by Bruce Bawer
The research performed by Ulrichs and Hirschfeld was serious, scholarly, and responsible: they were traditional-minded, even conservative men of science who believed in objective research methods. They weren’t propagandists but seekers of truth who felt that the truth would set them—and other gay men and women—free. Although both had theories that would later be discredited (Hirschfeld, for example, saw gay men as naturally effeminate), their work came to be recognized by serious scholars of sexuality as groundbreaking. Among those scholars is Wayne R. Dynes, a longtime professor of art history at Hunter College and a founder of Gay Studies in America, who points out that much of the work of his prewar German predecessors “was conditioned by evidence from ancient Greece and Rome, as one might expect from scholars with a thorough gymnasium training.”
Gay Studies in America started out as a serious academic discipline in the tradition of Ulrichs and Hirschfeld. Its genesis is part of the early history of the American gay rights movement, which began in the 1950s with orderly, low-profile picket lines protesting antigay laws and policies (Frank Kameny, one of the movement’s founders, was a World War II veteran who had been fired from his position as a U.S. Army astronomer for being gay) and entered a more aggressive and visible phase with the June 1969 Stonewall riots in New York, which are generally seen as inaugurating the “modern” gay rights movement. Dynes told me in July 2010 that it was in 1971 or thereabouts that his then best friend, a librarian named Jack Stafford, persuaded him to join a group of gay librarians working under the American Library Association’s auspices, whereupon the two men “undertook, rather naively as it turned out, to produce a bibliography of gay and lesbian topics that would eschew, by and large, the old negative psychiatric junk.” (At the time, it will be recalled, homosexuality was still officially considered a mental disorder.)
Some time later, Dynes “learned that a much bigger project . . . was under way at ONE, Inc. in Los Angeles.” (ONE, Inc., had published One, America’s first gay magazine, from 1953 to 1967.) “Its deficiencies soon became apparent, and I set out to work with W. Dorr Legg, head of ONE, to produce something better.” In the end Dynes produced Homosexuality: A Research Guide, which remains the most substantial bibliography of information on the subject. “My mentor in these studies was the late polymath Warren Johansson, who impressed on me the need to read and ponder the enormous contribution of gay scholarship produced in Germany prior to 1933.” In the fall of 1973, Dynes helped organize the first annual conference of the now-defunct Gay Academic Union (GAU) at John Jay College in Manhattan. “The quality of the presentations varied, with some scholarly, others just pep talks. But in talking to some of the better people I could see a convergence towards the idea of Gay Studies. We saw, of course, that there would be problems getting the proposals through the appropriate college committees. But we were on our way—or so we thought.” So began “Gay Studies as an academic discipline” in America.
“In order to avoid reinventing the wheel,” Dynes recalls, “Warren and I thought that one should begin the new chapter of gay studies . . . on the foundations of the German one”—which, he notes with admiration, had been “guided by the motto Per scientiam ad justitiam [Through science to justice]. That is to say, cumulatively the assemblage of objective knowledge would persuade society to eliminate laws and discriminatory policies regarding homosexuality. This was a continuation of the Enlightenment project of Sapere aude [an expression, meaning ‘dare to know’ or ‘dare to discern,’ that stems from Horace and that Immanuel Kant selected as the motto for the Enlightenment]. Warren and I resigned ourselves to the fact that most people were going to ignore the German contribution, but we drew heavily upon it in our own work. We assembled a small group of ten or so people meeting at regular intervals in my Morningside Drive apartment. Out of this collaboration came the Encyclopedia of Homosexuality”—a comprehensive and extremely well-received volume that included informative entries on everything and everyone from Alcibiades, Suetonius, and Theocritus to Jean Cocteau, Yukio Mishima, and Noël Coward.
Dynes emphasizes that he and his colleagues weren’t out to create an “epistemic rupture”—that is, they had no intention of overturning prevailing Enlightenment notions about reason, evidence, logic, and the nature of knowledge. “We thought that Gay Studies would become a department in most universities, not unlike the departments of, say, Spanish and chemistry.” Alas, other gay academics, who were more politically oriented and aligned with the New Left, didn’t share what they saw as the “assimilationist” views of Dynes and his colleagues, and, in Dynes’s words, “sought to break with the existing edifice of knowledge.” “Some of these dissidents,” Dynes says, “left academia, while others stayed behind to snipe from within.” And snipe they did. There were other problems, too: “During the seventies there was a great hullaballoo about the need to give full representation to lesbians and lesbianism. In vain we pointed out that historically there was much less data about gay women than gay men. We were tarred with the label of misogynist. In 1981 AIDS was first detected, and many diverted their research to that subject, perhaps understandably.”
Then, in the late 1980s, Lesbian and Gay Studies began to be transformed by a “social-constructionist” view of sexual orientation—a transformation that Dynes describes as nothing less than a “tsunami” and that was furthered by three books published in 1990: John J. Winkler’s The Constraints of Desire: The Anthropology of Sex and Gender in Ancient Greece; Before Sexuality: The Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient Greek World, edited by David Halperin, John Winkler, and Froma Zeitlin; and—most influential of all—Halperin’s One Hundred Years of Homosexuality: And Other Essays on Greek Love. Social-constructionist positions on sexuality vary in their purity: some social constructionists simply argue that the nature and expression of human sexuality are highly dependent on social and cultural factors; others go so far as to insist that sexual orientation does not exist as such, and that what an individual perceives as his immutable sexual identity is in fact entirely the product of his society and culture.
This new way of thinking about sexual orientation derived strongly from the work of the French philosopher Michel Foucault (1926–84), who wrote in The History of Sexuality: “We have had sexuality since the eighteenth century, and sex since the nineteenth. What we had before that was no doubt flesh.” In the same intellectual spirit, the fact that the word homosexuality was not coined until 1869 has led many social constructionists to claim that homosexuals as such didn’t even exist before 1869. (This view explains, for example, the otherwise ridiculous-sounding subtitle of Jonathan Ned Katz’s 2003 book, Love Stories: Sex Between Men before Homosexuality.) As Dynes notes, social constructionism has generally limited its adherents’ field of study to “Western Europe and North America in the last 150 years or so.” Typical of social-constructionist views are the assertions made in “Capitalism and Gay Identity,” John D’Emilio’s essay in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, that “gay men and lesbians have not always existed” and that “[t]here are more of us than one hundred years ago” (his emphasis) because “ideological conditions” have made it “easier for people to make [the] choice” to be gay. In his insistence on the concept of “choice” and his acknowledgment that his claim “confirms the worst fears and most rabid rhetoric of our political opponents,” D’Emilio contradicts the felt experience of the overwhelming majority of gay men.
The social constructionists invented a term to describe those who did not share their views: they were essentialists and were typically described as denying that people in different cultures and eras have had different understandings of the nature of sexual identity. But no one denies that understandings of sexual identity have changed over time; a fairer description of the “essentialist” view is that sexual orientation is a fact of nature and that homosexually oriented individuals have existed in roughly equal proportions in all societies across the generations—even though those individual
s’ way of thinking about their sexuality has surely varied in accordance with social and cultural factors. In the foreword to Lesbian and Gay Studies: An Introductory, Interdisciplinary Approach (2000), Mary McIntosh echoes the prevailing attitude of many social constructionists toward “essentialists” when she writes that “we in lesbian and gay studies are remote from the ordinary gay world and from the gay movement because we are aware of the lesbian and gay identities as the product of a particular period or culture, whereas the average lesbian or gay has a folk-essentialist view and, indeed, likes to think that ‘we’ have always been there, throughout historical and cultural oppression.” Note how the social-constructionist view is here simply taken for granted as the truth—a truth recognized as such by the properly educated members of the gay academic left—while the essentialist view is dismissed with imperial condescension as the product of sheer ignorance.
Social constructionism took over Lesbian and Gay Studies so quickly that by 1992 the philosopher Richard D. Mohr, who writes about homosexuality from a traditional academic perspective, was bemoaning the fact that “the social construction of homosexuality . . . has achieved hagiographical status within lesbian and gay studies” and lamenting Gay Studies scholars’ “generic worship of Saint Foucault.” Mohr’s lack of reverence for Foucault so outraged Halperin that he wrote a book, Saint Foucault (2004), in which he accused Mohr of seeking to tame him. But Halperin wasn’t about to be tamed:
Far from being intimidated into towing [sic] a more normative line by the prospect or threat of getting herded together with Foucault into the stigmatized company of “militant,” “radical,” or “extreme” gay male intellectuals and activists, I have been driven by an instinct of survival to want to expose the political operations that have brought about such a phobic construction of Foucault in the first place. [Note: Mohr, whose criticism of Foucault Halperin is apparently characterizing here as homophobic, is openly gay.] And in the course of pursuing that project, my admiration for Foucault and my identification with his discursive and political positioning have increased exponentially.
So let me make it official. I may not have worshiped Foucault at the time I wrote One Hundred Years of Homosexuality, but I do worship him now. As far as I’m concerned, the guy was a fucking saint.
Halperin goes on to praise the Frenchman for having “grasped his total political situation as a gay intellectual and scholar better than anyone else has ever done. . . . Michel Foucault, c’est moi,” he says, explaining that he shares with Foucault “the problem of how, as a gay man, an academic, and a public intellectual, I can acquire and maintain the authority to speak, to be heard, and to be taken seriously without denying or bracketing my gayness.” Halperin engages in this kind of self-dramatization throughout Saint Foucault, depicting himself as a victim or potential victim of “silencing,” when in fact he has never been silenced, and has, on the contrary, been abundantly celebrated and rewarded (for example, with a 2008–2009 Guggenheim fellowship). He depicts himself as a beleaguered truth-teller—“What Foucault and I have in common . . . is our vexed and inescapable relation to the sexual politics of truth”—when in fact he is a voice of Lesbian and Gay Studies orthodoxy and an enforcer thereof. He has actually written books called How to Do the History of Homosexuality and How to Be Gay—titles that make it clear that in Halperin’s eyes there are most assuredly right and wrong ways to do the former and be the latter.
Halperin endorses what he calls Foucault’s “dark vision of modernity, of the liberal state, and of progressive, Enlightenment-era values (such as freedom, truth, and rationality).” Deep down it’s all about power, which according to Foucault is “everywhere.” Halperin explains:
When he says that “power is everywhere,” Foucault is not talking about power in the sense of coercive and irresistible force (which in his lexicon goes by the name not of “power” but of “determination”); rather, he is referring to what might be called liberal power—that is, to the kind of power typically at work in the modern liberal state, which takes as its objects “free subjects” and defines itself wholly in relation to them and to their freedom. . . . The kind of power Foucault is interested in, . . . far from enslaving its objects, constructs them as subjective agents and preserves them in their autonomy, so as to invest them all the more completely. Liberal power does not simply prohibit; it does not directly terrorize. It normalizes, “responsibilizes,” and disciplines. The state no longer needs to frighten or coerce its subjects into proper behavior: it can safely leave them to make their own choices . . . because . . . they freely and spontaneously police both their own conduct and the conduct of others. . . .
In other words, the most formidable and disturbing kind of power at work in the world today is not the brutal totalitarianism of a country like North Korea, but the kind of power wielded by the government of a country like the United States—because in the latter, people think that they are free, even though they behave according to rules and norms that they have unconsciously internalized. Because the “modes of domination” in the modern liberal state do not present themselves as such, they are, as Halperin puts it, “all the more difficult to challenge or oppose”; freedom in the West, then, is nothing but a lie because its exercise is “conditional upon personal submission to new and insidious forms of authority, to ever more deeply internalized mechanisms of constraint”—otherwise known (as we have seen) as hegemony.
It should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with Foucault’s Orwellian philosophy—in which freedom is totalitarianism and totalitarianism is freedom—that he was a Communist Party member in the 1950s and a Maoist in the 1960s and ’70s. His “dark vision” of the free world enables Halperin—who is, of course, fortunate to be living in a time and place in which gay people enjoy more rights and respect than ever in history—to depict himself as a heroic victim of well-nigh unparalleled subjugation. He speaks of what “gay men in the United States . . . are up against in our struggles to survive this genocidal era”—an era marked not, to be sure, by “explicit oppression” but rather by “pervasive and multiform strategies of homophobia that shape public and private discourses.” Lesbians and gay men, says Halperin, need not “bewail the passing of . . . liberal, humanist notions, [or] be threatened by their demolition” because gays have been the targets of “a new kind of terror” carried out in the name of liberalism, humanism, and individual identity, “a terror all the more terrible in that its nature as terror is effectively concealed beneath the disguise of the supposedly nonarbitrary authority of freedom, truth, and rationality.” Describing Foucault’s objective as being “not liberation but resistance,” Halperin makes it clear that he shares this aim, insisting that “[t]he most radical reversal of homophobic discourses consists not in asserting . . . that ‘gay is good’ [a slogan coined by Franklin Kameny] but in assuming and empowering a marginal positionality.”
To this end, Halperin prefers the term queer to gay because while “gay identity . . . is . . . rooted in the positive fact of homosexual object-choice, queer identity need not be grounded in any positive truth or in any stable reality” but rather—and here Halperin is articulating an orthodoxy that we will explore more fully in the succeeding pages—“acquires its meaning from its oppositional relation to the norm. Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers. It is an identity without an essence,” and is therefore “available to anyone who is or feels marginalized because of his or her sexual practices.” Halperin makes it clear that this includes child molesters. “[O]ne can’t become homosexual, strictly speaking: either one is or one isn’t. But one can marginalize oneself; one can transform oneself; one can become queer.” And for Halperin, queerness is the goal: “Foucault insisted that homosexuality did not name an already existing form of desire but was rather ‘something to be desired.’ Our task is therefore ‘to become homosexual, not to persist i
n acknowledging that we are.’ Or, to put it more precisely, what Foucault meant is that our task is to become queer. . . . Self-invention is not a luxury or a pastime for lesbians and gay men: it is a necessity.” Apparently, lesbians and gay men who have no desire “to become queer” have failed at a task that is obligatory for them, whether or not they are aware of it. Halperin, like Foucault, in short, is yet another busybody who has an agenda for other people’s lives.
As it happens, the facts of Foucault’s own personal life have a direct relevance to his philosophy. Foucault called for “the intense pleasures procured by means of drugs, sadomasochistic eroticism, and anonymous sex”—and he practiced what he preached, which helps explain why he ended up dying of AIDS at age fifty-seven. Some of his disciples find the more excessive aspects of Foucault’s private life a source of embarrassment; but not Halperin, who considers Foucault’s private life to be triumphantly consistent with his philosophy. For in Foucault’s view, sex was not just sex: it was a political act, and gay bathhouses were sites of “resistance.” Forget the fact that gays who frequent bathhouses in, say, Amsterdam or Berlin aren’t “resisting” anything; they’re just having fun, and nobody tries to stop them. (Foucault the Maoist, by the way, was apparently unbothered by the fact that under Chairman Mao such places would have been destroyed and their patrons exterminated.)
Now, Foucault’s fetishes were certainly his own business, but he plainly meant to suggest that they made him more correctly queer, gay, transgressive, and oppositional than others. We are expected to understand, then, that what may seem like self-indulgence on his part was, in fact, heroism. For Foucault, it was not sufficient to do what he enjoyed doing and leave it at that; no, he needed (for whatever psychological reason) to represent it as a philosophical and moral response to institutional power. Halperin describes Foucault as gaining “insights into the transformative potential of sex . . . from his experiences in the bathhouses and S/M clubs of New York and San Francisco. . . .” Insights! Some might find it odd for a man so preoccupied with and unsympathetic to the exercise of power to be as powerfully drawn as Foucault was to violent acts of sadomasochism. But Foucault had an answer to this: the search for “new” sexual pleasure in a world in which power is all leads naturally to the power-obsessed phenomenon of sadomasochism. However much it may seem otherwise, “‘domination’ in S/M,” writes Halperin, is for Foucault “not a form of a personal or political subjugation.” To sum up, then, the sexual domination in S&M is not domination, while what seems to be the nondomination that characterizes free societies is domination.