If the ‘popular image of homosexuality in the late 20th century’ was that of monied, white men, then each of these examples represent contemporary gay identities haunted by this recent history. Considered together, they offer a hauntology of cis gay subjectivity—an identity forming around a process of failed mourning that unhelpfully sublimates the possibility of queer futurities.

In The White Lotus, the pursuit of absolution becomes a form of self-actualisation. Shame affirms these characters—both in how they respond to it, and how they attempt to elicit it in others. But this is an ability reserved to them precisely because of their circumstances. Privilege, we learn by the show’s end, offers a limitless supply of tools through which to both invoke shame and resolve it.