Gay hate to love books

The day after the election, November 6, having spent the previous evening cooking and consuming a healthy meal of grass-fed beef and roasted green beans and quinoa as a form of self-care, I sat at the kitchen table eating every single piece of our leftover Halloween treats. KitKats whose wrappers were red as the electoral map. Bags of popcorn labeled, preposterously, Lesser Evil. Coconut-chocolate bars called Unreal.

Around lunchtime, deep into this apathetic-apocalyptic sugar binge, I opened my email and saw a new Substack post from Patrick Nathan, an excellent writer and an especially astute critic of all the ways—both explicitly and implicitly—our country has embraced authoritarianism. America, he writes in his newsletter, not as a nation but as a mythology and set of unifying ideals, is dead. It’s clearer than ever, he says, that “there is no ‘we’ on a national level, and there won’t be anytime soon.”

And yet, writes Nathan, “if America is dead, our communities survive.” If our national politics has become little more than farcical theater, our towns and city councils and n