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Every brainy queer of my generation, especially those born under the sign of Saturn, went through a phase where Susan Sontag was their daddy She schooled you on everything: what to read, what to watch, who was important, and why you should know about it; what an intellectual authority was, how to perform authority well enough to become one; and, crucially, how to wear your hair She was how to pay attention to everything, why you should, and how to be serious about it She was why seriousness could be cool She was why being a snob was sexy She was the singular archetype of the twentieth-century American public intellectual She was New York City She was the centre of the world She was Artaud, Bresson, Sebald, Cioran, Canetti, and Weil She was smoking in bars with your friends, talking until dawn, revelling in how promiscuous she had made high culture be She was an informed, sophisticated opinion that you could bring out at parties to impress everyone And she was an opinion about almost everything: how camp puts quotation marks around all it touches (one of her most famous sentences: ‘not a lamp but a “lamp”, not a woman but a “woman”’), how the erotics of art is what we need, how the language around illness is often a lie She was those slow, black-and-white, foreign-language films you watched with the person you were dating and, when they fell asleep during them, it gave you a reason why things wouldn’t work out between you Of course, like any Daddy, as you grew into yourself, she began to lose her necessity She came to represent someone who you used to want to be Your adoration revealed itself, with age, to have been an affected performance that you used to become someone you weren’t yet Also, as the twenty-first century barrelled along into post-2008 precarity and Snapchat-timespans and climate catastrophe, you learned that Cioran and Canetti didn’t really matter anymore The moral quest for the perfect soul – a classical standard to which Sontag held both herself and