Peter Gay obuary | History books | The Guardian

Contents:

• I WAS TEAM DESANTIS BEFORE HIS DISGTG ANTI-GAY AD
• JAGUARS ACH KEV MAXEN OUT AS GAY HISTORIC ANNOUNCEMENT
• PETER PORTE - GAY RUMORS CONFIRMED WH PARTNER AND OTHER FACTS
• IS EVAN PETERS GAY? HIS SEXUALY AND LOVE LIFE
• PETER GAY (1923–2015)
• PETER GAY
• PETER GAY, HISTORIAN WHO EXPLORED SOCIAL HISTORY OF IAS, DI AT 91
• IN MEMORIAM: PETER GAY
• PETER GAY OBUARY
• PETER C. GAY, M.D.
• ALUMN, HISTORIAN PETER GAY DI AT AGE 91

I WAS TEAM DESANTIS BEFORE HIS DISGTG ANTI-GAY AD

Ltle did I know DeSantis was farther to the right on issu that meant the most to me and the more than 70 percent of Amerins who support gay has ma clear the past few weeks that he’s more terted appeasg Twter trolls who abhor any Amerin who intifi as LGBTQ+. That beg said, DeSantis has ma abundantly clear that he do not support gay Amerins regardls of whether they support his nservative I first enuntered DeSantis durg his bold stance agast COVID mandat earlier this year, I was generally pleased wh the Florida ernor. It beme evint that DeSantis was not the champn of dividual eedoms and rights that I had hoped anti-gay rhetoric and actns are not only eply hurtful to LGBTQ+ Amerins like myself but also tarnish the image of the nservative movement.

By disregardg such a signifint portn of the populatn, DeSantis reveals a ncerng lack of unrstandg of the evolvg societal norms and a gay woman, my sexual orientatn is jt one aspect of my inty, and should not fe my polil beliefs or my place wh the nservative movement. If he tly aims to lead the nservative movement and brg about posive change for all Amerins, he mt abandon divisive tactics and foc on polici that promote uny and far, he is only losg everyday Amerins, cludg many nservativ like myself, through his disgtg anti-gay rhetoric. Image source, Tham Valley PoliceImage ptn, Peter Farquhar and Ann Moore-Mart were both sgle and vulnerableBoth Peter Farquhar and Ann Moore-Mart were relig, sgle and whout Farquhar retired as Stowe School's head of English 2004 and was ved to be a gut lecturer at the Universy of Buckgham, where he met stunt the urt se, the jury heard how Mr Farquhar had a wi circle of iends but he was lonely and, as a gay man, he stggled wh his sexualy, regardg as patible wh his Anglin fah.

"This mak him the first former lead to be part of the LGBTQ muny, and the first gay male volved wh the Burt me out as bisexual durg "Bachelor Paradise, " and she later proposed to her girliend durg the Burt.

JAGUARS ACH KEV MAXEN OUT AS GAY HISTORIC ANNOUNCEMENT

Gay, an executive wh fense ntractor Raytheon Technologi, was makg his weekly mute to California, where he was velopg a new plant that would later produce the pany's next generatn of Patrt ually took Amerin Airl Flight 11 to Los Angel on Mondays, returng to his Tewksbury home on Fridays. Footnote 5 In the meantime, Gay explored the entertaments of Havana and worked on his English, polishg his prose at the Havana Bs Amy (to which he received a scholarship) and vourg Amerin perdils like Time, Collier's, and the Saturday Eveng Post. This was ma possible by the terventn of Gay's former high school English teacher, Helen Hunter, who worked out a plan to allow Gay to fish his high school gree by pletg a private urse wh her on William Shakpeare.

PETER PORTE - GAY RUMORS CONFIRMED WH PARTNER AND OTHER FACTS

Lookg back years later, Gay nsired fortuo that he had spent the early years “Middle Ameri, ” a place where was possible to pe the ncerns of the German immigrant muny and bee fully (or at least mostly) “Amerinized. In Gay's study, Bernste is very much the hero, the reformer who sought to ee the ethil re of Marxism om s encstatn Hegelian metaphysics and rencile socialism's visn of equaly wh the polil stutns of parliamentarism and mocracy. The choice of Bernste reflected Gay's rejectn of both the Stalist left and the McCarthye right; was also a rebuff to those of his lleagu and acquatanc who had migrated om one polil extreme to the other—typilly om the far left to the far right: “I felt fortunate beg immune om what I took to be an often willful polil bldns of two warrg groups who disputed their ground at New York cktail parti and on the Wellfleet beach.

”Footnote 7 Gay remaed fundamentally optimistic regardg Amerin polil stutns, even if his worldview was shaped ccially by tellectuals—many of them also German-Jewish émigrés—whose views of Ameri were hardly naïve or uncril. ”Footnote 8 Marce not only helped persua Gay to take Frd serly, but also to see his view of human nature as fundamentally psimistic, such that s unpleasant featur were unlikely to disappear a postpalist society.

IS EVAN PETERS GAY? HIS SEXUALY AND LOVE LIFE

Although she never earned a doctorate, Ruth Gay would go on to wre a seri of well-received works on Jewish history, cludg The Jews of Germany: A Historil Portra (1992), Unfished People: Eastern European Jews Enunter Ameri (1997), and Safe Among the Germans: Liberated Jews After World War II (2002). ”Footnote 15 In a siar manner, Gay sought to vdite the Enlightenment's attu toward history, argug that s notns of historil atn and culture were far richer than prevly acknowledged, and s nceptns of progrs far more tentative, particularly given the philosoph’ ls-than-rosy timate of human nature. Gay sisted, agast this le of thought, that the philosoph had sought a tly scientific view of the world, ground not ratnalist philosophy but rather a skeptil empiricism whose rults uld be revised light of new evince and new rmatn.

PETER GAY (1923–2015)

In Voltaire's Polics: The Poet as Realist (1959), Gay attempted to monstrate that almost all Voltaire's wrgs, cludg his plays and histori, were rmed by a sire to tervene ntemporary polil affairs, but that the threat of censorship or even imprisonment had forced him to hi his tentns behd “vague, allive generali. ”Footnote 19 Gay's approach to Voltaire—lotg his wrgs their ntemporary polil environment—formed the basis for what he me to ll the “social history of ias, ” which he envisned as an alternative to, on the one hand, Arthur Lovejoy's form of tellectual history, which ma ias the un of analysis and traced them across time as they passed om one great thker to the next, and, on the other hand, the type of tellectual history that foced on cultural trop and clichés—what he lled “the reer of send-class ias send-class mds.

”Footnote 20 Gay's form of tellectual history, by ntrast, was guid by the prciple that “ias have many dimensns”: “They are exprsed by dividuals, but they are social products; they are nceived, elaborated and modified amid a specific set of historil circumstanc… Therefore, the social historian of ias nnot rt ntent wh analyzg their formal logil stcture.

”Footnote 21 For Gay, the advantage of this approach was that helped unravel some of the more problematic aspects of the Enlightenment, such as Denis Dirot's sexual libertism (which uld be seen as a way of attackg the Catholic Church), Jean-Jacqu Rose's Social Contract (not jt a work of polil theory, but a proposal to reform the Genevan cy-state), and Voltaire's antisemism, which Gay explaed (away) as both a product of his day and as an direct means of attackg the te famy, i.

PETER GAY

Gay argued that the philosoph were “morn pagans, ” not jt the sense that they had sought to rever the herage of classicism but also (and pecially) bee they had been irreemably hostile to anized relign—and Christiany particular.

PETER GAY, HISTORIAN WHO EXPLORED SOCIAL HISTORY OF IAS, DI AT 91

”Footnote 25 This was a readg of the Enlightenment that placed Voltaire and his mpaign to “csh the famy” ont and center, while margalizg the German Aufklärer, whom Gay emed “isolated, impotent, and almost wholly unpolil. ”Footnote 31 Gay embedd his terpretatn of Weimar culture as the creatn of “outsirs” thst to the “si” wh a narrative of Oedipal revolt that, typil Frdian manner, risted any clear intifitn wh the sons or the fathers. ”Footnote 33 In fact, Gay wrote most affectnately about those few stutns that seemed to be bastns of vigoro cricism and reasoned quiry, such as the German Amy for Polics, the Psychoanalytil Instute Berl, and the Warburg Instute, the tellectual home of Gay's idol Ernst Cassirer.

Objective or not, the says this volume are among the most powerful and personal that Gay ever wrote, particularly three set piec that pict enunters between artists and crics, masters and discipl, Jews and “Aryans” that unfold the shadow of mil Wagnerism.

Footnote 40 Jt as Gay had nstcted his image of the philosoph, to some gree, on the mol of Frd, he now ma the se for Frd as the “last philosophe, ” the vtigator who had broken through to that science of the human that had been the goal of the Enlightenment.

IN MEMORIAM: PETER GAY

As a more or ls orthodox Frdian, Gay had ltle e for branch of psychoanalysis that viated om Frdian ego psychology, much ls for those (like Jacqu Lan) who fed wh stcturalist lguistics and Hegelian philosophy. Gay's sistence on Frd's stat as an empirilly ground scientist put him at odds wh those scholars who sought the roots of psychoanalysis the artistic and polil climate of Vienna, notably Carl Schorske, whose celebrated terpretatn of Frd he dismissed as “eccentric. ”Footnote 43 If there was a cultural ntext for Frd's thought, Gay suggted, was not fed by his physil surroundgs but rather by the books he had read (Goethe, Shakpeare) and the art he llected (notably reproductns of classil sculptur), all of which reflected tablished nons of German bourgeois taste, as well as by his ntacts wh scientists and tellectuals at home and abroad: “Frd, ” Gay sisted, “lived far ls Atrian Vienna than his own md.

Gay had taken note of the rise of social history the 1970s and the proliferatn of tailed studi of peasant and workg-class life, and he was nvced that the middle class were need of siar attentn, particularly given what he saw as misnceptns about the bourgeoisie as narrow, reprsed, and philiste.

Footnote 49) Another way which Gay's Bourgeois Experience parted om siar studi was s verage of not only Bra, France, and Germany, but also the Uned Stat, which offered evince of bourgeois life “at s purt or, perhaps better, at the edge of s sted future. ”Footnote 50 Ined, the mancripts divisn of the Yale Library provid Gay wh one of his crown piec of evince: the diary of Mabel Loomis Todd, which reunted her sexual experienc (and evint pleasure them) nsirable tail. For Gay, this and siar ttimony showed that the Victorian middle class—not jt men but also women—took pleasure sex, givg the lie to claims to the ntrary by the Victorians themselv and by later generatns of historians.

PETER GAY OBUARY

In particular, was claimed, Gay's project suffered om parison wh the work of Michel Fouult, whose fluence the amy was reachg an apex and who had traversed some of the same historil terra as Gay, notably his attentn to issu of sexualy and his impatience wh received pieti about reprsed Victorians. Gay was particularly cril of Friedrich Meecke, the twentieth century's greatt exemplar of this tradn, both for his polil equivotns the Weimar Republic and for The German Catastrophe (1946), where he suggted that post-Nazi Germany uld purify self by tablishg Goethe societi every town and village.

At the same time, Gay's mment to Frd prepared him to acknowledge the role that emotn, pecially anger, played his own historil wrg, jt as had allowed him to intify s role the tellectual bat of the eighteenth and neteenth centuri. Ernst Cassirer had first emphasized the break between seventeenth-century ratnalism and Enlightenment empiricism, but Gay doubled down on this claim The Enlightenment, repeatedly emphasizg the philosoph’ hostily to metaphysil speculatn. Dedited to E Bse, the gentile iend who had taken re of his fay's valuabl and hid Morz Fröhlich durg Kristallnacht, this book reprented Gay's attempt to relibrate his plited relatnship wh Germany, which had evolved over the s om outright hatred to somethg more ambivalent, thanks large part to his iendships wh dividual Germans (his relatnship wh Karl Dietrich Bracher was particularly important).

Gay also ed the book to exprs his tratns wh those who qutned why Germany's Jews had not tried to leave much earlier than 1938 or who suggted, as had Gershom Scholem, that the ia of a German-Jewish symbsis had been a lie om the start: “‘And you still thought, after the Nürnberg Laws and other horrors, that you were Germans? ”Footnote 63 Conversely, Gay's fay refed to accept the Jewish inty beg imposed on them by the Nazi regime: “Their fn of our race was jt another lie that we repudiated as unhistoril and unscientific… Whatever our p fellow-pariahs might say, we uld not make ourselv believe what we did not believe. In his acceptance speech, Gay noted that, even fifty years after the Holot, was still necsary to speak of “Germans” and “Jews” as mutually exclive tegori and that much had to be done before one uld speak of “normal relatns” between the two.

PETER C. GAY, M.D.

But drivg Gay's scholarship was not jt a sire for knowledge but an “urge to munite, ” to put right what others had supposedly gotten wrong, to replace myth wh fact, to nta dangero lns, to reward urage and honty, and to ntribute this way to the “science of eedom. 11 Hallowell was the thor of The Decle of Liberalism as an Iology, Wh Particular Reference to German Poli-Legal Thought (London: Kegan Pl, 1946), as well as Ma Currents Morn Polil Thought (New York: Henry Holt, 1950); Kirk, one of the founrs of “tradnalist nservatism, ” was the thor of The Conservative Md, om Burke to Santayana (Chigo: Regnery, 1953)12 Gay, Peter, “The Enlightenment the History of Polil Theory, ” Polil Science Quarterly 69, no. 40 Peter Gay, Frd for Historians (New York: Oxford Universy Prs, 1985); im, A Godls Jew: Frd, Atheism, and the Makg of Psychoanalysis (New Haven, CT: Yale Universy Prs, 1987); im, Frd: A Life for Our Time (New York: Norton, 1988); im, Readg Frd: Exploratns and Entertaments (New Haven, CT: Yale Universy Prs, 1990).

ALUMN, HISTORIAN PETER GAY DI AT AGE 91

48 Peter Gay, Edutn of the Sens (Oxford: Oxford Universy Prs, 1984); im, The Tenr Passn (Oxford: Oxford Universy Prs, 1986); im, The Cultivatn of Hatred (New York: Norton, 1993); im, The Naked Heart (New York: Norton, 1995).

Kid ma the parison explic: “Gay wav away Michel Fouult and his followers a biblgraphil note, but pared to Fouult's work this volume is very pale ed, facile and shallow, makg one wish that the two historians were not so ly divid: one has all the note rds and the other all the ias.

Yee/The New York TimMay 12, 2015Peter Gay, a German-born historian whose sense of tellectual adventure led him to wre groundbreakg books on the Enlightenment, the Victorian middle class, Sigmund Frd, Weimar culture and the cultural suatn of Jews Germany, died on Tuday at his home Manhattan. He was ath was nfirmed by his stepdghter Elizabeth Gay, a refugee om Nazi Germany, voted his reer to explorg the social history of ias, a qut that took him far om his origal area of specializatn, Voltaire and the Enlightenment. Gay to tra at the Wtern New England Instute for Psychoanalysis and motivated him to wre a revisnist psychohistory of the Victorian middle class, “The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Frd, ” whose five volum were published the 1980s and 1990s.