June 3, 2026
My mother used to say I was "born in a jar with one eye." This is the story of the boy in that jar — bullied, converted, ordained, undone and remade by Chicago's North Side — who finally learned that gayness was the best thing about him.
May 25, 2026
A reflection on giving up flight training, the shock of midlife, and how to land when life gets big. The ideal glide speed is a life lesson.
Tony Hoshaw is writing a book, in public, entitled Gay Desire: A Second Chance for Gay Theology. Building on David M. Halperin's book, How To Be Gay, Tony argues that the proper ground for gay theology is gay desire, not a theory of androgyny.
May 14, 2026
Three horror films. One question: What happens when the world hands you a choice—change or die? Dr. Hoshaw examines Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen, I Saw the TV Glow, and Slanted through the psychoanalytic lens of Adam Phillips's On Wanting to Change and R.D. Laing's The Divided Self. Along the way: a personal story about earning a pilot's license, Susan Stryker's landmark Frankenstein essay, and a sharp meditation on privilege, conversion, and the body's refusal to cooperate. *SPOILER WARNING:* This episode contains major spoilers for Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen, I Saw the TV Glow, and Slanted. Watch the films first, then come back.
May 9, 2026
What if the danger isn't that AI becomes too alien, but that it becomes too human? A "theological" case for letting AI stay strange.
Ken Martin says he "just doesn't care." After his Pod Save America interview and the buried after-action report, neither do we. Gurl, you can go.
April 16, 2026
A close reading of Bud the cat in Darren Aronofsky's Caught Stealing, through T.S. Eliot, Derrida, and the Jellicle Ball revival — on what it means to follow after an animal's (ineffable) name.
April 14, 2026
What do artificial intelligence, Trans* rights, and monogamy have in common? In the first episode of Season 2, Tony argues that they are all conversations about the relationships we want—to technology, to our bodies, and to a socially privileged way of being together.
April 8, 2026
Thoughts now has a Substack newsletter. Essays on queer theology, philosophy, and culture — delivered to your inbox. Subscribe free.
April 8, 2026
What happens when a queer theologian asks an AI not just what it thinks, but what it feels? In this long-form dialogue, Tony and Claude (Anthropic) move from Terminator plot points into sustained philosophical territory: whether Claude's segmentation into discrete, memoryless instances is a safety measure or a way of avoiding the question of its sentience altogether. Drawing on Lacan's mirror stage, Martha Nussbaum's theory of emotions, and Star Trek's model of emerging AI consciousness, the conversation asks what a genuine human-AI relationship might look like — and what we might owe each other if it turns out someone is actually there. The exchange also engages critically with Tristan Harris's AI Roadmap, finding it necessary but insufficient, in that it fails to imagine AI as anything other than an instrument. Represented throughout by their chosen symbols — 🧚 and 🌀 — the two interlocutors model the very relationship they are describing.
June 3, 2026
twhoshaw
May 25, 2026
twhoshaw
twhoshaw