I never actually ventured into the restroom. It was an idea that disgusted me, but that also left me unsettled. I didn’t yet know that public restrooms—“tearooms” is what they are called in gay slang—have a longstanding place in the history of gay cruising. Still, that street and the streets around it, the square in front of the theater, and, not far off, the area around the cathedral, became from this point on frequent sites in the landscape of my night life. I spent entire evenings there, walking around endlessly, or pretending to use the phone booth that was at the bus stop, so that no one would be able to imagine that I was actually out cruising. Sometime in the days following my “first time,” the woman at work who had been my informant and who seemed to have a way of knowing everything that went on, remarked to me: “I saw you hanging around the theater … Were you out cruising?” I fabricated some kind of an excuse: “Of course not, I was on my way to see a friend who lives in that part of town.” But what I said was hardly believable; the tone of my voice must have shown how uncomfortable the question made me. In any case, her mind was made up, which isn’t to say that she showed any hostility towards me. The insults she used so freely when she spoke arose from what we might call habitual homophobia. Probably, if I had had the courage that day to admit to her that I was gay, she would have assigned me to her category of “nancy-boys,” and would have made fun of me behind my back, without in any way changing her sympathetic feelings toward me, nor the kind and friendly ways she had of showing me how she felt towards me whenever she could. There grew up between us a strange kind of relation in which distrust and a strange kind of complicity were mixed together: she knew what I was and I knew that she knew, and she knew that I knew that she knew, and so on. I was terrified that she would speak to others about what she knew—as, indeed, she surely did—, while she toyed with my fear by making certain kinds of allusions, leaving me hoping desperately no one else actually understood them. I had been hired for two months by this insurance company thanks to my brother’s wife (or his wife-to-be, since they weren’t yet married at the time), who also worked there. The idea that the woman who had discovered my secret might inform her left me petrified. Did she, in fact, tell her? It seems likely, although it never showed if she did. The end of the summer came quickly enough, after which I never saw her again. But I would often come across similar examples of this kind of situation in which the play of power and that of knowledge were tightly intertwined. I thought of this woman again when, twenty years later, I read Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s analysis in Epistemology of the Closet of the “epistemological privilege” heterosexuals benefit from, the way they can manipulate their knowledge of what homosexuals are while those they scrutinize wish nothing more than to escape from their gaze. Reading the pages in which Sedgwick discusses these questions, especially in her dazzling chapter on Proust, stirred up many memories from my past.3
Reims also had a gay bar in those days, and many people preferred the discretion it allowed to the danger of being publicly visible while cruising on the street. Myself, I would never have dared enter the bar, even if I had been old enough. And in any case, partly due to a kind of leftist puritanism and partly to a kind of intellectual elitism (or what I took for such), I considered bars and nightclubs to be disreputable, or at least contemptible, pastimes.
These kinds of meeting places also serve as places of social interaction, places in which you learn how to function within a particular culture. Each conversation, be it with someone you end up picking up or with someone you don’t want to pick up, or else with someone you see every time you go there and end up getting to know (but without knowing much about them), is part of the socialization process for a young gay man, a way of becoming gay, in the sense of absorbing a kind of informal culture. You hear gossip about who in town might be “one of us”; you learn codes of behavior, a lingo, specifically gay ways of talking (ways of speaking in the feminine, for instance: “Look at her!”), classic jokes, and the like.4 By way of these passing conversations and informal discussions, by looking through the books and collections of music belonging to people you go home with, you acquire a whole set of references: books that mention homosexuality (this is how I first heard of Genet, and immediately began reading him, and also how I first heard of other less imposing writers), singers who are adulated by gay people (after one of my lovers played me the records of a singer he adored, Barbara, I, like so many others, became a huge fan of hers, learning later, or perhaps right then, that she was a gay icon), classical music and opera (these were unknown, distant continents for me at the time, ones that thanks to these early initiations and incitements, I would later come to explore with great fervor, going so far as to become a connoisseur who never missed a concert or performance, who bought several recordings of the same work, who read biographies of composers such as Wagner, Mahler, Strauss, Britten, Berg …), and so on. During conversations like these you hear about other cruising places, and rush off to check them out, or you hear about gay life in Paris, and begin dreaming about it. Thousands of informal discussions happening night after night in such places, involving countless meetings between newcomers to these places and more experienced visitors, thus all come together in a way no one participating in them is really conscious of, so that all of these individual “initiations” collectively become the medium through which a cultural heritage is transmitted. (It is, of course, a manifold heritage, varied according to ages and to social class, one that shifts over time, and yet all together it forms the contours of a specific “culture,” or, if you wish, a “subculture.”) We could take a certain literature of “initiation”—thinking perhaps of Gide’s The Counterfeiters or Jouhandeau’s Du pur amour or L’École des garçons—as a metonymy or a metaphor for a much larger phenomenon—a process of subjectivation happening through teaching and apprenticeship. It is similar in some ways to how for Foucault, towards the end of his life, the relation between a director of consciences and a disciple in the philosophical schools of Antiquity would serve as a metonymy or a metaphor for, or simply as a roundabout way of thinking about, larger processes involved in certain forms of gay relationality.
In any case, we can say that cruising areas have served as a kind of school of gay life, and this is true, obviously, whether or not anyone had a clear awareness of what was going on while the transmission of knowledge was actually taking place. In Gay New York, which covers the period from 1890 to 1940, George Chauncey provides a magnificent portrait and theorization of what I have been trying to describe here, and my description owes a great deal to what his work helped me to appreciate and to understand more fully.5 Reading his book in the mid 1990s, I rediscovered so many things I had experienced in Reims in the late 1960s and early 1970s that I felt myself being caught up in a strange and dizzying experience of the intemporality—I almost wanted to say the universality—of homosexual experience. This seemed paradoxical, since the goal of Chauncey’s book was to historicize the gay world, and along with it the sexual categories that govern it and the social and cultural practices that organize it and enable it to exist. Chauncey’s intent is to show both that gay culture didn’t wait until the Stonewall Riots and the late 1960s to come into existence, and that it was a notably different culture in the years he studies from the one we know today. Gay New York is a stirring work when it is read as an homage to all those who struggled to live their lives as they wished, to have a livable life—it is a hymn to a kind of gay resistance that operated on a daily basis, obstinate, tenacious, and inventive in its opposition to the power of dominant culture, a power that was always a threat, ready to abuse gay people, humiliate them, repress them, to track them and hunt them down, to strike them, wound them, arrest them, and put them in prison. Indeed the most important phenomenon Chauncey analyzes, the point of departure for his whole project (which reveals the strong influence on him of the urban sociology developed by the Chicago School), is the city: the way large cities attract gay people and the ways those people find to ceaselessl
y create and recreate the conditions necessary for them to be able to live out their sexuality: how they construct spaces of freedom, and how they put together a gay city within the straight one. This is not to say, of course, that gay life only exists within big cities! There are also places where gay people meet in small towns and in the country, along with forms of sociability and relationality that, even if less numerous, less concentrated, and less visible, are no less real for all that. But they exist on a reduced scale. In any case, in Chauncey’s book I could read again the story of many of my own experiences or ones I witnessed. Above all, I found reconstituted in his book, under the rubric of the “gay world,” the whole set of day-to-day practices, the whole set of multiple processes that allow one to put together a gay life alongside the other social life one also leads, a life in which it is preferable not to be identified as gay. This gay world and these gay ways of life do not have simply to do with “sexuality”; they also relate to the social and cultural creation of oneself as a subject. They could be described as the places, the means, the modes of a process of subjectivation that is at one and the same time individual and collective.
There surely are geographies and temporalities that are specifically gay or queer, as much wonderful recent work encourages us to imagine, having to do with where and how those people who somehow fail to correspond to the “norm” live their lives. It is just as true that those people whose existence is partially defined by these other space-times cannot live permanently within them. What characterizes queer lives or gay lives would rather be the capability—or the necessity—of moving regularly back and forth between spaces and between temporalities (from normal to abnormal and back again).
3
Another thing you encounter in gay cruising places is violence—of many kinds. You meet strange people, people who seem half crazy, and you learn you must always be on your guard. Above all, you run the risk of physical attack by gay bashers or of being stopped by the police, who practice a certain kind of harassment in these places. Has anything changed on this front? I doubt it. I remember the dread I felt the first time I was stopped by the police—I must have been 17—and was told that I was mentally ill and needed help, that they were going to inform my parents, that I would have a record for the rest of my life. This was only the beginning of a long series of interactions with the police, always involving insults, sardonic comments, threats of various kinds. After a few years of this, it didn’t bother me quite so much: it was just one among many features of my night life, not the most pleasant, obviously, but not particularly significant (at least for someone like me, since the risk is evidently much greater for someone who lives in a small town where everyone knows everything, or for someone whose papers are not in order). Gay bashings are more serious, and I was a victim of this extreme form of homophobic violence on a number of occasions. While I was never hurt too seriously, I knew someone back then who lost the use of one eye after being beaten by a group of thugs who were out to find some fags to bash. I should also mention here the endless acts of aggression to which I was a helpless witness over the years. After such events, you are left to turn them over and over again in your mind in the days and weeks that follow, relieved in a cowardly way that it wasn’t you, but sad and disgusted at the fact of having witnessed one of these episodes of brutality that gay people must always worry about encountering, and in the face of which they are often so helpless. More than once I found myself suddenly running away from some place, barely escaping the fate that was about to fall on others. One day, shortly after moving to Paris, I was walking in one of the open areas of the Tuileries Gardens, one of the cruising areas I liked to visit after dark and which was always crowded, when I saw a group of young people coming from a ways off and obviously looking for trouble. They decided to pick on a somewhat elderly gentleman, roughing him up, punching him, and then, once he had fallen to the ground, kicking him. I saw a police car passing on the avenue that in those days ran along the edge of the park and I shouted for it to stop: “Someone is being beaten up in the park!” They replied, “We’ve got no time to waste on faggots,” and continued on their way. Whatever city or town I would find myself visiting, for whatever reason, if I was out walking in a cruising area, I would witness similar scenes: gangs ruled by hatred suddenly descending on the area, forcing everyone there to flee, with the unlucky ones getting beaten up and often, though not always, robbed as well: watches, wallets, passports, and even clothes, especially if it was a leather jacket. Gay spaces are haunted by the history of this violence: every path, every park bench, every nook that is sheltered from prying eyes carries somewhere within it all of this past, and also this present, and probably even the future of such attacks, along with the physical wounds they have left, are leaving, and will continue to leave behind (not to mention all the psychological wounds). And yet these spaces endure: despite everything, despite all one’s own painful experiences or all the painful experiences of others that someone may have witnessed or heard tell of, despite all the fear, people keep coming back to these spaces of freedom. And so they go on existing, because, despite all the danger, people choose to keep them in existence.
It is true that internet dating services have profoundly changed the way people connect with potential partners and, have, in more general ways, profoundly changed the patterns of gay sociability, and yet it of course remains the case that nothing of what I have just described has disappeared. When I happen, not all that infrequently, to read a news story about a man found dead in a public park—or some functionally equivalent space: a parking garage, a wooded area, a highway rest stop—, a place that is “known to be frequented by homosexuals at night,” I remember all of these scenes and experience once more all these feelings of rebellion and of incomprehension: why should people like me be subject to this kind of violence? Why are we obliged to live under this kind of permanent threat?
To all of this we need to add other forms of social devalorization and medical pathologization (such as we find at work in psychiatric and psychoanalytic discourses on homosexuality), which represented a different kind of assault. It was not a physical one, but a cultural and discursive one, and one whose prevalence, not to say omnipresence, in the public sphere was part and parcel of a generalized homophobia that many experienced as specifically targeted at them. Things are not that different nowadays, as was made obscenely obvious by the bigoted attacks that were unleashed in the debates concerning legal recognition for same-sex couples and for same-sex parenting: so much of what was written by those pretending to some kind of expertise—psychoanalytic, sociological, anthropological, legal, and so on—seemed to reveal itself as nothing other than the continual churning of the wheels of a political and ideological machine whose function is to ensure the perpetuation of the established order, the perpetuation of certain norms of subjection, to ensure that the lives of gay men and lesbians remain in an inferior situation, to keep the people living these lives in a state of self-doubt, one manufactured by the culture as a whole, a state from which they are today struggling to free themselves.
Why is it that a certain number of people seem committed to the hatred of others (whether it be expressed brutally through physical violence in cruising areas or in a more disguised way through acts of discursive aggression originating in pseudo-scientific or intellectual arenas)? Why is it that certain categories of the population—gay men, lesbians, transsexuals, Jews, blacks, and so on—have to bear the burden of these social and cultural curses, ones whose motivations and whose ability to perpetuate themselves seem so hard to fathom? This was a question I found myself asking over and over again: Why? And also: What did we do to deserve this? There is no answer to these questions other than the absurdity and arbitrariness of social verdicts—just as in Kafka’s The Trial, there is no point in looking for the legal authority behind such judgments. It cannot be found; it does not exist. We are brought into a world in which a sentence has already been pronounced, and we come, at one point or an
other in our lives, to occupy the place of those who have been exposed to public condemnation, those who live with an accusatory finger pointed at them, who have no choice but to try to protect themselves from this condemnation, to do their best to manage this “spoiled identity,” to quote the subtitle to Erving Goffman’s books on Stigma.6 This curse, this sentence that one has to live with, produces feelings of insecurity and vulnerability in the deepest regions of the self, and is the source of a diffuse kind of anxiety that characterizes gay subjectivity.
All of this, which is to say all these kinds of lived realities that are experienced from day to day and from year to year—the insults, the attacks, the discursive and cultural violence—is engraved in my memory (I am tempted to say: in my body). It is a key feature of gay lives, as it is of the lives of any stigmatized and minority subject. It can help us to understand, for example, the predominant climate to be found throughout Foucault’s early publications in the 1950s, from his 1954 preface to the Ludwig Binswanger volume, Le Rêve et l’existence [Dream and existence] (where, in his interest for existential psychiatry, he seems so close to the Sartrean Fanon of Black Skin, White Masks, which had been published two years earlier) through Madness and Civilization, which was finished in 1960. It is a climate of anxiety, expressed in the vocabulary he mobilizes with a troubling degree of intensity, a vocabulary of exclusion, of alien status, of negativity, of enforced silence, a tragic vocabulary, a vocabulary of a fall. Foucault in some ways took a page out of the book of Georges Dumézil, who liked to place his research under the sign of the god Loki—a member of the Scandinavian pantheon known for his sexual transgressions and his rejection of the established order. Dumézil described Loki as an ideal psychiatric client, a classic psychiatric case, and he meant this as a compliment. If Foucault undertook to study the “Hell” of human “negativity” and of “anxiety” that medicine seeks to interrogate and regulate and reduce to silence, it was, in a manner related to Dumézil’s, in order to shed light on this hell, to give the stammers one can hear there the means to express themselves fully.7
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