Nor have more recent philosophers than Aristotle been much more use in getting to the root of the question. Today Michel Foucault is one of the most cited scholars in the social sciences in the West.21 For all the certainty and sanctity that is piled onto him, even in one of Foucault’s most famous and most influential works – his History of Sexuality (1976) – his views on homosexuality are deeply confused. Foucault points out that to talk of homosexuals as though they are a defined group is historically illiterate, apart from anything else. Those people who were accused of gay acts in the past were not a distinct category of individuals, as the nineteenth-century man or woman started to consider them. As he describes the change that happened late in the nineteenth century, ‘the sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species.’22
But other than using the opportunity to push his theories on power and sex further along their way, quite what Foucault thought about homosexuality is seriously debatable. At times he seemed to see it as absolutely central to identity. At other times (even in the same work) he considered it as unimportant. Those who have come after him, cited him and made themselves his disciples have used sexuality – like everything else – as a way to carry out group identification in opposition to the heterosexual norm. Foucault’s follower at MIT, David Halperin, famously said that there was ‘no orgasm without ideology’.23 Which aside from suggesting tedium in bed also points to the fact that people who wish to understand homosexuality through this prism are piling unstable foundations on unstable foundations.
One of the few things in his work that does seem clear is that even Foucault himself seems to have recognized that sexual identity was probably not a wise basis on which to build any formal identity. Indeed towards the end of the first volume of his History of Sexuality he marvels at the way in which something which was for centuries thought to be a kind of ‘madness’ should have become the centrepiece of our ‘intelligibility’, and that our ‘identity’ should now be the source of ‘what was perceived as an obscure and nameless urge’. Sex has become, he claims, ‘more important than our soul, more important almost than our life’. The Faustian pact ‘whose temptation has been instilled in us’ is (he claims) ‘to exchange life in its entirety for sex itself, for the truth and the sovereignty of sex. Sex is worth dying for.’24 Although his disciples seem to have decided otherwise – and although Foucault didn’t go into this in depth – it would seem that even Foucault noticed what an unstable thing sex or even sexuality is to base an identity on.
Gays Versus Queers
In spite of all of this, today being gay has become one of the absolutely central building blocks of identity, politics and ‘identity politics’. LGBT is now one of the groupings which mainstream politicians routinely speak about – and to – as if they actually exist like a racial or religious community. It is a form of absurdity. For even on its own terms this composition is wildly unsustainable and contradictory. Gay men and gay women have almost nothing in common. It may be too pedestrian to even mention, but gay men and lesbians do not always form the warmest of relationships. Gay men often characterize lesbians as dowdy and boring. Lesbians often characterize gay men as silly and displaying a failure to grow up. Neither have very much use for each other, and almost none meet in any ‘communal’ spaces. There are places where gay men can hook up and places where gay women can hook up, but there have hardly been any places in the decades since gay liberation where gay men and women organize or assemble to be near each other on anything like a regular basis.
Gay men and gay women, meanwhile, have a famous amount of suspicion towards people who claim to be ‘bisexual’. The ‘B’ in LGBT is a source of occasional angst within the gay media. But bisexuals continue to be viewed not so much a part of the same ‘community’ as gays as some kind of betrayal from within its midst. Gay men tend to believe that men who claim to be ‘Bi’ are in fact gays in some form of denial (‘Bi now, gay later’). And while a woman who sometimes sleeps with women will often get a hearing from male heterosexuals, few women react positively as partners to men who also sleep with other men. The question of what any of these people – gays, lesbians or bisexuals – have to do with people who decide to try to swap genders is a question for another chapter.
But it is worth bearing these internal frictions and contradictions in mind when people talk about the LGBT community, or try to co-opt it for any political purpose. It barely exists even within each letter of its constituent parts. And each has little in common with the others. Before decriminalization of homosexuality in the 1960s things were arguably slightly different. But the L’s don’t need the G’s today, and the G’s don’t much care for the L’s and almost everybody can be united in suspicion of the B’s. And there is tremendous dispute over whether the T’s are the same thing as everybody else or an insult to them. Still nobody is any the wiser about where any or all of this comes from. And yet it remains the means by which people are willing to identify vast swathes of the population, and build one of the defining justifications and bases for the liberal society.
Nor is it surprising that a conglomeration of people of such contradictory positions and origins might have serious tensions within every element of their own movement. From the origins of gay activism to the present every imaginable tension still exists over what is being asked for. It comes down to the unresolved question of whether gays are exactly like everybody else other than in one single characteristic. Or whether that single characteristic makes gays utterly unlike the rest of society. It is a divide which falls into two broad camps.
In the first are those who believe that gays are – and should be – just like everybody else. That they will win any and all remaining rights battles by demonstrating that nothing makes them different from their heterosexual friends and neighbours. Just like straight people, gays can live in houses with nice picket fences, can marry, have monogamous relationships and eventually produce and raise children like everybody else. In essence they can be respectable. This at least is one option, laid out in texts like Hunter Madsen and Marshall Kirk’s 1989 work, After the Ball: How America Will Conquer its Fear and Hatred of Gays in the ’90s.25 But such works, preaching a path to acceptance to gays via normalization with the rest of society, always found themselves countered by another element within precisely the same alleged ‘community’.
This side might be described (and self-described) not as ‘gay’ but as ‘queer’. It was – and is – the group of people who believe that being attracted to the same sex means more than simply being attracted to the same sex. It is a group of people who believe that being attracted to the same sex should merely be the first stage in a wilder journey. The first step not just to getting on with life but to transgressing the normal modes of life. Whereas gays may just want to be accepted like everyone else, queers want to be recognized as fundamentally different to everyone else and to use that difference to tear down the kind of order that gays are working to get into. It is an almost never acknowledged but completely central divide that has existed as long as ‘gay’ has been recognized as an identity.
At the start of the gay revolution there were those pushing for a unified ‘liberation front’ which could align the ‘gay liberation front’ with other movements. Under the influence of activists like Jim Fouratt these alliances extended (though were not limited) to domestic movements like the Black Panthers and foreign ones such as the Viet Cong, Mao’s regime in China, Castro’s Cuba and more. The fact that these movements were explicit in their varied opposition to homosexuals (Mao’s China, for instance, being willing to publicly castrate ‘sexual degenerates’) was merely one of those contradictions that needed to be got over.26 The gay rights movement kept identifying itself with movements that were not just revolutionary but opposed to the society that the movement was seeking to be accepted into. In every decade that has followed since the 1960s that divide has been replicated in the gay world.
During the AIDS crisis in the 1980s th
ere was a considerable (and understandable) radicalization among gays in Europe and America. Groups like ‘Act Up’ said that their elected representatives were not doing enough to recognize the unbelievable suffering which was going on with the unleashing of ‘the plague’. Such groups took direct action, but other ‘gays’ felt this was at the expense of the cause as a whole. In an important book in the early 1990s, pushing back against some of the ‘queer’ takeover of the gay rights fight, the American author Bruce Bawer recalled the ‘uncompromising’ attitudes of groups like Act Up. In A Place at the Table he recalled a response to a letter criticizing the group’s methods in the now-defunct gay weekly QW: ‘You self-hating, hypocritical, misinformed piece of shit’, one typical response read. ‘You’re a disgrace to the queer nation.’27 What was the ‘queer nation’? Was it to have only one voice and one set of aims? Was it to search for a life apart, or a life like any other? Then, as now, the question was unaddressed and unresolved. Were gays like everyone else, or were they a group of other people who wanted to knowingly and deliberately segregate themselves, as a city state if not a gay nation in their own right?
‘Gays’ and ‘queers’ remained in conflict throughout the 1990s. In Britain those who sought long-term acceptance and respectability were often horrified at the actions of groups like ‘Outrage’. On Easter Sunday 1998 Peter Tatchell and other members of his group stormed the pulpit at Canterbury Cathedral, disrupting the Archbishop of Canterbury during his Easter sermon and waving placards about the Church of England’s attitude towards gay rights. Was it a sensible way to bring gay rights to the fore, or did it risk alienating people who might be scared off by the apparent ‘fundamentalism’ of these gays? The same debate occurred (and to a lesser extent continues to happen) elsewhere. A bill legally opposing anti-gay discrimination went unpassed in New York State for 21 years. One of those involved described in 1992 how ‘many legislators’ contacts with gay groups came during angry clashes’, such as one in which the radical group Queer Nation ‘paraded around with an effigy of Senate majority leader Ralph J. Marino’, which they burned. Other groups lobbied more effectively, taking what was described as a more ‘polite’ approach.28
But the radical attitude persisted. And the divide between the gays who wanted equality and those who wanted to use being gay merely as a first step to tearing down some other order or forming some new sort of society persisted. It was rarely more openly displayed than in the ‘March on Washington’ on 25 April 1993. This march had been intended to do for gay rights what Martin Luther King’s march had done for the civil rights movement of three decades earlier. But the 1993 march was a mess, including ‘obscene comics’ and ‘fire-breathing radicals who spoke for only a tiny segment of the gay population’. It was, as Bawer said, ‘as if the march’s organisers were out to confirm every last stereotype about homosexuals’:
I kept comparing the event with the 1963 March on Washington for black civil rights. On that occasion, Martin Luther King, Jr., had given the speech of his lifetime and had imbued not only his followers but every scrupulous American with a sense of the seriousness of his mission and the rightness of his cause. He hadn’t called for revolution or denounced American democracy or shared the podium with stand-up comics . . . On that day in 1963 he gave voice to a vision of racial equality that struck at the conscience of America, bringing out the best in his followers and speaking to the more virtuous instincts of his antagonists.29
And this is another aspect of the gay rights movement that has continued to fester. As another gay writer, Andrew Sullivan, noted in the 1990s, ‘Go to any march for gay rights and you will see the impossibility of organising it into a coherent lobby: such attempts are always undermined by irony, or exhibitionism, or irresponsibility.’30
At almost any demonstration for gay rights today – most prominently the ‘gay pride’ marches which happen around the world – the call for legal equality (now achieved in most Western countries) is mixed in with things that would cause many homosexuals as well as heterosexuals to blush. There is nothing wrong with people enjoying whatever kinks they like in the privacy of their homes. But you don’t have to be prudish to feel that the phalanxes of people at such protests dressed in fetish gear, in chaps and more, is off-putting to whatever cause they are hoping to advance. If the black civil rights movement had included a fetish section it would have been considerably easier to ignore its moral force.
But the gays will not be corralled. Not by themselves and certainly not by others. Those calling for equality will always include a contingent who mistake exhibitionism for activism, feeling that nobody is free or equal until they have the right to dress in puppy gear and be led on all fours by a ‘master’ down a public street. The liberal thinker Paul Berman recalls the ‘high holy day’ Stonewall commemorations as they went on into the 1990s. How the ‘dour gay politicos’ would march past calling for civil rights, followed by ‘barechested young men’ dancing erotically, women with their tops off, fetishists with their leathers, sadomasochists flogging each other in the street, and then the slogans: ‘rectal pride’, ‘vaginal pride’. The justification for this (put forward by the intersectional sociologist Arlene Stein among others) was that if gay people looked like everybody else then they would disappear. Only by being flagrant and visible could they ensure they did not. Stein ended up describing herself as, among other things, a ‘sexpert’. A title which as Berman noted, ‘anybody would like to be, though maybe not twenty-four hours a day’.31 Those who push the ‘queer’ view of gay do tend to present being gay as a full-time occupation. Those who are gay tend not to like them.
Equal or better?
Even in the more conservative demands of the gay rights movements are questions which lie unaddressed and filled with risk. For example, if gays have achieved the same rights as everyone else, should they be subjected to the same standards as everybody else? Or is there built into gay equality some kind of opt-out? Now that gay marriage exists should gay couples be expected to be monogamous just as heterosexual couples are expected to be? If they do not have children to bind them together does it make sense to expect two men or two women who meet in their early twenties to get married and then have sex solely with each other for the next six decades or more? Will they want to? If not, what are the social consequences? There must be consequences after all, mustn’t there? Among the first couples to get married in the US was one who immediately admitted to an interviewer that they were in an open relationship. What are other people – including heterosexuals – to think of gay marriage in such a situation? The question rumbles on, entirely unremarked upon. In Britain one prominent gay couple who are married have gone to extraordinary lengths to conceal the fact that they are in an open relationship. Presumably because they realize the damage that it could do if the majority-straight population were to learn of ‘infidelity’ in a high-profile married gay couple.
Amid all the talk of ‘equality’ there isn’t anything like certainty that most gays actually want to be completely equal. Many would appear to want to be precisely equal but with a little gay bonus. When the American TV celebrity Ellen DeGeneres came out as lesbian in 1997 she took a considerable risk. The fact that it was a risk which paid off and significantly increased lesbian visibility made her an object of respect. But is it the remaining social capital accrued from that act or some type of lesbian advantage which allows her a kind of latitude that no straight man would be allowed? Such as the game ‘Who’d you rather’, where Ellen invites guests on her show (male and female) to look at pictures of two famous people at a time and say ‘Who’d you rather’.
At the start of the ‘MeToo’ scandal in 2017, any man who had not just ever inappropriately touched, but anyone who had ever objectified, a woman was in trouble. But it seemed that DeGeneres did not have to play by the same rules. Late in October, the month that Harvey Weinstein fell from grace, she posted to social media a picture of herself with Katy Perry. The pop star was wearing a noticeably figure-h
ugging dress which displayed her breasts to great effect. The photo showed DeGeneres with one arm around Perry, at eye-level with her breasts and ogling them with her mouth open. ‘Happy birthday Katy Perry!’ read the accompanying message on DeGeneres’s official Twitter account. ‘It’s time to bring out the big balloons!’32 Because although by then there was considerable agreement that men could not objectify women, it appeared that an exemption clause existed for celebrity lesbians.
Gay Parenting
The success of the gay rights movement may be understandably touted in all Western liberal democracies. But there is a flip side to its celebration, which is the moral blackmail it holds over other issues. What might be equivalent issues today that will be looked back on in the future with the kind of shame with which the criminalization of homosexuals is now looked back on? A number of candidates are available to fill the space. But there is a knock-on effect for other gay rights. For having got criminalization so wrong, everything else in the area can start to sail by before our eyes without much or any contestation.
The advent of gay marriage in the US and UK has led to an upsurge in the ensuing rights demand, which is the right to gay parenting. Not just the right of gays to adopt children, but to have children of their own. Celebrity gay couples like Elton John and David Furnish and Tom Daley and Dustin Lance Black often portray this as though it were the simplest thing imaginable: ‘We decided to start a family.’ In February 2018 Daley and Black released a photo of the two of them holding a photo of an ultrasound. Newspaper headlines read ‘Tom Daley Announces he and his Husband are Having a Baby’.33 The old gay joke used to go that ‘We haven’t had a baby yet, but that doesn’t mean we can’t keep trying.’ But here was a story suggesting a gay breakthrough. And it soon became clear that anyone who thought ‘Can two men just make a baby?’ received the reply ‘Why not? Bigot.’
The Madness of Crowds Page 5