To speak of reflections after Stonewall is not to suggest any logical chronology in which thought follows practice. But the Stonewall Riots do express a moment of intensity in the practice and thought of the radical gay rebellion of the period against the everyday violence of normative heterosexual capitalism, a rebellion mutually sustained by parallel dissidences of women, blacks, the colonised; a rebellion whose resonances continue to move through societies, and to which institutionalised powers are obliged to respond, with relative openness and/or rejection.
To cite Michel Foucault,
“Since the nineteenth century, great political institutions and great political parties have confiscated the process of political creation; that is, they have tried to give to political creation the form of a political program in order to take over power. I think what happened in the sixties and early seventies is something to be preserved. One of the things that I think should be preserved, however, is the fact that there has been political innovation, political creation, and political experimentation outside the great political parties, and outside the normal or ordinary program. It’s a fact that people’s everyday lives have changed from the early sixties to now, and certainly within my own life. And surely that is not due to political parties but is the result of many movements. These social movements have really changed our whole lives, our mentality, our attitudes, and the attitudes and mentality of other people – people who do not belong to these movements. And that is something very important and positive. I repeat, it is not the normal and the old traditional political organizations that have led to this examination.”
On the occasion of the anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, we share four authors, their writings or interviews with them, who marked the epoch and whose creative work both contested oppressive authorities and powers, and helped to experience differently and rethink the complexity of domination: Guy Hocquenghem, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Mario Mieli, Michel Foucault.
Guy Hocquenghem, active in events of May 1968 in france, was a pioneer of homosexual liberation in the 1970s and founding member of Front homosexuel d’action révolutionnaire. He would radicalise the legacy of May 68, both in his writing and in his life, through a vehement criticism of fetishistic conceptions of politics and revolution.
Many people think of the revolution as a series of struggles, defeats and victories. I see it rather as a canvas, spreading, in movement, with a loose weave. Is it too serious an affair to be placed in the hands of players? Let us not forget that one of the rules of the ridiculous game of capitalism is to stop the revolution from being a game, to make sure that it never grows opposed to docile reality, that it never goes against obeying this so-called reality.
…
The queer is a traitor whose greatest fear is betraying normalcy. And once he has overcome that shame, he realizes by betraying normalcy, what he did in fact was bow to it. Our own, more Machiavellian game, could be to allow the repressed half of desire, whether homosexual or heterosexual, to gush forth from everyone. Man should allow himself to desire man as much as he desires woman. And in the same way, man should allow himself to desire woman just as much as he desires man.
Guy Hocquenghem, The Screwball Asses
…
Revolutionary demands must be derived from the very movement of desire; it isn’t only a new revolutionary model that is needed, but a new questioning of the content traditionally associated with the term “revolution”, particularly the notion of the seizure of power.
…
Family heterosexuality dominates the whole of civilised sexuality; it is certainly no liberation to have to go through it. There can be no symmetry between what the gay movement advocates on the one hand and the dominant form of sexuality on the other. In other words, if bisexuality is to be viable, or better – why set a limit? – if there is to be an end to the sexual norm, this must come through the concrete disintegrative process which the gay movement has begun. Some women, and they more than anyone know that heterosexuality is no conquest, say they can only believe in a bisexuality which is derived from homosexuality. However approximate the formula may be, it appears sound: what is repressed in homosexuals is not the love of woman as a particular sexual object but the entire subject-object system which constitutes an oppression of desire.
…
The relationship between the gay movement and other kinds of struggle for the destruction of the repressive authorities is hardly comparable with the relationships which revolutionary political movements usually have between them. It was for the sake of the struggle against sexism, the cult of masculinity and the American version of war as a kind of “manly game” that the gay movement took part in the struggle against the war in Vietnam. This kind of distinction may seem artificial to civilised political thinking. Nevertheless, it carries some weight of its own. This is how the teeming confusion of youth movements, women’s movements, gay movements, ecological movements, community movements etc., experience politics. They all start from a particular desiring situation (their relation to sex, to nature, to the environment) and not, as the traditional workers’ movement would like, from a strategy based on general political theories ; the political world is founded on the debate between these !theories, which are all equally true whatever the bearer. The appearance of “autonomous movements”, movements which reject the law of the signifier all the more because they create a [aw for themselves, has completely upset the political world.
The confusion is total, since the links between these desiring situations do not occur according to the logical model of the signifier-signified but prefer to follow the logic of the event. It is therefore no use trying to work out the relationships between these movements in rational or strategic terms. It is incomprehensible that the gay movement should be closely connected with the ecological movement. Nevertheless, it is so. In terms of desire, the motor car and family heterosexuality are one and the same enemy, however impossible it may be to express this in political logic.
Guy Hocquenghem, Homosexual Desire
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What follows is Chapter 6 from Guy Hocquenghem’s 1972 essay, Homosexual Desire, entitled “The Homosexual Struggle”.
…
In Germany at the end of the nineteenth century, Hirschfeld created his Scientific Humanitarian Committee, a movement fot the defence and justification of homosexuality in the face of social repression. The “Club Arcadie” in France serves approximately the same purpose. However, what I mean by “homosexual struggle” is essentially different: it is no longer a matter of justifying, or vindicating, or even attempting a better integration of homosexuality within society. I shall now be discussing the way in which recent gay movements, linked up with leftwing activism, have changed or overturned the commonly acknowledged relation between desire and politics. Homosexual action, not action in favour of homosexuality: now that the gay movements have opened this crack, what has really changed?
The revolution of desire
Wilhehn Reich described how the restoration of the law on homosexuality in the USSR corresponded with the rise of stalinism:
“In March 1934, there appeared a law which prohibits and punishes sexual intercourse between men. . . . This law designated sexual intercourse between men as a ‘social crime’ to be punished, in lighter cases, with imprisonment of from three to five years. . . . Thus homosexuality was again put in the same category as other social crimes : sabotage, banditism, espionage, etc.”[130]
(According to Reich, at the time of the Soviet revolution homosexuality had enjoyed a general climate of tolerance, which was expressed in the fact that the Soviet Encyclopaedia’s definition of it relied on Hirschfeld and Freud.)[131]
Repressive actions are generally much more consistent than revolutionary movements. Reich’s analysis was based on the contrast between the Soviet Union’s revolutionary nature and its inevitable degeneration. In this same sense, revolutionary movements usually find themselves in the position of accusing the “official” communist parties of treason or degeneration. When a spokesman for the French Communist Party can say something such as “Finally, [the authorities] have always in store, like a fire smouldering under the ashes, a little barricade for the eve of the referendum or a few homosexuals for the First of May,” the united front of people seeking social change is shaken to the core. (In connection with homosexuals in particular, this same spokesman talked about the contrast between “the democratic and revolutionary order” and “leftist mayhem.”) The repression of desire, whether it be in the name of the higher interests of mankind or in those of the proletariat, is strictly the same in its effects. The first effect of the appearance of the gay movement has been to expose this equivalence.
It is possible that revolutionary politics are in themselves repressive processes. In this case, where does the opposition between Reich and Freud lead to? Reich thought in terms of revolutionary politics – he even practised a sexual politics (this was the first instance of a revolutionary movement discussing sexuality). To the inevitability of the repression of desire, which Freud had affirmed in Civilisation and its Discontents, he opposed a project for sexual revolution which tackled the question of happiness head-on. He saw what Freud refused to see: that the famous “reality principle” is not irremovable but rests in fact on the supremacy of the heterosexual family. He even showed how the social system of repression tries to pass off Oedipal repression as unalterable. He analysed the phenomenon of fascism in terms of desire, thereby rejecting the whining attitude to it which is common both to middle-class liberalism and to ossified marxism. However, Reich’s sexual revolution can unfortunately be reduced to the idea that what is repressed is man’s natural inclination towards woman and vice-versa. He himself wrote:
“According to sex-economic knowledge, homosexuality is, in a vast majority of cases, a result of a very early inhibition of heterosexual love …. (1.) Homosexuality among adults is not a social crime, it does no harm to anybody. (2.) It can be reduced only by establishing all necessary prerequisites for a natural love life among the masses. (3.) Until this goal can be achieved, it must be considered a mode of sexual gratification alongside the heterosexual one and should (with the exception of the seduction of adolescents and children) not be punished.”[132]
The sexual revolution solves the problem of homosexuality by making it disappear naturally, ‘With a minimum of repression. Elsewhere Reich indulges in numerous jokes about the homosexuality in Hitler’s youth camps,[133] speaking about the “development of homosexual tendencies and relationships between boys who had never thought of it before.” Simply coupling the word “sexual” with the word “revolution” cannot get rid of the heterosexual norm. We could add: on the contrary. From this point of view, and however reactionary his political position, Freud shows the greater understanding of polymorphously perverse desire.
Something always seems to go wrong somewhere between desire and revolution; we get the same continual wail both from those who want to but can’t (the far left) and from those who can but won’t (the Communist Party).
We must give up the dream of reconciling the official spokesmen of revolution to the expression of desire. We cannot force desire to identify with a revolution which is already so heavy with the past history of the “workers’ movement”. Revolutionary demands must be derived from the very movement of desire; it isn’t only a new revolutionary model that is needed, but a new questioning of the content traditionally associated with the term “revolution”, particularly the notion of the seizure of power.
The gay movement, along with certain other left-wing movements, has been successful in exposing the reactionary implications of waiting for an upheaval to come from some rough, muscle-bound, virile proletariat.[134] Reich’s attempt, through the German Communist Party, to reconcile the revolutionary past with the emergence of desire proved to be grossly reactionary with regard to homosexuality. This may, however, be an indication that radical questioning can spring from politically virgin and totally marginal territory. The apolitical nature of the homosexual question, in the sense of its absence from the sphere of traditional revolutionary politics, may also be its good fortune. All the “radical” movements appearing today share with the gay movement the fact that they are devoid of a political past (the women’s movement, ecology, etc.) and are marginal in relation to the questions normally put forward on revolutionary platforms.
The question of homosexuality is one of the many which are not asked so long as those concerned do not themselves do so. It is marginal essentially because it is totally alien to the “masses”.
A French progressive weekly, Politique-Hebdo, once gave an article on FHAR (the Homosexual Front for Revolutionary Action) the headline “Revolutionnaire par la bande”. [Translator’s note: The word bande as used here is a pun: it means “margin”, but it is also a slang term for “erection”.] The implied criticism was on the one hand that the erection is not terribly revolutionary, and on the other hand that the gay movement strikes only at the fringe, at the margins, and not at the centre of the social problematic. Desire is fated not only to manifest itself by erection alone, but also to indicate thereby that the real centre lies on the margin, i.e. that there is no centre at all.
Revolutionary tradition maintains a clear division between the public and the private. The special characteristic of the homosexual intervention is to make what is private – sexuality’s shameful little secret – intervene in public, in social organisation. It demonstrates that alongside (and perhaps in opposition to) conscious political investments which are based on the broad social masses united by their interests, there is a system of unconscious or libidinal investments whose repression depends precisely on the capacity of the political system to think of itself as the only possible one. A reactionary libidinal investment may well coexist with a progressive or revolutionary political investment, in the shadow of the wall dividing private from political life. Daniel Guérin pointed out, in connection with the abovementioned remarks from the French Communist Party, that the presence of homosexuals on the May Day demonstration would certainly not be new: what is new is that homosexuals now shout aloud what they are on such occasions. Besides, the Communist Party says it doesn’t so much dislike homosexuality as the mixture of styles, the interference of a purely private (and therefore politically meaningless) affair in the sphere of official relations between the classes.
The gay movement is thus not seeking recognition as a new political power on a par with others; its own existence contradicts the system of political thought, because it relates to a different problematic. The bourgeoisie generates the proletarian revolution, but defines the framework within which the struggle takes place; this we could call the framework of civilisation, from whose historical continuity every social force benefits. In this sense, Freud is right to speak of the discontents existing in civilisation, or as we might say, the discontents of civilisation. In a discussion on Fourier, Rene Schérer notes:
“In this respect, the appearance of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat is a phenomenon which takes place within civilisation. The stakes of the struggle could well be, in this case, the appropriation of civilisation by either one of the two classes.”[135]
From this point of view the gay movement appears basically uncivilised, and it is not without reason that many people see it as the end of reproduction and thus the end of the species itself. There is no point in speculating whether the class war might be replaced by a war of civilisation, which would have the advantage of adding a cultural and sexual dimension to the political and economic struggle. Going to this extent would mean challenging the very concept of civilisation, and we must retreat with Fourier to the notion of a struggle against civilisation understood as the Oedipal succession of generations. Civilisation forms the interpretative grid through which desire becomes cohesive energy. Wildcat movements among workers, actions which take place outside the commonly accepted political frameworks and which make no formal claims, not even for the seizure of power, are part of the disintegration of that coherence. The most honest leftists will cite the desire for a new society as evidence of absence. It is already too much to believe that the “wildcatter” is
a future civilised person, as the child is a future adult. The gay movement is a wildcat movement because it is not the signifier of what might become a new form of “social organisation”, a new stage of civilised humanity, but a crack in what Fourier calls “the system of the falsity of civilised loves”; it demonstrates that civilisation is the trap into which desire keeps falling.
Why homosexuality?
While on the one hand Freud is more lucid than Reich as regards the component forces of sexuality, on the other hand and this is what enables him to keep his discovery under control – he sticks to a reactionary thesis by enclosing desire within the privatisation of the family. Deleuze and Guattari write:
“There is a thesis which Freud values most of all: the libido invests the social field as such only so long as it is desexualised and sublimated.”[136]
But the homosexuality of the gay movement invests the social field directly, without passing through sublimation; in fact it desublimates everything it can by putting sex into everything.
But why homosexuality? What is so special about this particular category, this artificial subdivision of desire? Deleuze and Guattari also claim:
“For instance, no Homosexual Front is possible so long as homosexuality is caught in a relation of exclusive disjunction with heterosexuality, which refers them both to the same castrating Oedipal blueprint, charged with ensuring their differentiation.”[137]
What they do not state, though it explains the actual role played by homosexuality, is that the Oedipal system is not only a system of exclusive disjunction but also the system of oppression of one sexual mode, the heterosexual family mode, over all possible other modes. The Oedipal system actually brings the oppressed sexual modes together, even while it is trying to cut them off from the original non-differentiation of desire. General positions of principle are not enough here: it must be clearly stated, as the quotations in this book illustrate, that what nearly always emerges from the homosexual protest is a protest against the whole Oedipal system, and that the gay movement has brought the entirety of men’s sexual problems to the surface. The women’s movement has begun to find a response from men in this particular form.
On the other hand, it would be absurd to expect that we could reconstitute the polymorphism of desire by making a simple addition of all the forms of Oedipal sexuality, for example by adding homosexuality to heterosexuality. These forms as such are just arbitrary divisions. The very difference between man and woman is in itself already one of the given factors of the Oedipal family system. And the question which the gay movement raises is not so much that of the particular sexual object as that of the functioning mode of sexuality. It is not through the object and its choice that the non-exclusiveness of desire is revealed, but through its very system of functioning. In this respect there is a lot to be said for the so-called “homosexual” system of pick-ups and mechanical scattering (see the section on the “pick-up machine” at the end of the previous chapter), a system which is so obsessed by sexuality that it often stands accused of lacking soul or feeling.
It is therefore quite useless to contrast bisexuality with homosexuality, as a more accomplished system of sexual diversity. It is even ideologically suspect to seek, in the name of the principle that nothing is excluded, to bring strays back to the form of sexuality which is not only characteristic but dominant in our society. Family heterosexuality dominates the whole of civilised sexuality; it is certainly no liberation to have to go through it. There can be no symmetry between what the gay movement advocates on the one hand and the dominant form of sexuality on the other. In other words, if bisexuality is to be viable, or better – why set a limit? – if there is to be an end to the sexual norm, this must come through the concrete disintegrative process which the gay movement has begun. Some women, and they more than anyone know that heterosexuality is no conquest, say they can only believe in a bisexuality which is derived from homosexuality. However approximate the formula may be, it appears sound: what is repressed in homosexuals is not the love of woman as a particular sexual object but the entire subject-object system which constitutes an oppression of desire.
Experience in Europe and the USA has shown that the women’s movement and the gay movement have coincided. It is as if society could not bear to see in man what it demands to see in women, as if to dominate women and to repress homosexuality were one and the same thing. We shall therefore not accuse the gay movement of failing to relate to women, lest we reintroduce thereby the very guilt which we have worked to dissolve. Deleuze and Guattari point out that the women’s movement is perfectly justified in replying to people who accuse these women of expressing their penis envy, “We are not castrated and we don’t give a damn.”[138] The gay movement likewise replies that its members are not afraid of the castration which their fear of the relationship with women would seem to imply, and that in any case they are indifferent to such notions. The danger for homosexuality, the trap of desire, lies elsewhere, in what we call its guilt-induced perversion.
The homosexual situation which has been created by the gay movement, as opposed to those which have long been established in society, has the inestimable advantage of being located in fact rather than in principle, in the reality of everyday life where the division between the public and the private is abolished. Some left-wing elements may well have been outraged at Jean Genêt’s remark: “Perhaps if I had never gone to bed with an Algerian, I would never have approved of the FLN.” A leftwing weekly replied, “We would be the last, whatever our opinion of homosexuality, to demand any repression in that sphere. But the matter gets worrying when politics are thrown into it.” It all comes back to the French Communist Party’s remarks. Kicking over the traces causes a scandal. Live it, but don’t mention it in public. Significantly Minute,[139] a publication which specialises in anti-Arab racism, also picked on what Genêt said, stating that “In this sphere at least, colonialism is practised in reverse.” Between many Arabs and many homosexuals there are desiring relations which are unacceptable; so the cloak of Oedipal moral decency is thrown over them, which may well deeply affect those concerned. In Arab nationalism as expressed by some Arab students in France there is ready talk about “back-to-front colonialism”, though this is not something we can joke about: they are talking about colonialist pederasty, which means the exploitation of young Arabs for a modest fee. But they insist on the degenerate and debauched nature of homosexuality as a colonialist invention, and admit its existence among Arabs only as a substitute, when relations with women are difficult. We find the same attitude concerning prisoners, as if homosexuality were a necessity for them – a poor man’s sexuality, the sexuality of the oppressed as opposed to middle-class, degenerate homosexuality. We have to admit that a desiring relation of this type can apparently be experienced only if necessity is the excuse. But the guilt-inducing nature of such explanations makes them suspect, and offers the gay movement the chance to make an intervention based not on a kind of solidarity of principle but on a desiring relation.
There is one category among the oppressed which inspires a particular degree of civilised concern: the young, the sexual minors. The Oedipus complex is based on the succession of the generations and on the conflict between child and adult. It is obviously the adult who leads the child astray; if there is a homosexual between the two of them, it is inevitably the adult. Now many young people are affirming their desire to be seduced, their right to dispose of their own sexuality. In the abovementioned article, Minute abandons its jesting tone in order to deal with this serious matter:
“All this could just be grotesque. But when homosexual schoolboys are invited to organise and to expose their teachers’ ‘repression’, it all becomes loathesome.”[140]
The main opposition to psychoanalysis stems from the fact that it speaks about the existence of an infantile sexuality, even though immediately it is discovered it gets fed into the Oedipus complex and sublimation, and imprisoned in the famous “latency period” . Here too, as in the case of the Arabs, political thought presupposes the existence of groups of oppressors (adults – or Europeans) and oppressed (children – or Arabs), in order to exclude any possible desiring relation. It then becomes quite easy to say that the relation in question is due to oppression.
The “political” positions of the gay movement can therefore not be derived from the elementary classification into progressive and reactionary, because they challenge this classification.
The relationship between the gay movement and other kinds of struggle for the destruction of the repressive authorities is hardly comparable with the relationships which revolutionary political movements usually have between them. It was for the sake of the struggle against sexism, the cult of masculinity and the American version of war as a kind of “manly game” that the gay movement took part in the struggle against the war in Vietnam. This kind of distinction may seem artificial to civilised political thinking. Nevertheless, it carries some weight of its own. This is how the teeming confusion of youth movements, women’s movements, gay movements, ecological movements, community movements etc., experience politics. They all start from a particular desiring situation (their relation to sex, to nature, to the environment) and not, as the traditional workers’ movement would like, from a strategy based on general political theories; the political world is founded on the debate between these theories, which are all equally true whatever the bearer. The appearance of “autonomous movements”, movements which reject the law of the signifier all the more because they create a law for themselves, has completely upset the political world.
The confusion is total, since the links between these desiring situations do not occur according to the logical model of the signifier-signified but prefer to follow the logic of the event. It is therefore no use trying to work out the relationships between these movements in rational or strategic terms. It is incomprehensible that the gay movement should be closely connected with the ecological movement. Nevertheless, it is so. In terms of desire, the motor car and family heterosexuality are one and the same enemy, however impossible it may be to express this in political logic.
The perverse trap
It is not suitable to employ a triumphant tone when speaking about the social desiring struggle. I have already pointed out how unsatisfactory it is to confuse the term “homosexual” with “homosexual desire”. There is always a trap waiting for desire, inscribing the law in the heart of the dispute. We know how acceptable homosexuality is when it is seen as something perverse. A homosexual movement certainly cannot free itself from this perverse integration by simply announcing its presence. The trick of social repression is to forbid it in a loud enough voice to focus desire on what is supposed to be forbidden, so that anyone who wants to ignore the prohibition can have a taste of the transgression. France-Dimanche opened its investigation, not with the usual historical reference to the Greeks but, with successful journalistic daring, by introducing FHAR. The title of the first article was, “In France today, homosexuals dare to come out into the open”. We can sense the acid taste of transgression in “daring” to come out into “the open”. The taste of scandal, the political striptease, contain their own antidote. They wrap the gay movement in an apologetic discourse, they freeze the event into a role.
This is all the more evident when that newspaper’s anti-desiring operation, like all great liberal debates, offers the testimony of doctors and homosexuals alongside each other: “We shall open our pages to homosexuals who will describe their own experiences. Doctors who have been studying these problems for years will speak about their work,” was the promise. The militants of the gay movement have just as much of a natural tendency to become specialists on homosexuality as psychiatrists and social workers.
Homosexual desire has got entangled in a game of shame, and it is no less perverse to turn this into a game of pride. In fact people are always a little ashamed of being proud of being homosexual. By becoming passionate propagandists of homosexuality, referring not to Freudian bisexuality but to a homosexual “nature” as opposed to the heterosexual one, they remain enclosed within the system of Fourier’s “civilised loves”.
The pervert is essentially “civilised”, which is what Fourier is expressing when he speaks about civilisation as “subversive order”. For him, civilisation is subversive because it organises desire in a guilty way. Subversion and perversion are therefore not synonymous with liberation: quite the contrary. Schérer, in his introduction to Fourier, writes: “Civilisation is false because its movement is the thwarted progress of passions, their subversive rise.” Because it operates “as a theoretical whole which has practically the effect of a repressive totality”, what we need in order to break it up is “not so much a good theory, but the liberation of the passions whose rise it has hampered”.[141] The “subversive rise” of the passions refers not only to their repression but also to their access to the status of perversion.
Civilised perversion, the perverse status of desire, is the worm in the rose of passion. To assume perversity is to accept, in the case of homosexuals, the notion of an opposition between two clearly defined sexes, and to believe that a few men donning femininity is enough to question this opposition. Sartre’s conception is that Genêt is a homosexual who takes pride in betraying his masculinity and is therefore the bearer of a great significance.[142] But the gay movement does not care to describe itself as the instrument of a betrayal: to betray the law of normality means continuing to recognise its existence. “Queens” in drag are not “feminine”: that is not why they possess such a challenging force. Sartre comes closer to the reality of the movement when he writes, “Genêt’s femininity is an evanescent being, a pure challenge to masculinity.” “Queens” do not want to be either men or women: they carry the decoding of the fluxes of desire to its limit.
It is not the perverse psychology of homosexuality, its procession of roles and mirrors, that is interesting. The essential effect of the gay movement is first of all its crude sexualisation of the social field; the most common criticism made of it is that it speaks only about sex, and not about love.
Young revolutionaries are all the more keen to revive the humanist values which they believe the bourgeoisie to be constantly betraying even as it mouths them. The “commune” movement, for example, reappropriates the values of “real” inter-human relationships which an inhuman capitalism seeks daily to destroy. However, the attempt to reactivate liberal humanist values usually drowns this movement in gushes of glutinous affectivity, in which the analysis of “psychological” problems ends up by occupying the entire field of relationships. Capitalism decodes the fluxes of desire and immediately circumscribes them within privatisation. It is no use trying to turn the clock back. We can say the same thing about “respect for the human personality” as Marx said about the family in The Communist Manifesto: capitalism has effectively destroyed the social substructure of these territorialisations, and they can therefore only reappear in the perverse form of artificial re-territorialisations. This impossible return is expressed among revolutionary youth in the enormous growth of what Deleuze and Guattari call “the abject desire to be loved”. The sexualisation of the world heralded by the gay movement pushes capitalist decoding to the limit and corresponds to the dissolution of the human; from this point of view, the gay movement undertakes the necessary dehumanisation.
Against the pyramid
By no means the least of the functions of the gay movement is to confront the confrontation movement itself with the abolition of the difference between public and private, the disintegration of the civilised illusion common to the political world, and the collapse of this civilisation’s imaginary affective system. It has discovered forms of oppression even among the forms of struggle. The association of the words “homosexuality” and “revolution” seems to possess a demystifying function which Huey P. Newton once acknowledged in the following terms:
“Nothing gives us the right to say that a homosexual cannot also be a revolutionary. And no doubt it is only because of prejudice that I say: even a homosexual can be revolutionary. On the contrary, it is more than likely that a homosexual will be among the most revolutionary of the revolutionaries.”[143]
There is no innocent association between the two words, no chance of a peaceful coexistence between the gay movement and the more traditional forms of politics. The political system operates on the relation between signifier and signified, on the pyramidal relation between representative and masses. The gay movement questions the signified “masses”, first of all by showing that the separate division of these masses is itself the product of “civilised ideology”. The homosexual problem is marginal, but at the same time it is undoubtedly a mass one, assuming (and one generally does) the universal nature of bisexuality in Freud’s sense. However, this mass scale is not translated into the existence of a large social mass delegating representatives. These masses are not organised according to molar system of the large-scale social groupings and their institutions, but according to that of small subject groups. The gay movement’s characteristic is that it apparently has no real centralisation (nor any real democracy), no slogans to send round, no representatives. We have already seen (in chapter three) that an annular desiring system would abolish the phallic hierarchy, which finds its concrete expression in the delegation of powers. We have seen that politics is divided between people who want to but can’t and people who can but won’t. The means of proceeding from desire to power is commonly believed to be the political organisation. In his introduction to Fourier, Schérer points out that the usual case against Fourier is that although he forged a theory, this was insufficient without the addition of an organising practice:
“Does the revolutionary ‘reappropriation’ of Fourier mean that it is enough to add to Fourierist ‘theory’, which has remained inoperative, the ‘revolutionary organisation’ which would project it into reality?”[144]
This kind of division in itself constitutes the reign of the political, whereas what makes Fourier’s thought “so close to initially disorganised masses” is perhaps “the virtue of his very rejection of organisation”.
The tempo of politics is the tempo of strategy, of the division between means and aims. In Schérer’s words:
“The pattern – unorganised practice/theory/organised practice/readjustment of the theory of organisation in terms of the practice – has dialectically structured the field of the class war up to the present day. Its tempo is one of phases and pauses. Structurally, it is based on hierarchies and privileges.”[145]
The true representative of the masses is the person who is able to distinguish these hierarchies and privileges, and to organise the relation between the signifier and the signified. This tempo can be contrasted with Fourier’s naive injunction to the reader in Avis aux civilisés relativement à la prochaine métamorphose sociale to get ready now because the change is coming in six
months’ time. The gay movement is related to the ungenerating-ungenerated of the orphan desire, and is unaware of the passing of generations as stages on the road to better living. It knows nothing about “sacrifice now for the sake of future generations”, that cornerstone of socialist enlightenment. Deleuze and Guattari write as follows:
“A revolution<:JIY group remains, as far as the pre-conscious is concerned, a subjected group, even when winning power and for as long as that power itself reflects a form of mastery which continues to enslave and crush desiring production . . . . A subject group, on the contrary, is one whose libidinal investments are in themselves revolutionary ; i? introduces desire into the social ary group remains, as far as pre-conscious is concerned, a subjected group, even when winning power and for as long as that power itself reflects a form of mastery which continues to enslave and crush desiring production. … A subject group, onthe contrary, is one whose libidinal investments are in themselves revolutionary; it introduces desire into the social field.”[146]
The gay movement can be the producer of subject groups in this sense. Of course, the subject group has a tendency to be subjected – for example, in the course of affirming its perversity. The group which is composed of individuals, the phallic and hierarchical group, is subjected; it obeys civilised institutions whose values it adopts because the individual feels weaker than the institution, and because the individual’s tempo is circumscribed by death while the institutions are apparently immortal. In the subject group, the opposition between the collective and the individual is transcended; the subject group is stronger than death because the institutions appear to it to be mortal. The homosexual subject group – circular and horizontal, annular and with no signifier – knows that civilisation alone is mortal.
[130] Wilhelm Reich, The Sexual Revolution, New York, 1 969, p. 209.
English language translations of Guy Hocquenghem’s essays, Homosexual Desire (1972) and The Screwball Asses (1973) are available online, here and here, respectively.
See also an excerpt from Guy Hocquenghem Gay Liberation after May ?68, posted withIll Will, and recently published in english.
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We close with the excellent documentary, La Révolution du Désir, 1970, by Alex Avellis et Gabriele Ferluga (2006) with English subtitles.
Reflections after the Stonewall Riots: Guy Hocquenghem
To speak of reflections after Stonewall is not to suggest any logical chronology in which thought follows practice. But the Stonewall Riots do express a moment of intensity in the practice and thought of the radical gay rebellion of the period against the everyday violence of normative heterosexual capitalism, a rebellion mutually sustained by parallel dissidences of women, blacks, the colonised; a rebellion whose resonances continue to move through societies, and to which institutionalised powers are obliged to respond, with relative openness and/or rejection.
To cite Michel Foucault,
“Since the nineteenth century, great political institutions and great political parties have confiscated the process of political creation; that is, they have tried to give to political creation the form of a political program in order to take over power. I think what happened in the sixties and early seventies is something to be preserved. One of the things that I think should be preserved, however, is the fact that there has been political innovation, political creation, and political experimentation outside the great political parties, and outside the normal or ordinary program. It’s a fact that people’s everyday lives have changed from the early sixties to now, and certainly within my own life. And surely that is not due to political parties but is the result of many movements. These social movements have really changed our whole lives, our mentality, our attitudes, and the attitudes and mentality of other people – people who do not belong to these movements. And that is something very important and positive. I repeat, it is not the normal and the old traditional political organizations that have led to this examination.”
On the occasion of the anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, we share four authors, their writings or interviews with them, who marked the epoch and whose creative work both contested oppressive authorities and powers, and helped to experience differently and rethink the complexity of domination: Guy Hocquenghem, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Mario Mieli, Michel Foucault.
Guy Hocquenghem, active in events of May 1968 in france, was a pioneer of homosexual liberation in the 1970s and founding member of Front homosexuel d’action révolutionnaire. He would radicalise the legacy of May 68, both in his writing and in his life, through a vehement criticism of fetishistic conceptions of politics and revolution.
Many people think of the revolution as a series of struggles, defeats and victories. I see it rather as a canvas, spreading, in movement, with a loose weave. Is it too serious an affair to be placed in the hands of players? Let us not forget that one of the rules of the ridiculous game of capitalism is to stop the revolution from being a game, to make sure that it never grows opposed to docile reality, that it never goes against obeying this so-called reality.
…
The queer is a traitor whose greatest fear is betraying normalcy. And once he has overcome that shame, he realizes by betraying normalcy, what he did in fact was bow to it. Our own, more Machiavellian game, could be to allow the repressed half of desire, whether homosexual or heterosexual, to gush forth from everyone. Man should allow himself to desire man as much as he desires woman. And in the same way, man should allow himself to desire woman just as much as he desires man.
Guy Hocquenghem, The Screwball Asses
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Revolutionary demands must be derived from the very movement of desire; it isn’t only a new revolutionary model that is needed, but a new questioning of the content traditionally associated with the term “revolution”, particularly the notion of the seizure of power.
…
Family heterosexuality dominates the whole of civilised sexuality; it is certainly no liberation to have to go through it. There can be no symmetry between what the gay movement advocates on the one hand and the dominant form of sexuality on the other. In other words, if bisexuality is to be viable, or better – why set a limit? – if there is to be an end to the sexual norm, this must come through the concrete disintegrative process which the gay movement has begun. Some women, and they more than anyone know that heterosexuality is no conquest, say they can only believe in a bisexuality which is derived from homosexuality. However approximate the formula may be, it appears sound: what is repressed in homosexuals is not the love of woman as a particular sexual object but the entire subject-object system which constitutes an oppression of desire.
…
The relationship between the gay movement and other kinds of struggle for the destruction of the repressive authorities is hardly comparable with the relationships which revolutionary political movements usually have between them. It was for the sake of the struggle against sexism, the cult of masculinity and the American version of war as a kind of “manly game” that the gay movement took part in the struggle against the war in Vietnam. This kind of distinction may seem artificial to civilised political thinking. Nevertheless, it carries some weight of its own. This is how the teeming confusion of youth movements, women’s movements, gay movements, ecological movements, community movements etc., experience politics. They all start from a particular desiring situation (their relation to sex, to nature, to the environment) and not, as the traditional workers’ movement would like, from a strategy based on general political theories ; the political world is founded on the debate between these !theories, which are all equally true whatever the bearer. The appearance of “autonomous movements”, movements which reject the law of the signifier all the more because they create a [aw for themselves, has completely upset the political world.
The confusion is total, since the links between these desiring situations do not occur according to the logical model of the signifier-signified but prefer to follow the logic of the event. It is therefore no use trying to work out the relationships between these movements in rational or strategic terms. It is incomprehensible that the gay movement should be closely connected with the ecological movement. Nevertheless, it is so. In terms of desire, the motor car and family heterosexuality are one and the same enemy, however impossible it may be to express this in political logic.
Guy Hocquenghem, Homosexual Desire
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What follows is Chapter 6 from Guy Hocquenghem’s 1972 essay, Homosexual Desire, entitled “The Homosexual Struggle”.
…
In Germany at the end of the nineteenth century, Hirschfeld created his Scientific Humanitarian Committee, a movement fot the defence and justification of homosexuality in the face of social repression. The “Club Arcadie” in France serves approximately the same purpose. However, what I mean by “homosexual struggle” is essentially different: it is no longer a matter of justifying, or vindicating, or even attempting a better integration of homosexuality within society. I shall now be discussing the way in which recent gay movements, linked up with leftwing activism, have changed or overturned the commonly acknowledged relation between desire and politics. Homosexual action, not action in favour of homosexuality: now that the gay movements have opened this crack, what has really changed?
The revolution of desire
Wilhehn Reich described how the restoration of the law on homosexuality in the USSR corresponded with the rise of stalinism:
“In March 1934, there appeared a law which prohibits and punishes sexual intercourse between men. . . . This law designated sexual intercourse between men as a ‘social crime’ to be punished, in lighter cases, with imprisonment of from three to five years. . . . Thus homosexuality was again put in the same category as other social crimes : sabotage, banditism, espionage, etc.”[130]
(According to Reich, at the time of the Soviet revolution homosexuality had enjoyed a general climate of tolerance, which was expressed in the fact that the Soviet Encyclopaedia’s definition of it relied on Hirschfeld and Freud.)[131]
Repressive actions are generally much more consistent than revolutionary movements. Reich’s analysis was based on the contrast between the Soviet Union’s revolutionary nature and its inevitable degeneration. In this same sense, revolutionary movements usually find themselves in the position of accusing the “official” communist parties of treason or degeneration. When a spokesman for the French Communist Party can say something such as “Finally, [the authorities] have always in store, like a fire smouldering under the ashes, a little barricade for the eve of the referendum or a few homosexuals for the First of May,” the united front of people seeking social change is shaken to the core. (In connection with homosexuals in particular, this same spokesman talked about the contrast between “the democratic and revolutionary order” and “leftist mayhem.”) The repression of desire, whether it be in the name of the higher interests of mankind or in those of the proletariat, is strictly the same in its effects. The first effect of the appearance of the gay movement has been to expose this equivalence.
It is possible that revolutionary politics are in themselves repressive processes. In this case, where does the opposition between Reich and Freud lead to? Reich thought in terms of revolutionary politics – he even practised a sexual politics (this was the first instance of a revolutionary movement discussing sexuality). To the inevitability of the repression of desire, which Freud had affirmed in Civilisation and its Discontents, he opposed a project for sexual revolution which tackled the question of happiness head-on. He saw what Freud refused to see: that the famous “reality principle” is not irremovable but rests in fact on the supremacy of the heterosexual family. He even showed how the social system of repression tries to pass off Oedipal repression as unalterable. He analysed the phenomenon of fascism in terms of desire, thereby rejecting the whining attitude to it which is common both to middle-class liberalism and to ossified marxism. However, Reich’s sexual revolution can unfortunately be reduced to the idea that what is repressed is man’s natural inclination towards woman and vice-versa. He himself wrote:
“According to sex-economic knowledge, homosexuality is, in a vast majority of cases, a result of a very early inhibition of heterosexual love …. (1.) Homosexuality among adults is not a social crime, it does no harm to anybody. (2.) It can be reduced only by establishing all necessary prerequisites for a natural love life among the masses. (3.) Until this goal can be achieved, it must be considered a mode of sexual gratification alongside the heterosexual one and should (with the exception of the seduction of adolescents and children) not be punished.”[132]
The sexual revolution solves the problem of homosexuality by making it disappear naturally, ‘With a minimum of repression. Elsewhere Reich indulges in numerous jokes about the homosexuality in Hitler’s youth camps,[133] speaking about the “development of homosexual tendencies and relationships between boys who had never thought of it before.” Simply coupling the word “sexual” with the word “revolution” cannot get rid of the heterosexual norm. We could add: on the contrary. From this point of view, and however reactionary his political position, Freud shows the greater understanding of polymorphously perverse desire.
Something always seems to go wrong somewhere between desire and revolution; we get the same continual wail both from those who want to but can’t (the far left) and from those who can but won’t (the Communist Party).
We must give up the dream of reconciling the official spokesmen of revolution to the expression of desire. We cannot force desire to identify with a revolution which is already so heavy with the past history of the “workers’ movement”. Revolutionary demands must be derived from the very movement of desire; it isn’t only a new revolutionary model that is needed, but a new questioning of the content traditionally associated with the term “revolution”, particularly the notion of the seizure of power.
The gay movement, along with certain other left-wing movements, has been successful in exposing the reactionary implications of waiting for an upheaval to come from some rough, muscle-bound, virile proletariat.[134] Reich’s attempt, through the German Communist Party, to reconcile the revolutionary past with the emergence of desire proved to be grossly reactionary with regard to homosexuality. This may, however, be an indication that radical questioning can spring from politically virgin and totally marginal territory. The apolitical nature of the homosexual question, in the sense of its absence from the sphere of traditional revolutionary politics, may also be its good fortune. All the “radical” movements appearing today share with the gay movement the fact that they are devoid of a political past (the women’s movement, ecology, etc.) and are marginal in relation to the questions normally put forward on revolutionary platforms.
The question of homosexuality is one of the many which are not asked so long as those concerned do not themselves do so. It is marginal essentially because it is totally alien to the “masses”.
A French progressive weekly, Politique-Hebdo, once gave an article on FHAR (the Homosexual Front for Revolutionary Action) the headline “Revolutionnaire par la bande”. [Translator’s note: The word bande as used here is a pun: it means “margin”, but it is also a slang term for “erection”.] The implied criticism was on the one hand that the erection is not terribly revolutionary, and on the other hand that the gay movement strikes only at the fringe, at the margins, and not at the centre of the social problematic. Desire is fated not only to manifest itself by erection alone, but also to indicate thereby that the real centre lies on the margin, i.e. that there is no centre at all.
Revolutionary tradition maintains a clear division between the public and the private. The special characteristic of the homosexual intervention is to make what is private – sexuality’s shameful little secret – intervene in public, in social organisation. It demonstrates that alongside (and perhaps in opposition to) conscious political investments which are based on the broad social masses united by their interests, there is a system of unconscious or libidinal investments whose repression depends precisely on the capacity of the political system to think of itself as the only possible one. A reactionary libidinal investment may well coexist with a progressive or revolutionary political investment, in the shadow of the wall dividing private from political life. Daniel Guérin pointed out, in connection with the abovementioned remarks from the French Communist Party, that the presence of homosexuals on the May Day demonstration would certainly not be new: what is new is that homosexuals now shout aloud what they are on such occasions. Besides, the Communist Party says it doesn’t so much dislike homosexuality as the mixture of styles, the interference of a purely private (and therefore politically meaningless) affair in the sphere of official relations between the classes.
The gay movement is thus not seeking recognition as a new political power on a par with others; its own existence contradicts the system of political thought, because it relates to a different problematic. The bourgeoisie generates the proletarian revolution, but defines the framework within which the struggle takes place; this we could call the framework of civilisation, from whose historical continuity every social force benefits. In this sense, Freud is right to speak of the discontents existing in civilisation, or as we might say, the discontents of civilisation. In a discussion on Fourier, Rene Schérer notes:
“In this respect, the appearance of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat is a phenomenon which takes place within civilisation. The stakes of the struggle could well be, in this case, the appropriation of civilisation by either one of the two classes.”[135]
From this point of view the gay movement appears basically uncivilised, and it is not without reason that many people see it as the end of reproduction and thus the end of the species itself. There is no point in speculating whether the class war might be replaced by a war of civilisation, which would have the advantage of adding a cultural and sexual dimension to the political and economic struggle. Going to this extent would mean challenging the very concept of civilisation, and we must retreat with Fourier to the notion of a struggle against civilisation understood as the Oedipal succession of generations. Civilisation forms the interpretative grid through which desire becomes cohesive energy. Wildcat movements among workers, actions which take place outside the commonly accepted political frameworks and which make no formal claims, not even for the seizure of power, are part of the disintegration of that coherence. The most honest leftists will cite the desire for a new society as evidence of absence. It is already too much to believe that the “wildcatter” is
a future civilised person, as the child is a future adult. The gay movement is a wildcat movement because it is not the signifier of what might become a new form of “social organisation”, a new stage of civilised humanity, but a crack in what Fourier calls “the system of the falsity of civilised loves”; it demonstrates that civilisation is the trap into which desire keeps falling.
Why homosexuality?
While on the one hand Freud is more lucid than Reich as regards the component forces of sexuality, on the other hand and this is what enables him to keep his discovery under control – he sticks to a reactionary thesis by enclosing desire within the privatisation of the family. Deleuze and Guattari write:
“There is a thesis which Freud values most of all: the libido invests the social field as such only so long as it is desexualised and sublimated.”[136]
But the homosexuality of the gay movement invests the social field directly, without passing through sublimation; in fact it desublimates everything it can by putting sex into everything.
But why homosexuality? What is so special about this particular category, this artificial subdivision of desire? Deleuze and Guattari also claim:
“For instance, no Homosexual Front is possible so long as homosexuality is caught in a relation of exclusive disjunction with heterosexuality, which refers them both to the same castrating Oedipal blueprint, charged with ensuring their differentiation.”[137]
What they do not state, though it explains the actual role played by homosexuality, is that the Oedipal system is not only a system of exclusive disjunction but also the system of oppression of one sexual mode, the heterosexual family mode, over all possible other modes. The Oedipal system actually brings the oppressed sexual modes together, even while it is trying to cut them off from the original non-differentiation of desire. General positions of principle are not enough here: it must be clearly stated, as the quotations in this book illustrate, that what nearly always emerges from the homosexual protest is a protest against the whole Oedipal system, and that the gay movement has brought the entirety of men’s sexual problems to the surface. The women’s movement has begun to find a response from men in this particular form.
On the other hand, it would be absurd to expect that we could reconstitute the polymorphism of desire by making a simple addition of all the forms of Oedipal sexuality, for example by adding homosexuality to heterosexuality. These forms as such are just arbitrary divisions. The very difference between man and woman is in itself already one of the given factors of the Oedipal family system. And the question which the gay movement raises is not so much that of the particular sexual object as that of the functioning mode of sexuality. It is not through the object and its choice that the non-exclusiveness of desire is revealed, but through its very system of functioning. In this respect there is a lot to be said for the so-called “homosexual” system of pick-ups and mechanical scattering (see the section on the “pick-up machine” at the end of the previous chapter), a system which is so obsessed by sexuality that it often stands accused of lacking soul or feeling.
It is therefore quite useless to contrast bisexuality with homosexuality, as a more accomplished system of sexual diversity. It is even ideologically suspect to seek, in the name of the principle that nothing is excluded, to bring strays back to the form of sexuality which is not only characteristic but dominant in our society. Family heterosexuality dominates the whole of civilised sexuality; it is certainly no liberation to have to go through it. There can be no symmetry between what the gay movement advocates on the one hand and the dominant form of sexuality on the other. In other words, if bisexuality is to be viable, or better – why set a limit? – if there is to be an end to the sexual norm, this must come through the concrete disintegrative process which the gay movement has begun. Some women, and they more than anyone know that heterosexuality is no conquest, say they can only believe in a bisexuality which is derived from homosexuality. However approximate the formula may be, it appears sound: what is repressed in homosexuals is not the love of woman as a particular sexual object but the entire subject-object system which constitutes an oppression of desire.
Experience in Europe and the USA has shown that the women’s movement and the gay movement have coincided. It is as if society could not bear to see in man what it demands to see in women, as if to dominate women and to repress homosexuality were one and the same thing. We shall therefore not accuse the gay movement of failing to relate to women, lest we reintroduce thereby the very guilt which we have worked to dissolve. Deleuze and Guattari point out that the women’s movement is perfectly justified in replying to people who accuse these women of expressing their penis envy, “We are not castrated and we don’t give a damn.”[138] The gay movement likewise replies that its members are not afraid of the castration which their fear of the relationship with women would seem to imply, and that in any case they are indifferent to such notions. The danger for homosexuality, the trap of desire, lies elsewhere, in what we call its guilt-induced perversion.
The homosexual situation which has been created by the gay movement, as opposed to those which have long been established in society, has the inestimable advantage of being located in fact rather than in principle, in the reality of everyday life where the division between the public and the private is abolished. Some left-wing elements may well have been outraged at Jean Genêt’s remark: “Perhaps if I had never gone to bed with an Algerian, I would never have approved of the FLN.” A leftwing weekly replied, “We would be the last, whatever our opinion of homosexuality, to demand any repression in that sphere. But the matter gets worrying when politics are thrown into it.” It all comes back to the French Communist Party’s remarks. Kicking over the traces causes a scandal. Live it, but don’t mention it in public. Significantly Minute,[139] a publication which specialises in anti-Arab racism, also picked on what Genêt said, stating that “In this sphere at least, colonialism is practised in reverse.” Between many Arabs and many homosexuals there are desiring relations which are unacceptable; so the cloak of Oedipal moral decency is thrown over them, which may well deeply affect those concerned. In Arab nationalism as expressed by some Arab students in France there is ready talk about “back-to-front colonialism”, though this is not something we can joke about: they are talking about colonialist pederasty, which means the exploitation of young Arabs for a modest fee. But they insist on the degenerate and debauched nature of homosexuality as a colonialist invention, and admit its existence among Arabs only as a substitute, when relations with women are difficult. We find the same attitude concerning prisoners, as if homosexuality were a necessity for them – a poor man’s sexuality, the sexuality of the oppressed as opposed to middle-class, degenerate homosexuality. We have to admit that a desiring relation of this type can apparently be experienced only if necessity is the excuse. But the guilt-inducing nature of such explanations makes them suspect, and offers the gay movement the chance to make an intervention based not on a kind of solidarity of principle but on a desiring relation.
There is one category among the oppressed which inspires a particular degree of civilised concern: the young, the sexual minors. The Oedipus complex is based on the succession of the generations and on the conflict between child and adult. It is obviously the adult who leads the child astray; if there is a homosexual between the two of them, it is inevitably the adult. Now many young people are affirming their desire to be seduced, their right to dispose of their own sexuality. In the abovementioned article, Minute abandons its jesting tone in order to deal with this serious matter:
“All this could just be grotesque. But when homosexual schoolboys are invited to organise and to expose their teachers’ ‘repression’, it all becomes loathesome.”[140]
The main opposition to psychoanalysis stems from the fact that it speaks about the existence of an infantile sexuality, even though immediately it is discovered it gets fed into the Oedipus complex and sublimation, and imprisoned in the famous “latency period” . Here too, as in the case of the Arabs, political thought presupposes the existence of groups of oppressors (adults – or Europeans) and oppressed (children – or Arabs), in order to exclude any possible desiring relation. It then becomes quite easy to say that the relation in question is due to oppression.
The “political” positions of the gay movement can therefore not be derived from the elementary classification into progressive and reactionary, because they challenge this classification.
The relationship between the gay movement and other kinds of struggle for the destruction of the repressive authorities is hardly comparable with the relationships which revolutionary political movements usually have between them. It was for the sake of the struggle against sexism, the cult of masculinity and the American version of war as a kind of “manly game” that the gay movement took part in the struggle against the war in Vietnam. This kind of distinction may seem artificial to civilised political thinking. Nevertheless, it carries some weight of its own. This is how the teeming confusion of youth movements, women’s movements, gay movements, ecological movements, community movements etc., experience politics. They all start from a particular desiring situation (their relation to sex, to nature, to the environment) and not, as the traditional workers’ movement would like, from a strategy based on general political theories; the political world is founded on the debate between these theories, which are all equally true whatever the bearer. The appearance of “autonomous movements”, movements which reject the law of the signifier all the more because they create a law for themselves, has completely upset the political world.
The confusion is total, since the links between these desiring situations do not occur according to the logical model of the signifier-signified but prefer to follow the logic of the event. It is therefore no use trying to work out the relationships between these movements in rational or strategic terms. It is incomprehensible that the gay movement should be closely connected with the ecological movement. Nevertheless, it is so. In terms of desire, the motor car and family heterosexuality are one and the same enemy, however impossible it may be to express this in political logic.
The perverse trap
It is not suitable to employ a triumphant tone when speaking about the social desiring struggle. I have already pointed out how unsatisfactory it is to confuse the term “homosexual” with “homosexual desire”. There is always a trap waiting for desire, inscribing the law in the heart of the dispute. We know how acceptable homosexuality is when it is seen as something perverse. A homosexual movement certainly cannot free itself from this perverse integration by simply announcing its presence. The trick of social repression is to forbid it in a loud enough voice to focus desire on what is supposed to be forbidden, so that anyone who wants to ignore the prohibition can have a taste of the transgression. France-Dimanche opened its investigation, not with the usual historical reference to the Greeks but, with successful journalistic daring, by introducing FHAR. The title of the first article was, “In France today, homosexuals dare to come out into the open”. We can sense the acid taste of transgression in “daring” to come out into “the open”. The taste of scandal, the political striptease, contain their own antidote. They wrap the gay movement in an apologetic discourse, they freeze the event into a role.
This is all the more evident when that newspaper’s anti-desiring operation, like all great liberal debates, offers the testimony of doctors and homosexuals alongside each other: “We shall open our pages to homosexuals who will describe their own experiences. Doctors who have been studying these problems for years will speak about their work,” was the promise. The militants of the gay movement have just as much of a natural tendency to become specialists on homosexuality as psychiatrists and social workers.
Homosexual desire has got entangled in a game of shame, and it is no less perverse to turn this into a game of pride. In fact people are always a little ashamed of being proud of being homosexual. By becoming passionate propagandists of homosexuality, referring not to Freudian bisexuality but to a homosexual “nature” as opposed to the heterosexual one, they remain enclosed within the system of Fourier’s “civilised loves”.
The pervert is essentially “civilised”, which is what Fourier is expressing when he speaks about civilisation as “subversive order”. For him, civilisation is subversive because it organises desire in a guilty way. Subversion and perversion are therefore not synonymous with liberation: quite the contrary. Schérer, in his introduction to Fourier, writes: “Civilisation is false because its movement is the thwarted progress of passions, their subversive rise.” Because it operates “as a theoretical whole which has practically the effect of a repressive totality”, what we need in order to break it up is “not so much a good theory, but the liberation of the passions whose rise it has hampered”.[141] The “subversive rise” of the passions refers not only to their repression but also to their access to the status of perversion.
Civilised perversion, the perverse status of desire, is the worm in the rose of passion. To assume perversity is to accept, in the case of homosexuals, the notion of an opposition between two clearly defined sexes, and to believe that a few men donning femininity is enough to question this opposition. Sartre’s conception is that Genêt is a homosexual who takes pride in betraying his masculinity and is therefore the bearer of a great significance.[142] But the gay movement does not care to describe itself as the instrument of a betrayal: to betray the law of normality means continuing to recognise its existence. “Queens” in drag are not “feminine”: that is not why they possess such a challenging force. Sartre comes closer to the reality of the movement when he writes, “Genêt’s femininity is an evanescent being, a pure challenge to masculinity.” “Queens” do not want to be either men or women: they carry the decoding of the fluxes of desire to its limit.
It is not the perverse psychology of homosexuality, its procession of roles and mirrors, that is interesting. The essential effect of the gay movement is first of all its crude sexualisation of the social field; the most common criticism made of it is that it speaks only about sex, and not about love.
Young revolutionaries are all the more keen to revive the humanist values which they believe the bourgeoisie to be constantly betraying even as it mouths them. The “commune” movement, for example, reappropriates the values of “real” inter-human relationships which an inhuman capitalism seeks daily to destroy. However, the attempt to reactivate liberal humanist values usually drowns this movement in gushes of glutinous affectivity, in which the analysis of “psychological” problems ends up by occupying the entire field of relationships. Capitalism decodes the fluxes of desire and immediately circumscribes them within privatisation. It is no use trying to turn the clock back. We can say the same thing about “respect for the human personality” as Marx said about the family in The Communist Manifesto: capitalism has effectively destroyed the social substructure of these territorialisations, and they can therefore only reappear in the perverse form of artificial re-territorialisations. This impossible return is expressed among revolutionary youth in the enormous growth of what Deleuze and Guattari call “the abject desire to be loved”. The sexualisation of the world heralded by the gay movement pushes capitalist decoding to the limit and corresponds to the dissolution of the human; from this point of view, the gay movement undertakes the necessary dehumanisation.
Against the pyramid
By no means the least of the functions of the gay movement is to confront the confrontation movement itself with the abolition of the difference between public and private, the disintegration of the civilised illusion common to the political world, and the collapse of this civilisation’s imaginary affective system. It has discovered forms of oppression even among the forms of struggle. The association of the words “homosexuality” and “revolution” seems to possess a demystifying function which Huey P. Newton once acknowledged in the following terms:
“Nothing gives us the right to say that a homosexual cannot also be a revolutionary. And no doubt it is only because of prejudice that I say: even a homosexual can be revolutionary. On the contrary, it is more than likely that a homosexual will be among the most revolutionary of the revolutionaries.”[143]
There is no innocent association between the two words, no chance of a peaceful coexistence between the gay movement and the more traditional forms of politics. The political system operates on the relation between signifier and signified, on the pyramidal relation between representative and masses. The gay movement questions the signified “masses”, first of all by showing that the separate division of these masses is itself the product of “civilised ideology”. The homosexual problem is marginal, but at the same time it is undoubtedly a mass one, assuming (and one generally does) the universal nature of bisexuality in Freud’s sense. However, this mass scale is not translated into the existence of a large social mass delegating representatives. These masses are not organised according to molar system of the large-scale social groupings and their institutions, but according to that of small subject groups. The gay movement’s characteristic is that it apparently has no real centralisation (nor any real democracy), no slogans to send round, no representatives. We have already seen (in chapter three) that an annular desiring system would abolish the phallic hierarchy, which finds its concrete expression in the delegation of powers. We have seen that politics is divided between people who want to but can’t and people who can but won’t. The means of proceeding from desire to power is commonly believed to be the political organisation. In his introduction to Fourier, Schérer points out that the usual case against Fourier is that although he forged a theory, this was insufficient without the addition of an organising practice:
“Does the revolutionary ‘reappropriation’ of Fourier mean that it is enough to add to Fourierist ‘theory’, which has remained inoperative, the ‘revolutionary organisation’ which would project it into reality?”[144]
This kind of division in itself constitutes the reign of the political, whereas what makes Fourier’s thought “so close to initially disorganised masses” is perhaps “the virtue of his very rejection of organisation”.
The tempo of politics is the tempo of strategy, of the division between means and aims. In Schérer’s words:
“The pattern – unorganised practice/theory/organised practice/readjustment of the theory of organisation in terms of the practice – has dialectically structured the field of the class war up to the present day. Its tempo is one of phases and pauses. Structurally, it is based on hierarchies and privileges.”[145]
The true representative of the masses is the person who is able to distinguish these hierarchies and privileges, and to organise the relation between the signifier and the signified. This tempo can be contrasted with Fourier’s naive injunction to the reader in Avis aux civilisés relativement à la prochaine métamorphose sociale to get ready now because the change is coming in six
months’ time. The gay movement is related to the ungenerating-ungenerated of the orphan desire, and is unaware of the passing of generations as stages on the road to better living. It knows nothing about “sacrifice now for the sake of future generations”, that cornerstone of socialist enlightenment. Deleuze and Guattari write as follows:
“A revolution<:JIY group remains, as far as the pre-conscious is concerned, a subjected group, even when winning power and for as long as that power itself reflects a form of mastery which continues to enslave and crush desiring production . . . . A subject group, on the contrary, is one whose libidinal investments are in themselves revolutionary ; i? introduces desire into the social ary group remains, as far as pre-conscious is concerned, a subjected group, even when winning power and for as long as that power itself reflects a form of mastery which continues to enslave and crush desiring production. … A subject group, onthe contrary, is one whose libidinal investments are in themselves revolutionary; it introduces desire into the social field.”[146]
The gay movement can be the producer of subject groups in this sense. Of course, the subject group has a tendency to be subjected – for example, in the course of affirming its perversity. The group which is composed of individuals, the phallic and hierarchical group, is subjected; it obeys civilised institutions whose values it adopts because the individual feels weaker than the institution, and because the individual’s tempo is circumscribed by death while the institutions are apparently immortal. In the subject group, the opposition between the collective and the individual is transcended; the subject group is stronger than death because the institutions appear to it to be mortal. The homosexual subject group – circular and horizontal, annular and with no signifier – knows that civilisation alone is mortal.
[130] Wilhelm Reich, The Sexual Revolution, New York, 1 969, p. 209.
[131] See P. Hahn, Français encore un effort.
[132] Wilhelm Reich, op. cit., p. 211.
[133] See Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism.
[134] See Front Homosexuel d’Action Revolutionnaire, Rapport contre la normalite, Paris 1971.
[135] Rene Schérer, L’ordre subversif, Paris, 1972.
[136] Deleuze and Guattari, L’ Anti-Oedipe, Capitalisme et schizophrenie, Paris, 1972.
[137] Ibid.
[138] Ibid.
[139] Minute, 19 May 197 1.
[140] Ibid.
[141] Rene Scherer, op. cit.
[142] Jean-Paul Sartre, Saint-Genêt, Actor and Martyr, London, 1964.
[143] Huey P. Newton, “On the Just Struggle of Homosexuals and Women”.
[144] Rene Scherer, op. cit.
[145] Ibid.
[146] Deleuze and Guattari, op. cit.
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English language translations of Guy Hocquenghem’s essays, Homosexual Desire (1972) and The Screwball Asses (1973) are available online, here and here, respectively.
See also an excerpt from Guy Hocquenghem Gay Liberation after May ?68, posted with Ill Will, and recently published in english.
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We close with the excellent documentary, La Révolution du Désir, 1970, by Alex Avellis et Gabriele Ferluga (2006) with English subtitles.
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