Ken Plummer: What it is to be human

Introduction: Making a humanist sociologist

Ken Plummer tells a story about himself that encapsulates and illuminates a life and a career:

Some year ago, my very first undergraduate essay in sociology posed a beguiling question. It simply asked me to discuss the proposition that ‘sociology is not interested in people’. I wrote my answer attacking the claims, and soon learned that this was not what my tutors wanted to hear. Sociology, I was told, was concerned with social structure and social facts….As I got a lowish mark, so I learnt my first lesson….I should have known better than to believe that sociology was concerned with people…. Luckily, a few years on as I struggled to use sociology to make sense of my own life as a young gay man, I encountered some books that told me this convention was really not the whole story. For there was, I discovered, a vibrant strand of thinking in sociology that traced social action, conversation, subjectivity, and biography, as well as the personal life, as valuable fields of enquiry…. Human nature is not a very human thing; it is indeed a very social thing (Plummer, 2003: ix).

Ken Plummer’s career embraced a range of interests and many achievements. Apart from his best known writings on sexualities and sexual story telling he is the author of highly respected and popular criminology and sociology text books, he has edited influential collections on symbolic interactionism, the Chicago School, sexualities and homosexuality, he has offered a manifesto for Critical Humanism (2021), he has countless articles in journals and books, he was the founding and long-term editor of this journal, making it a world-class publication, and runs an engaging website, and as well he had a bottom drawer of unpublished drafts and half-finished books. And oh yes, he has a passionate and joyful interest in musicals, and promised a book on these some day. Unlike most of us, writing reluctantly to order, he wrote something every day, come hell and high water. For Plummer, words, language, and narratives are the supreme forms of communication and engagement.

Beyond the prolific output and its eclecticism, however, is a remarkable consistency, rooted in a profound humanistic understanding of the social world that was defined by that formative experience as a young undergraduate. Whilst many of his contemporaries engaged in wild and shameless flirtations with every intellectual fashion that popped up, from Althusserianism, structuralism, and post-structuralism to discourse theory, Deleuzian vitalism, Queer Theory, anti-humanism, post-humanisms, and whatever lies in between, over the past half-century, Plummer, whilst being sharply alert to every nuance and subtlety of contemporary sociological debate, remained faithful to his early moral and theoretical interests. Rather than being seduced by the delights of European high theory with its close relationship to Western Marxism, Plummer found alternative inspiration in the often marginalised and undervalued side of a largely American sociology and social theory. His interest in a sociological humanism, he wrote, ‘goes back to the modern foundational works of William James, George Herbert Mead, Jane Addams and Herbert Blumer’ (Plummer, 2021: 3). His own writings reflect his interest in the resulting themes: ethnography, pragmatism, deviance and labelling theory, dramaturgy (and it’s surely Erving Goffman’s work on stigma gave a title to Plummer’s first book), and the many worlds and languages of symbolic interactionism. All these approaches were rooted in an outsider consciousness and stance, and a moral and political pluralism, eschewing determinism, listening to the life stories, words, and ‘the music of what happens’, and the complex ways in which we act out our lives in a never completed journey of evolving meanings and languages. The play of language has always been central to his interests, reflected in his ear for the good phrase and illuminating concept that may help us to see the world a bit differently and which can become sensitising concepts for wider research. His life’s work, he has commented, can be summed up in his key book titles, each with a striking image: Sexual Stigma (1975), The Making of the Modern Homosexual (1980), Modern Homosexualities (1992), Documents of Life (1983/2001), Telling Sexual Stories (1995), Intimate Citizenship (2003), Cosmopolitan Sexualities (2015), Narrative Power (2019), and Critical Humanism (2021) (see https://kenplummer.com/selected-writings-2/studying-sexualities-for-a-better-world/).

He is one of the most knowledgeable of sociologists, an avid reader, a fluent theorist but also a passionate and committed teacher who strives to communicate as widely as possible – his website is an excellent example of this. He is one of the very few senior sociologists I know who rather than relying on junior colleagues or graduate students insisted on teaching first year sociology undergraduates himself (and writing introductory text books for them as well as a wider readership). But grounding him, throughout his life and work, over many years, and evident in that listing of titles and the other books that followed, you can still trace the impact of perhaps the critical moment of his early life, his engagement with the gay liberation movement from 1970 which transformed his personal journey and profoundly shaped his trajectory as a scholar and engaged intellectual, though characteristically he never felt that he had contributed enough as an activist. That was when I first met him, at an early London Gay Liberation Front meeting in November 1970, when he was still working on his PhD, which became his first book, Sexual Stigma. We have remained warm friends and occasional collaborators and colleagues ever since. Throughout this long period of extraordinary change since the 1970s I have always found him a source of inspiration, intellectual challenge and support, and looking back I remain amazed at the extent to which, from often different starting points, we have come to very similar positions. In this essay, I will focus on the central thread of his journey: from sexualising sociology, exploring sexual stories, conceptualising intimate citizenship, and developing a critical humanism. Together these offer a story of Ken Plummer’s engagement with his overarching theme: what it is to be human, and sexual, in a world of multiple challenges and possibilities.

Sexualising sociology

With the existential pessimism to which he is spasmodically prone, the complement to his natural ebullience Ken Plummer (2010) has noted the ephemeral life span of ideas as their progenitors sink beneath the waves of new generations. That’s both true, as the fashionable pursuit of the new readily confirms, but also misleading, in that ideas that are apparently forgotten often have a strong subterranean life, popping up in unexpected places, as his own constant paddling in the ostensibly minor rivulets of social science confirms. It is now nearly 50 years since Sexual Stigma was published, and it is easy to forget how important and innovative a work it was, and how marginal it seemed to mainstream sociology (or sexology). A recent attempt by Heather Love (2021) to give a belated due recognition to sociological pioneers of many of the ideas resurrected in fin de siècle queer theory doesn’t discuss it. Yet this book has made not only Plummer’s later work possible, as one would expect, but also it has been central, I would argue, to the elaboration of a critical sociology of sexuality and the development of lesbian and gay studies on the way to LGBTQI+ and queer and post-queer studies. Without that book, none of the rest would have been possible, at least in the ways in which they developed.

Sexual Stigma is clearly part of that struggle ‘to use sociology to make sense of my own life as a young gay man’ that I quoted above. At just the same time I was turning away from the academic study of the history of political ideas which had been my postgraduate work in favour of exploring lesbian and gay history, with a similar motivation, Ken Plummer was implicitly challenging the weight of imperial sociology, including a burgeoning radical sociology, and its aspiration to be a rigorous ‘science’ of the social. Simultaneously he was rejecting the sexological tradition’s claim to be a ‘science’ of desire, with the ambition that a new, critical sociology of sexuality would take sex research in quite new directions. Yet there were few resources in the sociology canon to help a young researcher make sense of his sexuality or of gay life as it was exploding around him. Apart from the fact that sex research made you ‘morally suspect’, as he wryly remarks, the sociology of sex was a ‘theoretical sea of confusion’ (1975: 4). Plummer saw a dearth of serious sociological work on sexuality, just as I was finding the same in academic history. When later on Ken Plummer (2002) came to edit the four volumes of his collection of key writings on sexualities, he could only find nine articles published before 1968 that were seriously sociological enough to be placed amongst the 83 included. And even the most revered pioneers of modern sex research were found wanting: the ‘social book-keeping’ of Alfred Kinsey was breezily dismissed as a turgidly taxonomic and ponderous ‘massive dull tome of statistics’ (Plummer, 2015: 195).

So what constituted a radical, empathetic, and engaged alternative? The new sociology of sexuality, Plummer asserted, requires the recognition of ‘the social nature of sexuality while remaining sensitive to the boundaries imposed by biology and psychology’ (Plummer, 1975: 6). The ‘social’ emphasis is the obvious key, a positioning against the naturalistic or essentialist emphases of the sexological tradition, including the giants of post-war sex research such as Kinsey and colleagues and William Masters and Virginia Johnson. Yet absolutely there too is a recognition of limits imposed by bodies and minds. There is nothing in this book like the sociological determinism that some critics see in what came to be known as ‘social constructionism’. Though emphasising the demonstrable social moulding of categories and identities, even in this first book Plummer is alive to the possibility that there were ‘deep structures’ of homosexuality that were yet to be discovered (and sadly, if they exist at all, remain to be discovered despite many false alarms and wild polemics to this day).

The sources of Plummer’s ideas are many. We have already seen some key names of the symbolic interactionist tradition. A more empirical influence closer to home is the often overlooked work of the senior British researcher Michael Schofield, himself gay, who as Gordon Westwood wrote pioneering if covert apologias for homosexuality at a time when it was illegal and socially beyond the pale in the 1950s, and later under his given name was to author various further empirical studies of homosexuality, as well as on the sex lives of young people and promiscuity. As a young student, Plummer had helped out on Schofield’s research studies and was to become a life-long friend. Although many early gay liberationists, including myself, tended to see Schofield as a conservative figure by the early 1970s because of his apparent acceptance of negative views of homosexual life, and his ostensible closetry, Plummer recognised from the start his key contribution: that the homosexual should no longer be seen as a sick or evil creature but as a full social being with a life, and hopes and desires of their own, and a worthy subject of social research.

Another key role was played by the British sociologist Mary McIntosh (1968), whose essay in Social Problems, ‘The Homosexual Role’, was in the 1970s to become the founding text in exploring homosexuality as a social category rather than a biological anomaly. There were sufficient hints in the essay to inspire a distinctive gay and lesbian history, which is where I took off, as well as a sociology of homosexuality. She became a central figure in early gay liberation meetings in London, where we met. McIntosh and Plummer were also participants in the radical deviancy symposiums that were exploring alternatives to traditional criminology, and were emphasising the importance of social labelling and stigmatisation in constructing outsider categories. Later in the 1970s I was to join McIntosh and Plummer as a researcher in an ad hoc research grouping at the University of Essex, where they now both worked. Alongside its conviviality, generated above all by Plummer’s energy and enthusiasm, it became a powerhouse of ideas and of practical interventions, including pioneering television programmes on sexualities research and methodology for the Open University. One of its most significant outputs was the essay collection The Making of the Modern Homosexual (Plummer 1981) which was built around an interrogation of McIntosh’s essay by her and Plummer’s graduate students and myself as a colleague, and was to prove enormously influential in setting out an agenda for researching gay, lesbian, bisexual, and trans identities, categories, and communities.

Later this grouping was to assume an almost mythical reputation largely because of the denunciation of its malign influence by the American gay social anthropologist Stephen O. Murray. He saw in what he bizarrely called the Sussex Group a coterie of proto-Marxists who were set on subverting the hard fought achievements of gay liberation. There were indeed some self-declared Marxists in the group, including McIntosh and at the time myself, but the major influences on Plummer himself lay elsewhere, in interactionist social science. The single most important influence on Plummer’s development of a sociology of sexuality was the work of John Gagnon and William Simon, who had assisted Kinsey, and whose Sexual Conduct, published in London in 1973, provided a theoretical vocabulary that pervades Sexual Stigma: the social sources of sexuality, sexual scripts, the need that might once have existed to invent a purpose for sexuality. Scripts referenced the language of dramaturgy, but for Plummer it was not the prescriptions of classical drama that were important, rather the multifold possibilities of improvisation, ‘the making’ of sexualities. The interactionist approach to sexuality assumes the problematic and social nature of sexual meanings. Rather than sexuality determining our social being, social meanings determine and affect sexuality: ‘Nothing is sexual but naming makes it so. Sexuality is a social construct learnt in interaction with others’ (1975: 30).

Long before the ‘constructionist’ history of sexuality of Michel Foucault worked its problematising magic on sexual theory, Plummer following Gagnon and Simon laid out a strong outline of a viable sociology of sexuality rooted in interactionism, constructionism, and pragmatism which, as he put it in 1995, denies the absolute essentialist world of foundational truth; seeks pluralities and multiplicities; highlights the role of language and symbols, signs, and signifiers; and throws into doubt any grand narratives of sexuality. Social constructionist theories of sexuality may have a number of sources, but for Plummer the tradition of symbolic interactionism has always been central (1995).

The ambiguity, relativity, and modifiability of each actor’s social constructed sexual meanings lead to a seemingly infinite potentiality for the attribution of sexuality to any object. This though does not mean there is an infinite world of choice because choices inevitably get narrowed, routinized, and restricted by biology, culture, and social interaction. A sociology of sexuality can never rely on theoretical assertions. It requires a ‘massive research programme’ (1975) to tease out how we make our sexualities in the human worlds we inhabit.

Telling stories about sexuality

Plummer followed his own prescriptions by embarking in the late 1970s on a major research project in the Sociology Department at the University of Essex. His researcher was Annabel Faraday who was also doing a pioneering PhD on lesbian identity supervised by Mary McIntosh. Funded by the UK’s Social Science Research Council, the ‘Symbolic Interactionism and Sexual Differentiation’ research project was a sociological exploration of sexual variations and ‘deviances’, in the language of the time, especially paedophilia, sado-masochism, and transvestism and transsexuality, as they were then generally called, as well as other forms of sexual outsiderdom, using life history methods as the essential method of his interactionism. His position, he claimed, was that of a ‘pragmatic symbolic interactionist ethnographer’, and the research entailed a ‘reflective and reflexive hearing of voices’. It was an extremely ambitious project for the time and was to prove the only major empirical project on sexuality of his career.

For something like 15 months during 1978–1979 I worked alongside Ken Plummer and Mary McIntosh at Essex, researching a project on same-sex identities and communities from the late 19th century, offering a historical complement to Plummer’s sociological approach. Unfortunately for me the new Conservative government cut my funding in August 1979 after a pilot period, so my project ended prematurely, but we continued our collaboration more informally. I remember this period of working at Essex as one of intense intellectual and political excitement, as well as emotional turmoil for myself, but this in turn reflected a transformative moment in British political and cultural life as the advent of the new Conservative government led by Margaret Thatcher heralded a decade of New Right cultural shifts that reshaped progressive politics. One sign of this in relationship to Ken Plummer’s research was the increasing difficulty from the early 1980s of freely discussing some of the issues his empirical work was throwing up, most obviously in relation to paedophilia. Plummer was to be plagued for many years after by persistent accusations that he was an advocate for paedophilia rather than a researcher into it. Later, he was to admit a certain naivete about whether it was possible to analyse contested sexualities as if they were absolutely unproblematic. He abandoned the idea of a new major book on sexual diversity, and at this stage only a few articles flowed from the project. Instead Plummer battled with conceptual problems as he saw them with his method and approach: why do people tell their stories, why do we listen to them, what do they mean, what is their relationship to the truth, who can and should speak their truths, and what do they tell us about remembering – and forgetting? All these became increasingly relevant as the romantically utopian hopes of the 1970s about sexual freedom and human liberation were crushed by the darker realties of the 1980s, from backlash to epidemic, and as the movements that carried hopes for radical change fragmented into the ‘sex wars’ between feminists. Plummer quietly continued to support progressive causes – such as the great Miners’ strike of 1984-5 – and showed a growing interest in radical feminist views on pornography and violence to the surprise of many of his colleagues, who tended more to identify with pro-sex feminists and the defence of sexual choice. Plummer was never one to follow a party line, and he was influenced by developing critiques of masculinity. More fundamentally, from the early 1980s there was a major turn in his work leading to his new emphasis on the analysis of sexual stories, which in turn was a critique of the anti-humanist approaches which still dominated mainstream, including leftist, sociology. For Plummer research was inextricably social, moral, and political in its implications, and this was laid bare in the first edition of his Documents of Life in 1983.

It is difficult now to remember how quaintly off-beam his advocacy of life history and storytelling seemed at a time of massive cultural and political polarisation. Yet barely 20 years later, when Life Documents 2 appeared in 2001, proudly proclaiming itself as a guide to humanist sociology, there had been a growing recognition of the value and validity of Plummer’s work. Sexual storytelling and the claims to intimate citizenship closely linked to it had become central to critical sexualities research.

Human sexuality, Plummer wrote in Telling Sexual Stories in 1995, ‘wanders in a world of ambiguity, disorder, potential chaos’ (1995: 177). Sexualities need stories to provide coherence, and sexual storytelling is a part of the elaborate symbolic systems which make social life possible. These stories are not simply languages, texts, or discourses; Plummer wants to move away from the sort of analysis which ‘reduces dense, empirical human life to texts’ (1995:16).

Stories can be told when they can be heard, and come into their own when a community has been rendered ripe and willing to hear these stories. From the 1970s new sexual stories began to be told, not by the expert voices from above but by the grassroots voices from below in growing social worlds and communities. These are stories in the ‘flow of power’ and are transforming what can be said about sexuality and gender. In Telling Sexual Stories, he offers three case studies that illustrate this: rape survival stories, gay and lesbian ‘coming out’ stories, and recovery stories that tell of struggles against dependency and addiction, including the modern invention, sexual addiction. These were modernist stories, with clear structures of storytelling (in the case of coming out stories of desires that couldn’t be named, of guilt and shame, of tentative meeting of others like yourself, of coming out to yourself and then coming out publicly as you discovered a new world of possibility) that were extremely powerful and have inspired libraries of coming out narratives. They affirmed that we have much in common with many others we can name as like ourselves. But there is a supreme paradox in this process of storytelling: in speaking our truth we reveal a multiplicity of truths. Instead of confirming a common core of being, late modern stories fracture into tales of difference, multiplicity, plurality, fiction, and fluidity. The gay and lesbian stories of early gay liberation have become stories of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, intersex, enquiring, asexual, pansexual, queer, gender fluid, plus plus plus, that challenge any unitary notions of sexuality and gender. How in this maelstrom of potentialities can we find common belongings?

Towards intimate citizenship

Citizenship is about belonging and recognition. According to one of its most influential theorists, T. H. Marshall, it is a status bestowed on those who are full members of a community. All who possess the status are equal with respect to the rights and duties with which the status is endowed (Marshall, 1983 [1950]: 253). Originally a civil and political concept it has gradually extended its meaning to incorporate rights that were hitherto ignored – class, gender, race, and disability, all of which engendered struggles and mobilisation, The idea of sexual citizenship was implicit in the earliest campaigns for LGBTQ+ rights. For David Evans (1985), whose book Sexual Citizenship was one of the first to articulate the concept fully, it represented the partial and disempowering incorporation of the claims of sexual minorities into the capitalist and consumerist status quo. For others it was a potentially empowering concept, less a set of prescriptions than a series of aspirations. For Ken Plummer, it was a concept that seemed a logical complement to his developing analysis of the new narratives around sexuality and intimate life. The University of Essex once again proved an ideal context for his developing ideas. One of his colleagues was the leading sociologist Bryan Turner (1993) who was engaged with a major exploration of the relationship between citizenship, the body, and human rights in social theory. Plummer’s work was both part of this ongoing debate and a distinctive contribution as he went beyond the idea of sexual citizenship to a conceptualisation of what he called intimate citizenship.

Intimate citizenship for Plummer flagged a proliferation of debates about how to live in a late modern world. It was a public discourse on personal life, referring to all those areas of life that had traditionally been regard as private, outside the claims of social life, but are necessarily if not always obviously structured by social forces and public imperatives. This is what sexual and gender politics since the late 1960s had insistently affirmed – ‘the personal is political’ – and what Plummer was attempting to capture were new worlds of intimate life in the making. ‘Intimate citizenship’ was he suggested a ‘sensitizing concept’ that alerted us to the possibilities of these new worlds, and the new understandings of moralities and ethics that were in play. It speaks of ‘the possibilities of new personal narratives that may be told around the intimate and the sexual stories which suggest new living arrangements, new families, new ways of thinking about feelings, bodies, representations and identities, and new modes of the erotic’ (1995:161).

The idea of intimate citizenship was in large part response to profound changes in the worlds of sexuality, and especially in the direction of LGBTQ+ politics under the double impact of political reaction and the HIV/AIDS epidemic. In its continued growth in this context, the LGBTQ+ world moved beyond its early preoccupation with sexual freedom and coming out towards full recognition of human rights, including most prominently parental and marriage rights. But beyond this was a recognition of a wider shift from emancipatory or liberationist politics to a life politics (Giddens, 1992), ‘a radical, pluralistic, democratic, contingent, participatory politics of human life choices and difference’ in the making (Plummer, 1995: 147).

These were possibilities simultaneously opened up and threatened by the transformations of late modernity, brought about by the complex and contradictory effects of globalisation, the weakening of traditions and individualisation, which gave rise inevitably to conflicting stories – fundamentalist, conservative, liberal and progressive, and transgressive. There was a delicate balance between utopian possibilities and dystopian threats, and Plummer forecast that the late modern world will become an increasingly ‘risky place’ (1995). Plummer’s later works are framed by this sense that the world is finely balanced between human potentialities for good and human disaster.

In confronting heightened risk, Plummer suggests that there can be no solace or hope in the absolutes of Revelation or Faith, the certainties of Science, the lessons of History, or the pursuit of an imaginary Truth. At the same time, the weakening of a foundationalist ethic does not necessarily lead to a relativistic morass. There was a need for a position of ‘thin universals’, an acknowledgement of universal potentials and capacities that define what it means to be human. Moral life is a web of narratives, Plummer argues, with narrative as an ethical bond (after Alasdair MacIntyre), a source of moral learning (Martha Nussbaum), a well of moral tales (Carol Gilligan), and a vehicle of moral change (Richard Rorty). Instead of grand narratives, Plummer looked to grounded everyday moralities as a key to how people can conduct their moral lives (2003: 95, 100).

Implicit in all these reflections was a growing argument about critical humanism that was to dominate his later writings.

Elaborating critical humanism

In the Introduction to Critical Humanism: A Manifesto for the 21st Century (2021), Plummer recounts how in 2007 he had a liver transplant that saved his life. Over many years he had developed a chronic, potentially fatal liver disease and his life had become increasingly precarious. The only way though was by a liver transplant: after an agonising wait a suitable liver was donated by a 17 year old girl killed in a car crash. From that tragedy came his hope. He was ‘born again’, he writes: ‘Balancing on the edge of death for three and a half years and experiencing a successful transplant most surely wants to make you celebrate the wonders of being uniquely alive, connected to the world and being complexly human’ (2021: 1). But as in all his later work, part of that complexity of being human was the necessary recognition of the morass of ‘anti-humanity’, ‘a deep disconnection from being human as we engage in mass dehumanization, mass expulsions, mass digitalism and mass extinctions’ (2021: 3). Surely in such a conflictual and hate filled world the pieties of traditional humanism seemed hopelessly useless. Humanism had long been subjected to relentless critique – as male, white, Western, imperialistic, racist, classist, femicidal, essentialist, individualistic – and a cover for continuing exploitation under the guise of human rights. Plummer was fully aware of such critiques ‘Humanity is in a mess. Why’, he asks himself, ‘still write about a moribund humanism?’ (2021:3).

But what else is there? ‘We need to find a fallible universality out of our precarious particularity’ (2021: 5). Humanity may be an invented concept, but it can be reinvented to suggest a collective social nature of being human that is connected, relational, and valued. Through language and stories we can act to share what we have in common, and the good things that give meaning to our lives. We can find a solidarity in loving and caring for one another. ‘To live well with other people, animals and things in the deep multiverse is surely a laudable goal’ (2021: 5). So the key questions become:

How are we to live cooperatively with our diverse yet common humanity, not rendering it divisive or dehumanising? How can we best live together with our differences (2021:5).

This is the core challenge of critical humanism, and the unifying thread of all Plummer’s work. Critical humanism, he argues, engages with and tells the stories of the constant process of narrative construction and reconstruction around changing ideas of what it is to be human, with the goal of engaging with different understandings in the hope of finding pathways to better futures and worlds. It is not about revealing the truth of humanity. It is an emergent project to construct a common understanding of what we can find that unites us across the chasm of our differences. And it can be seen at work in one of the most fraught and contested areas of our common humanity: human sexualities.

Cosmopolitan Sexualities: Hope and the Humanist Imagination, published in 2015, is the sister book of Critical Humanism. It is an extraordinary achievement by any standard, an apparently effortless medley of theory and empirical examples, global in scope and understanding, one of the most significant products of the ‘class of 1969-70’ of writers on sexuality. His self-imposed ‘challenge’ is to come to grips with ‘the global gendered world of human sexual complexity: the human sexual labyrinth’ (2015: 2). But this is no tedious trudge across conflicting theories, or an accumulation of detailed ethnographies. The focus of the book is the challenge of understanding human vulnerabilities and how we can live with gender and sexual diversity, how we can make meaningful distinctions, and how we can begin to construct institutions that will enable us to make cosmopolitanism, world citizenship, a realistic possibility. This is the heart of a critical humanism ‘that takes seriously the centrality of a contingent human vulnerability, agency and meaning emerging alongside global human values: empathy and dialogue, care and kindness, dignity and rights, actualization and human flourishing, and fairness and justice’ (2015: 3). He is offering a map of possibilities rather than an encyclopaedia of sexual lives and solutions.

The first part of the book starts with the transformation of human sexualities since the turn of the millennium and in particular the growing recognition of their infinite pluralism and variety. As the facts of this complexity dawn so the challenge of finding ways of living with it grows. The second part of the book examines some of the problems that have arisen as people and cultures inevitably try to grapple with this challenge, which in all too many historic examples have led as much to fear and hatred as love and harmony. Against these darkening realities, Plummer attempts to tease out the ‘grounded utopian processes’ that nudge us a little closer to a recognition and acceptance of ‘inclusive sexualities’ (2015: 5; italics in original) that can accommodate gender and sexual complexity. He is not attempting a grand design for a cosmopolitan world but looking for those local grounded examples that can offer pathways to better worlds and lives.

Plummer, like myself, is a child of social movements that sparked what has come to be known disparagingly as ‘identity politics’. In the paradox I noted earlier, the very process of finding a sure sense of ourselves through collective belongings and the strong assertion of selfhood (as gay) has led us to problematise the fixity of identities, the absoluteness of who we say we are. ‘Human sexualities, like lives, are contingent. They do not have a safe, sure inner coherence, but lead us tumbling into precarious worlds’ (2015: 192).

In that precarity, we find examples of everyday kindnesses. The transformation of the global structures of power, with all their cruelties and inequities may be necessary, but they are long term, and certainly contingent possibilities. The days of big abstractions and dreams of revolutionary utopias are over (and Plummer never really believed in them anyway). ‘We need instead a down-to-earth everyday loving pragmatism of empathy, fairness, kindness and care. These, indeed, are the little-grounded utopian processes of hope. We have to think very small in a very big way’ (2015: 189).

This is the theme that finds its fullest realisation in his ‘Manifesto for the 21st Century’. He concludes that work:

It may well be that, ultimately, the human project is a uniquely tiny but diverse one. It creates minuscule local worlds that enable the little interests, lives and hopes of an everyday life to develop the small joys of being a tiny but vital human (2021: 204).

Plummer’s diffidence is detectable in all his works, which he often distances himself from with frequent references as in this quotation to ‘uniquely tiny’ human projects or elsewhere as ‘small books’, ‘fragments’ of understanding, ‘modest’ contributions. There is a danger that we are left simply with Voltaire’s apparent urgings to cultivate one’s own garden. But in the absence of all embracing claims and proclamations of Truth, there is surely a truly major ambition here, to embrace the pleasures and pains of what it is to be human in many, overlapping social worlds.