V
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1
When I think back over the years of my adolescence, Reims appears to me not only as the place from which I had to uproot myself, leaving behind my family and my class origins in order to live differently; it also figures as a town of insults. This fact also weighed heavily in the decisions I made. On how many different occasions was I called a faggot or some other similar word? It was an insult that became my constant companion, from the very first time I heard it. Yes, of course, it was a word I had always known in some way. Who doesn’t? You learn it in learning to speak. I heard it at home and also outside my family circle long before I even knew what it meant.
I mentioned earlier that my father would often verbalize his anger at political figures who appeared on television as he was watching. The same was true when he would find himself confronted by people he couldn’t stand because of their sexuality—real or imagined. If Jean Marais’s name appeared in the credits for a film, every five minutes we would hear him repeat “fruit,” “faggot,” “fairy.” The fact that my mother never missed a chance to remark that she thought he was handsome only made matters worse. She didn’t approve of this kind of talk and so would make a point of replying, “What business is it of yours?”, or “It’s none of your business what other people get up to.” Sometimes she would take a different tack and reply, “Maybe he is, but he’s a lot richer than you are.” Discovering little by little what my desires were, and what my sexuality would be thus meant inserting myself into a predefined category, one that had been stigmatized by means of these words of insult. It meant experiencing the terrorizing effect these words can have on those to whom they apply, on those who run the risk of exposing themselves to them for an entire lifetime. To use an insult is to cite the past. It only has meaning because it has been used by so many earlier speakers: “a dizzying word that rises from the depths of time immemorial,” as one of Genet’s verses puts it. Yet, for those at whom it is aimed, it also represents a projection into the future: the dreadful presentiment that such words, and the violence they carry, will accompany you for the rest of your days. To become gay is to become a target, and to realize that you already potentially were such a target even before you had actually entirely become one, before you were ever fully aware of what this word that you had heard hundreds of times might mean, even if you had always known how powerfully insulting it was. The stigmatized identity precedes you, and you step into it, you embody it, you have to deal with it in one way or another. They may be numerous and diverse, all the different ways it is dealt with, but they are all marked by the constitutive power of the verbalized insult itself. So it is not, as Sartre would have it in an enigmatic phrase he writes about Genet, that homosexuality is a way out that someone invents in order to avoid suffocating. It is rather that someone’s homosexuality obliges them to find a way out in order to avoid suffocating. I can’t help thinking that the distance that came into being—that I created—between myself and the world I grew up in, that my self-creation as an “intellectual,” represented the way I found to deal with what I was becoming. I couldn’t become what I was becoming without inventing myself as different from those from whom I was in fact already different. A bit earlier in this book, discussing my path through school, I described myself as a miracle case. It could well be that what made that miracle possible for me was my homosexuality.
Thus even before I discovered that this particular insult was referring to me, I was quite familiar with its use. I used it myself more than once. To be honest, I continued using it against other people even after I knew it was applicable to me. This would have been when I was around 14 or 15, and I did it as a way of protecting myself. I would, along with two or three other classmates, make fun of another boy in our high school whom we considered to be too effeminate. We called him a “fairy.” By insulting him, I indirectly insulted myself, and, sad though it is to admit it, I knew this to be the case at the time. I was driven to it by an irresistible desire to belong to the “normal” world, to avoid paying whatever the cost was of being excluded from that world. It was probably also a way of lying to myself as much as I was lying to others, an attempt at a kind of exorcism.
Soon enough, in any case, the insult would come directly at me; people would use it specifically against me. I would be surrounded by it. It wouldn’t be going too far to say that I was defined by it. It followed me everywhere, a constant reminder that I was breaking the rules, that I wasn’t normal. The insult was always lurking outside the high school I attended or in the neighborhood where I lived, waiting to leap out. And leap out it inevitably would. When I would be visiting a cruising area (after I discovered around the age of 17 that such places existed)—and in this case it wasn’t a particularly discreet location, a street between the Great Theater and the Hall of Justice—a car full of idiots would slow down as it drove by so they could yell “faggots!” at everyone who was there. It felt as if there was some kind of organized conspiracy that had decided that this form of verbal aggression would only be strong enough and effective enough if it was repeated constantly and if it was found everywhere. It was something you had to learn to live with. What else could be done? But in fact I never really did manage to get used to it. Each time that same constantly reiterated insult was used against me, it seemed to stab me like a knife, and left me shaking with fear, since it meant that people either knew or suspected what I was—something I had been trying to hide. Or it meant I was being assigned to a certain fate, that of always being subject to this omnipresent denunciation, to the curse it pronounced. I was put on public display: “Look at him. See what he is. Did he think we wouldn’t notice?” It was in fact the whole of the cultural universe around me that was calling me a “faggot,” or else a “fairy,” or a “fruit,” or a “queer,” or other ugly words that, when I hear them again today, reawaken in me the memory I have never been able to shake of the fear they provoked in me, the wounds they inflicted, the feelings of shame they drummed into my mind. I was produced by insult; I am the son of shame.
You might want to insist to me that it should be desire that comes first, that shame comes after, and that it is desire we should be speaking of. It is true that one becomes the object of insult because of the desire one feels, the kind of desire that insult denounces. And I did feel desire for boys in my classes, in the rowing club to which I belonged for a few years (from age 13 to 15), in the political organization in which I was active starting at the age of 16. My first sexual experiences were, in fact, with two boys from my rowing club and then with a classmate my second to last year in high school. There were never any experiences with any of the other boys in the Trotskyist organization I’ve spoken of. Even if this organization didn’t participate in the generalized homophobia that ruled over the Communist Party or over Maoist organizations, Trotskyist political organizations were fundamentally heterosexist and not in any way welcoming to homosexuality. You could often hear activists spouting a Reichian catechism regarding the “sexual revolution,” a kind of Freudo-Marxism in which the traditional Marxist condemnation of homosexuality was mixed together with a Freudian one. The idea was that bourgeois society was built on the repression of libido, on the redirection of libidinal energy into work, and that consequently sexual liberation would contribute towards the creation of a new social and political system. But this way of thinking contained within it a disparaging evaluation of homosexuality, which was considered to be simply the effect of sexual taboos, something that would disappear along with them. The reality was that every day I had the feeling of there being no place for me within the Marxist world; when I found myself moving within this context I had to live a divided life, just as I did everywhere else. I was split in two: half Trotskyist, half gay. The two identities seemed irreconcilable; as time passed, I was having more and more difficulty reconciling them with each other, and it was becoming harder and harder for me to hold them together. It is easy for me to see why the gay movement of the 19
70s found it necessary, as it was in the process of establishing itself, to break with these kinds of organizations and with this kind of political thinking. Even so, the gay movement did remain—or parts of it did—heavily marked by Reichian ideology.1 A large part of Foucault’s aim when he undertook to write his History of Sexuality in the mid-1970s was to critique this Freudo-Marxian discourse. As part of a more general opposition to Marxism and to psychoanalysis, Foucault wished to forge a new approach to the question of power and of social change, freeing critical thought and radical liberation movements not only from Freudo-Marxism, but also, and he was equally firm about this, from Marxism and from psychoanalysis, from the “communist hypothesis” and from the obstacle that was Lacanian thought.2 The return of these old, rigid, sterile dogmatisms on today’s intellectual scene is something truly deplorable and represents a dangerous kind of regressiveness. They are, of course, often hostile to the gay movement and to sexual liberation movements in general. Their return to today’s intellectual scene seems to be connected with and solicited by the reactionary moment we have been living through for many years now: they are simply the other side of the same reactionary coin.
In any case, these desires—my desires—along with the rare instances in which they were actually realized, had to remain silent and secret. What is a form of desire that must remain silent, hidden, publicly disavowed, that lives in fear of being mocked, stigmatized, psychoanalyzed, and then, once it has moved beyond this stage, must constantly affirm itself, reaffirm itself, and loudly declare its right to exist, sometimes in a manner that is theatrical, over the top, aggressive, extreme, one that seems to proselytize in an activist way? Such a desire carries within itself an essential fragility, a deep awareness of its own vulnerability, something it experiences at every moment and in every place. It is a desire that is filled with anxiety (at work, in the street, etc.). Things are only made more difficult by the way in which insult extends to include all the pejorative, devalorizing, derogatory, sarcastic, humiliating words that you hear without them even being addressed to you—the word “faggot” and all its synonyms that keep coming back obsessively in the conversations that make up daily life, in elementary school, in high school, at home … You feel yourself struck by these words, burned, frozen, even if those who use them in chatting with you don’t seem to have any idea they might be talking about you. Inside yourself you experience these words as addressed to you even if they seem to be directed at someone else, or used in some general manner to refer to some category of persons to which you feel like you might belong, even if your most ardent desire would be not to do so. (This is surely one of the most powerful psychological mechanisms that contributes to producing the will towards disidentification that is so strong and so durable in many gays and lesbians. It also contributes to the sense of horror certain of them experience when confronted with the very existence of a gay and lesbian movement that is struggling to establish a self-consciously public image of something such people would prefer remained cordoned off in the private sphere, where it can claim the benefit of a social “right to be ignored.” Of course, their own personal experience must contradict this fantasy of being left alone. Within their own experience it must be clear on a daily basis to what an extent private and public spheres are inextricably mixed together, to what an extent the “private” itself is a production of the public sphere—that is to say, to what an extent a given psyche is shaped, even within its most private recesses, by the injunctions of sexual normativity.) Actual or potential insults—which is say not only those one is actually subjected to, but also those one fears being subjected to and so acts in order to avoid, and even those violent and obsessive kinds of insults by which one is always and everywhere surrounded—henceforth constitute the horizon of one’s relation to the world and to others. Being-inthe-world becomes actualized as a kind of being-insulted, being rendered inferior by the social gaze and by social forms of speech. The object of an inferiorizing act of naming is produced as a subject subjugated by the structures of the sexual order (of which insult represents only the sharpest point). This subject’s entire conscious mind, as well as his or her unconscious (to the extent that it is possible to imagine a clear line of separation between these two tightly connected spheres) finds itself marked and shaped by what has turned out to be the very process through which a sense of self and a personal identity are constructed. The process thus obviously cannot be said to be purely psychological: it is more the insidious and effective action of sexual norms and the hierarchies they control—hierarchies that produce, day in and day out, our psyches and subjectivities.
2
Reims was thus also, and during this same period, the city in which I managed with immense difficulty to become gay, which is to say, to begin living a gay life even before I had acknowledged myself as such or claimed any such identity. You see, it turns out that even as you are trying to persuade yourself that there is something you really should avoid becoming—a “faggot”—, you are at the same time, and quite intensely, trying to figure out how to become precisely that. How are you going to meet partners—for sex or for love? How are you going to make gay friends, people to whom you can talk freely? One day you learn there are places gay men go to cruise. I found this out in a very strange way, during the summer when I was 17 years old. I was spending that summer working in the office of an insurance company, and one of the women working there would endlessly make fun of her manager behind his back. I remember her laughing while she said to me, “What a nancy-boy! Go by the theater some night and you’ll see him out cruising.” This piece of information thus came my way connected to an insult that terrified me; despite that, it was an incredible discovery for me. It was certainly true that this boss was someone who at work liked to throw around what little weight he had; he was petty, authoritarian, and rude, and he was also the constant butt of jokes for the young women he supervised. He seemed to believe no one knew anything about his sexuality, yet his every gesture, his way of walking, his voice and his manner of speaking all loudly broadcast to anyone around him what he nonetheless seemed to wish to keep hidden from them. There are certain gay people so intent on hiding what they are that the problem of their sexual identity comes to occupy a huge part of their mind. He was such a person. He could not stop himself from talking about homosexuality, and was constantly telling jokes about it, or “amusing” anecdotes that were always slightly off color—doubtless ones current in the gay circles in which he moved—, and he really seemed to believe that by directing this crude humor against those he was so fearful of being associated with, he would remove all suspicion from himself. Over the years, I have not infrequently encountered this same kind of duplicitous attitude (it comes in several varieties), a kind of attraction-repulsion that leads many gay people (I put this in the present tense, because cases like this still exist) to talk about homosexuality constantly, but in an ostentatiously derogatory or disgusted way, in order to put some distance between them and the people to whom they are linked in so many ways. (We could perhaps say that the paradigmatic instance of this attitude, as André Gide took great pleasure in pointing out in his Journal, is to be found in both the work and the person of Proust—even though it hardly needs saying that other people who engage in this practice don’t always produce results that attain the same high level that Proust’s did.)
Simply learning that a place like this existed was for me a miraculous revelation, even if the revelation occurred simultaneously with the act of someone pinning an ignominious label on anyone who happened to be caught visiting such a place. Filled with apprehension at the prospect that someone I knew might see me there—since that would mean that I too could be called a “nancy-boy”—, I nonetheless found myself immediately dying to go see what went on there and, maybe, to meet someone. That very night, or maybe the next one, I got on my moped and headed in to the center of town. I parked at a safe distance from the street in which men could be seen rapidly and furtively going down
the short flight of steps leading to a public restroom. Others could be seen further down the street strolling back and forth, and still others could be seen sitting in their parked cars. Occasionally one of those car’s engines would start up suddenly, and the car would drive off, followed by a second one, the two drivers seeking a place where they could chat unseen. I don’t remember if any one came up to me the first night I went there, or if it happened later. In any case, this became my entry into the gay world, and also a way into the whole subculture associated with that world.
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