A poetics of sensuality through drugs, music and sex was uniquely available in New York in the late 1970s, before the inner boroughs underwent gentrification-related transformation from the mid 1980s.^[26] It was still possible for artists and the culturally radical or marginal to afford to live in metropolitan New York, and McDiarmid was attuned to the relative cultural freedom that the streets of the city offered at this time, before ‘zero-tolerance’ policing of street misdemeanours changed the cultural character of inner city New York.^[27] McDiarmid had been interested by the more dissident traditions in American intellectual and cultural life, as evidenced in his 1972 essay and in subsequent interviews.

In spite of conservative political regimes such as those of Ronald Reagan (US President from 1981–89) and Margaret Thatcher (British Prime Minister from 1979–90), the 1970s and early 1980s in the urban West were a period of paradoxical cultural and social radicalism. The idea of ‘politics’ had been extended beyond the traditional parameters of the liberal and Marxist left to include personal and private life, sexuality, gender and race and to incorporate hitherto incompatible cultural themes and political methodologies. Andrew Ross describes this post-1960s politics, largely of the Western middle class, as generating ‘a vocabulary of dissent and anti-authoritarianism’, wielded against an establishment that was ‘struggling to resolve, through consumerism, its long crisis of over production’. In this struggle,

McDiarmid’s personal and creative practice—the kind of art he made and the kind of sociality he engaged in—fell firmly on the hedonistic side of the hedonism–consumption tension mentioned by Ross. His oeuvre as a whole, while remaining intensely political, engages the hedonistic politics of pleasure and excess extending to the utopian and the ecstatic.