The Very Heart of It: New York Diaries, 1983–1994, by Thomas Mallon, Knopf, 592 pages, $40

Writing in 1985, arguably the worst year of the AIDS crisis, the leftist columnist Christopher Hitchens attacked closeted gays who preached right-wing politics. Once "out" (or in many cases "outed"), Hitchens argued, these onetime conservatives would "evolve politically" and renounce the Moral Majority and President Ronald Reagan's foreign policy. Opening up about their sex lives meant veering to the left.

But openly gay and right-wing were not always mutually exclusive in this era. Thomas Mallon—acclaimed novelist, prolific essayist, professor of English literature, and self-described "gay neoconservative"—provides a perfect example. On coming out, he didn't evolve politically so much as become more of what he already was.

The Very Heart of It: New York Diaries, 1983–1994 is compiled from 30 notebooks written at a time when the world in general and New York City in particular were witnessing "the relentless spread of AIDS." It might be difficult to recall the climate of this era. About 30,000 people died of AIDS in America from 1981 to 1987. Many social conservatives regarded the disease as a Biblical plague for the sin of homosexuality: In 1983, Pat Buchanan—soon to be hired as White House communications director—wrote, "The poor homosexuals. They have declared war on nature and now nature is exacting an awful retribution." The conservative columnist William F. Buckley called for tattooing people with AIDS.

Mallon's diaries capture the nightmarish flavor of an era when gay sex could kill you. ("My mind…keeps running towards the Ultimate Horror, Killer AIDS," he wrote.) His diaries are replete with times he inspected his body for signs of the disease: Swollen glands, bruises, even freckles could be cause for alarm. Every day he lived in fear and was emotionally devastated by it: "I had my worst AIDS scare in months. I saw a reddish patch on my leg….I was convinced it was a sarcoma and I began to cry. I walked around outside…and resigned myself to death. This is the way we live now."

It is this emotional fragility that keeps him from being tested for six years: "Part of me would love to gamble & take the test & rejoice if it came back negative. But I can't risk what would happen to my mind if it came back positive. I can't do it…[Sex] doesn't kill you, it gives you nervous breakdowns." When he was finally tested negative in 1990, he fell to his knees and thanked a God the Catholic-raised Mallon never renounced.

Despite that faith, it's hard to paint Mallon as a social conservative. He disliked the religious right—the "religious crazies," he called them—and could not bring himself to vote for Reagan in 1984. "There are limits," he wrote, "to what one can do for one's anti-Communism and country."

But he also couldn't bring himself to vote for the alternative, Walter Mondale. Mallon was very much a neocon, and over the course of these pages his identification with the right does not fade at all. Indeed, it arguably does the opposite. As friends and lovers died painful, protracted deaths from a disease the Reagan administration was widely accused of failing to prioritize, Mallon became more supportive, even defensive of the president. "My conservatism grows stronger as the years go by," he wrote in 1985.

Much of this came from Mallon's anti-Communism. He endorsed the 1983 invasion of Grenada and backed the Strategic Defense Initiative. ("If Star Wars is such a will-of-the-wisp, as the TV boys keep saying, then why are the Russians so dead set vs. our having it?") He argued that Soviet dictator Mikhail Gorbachev "never granted one reform he knew he wouldn't have to," and he complained that Reagan wasn't getting enough credit for predicting "less than a decade ago" that communism was nearing its end ("Has one network or newspaper quoted that remark today?").

"I want to be in a world where one can hate [leftist Nicaraguan leader Daniel] Ortega and not be a fag-basher," Mallon wrote in 1987. "I believe in God and believes He wants me to make love to men. Why should that be so hard?"

Mallon's roster of political enemies certainly could have been composed by countless conservatives. He loathed President Jimmy Carter ("a mean little man" with a foreign policy team of "mediocrities"), Vice President Al Gore ("robotic and condescending"), and Democratic presidential nominee Micheal Dukakis ("a mushed mouth McGovern"). In these diaries, the leftist playwright Lillian Hellman is a fabricator, Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan is a Hitlerite who wants to put Jews and gays in the "gas chamber," and civil rights leader Al Sharpton is "a gangster." The United Nations is a "sinister place" that spouts "agitprop" and "Newspeak." New York union leaders want "to milk the city dry." During the 1992 presidential campaign, when he read Bill Clinton's 1969 letter to the draft board, Mallon concluded that the Democratic candidate was "trying to convince himself that he has been mostly making moral choices rather than career calculations."

And Mallon made sure to note that it wasn't just Republicans who could be heartless and repressive toward homosexuals. New York Gov. Mario Cuomo, he pointed out, wanted "to put in jail people who pass the virus on to others."

He even blasted New York's annual Gay Pride Parade, deriding it as a day when "my people evolve backwards and drag their knuckles along the ground in that colorless parade." He felt, he wrote, "no more pride in being gay than I do in being Irish." He lamented that gays "swallowed so much of the leftwing hog and forgot that privacy was one of the things they were striving to protect in the first place." At the same time, he praised the previous generation of gays and connects their victories to his politics: "My own conservatism…will never to me feel incompatible with the fight they fought and achieved."

In other contexts, Mallon has called himself "a libertarian conservative." But one would be hard-pressed to find much libertarianism in these diaries. Apart from privacy rights, there is little here about big government; he had nothing to say in these journals about free markets. This book is valuable not because you will agree with all of it—or even, for some readers, with most of it—but because it reflects the hidden ideological diversity not just of gays in general but of gays who weren't conventional liberals or leftists. Other possible paths in that era ranged from the libertarianism of Duke Armstrong, a gay Republican lawyer who fought the San Francisco Democrats' effort to close the city's bathhouses, to the moderate conservatism of Andrew Sullivan, who argued against outing on the grounds that it violated people's privacy.

Like all good diarists, Mallon has a persona: He emerges in these pages as hard-working, opinionated, angry, pessimistic, and laugh-out-loud funny. So it's not as though this book is valuable only as a historical document. But it's fascinating as history too. These diaries, with their blizzards of editorial lunches, faculty meetings, and gay barhopping, reveal a side of the '80s that both the standard gay histories and the standard conservative histories tend to ignore.

The post Yes, You Could Be Both Openly Gay and Conservative in the '80s appeared first on Reason.com.

There are a lot of reasons why Zohran Mamdani surged to a surprise victory in the Democratic primary race for New York City mayor. His opponent was former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a tired, old, corrupt, creepy symbol of the feckless Democratic establishment. The cost of living and, in particular, housing, in New York City is absurdly high. Mamdani himself is young, energetic, and charming, even if you don't support his worldview. 

But in some ways you can capture Mamdani's appeal in a single, simple image: halal food carts. Halal food carts are a staple of New York's working-class food culture. But in recent years, as food prices have soared nationwide, they have become increasingly expensive. And as Republican pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson pointed out on this week's Reason Roundtable, Mamdani was able to channel public frustration with halal cart price increases effectively into a zippy, viral video. 

Here's what Anderson said on Roundtable when discussing the causes of Mamdani's win. 

I think that populist viewpoints blended with real communications savvy and an understanding of how to reach voters in the year of our Lord 2025 is a pretty unbeatable combination these days. Not too many politicians have it, but he's clearly one of them. 

I've been thinking a lot over the last couple of days about the video of him going around to halal carts, talking about how the cost of a plate of chicken and rice is too high and we need to make it cheaper. I would argue that most of his policies are not necessarily going to achieve those reduced cost of living type ends, or at least not do so without enormous government subsidies and intervention. But he was focused on the right issue. He was doing so in a way that is very smart communication strategy. 

So I would take his victory less as an endorsement of the far left on the part of the New York Democratic primary electorate and more that establishment politicians should take nothing for granted and populism. That focus on cost of living is extremely politically potent these days. 

.@KSoltisAnderson discusses Zohran Mamdani's win on the #ReasonRoundtable: "I think that populist viewpoints blended with real communications savvy and an understanding of how to reach voters in the year of our Lord 2025 is a pretty unbeatable combination these days." pic.twitter.com/c6aUUvWc8Z

— reason (@reason) June 30, 2025

It wasn't just food carts. Mamdani embraced narrowly targeted new media, appearing on the niche menswear and culture podcast Throwing Fits to talk about, among other things, his favorite trashy reality television. He worked with a publicist well known to New York "cool kids"—the New York Times' description—to target hip younger voters. And he ultimately won on the strength of the support of younger voters. 

Anderson is the author of The Selfie Vote, a book about young voters. And as she noted elsewhere in the pod, she was rather stunned by a ballot analysis showing that toward the end of the final week, "the biggest group of voters, just in terms of raw numbers, were young voters in this primary. As someone who's written about young voters a lot, that doesn't happen. It just doesn't happen." But thanks to a combination of halal carts, niche media, and a relentless focus on cost of living, in this case, well, it did. 

As we talk about on the podcast, that doesn't mean Mamdani's policies are good ideas, or that they will work to bring down prices. There are plenty of reasons to think his approach—to subsidize, regulate, and impose price controls on just about everything—will, if anything, make things even worse. 

Halal cart socialism won't work as policy. But in New York, it worked as politics. And Mamdani's appeal to young voters is real, and other politicians, especially on the left, are no doubt watching.

If there's good news for libertarians and others who oppose socialist policies, it's that Mamdani's win doesn't necessarily signal strong support for his brand of full-bore socialism. Rather, Mamdani rode to victory on a combination of frustration with affordability—especially housing—and exhaustion with an establishment that has repeatedly failed to deliver, plus some social media savvy. So other policy agendas aimed at solving those problems might have a chance. Who's ready for halal cart libertarianism? 

The post Did Mamdani Win Because of Halal Cart Socialism? appeared first on Reason.com.

WASHINGTON, D.C. — In an unprecedented move sure to take the legal world by storm, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson issued a savage dissent in the form of a TikTok dance.

The post This is an anti-fascist appeared first on spiked.

NEW YORK, NY — In response to growing questions about his political leanings, New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani issued a statement to clarify that he is not a communist, but only wants the government ot seize the means of production, abolish private property ownership, and put capitalists in gulags.

Defending Christianity—and the legacy of Abraham in particular—Søren Kierkagaard concludes (approvingly) that one’s accepting it means “to relinquish his understanding and his thinking, and to keep his soul fixed upon the absurd.” Source: Kierkegaard, Søren. Fear and Trembling [1843]. Related: On the fuller context of Kierkegaard’s provocative claim: Related: On Kierkegaard’s place in the historical […]