Insult and the Making of the Gay Self

by Didier Eribon

  In any case, insult is a performative utterance. Its function is to produce certain e√ects—notably, to establish or to renew the barrier between ‘‘normal’’ people and those Go√man calls ‘‘stigmatized’’ people∑ and to cause the internalization of that barrier within the individual being insulted. Insult tells me what I am to the extent that it makes me be what I am.

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  The Flight to the City

  All of the studies done in homosexual populations (of either sex) show that the experience of insult (not to mention of physical violence) is one of the most widely shared elements of their existence—to di√erent degrees, of course, according to which country, and, within any country, according to where they live and in what environment they grow up. But it is a reality experienced by almost everyone. This tells us that even those who feel the most freedom these days, in large Western cities, need to know how to deal at every instant with the surrounding world: to know whether it is possible to hold hands with a partner or to show signs of a√ection to someone of the same sex, or whether those actions should be avoided. This practical knowledge, so deeply interiorized that one seldom even notices it, does not need to be made fully conscious in order to have e√ects, to organize successful forms of behavior. Mistakes can have painful consequences. The experience of physical violence or the obsessive awareness of its threat are so common in gay lives that they are mentioned in almost every autobiography and in numerous novels with gay male characters.∞ Sometimes no gesture is even necessary: one’s appearance or clothing su≈ce to provoke an act of hatred.

  For the most openly gay, as for those who are less so or are not open at all, for those who are ‘‘flaming’’ as for those who are ‘‘discreet,’’ the possibility of being the target of verbal or physical aggression is never absent, and has in any case often been a determining factor in the way a personal identity has been constructed (including the ability to sense danger) or in the way strict controls on words and gestures have been internalized.

  The phrase ‘‘moral harassment’’ has recently been used to describe what certain salaried employees experience in the workplace.≤ The experience has notable psychological consequences. Is not the whole life of gay people

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  entirely defined by permanent ‘‘moral harassment,’’ be it direct or indirect, a harassment present in every situation in which they find themselves, a social harassment? And are not the personalities that they construct and the identities that they shape determined by the psychological consequences of the

  ‘‘harassed’’ social position they occupy in daily life (produced by ambient insults, mockery, aggression, hostility)? It is not hard to understand why one of the structuring principles of gay and lesbian subjectivities consists in seeking out means to flee insult and violence, whether it be by way of dissimulation or by way of emigration to more hospitable locations.

  This is why gay lives are oriented toward the city and its social networks.

  Those who seek to leave their birthplaces and the places where they spent their childhoods in order to live in more welcoming cities are numerous.

  Marie-Ange Schiltz writes, speaking of recent studies, that ‘‘in comparison to studies of the general population, it seems that the departure from the family household and the attainment of economic independence are much more precipitous among young homosexuals.’’≥ This flight surely leads, in most cases, to large cities.

  Cities have always been the refuge of gay people. At the end of the 1960s, a gay activist described San Francisco as a ‘‘refugee camp’’ that had attracted gay people from all over the country—people who were running from the impossibility of living out gay lives in the hostile, hate-filled atmosphere of small-town America.∂ One sees clearly, reading the works of Allan Bérubé or John D’Emilio, that the history of the construction of gay ‘‘enclaves’’ within large cities is closely tied to the history of discrimination and homophobia.

  Allan Bérubé shows that during World War II, soldiers dismissed from the U.S. armed forces because of their sexual orientation often stayed in the city in which they were demobilized (San Francisco for the navy, for example). It was hardly possible to return to one’s small town having been dismissed from the armed forces. For others, the simple fact of having been able to build up a set of relations with other gay men during the time spent in uniform led them to decide not to return home, where a heterosexual marriage seemed inevitably to await them.∑ For his part, John D’Emilio reminds us that during the McCarthy era, at the beginning of the 1950s, it was not only communists who were being hunted, but homosexuals as well, many of whom were

  removed from public functions at the time. What else could a person rendered infamous in this way do but seek out a large city? There gay men and lesbians had some chance of warding o√ a hostile environment, even given

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  i n s u lt a n d t h e m a k i n g o f t h e g ay s e l f the extreme di≈culty of organizing a gay or lesbian milieu at that time, due to the unrelenting repression brought to bear on bars and other social spaces.∏

  Yet even well before that, from at least the beginning of the century, even from the end of the nineteenth century, certain cities such as New York, Paris, or Berlin had reputations that attracted waves of ‘‘refugees’’ from a wide area, even from abroad, refugees who thereby helped to consolidate the reason for their coming: the existence of a ‘‘gay world’’ that they joined and to which they brought the enthusiasm that characterizes new arrivals.π

  This explains why a true mythology of the city developed within gay

  culture, within the collective homosexual imaginary, from the end of the nineteenth century onward (and perhaps even earlier). Paris, London, Berlin, Amsterdam, New York, San Francisco: these became wonderful symbols of a certain freedom; they nourished the dreams of anyone reading books or newspapers (even when the images given by these sources were pejorative or even insulting) or hearing reports brought back by luckier travelers, those who had been able to visit a capitol or a major metropolitan area. (George Chauncey cites the accounts of gay men who decided, on the basis of a story told by a friend of a stay in New York, to leave behind the small town in which they had been living.)∫

  This mythology of the big city—and of migration to it—coexisted for a long time with a more general mythology of travel and exile, not to the city in this case, but to a foreign country, another continent. There was—and doubtless still is—a phantasmagoric ‘‘elsewhere’’ for gays, an ‘‘elsewhere’’ that o√ered the possibility of realizing your hopes and dreams—ones that seemed impossible for so many reasons, unthinkable even, in your land of origin.Ω

  Among possible examples, one might mention the appeal of Italy at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth (von Platen) or Germany in the 1920s (Isherwood, Auden, Spender, etc.), trips to the colonies or distant lands (Gide in North Africa, Forster in Egypt and India), or expatriation for career reasons (Dumézil in Turkey, Foucault in Sweden).∞≠

  But the pull—real or imaginary—exercised by the city seems the more

  general phenomenon. Even today, the migration of gays and lesbians to large cities continues. Homosexuality is intimately connected to cities. As Henning Bech, a Danish sociologist, puts it, ‘‘The city is the social world proper of the homosexual, his life space; it is no use objecting that lots of homosexuals have lived in the country. Insofar as they wish to be homosexual, the vast majority must get out into ‘the city’ one way or another.’’∞∞ That is not to say that there can be no gay life in small towns or in the country. To the contrary:

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  there, as elsewhere, there exist (and have existed for a long time) meeting places, circles of friends who get together regularly, organizing evening parties, and so on. The forms of sociability found in these urban or semirural sub
cultures are little known and little studied by historians and sociologists, doubtless because documents are rare and hard to come by (often being private diaries or personal correspondences), but also because the ‘‘invisibility’’ of these clandestine ways of life has been better protected (for obvious reasons) than in big cities: it is di≈cult to find out in which bar or which restaurant gays get together—even more di≈cult to know in which private homes. Perhaps a systematic review of police records and court archives would allow one to discover lives and ways of life that are less well known than those that have been recently studied by historians of urban culture.

  It remains the case that it was in large cities that gay ways of life found the possibility of full development. The city is a world of strangers, which allows a certain anonymity to be maintained. Such anonymity is hardly possible given the stifling constraints created by the acquaintance networks that characterize small town or village life, where everyone knows everyone else and any breach of normal behavior must be all the more well hidden. As Magnus Hirschfeld wrote in his 1904 book about ‘‘homosexuals in Berlin,’’

  the city is a ‘‘desert of men’’ where an individual ‘‘evades the controlling influence of those around him better than in any provincial location, where everything, the senses and the mind, reduces itself to a narrow horizon. In provincial places people know—quite consciously—when, where, and with whom their neighbor has eaten and drunk, has gone walking or gone to

  bed . . . whereas here, people living in a given street do not even know who lives on the other side of the building, and thus even less so what those other lodgers might be doing.’’∞≤

  Of course the city is also a social world, a world of possible forms of socialization. Along with anonymity, it provides the possibility of surmounting loneliness. A gay person who decides to move to a big city plans to join others who have done the same thing previously, who have helped create the world that provides the city’s attraction, that has made it an object of dreams long before the move could be undertaken. This is why there is a sort of exaltation, mixed with fear, that characterizes the arrival in the city and the discovery of all its possibilities.∞≥ Magnus Hirschfeld gives a wonderful description of gay and lesbian culture at the beginning of the century, of cabarets, restaurants, taverns and cafes, balls, nightlife, and everything else that makes up what we would call today gay subculture—a culture whose richness, whose evolu-

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  i n s u lt a n d t h e m a k i n g o f t h e g ay s e l f tions, whose chance developments, even, have recently been reconstructed for us by George Chauncey’s book on New York. That book shows how

  widespread that culture already was at the end of the nineteenth century, in spite of the repression brought to bear on it.∞∂ We are speaking of the city as it was lived, loved, dreamed, and fantasized by millions of gay people of both sexes throughout this century, a city in which what Hirschfeld called the

  ‘‘web’’ of homosexual life causes changes: ‘‘Through its own specific action,

  [it] alters every nuance of the scene, inflects in an essential way the physiognomy of the whole.’’∞∑

  It is quite likely the case that the interaction between gay and lesbian culture and the city as a whole was much more wide-ranging in the early years of the century and in the 1920s than it would be in the 1940s and 1950s.

  Chauncey shows this to be the case for New York: huge drag balls drew crowds of heterosexual spectators. Newspapers wrote articles about them that were accompanied by photos. Moreover, places for meeting or socializing (bars, saloons, restaurants) were rarely exclusively gay. The border between the gay world and the heterosexual city was not as marked as it would become after World War II, even if police raids and arrests and various other kinds of controls of course kept up a constant pressure on this semiclan-destine, semiopen subculture. The fluctuations in the degree of openness to the exterior world can be thought of as one of the most striking aspects of the level of general awareness of gay people and of the level of self-awareness of gay people throughout this period—and also of the ability of gay people to a≈rm their identities and their ways of life, to resist hostile forces when those identities and ways of life came under attack. During this period one moved from a time of surprising audaciousness to one of almost total self-concealment, in which the doors to the gay world were almost locked shut from the inside. One finds a perpetual give and take between secrecy and visibility, between silence and public openness, between fear and daring.∞∏

  Clearly then, a ‘‘gay world’’ did not burst into existence suddenly with the Stonewall riots in 1969, those riots set o√ by a police raid in New York, and whose annual commemoration, beginning a year later, would become the

  starting point for the contemporary Gay Pride movement. To the contrary, it is only because a subculture had already existed for quite a long time that any such riot was possible. It is the case that in almost every Western country the 1950s and 1960s (and before them the 1940s and the wartime period) had been a period in which gay subcultures were forced to become more rigorously clandestine than in the 1920s and 1930s. Repression became much

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  more intense than it had been before the war. (In France, in 1960, the parliament approved an amendment that defined homosexuality as a social illness alongside alcoholism and prostitution.)

  Consequently, the upsurge at the beginning of the 1970s, one that continued to develop in the 1980s and 1990s, forms part of a longer history of urban culture, a history including the ways of life that made cities famous in the Belle Époque and the Roaring Twenties.∞π It seems quite noteworthy that we are witnessing today a reopening of this world to the exterior, if only in that it is again suddenly extremely visible. There are now few who do not know about the existence of gay bars, gay cafes, or gay neighborhoods: the subculture is once again in permanent contact with the city as a whole. For even if the bars are exclusively gay (and this is not necessarily the case for all of them), the cafes and restaurants are open to all, and the neighborhoods are obviously not private enclaves, but areas in which gay visibility is af-firmed in relation to and interaction with other ‘‘communities’’ (the gay quarter in Paris, for example, adjoins the historic Jewish neighborhood) and with the city more generally. The boundaries of these gay enclaves within large cities are in any case quite fluid and subject to change according to the openings and closings of bars, cafes, and restaurants. Gay businesses usually remain in the minority, and, in any case, the streets are open to all. A mix is the normal state of a√airs.

  We also see that, far from being adequately understandable through

  terms sometimes invoked with hostile intent, such as ‘‘identity politics’’ or

  ‘‘separatism’’ (in French, one speaks of communautarisme or of communautarisme à l’américaine, which is always unfavorably juxtaposed with a putatively more French universalisme), such phenomena as Gay Pride festivals or the growth of gay neighborhoods in major European cities are indicators of the reopening of doors of the ‘‘gay world,’’ doors that had shut themselves of necessity for a good number of years. What seems to upset so deeply those observers who wax indignant about the growth of a gay neighborhood (I am thinking of the many articles in recent years in French newspapers devoted to the development of the Marais neighborhood in Paris) is that this new gay visibility allows an entire culture to open onto and interact with the exterior world, with the rest of the city—as was already the case, on a smaller scale, of course, in the 1920s and 1930s. Think, for instance, of the participants in the costume balls of those years making their way toward the entrance of the dance hall through a crowd of perhaps applauding, perhaps hissing, by-standers who had made their own way there on purpose to watch. . . .

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  Friendship as a Way of Life

  The city is first and foremost a means of escape, to the extent that this is possi
ble, from the rule of insult, in which it is impossible to live out one’s homosexuality without constant dissimulation. When Erving Go√man studies the strategies used by those he refers to as ‘‘stigmatized,’’ he mentions in speaking of homosexuals the act of leaving for the big city. But he also insists that it is not simply a matter of going to live ‘‘somewhere else’’ in the search of ‘‘anonymity.’’ Such an act involves a serious break in one’s biography.∞

  Much more than a simple geographical displacement or a quest for potential partners, it also creates the possibility of redefining one’s own subjectivity, reinventing one’s personal identity. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, in a suggestive formulation, speaks of the psychological as well as geographical trajectory that leads from small towns to big cities, as the ‘‘more than Balzacian founding narrative of modern identity of numerous American and European gays,’’ a story that unfolds with the passage from an isolated childhood and adolescence in a small town or some other hostile environment, to the freedom o√ered by city life.≤ A small town is a place where it is di≈cult to escape from the only available mirror, that o√ered by family life and by school, di≈cult to escape from the ‘‘interpellations’’ that enforce conformity to the a√ective, cultural, and social models of heterosexuality, to escape from what Adrienne Rich has called ‘‘compulsory heterosexuality.’’≥ A personal identity in fact takes shape through the degree of acceptance or refusal of this ‘‘interpellation’’ and through the often di≈cult and painful evolution, over years, of this relationship of submission or of rebellion. Such an identity assembles itself step by step, necessarily remaining a conflicted one, no matter which alternative one chooses: in one case, there will be conflicts between the submission to the heterosexual order and the internal pressure for relations with people of the same sex; in the other case, there will be