summarized the long struggle within the German-speaking world to surface male-male longing, noting that some of the same tensions within the masculinist and emancipation movements continue to shape the “architecture of our most intimate desires” (Tobin 249). More recently, together with Peter Rehberg and Ivan Raykoff, he immersed himself in the playfulness of the Eurovision song contest, arguing that its strong association with LGBTQ+ communities served as a barometer of a nation's liberal values (Tobin, “Eurovision”). And yet, whereas in 2013 and then in 2020 Turkey and Hungary respectively objected to what one official called “the homosexual flotilla” dominating the song contest, the backlash against drag performers and trans masculinities and femininities today suggests the goal post has moved closer to the mainstream (Walker and Garamvolgyi). The tensions around queer and trans identities within the European Union vexed Bob in what turned out to be his final writing, on the impact of the self-made Italian philosopher Julius Evola, a central figure in conservative and far-right circles during and after World War II who networked with the homosexual rights movements of the 1920s. Bob left us with a warning: not to make facile assumptions linking same-sex sexuality to progressive values.

Evola was a staunch critic of the Enlightenment. He advanced an alternative to the race science of the Nazis and yet was also embraced by them and by Mussolini. He believed in a lost Northern culture whose descendants first built Atlantis and then Rome. He gave lecture tours and was friendly with leaders of core gentlemen's clubs in Berlin and Vienna, which included members of the conservative circles that supported Hitler.

In the postwar period, Evola's illiberal and antidemocratic thinking made him the perfect person to serve as intellectual guide for a post-Nazi far-right conservativism. He became part of a group calling themselves Traditionalists, who rejected modernity, egalitarianism, democracy, liberalism, socialism, capitalism, communism, materialism, and bourgeois values. Alain de Benoist, the founder of the French neo-fascist nouvelle droite, lauded Evola in an interview in 2003. Even Trump's erstwhile standard bearer Steve Bannon cited Evola in a 2014 visit to the Vatican.

Evola's mysticism and interest in medieval asceticism struck a chord not only with this small band of right-leaning illiberals; they were also attractive to the New Age and fantasy set, a group that fuels a particular contingent of those on the far right today. We might think of the self-proclaimed QAnon Shaman Jake Anjeli from the Capitol Riot and his infamous Norse tattoo, which also graces the cover of Evola's own book for Italian youth. Or Giorgia Meloni, who cut her teeth in the Italian Social Movement neo-fascist Hobbit camps which drew explicitly on Evolian ideas mixed with a little Tolkien for good measure. The asceticism of Jordan Peterson, and the all-meat diet and ritualistic self-denial he promotes, sits nicely against the New Age health, wellness, and strength groups that form part of this ecosystem.

Bob's most surprising discovery in reading through Evola's work was his belief in the power of erotic love among men. It seems unmistakable that he drew on ideas from the homosexual rights movement, which he encountered during his time in Berlin. What's especially interesting is not that Evola read sexologists like Magnus Hirschfeld but that he engaged so deeply with them, especially the way they spoke about the power of masculinity, male bonding, and desire as the cornerstones of the contemporary state. Not only does this tell us about the significance of male bonding to illiberal notions of citizenship—scholars have always felt uneasy about the coziness between the masculinists and the Nazi Sturmabteilung—but Bob went further still in arguing that the antecedents of the emancipation movement's liberal agenda were equally of interest to the far right.

Evola engaged directly with the thinking of Karl Friedrich Ulrichs, the nineteenth-century jurist who made a case for urnings—men who desired other men—setting in motion arguments for the long march to decriminalization. Evola was drawn to Ulrichs's concept of the Uranian for the way it evoked a time when “Nordic-Germanic societies” flourished. Evola's “Heroic-Uranian” settled in Atlantis and drew on solar symbols like the swastika to reference solar wheels, hence the symbolism of double axes and other objects arranged in circular patterns that show up on the flags of far-right organizations today. Where Evola differed from Ulrichs was in the latter's assumption that the urning has a female soul. There, he connected more directly into the writing of masculinists Otto Weininger and Hans Blüher.

Weininger believed that men possessed a kind of transcendent masculinity, based around pure virility. These ideas outlived Weininger, who committed suicide at the age of 23, and persisted in Hans Blüher's argument that male-male erotic desire was the glue that bound men in patriarchy. Looking back to history—to Hellenism and the Platonic universe that also galvanized the fantasy of the early gay rights movement (and is the firmament for Western political formations as well)—Blüher argued that the transmission of knowledge between men and boys was a rite of passage, the source of male power, and the crucible of the state.

For Evola, a classic example of the Männerbund “is the Prussian State, which originated from a knightly Order […] namely the Order of Teutonic Knights” (Evola 129). And indeed, the Templar Cross remains a potent cultural signifier for various far-right groups today. As Patrick Geary has shown, the history of the Middle Ages itself was never entirely benign. Europeans on the left and the right looked to the Middle Ages in the nineteenth-century age of nationalism, and through the Middle Ages to Rome, as a touchstone of Western values and identity. These evocations of western civilization, heritage, and culture, centered around patriarchy, male bonding, and religion, pre-dated the Internet. They were taken up in liberal democracies as well as authoritarian states.

Bob argued that the influence of Evola's distillation of some of the ideas in masculinist and homosexual rights movement circles helps explain the preponderance of far-right queers, from Pim Fortyn to Jörg Haider, Renaud Camus, and Milo Yiannopoulos. But this shared inheritance with the homosexual emancipation movement also gave succor to the modern-day conservative, alt- and far-right traditions. When we recognize that the challenge to democracy can come from inside as well as out, that liberalism houses a measure of illiberalism especially when encountering its others, we begin to make good on the thought Bob leaves us with in one of his last blog posts on Evola: “that this kind of starkly anti-modernist vision of society can draw not only traditional conservatives in America and elsewhere, but many people who don't consider themselves conservative at all” (“Behind the Issue”).