A Third Way
By Sam Moore
In a 1998 speech to Labour Party Conference, Tony Blair went out of his way to tell people that his much-discussed Third Way (a philosophy also adopted by Clinton on the other side of the Atlantic) wasn’t just a fancy way of saying “Labour are centrists now”: The Third Way is not a new way between progressive and conservative politics. It is progressive politics distinguishing itself from conservatism of left or right (Tony Blair).
Finding a name for this press is something that was more difficult than it looked, like naming the zine before hand (initially the plan was to call it Raspberry Beret, but the shorter, sharper Powder, with its slightly queer double-meaning, won the day. And then we were stuck with it when I used it in a bio after having an essay published in the Oxonian Review). The idea of turning Powder into one arm of a small press is something that I found myself thinking about after talking to a few other small press publishers for an article (people at Chapterhouse Press and Sick Love Zine), and the general state of queer art. So the name needed to be clever, queer, and radical. That’s what made Third Way seem so appealing: a way of queering one of the most upper-case-e Establishment phrases of my lifetime. And even if I don’t agree with Blair and Clinton on the merits of the Third Way as a political philosophy (no matter how progressive it might want to seem, it still reads like centrism), the thing that’s most striking about it is the way in which it acknowledges the binary system of party-politics.
I spent some time this autumn and winter knocking around an essay about the prevalence of death in contemporary queer cinema. I watched Supernova for the now-digital London Film Festival, and by the time it enters its third act, it becomes obsessed with the inevitable death of one of the two major characters (a gay couple travelling across the country together, making the most of the time they’ve got left). Even in 2020, it was impossible to shake the specter of death from queer storytelling. It seemed to exist as one of two poles — at least that’s what I said in the pitch — with the other being coming out. Even now, there were only a couple of types of queer stories that seemed to get told, especially in mainstream cinema. Queer life was still binary; coming out on one side, and dying on the other, with no room for the actual life lived that took place in-between these two points.
Queer space still struggle with identities that exist beyond easy to understand binaries, something I’ve written about before. I’ve even made offhand comments in emails to editors or alongside poetry submissions saying something like “bisexuality is a weird one to talk about here,” after sending two poems about what might be called “Gay culture” (a term that needs to be rethought), alongside a third one about a girl, my relationship with her, and her relationship with God. There’s always the fear that the third poem undermines that first two, that somehow talking about attraction to a different gender puts a limit on your own queer identity. It comes back to binaries, the kind of thing that gets wrapped up in terms like Gay culture, or Gay activism (which seemed to stop doing much of anything after equal marriage; a worthy cause and fundamentally decent victory but something that should never have been the end of the fight).
So, to borrow from Blair, it might be worth saying that Third Way Press is a radical art distinguishing itself from the conservatism of straight or gay.
The hope for Third Way is to find a way to shine a light on those moments in-between, to champion work that, in form and content, refuses to exist entirely through a binary lens. Some of this work will be political, some of it will be personal (and of course, for a lot of the work, those two things will be inseparable).
The problem with binaries is how limiting they are; they can force you to define yourself in ways that you know aren’t right, because points on binaries are often presented as the only options available to you.
You cannot permit this election to be about false choices from America’s past, about the same old categories, the same old boxes we try to put people in (Bill Clinton).
Clinton said that after the Cold War, we were living in a new world. I don’t think that this world — the one at the heart of Third Way, rooted in the intersections and contradictions that define the ways we move through the world — is all that new, even if intersectionality as a term is something that falls in and out of vogue when it comes to politics and activism. This world has existed forever, and a lot of writers and publishers who have come before us have done the work of revealing this. As with so many things, especially when it comes to queer history and culture, we wouldn’t be here without everyone that came before us.
Blair and Clinton seemed to want to rise above the norms of party-politics, but this Third Way isn’t about rising above anything. Critiques of existing queer art aren’t levelled just so we can place ourselves above them, but to highlight the kind of work that we want to champion, work that understands that definition and identification are never simple acts.
The current plan for Third Way is to release the first issue of Powder very soon — themed around Erasure — and the second one, on Illness and Isolation relatively soon after that, with the next step to be announced in the new year. This is the beginning of a long and — hopefully — rewarding journey, and I know that some of our plans have had to be delayed a few times this year because of what 2020 has been like, but we’re happy to be moving forward, and doing our bit to champion new writing that refuses to be easily defined.
