ARTICLE Queering Martin Buber: Harry Hay’s Erotic Dialogical * Jay Michaelson ABSTRACT One of the lingering questions in Martin Buber’s mature thought is the place of the erotic within it. Despite some earlier remarks on the subject, and the potentiality for I-You relations to emerge from erotic encounters, Buber’s later work seems solely concerned with the objectifying tendencies in Eros, rather than its redemptive possibili- ties. This article reads Buber together with a lesser-known dialogical thinker, Harry Hay, the founder of the frst gay rights organization in the United States, who developed what he called subject-SUB- JECT consciousness: a nonobjectifying, nonhierarchical dialogical relationship between gay male subjects. Though apparently unaware of Buber, Hay’s parallel dialogical system centers desire and Eros as generative of a redemptive politics and ethics. After introducing the reader to Hay’s dialogical philosophy, I propose that, on the one hand, Hay’s inclusion of eroticism enriches our readings of Buber and, on the other, that Buber’s nonessentialist and nongendered thought is a necessary complement to Hay’s. Reading Buber through Hay offers one approach to a nonhierarchical and sex-positive erotic ethos in the context of dialogical thought, and reading Hay through dialogical philosophy offers a way to recover subject-SUBJECT consciousness in a postessentialist frame. Keywords: Martin Buber, Harry Hay, queer theory, ethics, sexual ethics Shofar 36.3 (2018): 31–59