Insult and the Making of the Gay Self

by Didier Eribon

  ‘‘choice’’ to be homosexual, but of the choice that a gay person makes of a certain way of life, the choice to aspire to a way of life that gives a way out of an unbearable ‘‘positional su√ering’’ and the ‘‘melancholy’’ that is its psychological expression.

  6

  The City and Conservative Discourse

  Certainly the city represents an aspiration to freedom and self-realization, yet it can also be a place of misfortune. In certain ways condemned to city life, gay people are also forced to live with all the forms of violence that come with the city: gay bashings, police harassment, communicable diseases, and so on. Of course all of this exists in smaller towns as well, and it is even in order to escape physical violence and harassment that many gay people have taken refuge in larger cities.∞ In the big cities violence takes on other forms, and methods to resist it are better developed, yet social control of the subculture and various manifestations of hostility find ways of flourishing as well.

  This is perhaps one of the prominent characteristics of gay history and of the gay city, especially as George Chauncey describes it. He emphasizes the e√ort given to the social control of sexuality and of gender, something he labels a ‘‘street-level policing of gender.’’≤ Unless one understands this phenomenon it will be di≈cult to grasp how contemporary gay identity emerged via the installation of specific ways of life and specific freedoms. The city is thus both the place in which gay culture comes to exist and the place in which that culture is subject to social surveillance in its most basic and quotidian forms. In the city these two phenomena interact. Throughout history, homosexuality and the vice squad have formed a strange couple, whose divorce, alas, seems still to be nowhere in sight, even if the couple has gone through some changes and even modernized itself over the years.

  The city is also a place of illness. In Western countries it was the ‘‘ecological niche’’ of the aids epidemic.≥ The marvelous names that had figured in the dreams of generations of gay people (San Francisco, New York, Paris . . . ) were darkened by the specter of death as well as by the infinite sadness of the

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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 repeated acts of mourning experienced by those who survived and yet lost so many friends. Yet the city also became at that time the locus for new forms of solidarity and bonding: new organizations to fight the epidemic, newsletters to provide information about it, demonstrations, and so on. Sociological studies have shown that even if certain ‘‘activists’’ (though obviously not all of them) were slow to realize the gravity of the growing epidemic at the beginning of the 1980s, it was in any case those gay people most fully integrated into and involved in their communities (thus those living in the big cities) who reacted the most rapidly to the epidemic, adopted preventive measures (once they had been recommended by doctors), and founded organizations. At the outset, the prime movers of the struggle against aids were, along with some former activists from the 1970s, gays from the urban subculture.∂

  The city has thus been both a place for new forms of solidarity and a place for new forms of abjection. Those who had fled from shame and insult

  would encounter them anew in this new place and have to learn to live with them again—supplemental forms of aggression attacking an immune system already threatened by illness. aids has often forced those who had previously chosen to remain silent about their homosexuality to come out, bringing on the hostility of neighbors, colleagues, and family. For many infected people, it has been not only their seropositivity or aids that has been di≈cult to speak of, but also, of course, their homosexuality. The shame of being gay was reinforced by the shame of being ill—and with an illness that reinforced the shame of being gay.∑

  The abjection could extend even further when those who had sought to

  escape their families were, on many occasions, literally retaken by them: families who would sometimes go as far as refusing hospital access to a partner, not notifying the partner of his lover’s death, evicting the partner from the apartment the couple had lived in for years, denying the partner all rights to his lover’s personal belongings—even clothes, records, books. . . .

  Indeed, this is hardly a new phenomenon: is it not exactly the theme of Balzac’s Cousin Pons? This ‘‘queer cousin’’ (as Michael Lucey has called him), who lives with another man and seems to have strange tastes (in his way of life as well as in his artistic passions), is held at a distance by his family until the moment that family conceives of the project of laying their hands on the marvelous collection of art objects that he has amassed over the years. At a distance from their families, exterior to the order of generations and filiation, such people ‘‘have no heirs.’’ They seem to have ‘‘sprung up like mush-

  t h e c i t y a n d c o n s e rvat i v e d i s c o u r s e

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  rooms on this earth,’’ as the concierge of Pons and Schmucke’s building says of them. (Similarly, Miss Wade, in Dickens’s Little Dorrit, is an orphan who comes from nowhere.) But these ‘‘queers’’ are caught up by the family order again when Pons dies. One sees how, at the end of the novel, Schmucke, to whom Pons has left everything, is entirely dispossessed by the family. Michael Lucey has referred to this event as ‘‘a final revenge of heterosexuality on a queer attempt to wrest some of society’s wealth to its own ends.’’∏ The deceased ‘‘queer’’ is reinscribed into the heterosexual family order as soon as the transmission of an economic patrimony—or even some simple inheritance, however small—comes into question. But this is accomplished only through the e√acement of the queer aspect of the person who has died, thereby implying a radical exclusion of the surviving partner.

  Schmucke, driven to misery and death, is a paradigmatic instance of this.

  With aids, it has become more clear than ever that the relation of exteriority that gay people maintain with families and with the family order carries with it numerous juridical consequences that can lead to spoliation and systematic discrimination. It has come to be increasingly unbearable to be deprived of the most elementary of rights. The city has thus become the battleground for these rights, just as it has been, on numerous occasions throughout the century, the place in which gay movements were born and developed.π

  Even before aids, the city was always considered by conservative dis-

  course as an exemplary place of perdition, the cauldron of sexual freedom, and thus of the corruption of bodies and souls. Chauncey cites a text from 1895 that asserts that the growth of big cities and the influx of foreigners would ‘‘lead to an increase in inversion and similar vices.’’∫ Similarly, the earliest practitioners of urban sociology (who cooperated closely with social reformers and faithfully repeated all of their worries) did not fail to call attention to the fact that urbanization had a destructive e√ect on families and the other kinds of social bonds that, in smaller towns, allowed for controls on individual behaviors. As Walter Reckless wrote in 1926, this ‘‘personal disorganization’’ caused people to stray from ‘‘socially approved channels’’

  and could end ‘‘not merely in prostitution, but also in perversion.’’Ω

  One could even go so far as to say that Proust’s work (without, of course, exhibiting such foul ideological tendencies) is also haunted by the opposition between the city and the countryside. On one side there is Françoise, the

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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 feeling of nostalgia for childhood and family life, the traditional rhythms of the works and the days, the rural landscape and its church towers. On the other there is Charlus, the breaking down of class boundaries, cafes filled with gay people, and male bordellos in which all forms of ‘‘vice’’ are allowed.

  The cities mentioned above as symbols of a freedom that was either lived or dreamed of (Berlin, Paris, Amsterdam, London, San Francisco, New

  York . . . ) have thus at the same time, and in symmetrical fashion, represente
d everything that the guardians of social and moral order—the apostles of religion, familialism, and oppression of women and homosexuals—held (and continue to hold) in horror. The city’s atmosphere is vicious and delete-rious. The city is sick and also a place of sickness. In all the discourses of traditional ideologies, as in those of conservative revolutions or restorations, of nationalisms and fascisms (which are nonetheless linked to the city by the very structure of political mobilization upon which they rely), the idea of the city has always been associated with the threat of decadence (as opposed to health) and of mixity (as opposed to purity—of race, for example). Nazism and fascisms prospered from the denunciation of everything that made cities into paradises for gay people. It must not be forgotten that Nazism presented itself as a project of ‘‘purification’’ that was sexual as well as racial.∞≠

  And who could deny that today the French National Front also draws suste-nance from the televised images of Gay Pride?

  At the beginning of the twentieth century, as in the 1920s and 1930s, Berlin was continually denounced as the international capital of decadence.

  Octave Mirbeau described this ‘‘Berlin-Sodom’’ in 1907.∞∞ One wonders what image or phantasm of the city all the conservative revolutionaries of pre-Nazi Germany had in their minds, leading them to preach the return to an authentic life—that is to say, the life of the countryside. Surely it was the same image, but reversed, that Hirschfeld provided in his description of Berlin in the early years of the century. The story Ernst Jünger tells of a stay in Hamburg at the end of the 1930s can be read as supporting this idea.∞≤ And how can one not think of Hirschfeld’s exalted descriptions upon reading the text Heidegger wrote in the autumn of 1933, in order to explain why he turned down the o√er of a Chair at Berlin University? In these few pages, titled

  ‘‘Why We Are Remaining in the Provinces,’’ pages that constitute a veritable resume of the entire right-wing ideology of the metropolis that flourished after Spengler, Heidegger opposes the Black Forest, contact with nature, an anchoring in the soil and in peasant memory to the evil spells of the city and its ‘‘pleasure haunts.’’∞≥

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  Still today the city is denounced as the place of luxury and of the loose morals that eat away at the nation and lead it to its downfall. Imprecations against modern-day Sodoms and Gomorrahs are one of the structuring

  principles of the discourse of the American religious right (or even the American right tout court), and this is merely an exaggerated version of what is found in most French right-wing discourse (and even in that of many on the Christian ‘‘left’’ in France). These same schemas of thought were found, at the beginning of the aids crisis, in many remarks made about New York, San Francisco, or Paris as gay cities or cities of debauchery. Today’s mobilization of the right and the extreme-right against the legal recognition of same-sex couples shows su≈ciently clearly the degree to which the horror of homosexuality is active and violent in the more retrograde sectors of society.

  Is it not the barely dampened echo of this out-of-date hatred for the modern city, its turpitudes and its ‘‘abnormal’’ and suspect inhabitants, that one still hears in the discourse of all those who denounce the gay ‘‘community’’ and its visibility, as well as Gay Pride and its ‘‘excesses’’? Surely the horror provoked by this gay ‘‘community’’ is colored, in the fantasy that lurks behind it, by a certain disgust at promiscuity, and at sexual promiscuity in particular. In his denunciation of ‘‘Berlin-Sodom,’’ one of Mirbeau’s characters was already speaking out against the phenomenon that so many edi-torialists in the ‘‘liberal’’ Parisian press of the 1990s also found repugnant:

  ‘‘Can you imagine that such men have actually formed an organization?’’∞∂

  The denunciations of ‘‘identity politics’’ by those who seem today finally to have noticed that cities contain people with minority identities (which are consubstantial with the very existence of cities, one might note), their fright at the sight of the ‘‘gay menace’’ that threatens the ‘‘unity’’ of society, recalls the accusation (one already leveled at Oscar Wilde and André Gide) that homosexuals represent a corrupting element in the heart of society, a gan-grene that threatens the strength of the nation. It is hardly surprising that one finds in those homophobic ideologists with the widest media exposure today a kind of watered-down Heideggerianism (Heidegger without the philosophy): a discourse that invokes a nation’s roots, that refers to the ‘‘immemorial’’ order in which the family guarantees the transmission of a spiritual heritage, that repeats in incantatory fashion how these days everything is going to the dogs. Thanks to all this, such a discourse seems nothing more than a repetition in a minor mode of all of the main themes of the founders of conservative, nationalist, and fascist ideologies.

  7

  To Tell or Not to Tell

  I realize that heterosexual readers may have a hard time believing my assertion that insult is a constitutive part of gay identity. They may never have thought about these questions before. More importantly, especially if they are men—white, Christian men of the Western world (women or black,

  Jewish, or Arab men may see things di√erently)—if they have never been confronted by the violence of insult, they may find such an assertion exaggerated. I also know that certain gay men might also deny my assertion. Even if they have themselves experienced what I am writing about, they may make a point of insisting that it has had no e√ect on their lives, behaving as if the fact of having been called, perhaps even repeatedly, a ‘‘faggot,’’ could have no importance, could leave no trace, could remain an isolated and insignificant event within the context of a given existence.

  Perhaps certain gay men will assert that they have in fact never been the target of a verbal attack. One might respond that there are many who would make that assertion without it being true. But further, it needs to be pointed out that insult is only the extreme form on a linguistic, cultural, and social continuum that also includes malicious gossip, allusions, insinuations, spiteful remarks, and jokes that are more or less explicit, more or less nasty.

  An insult can be heard or understood merely in the inflection of a voice or in an amused or a hostile glance. All of these attenuated or displaced forms of insult together form the linguistic horizon of the hostility within which gay people lead their lives.

  Moreover, even those who are the most resistant to the idea that insult could be an important aspect of their relation to the world will concede that, even if they have no concrete experience of it, they are nonetheless fully conscious of the fact that such a verbal attack is possible at any moment, that it is a threat forever present in their social life, that there is a risk it will

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  plunge that life into an unimaginable and even unbearable future. One has only to read the interviews conducted by Régis Gallerand with the members of the Christian organization David and Jonathan, one of the largest gay and lesbian organizations in France. Consider the remarks of one small-town secondary-school teacher. He confides that every morning, as he enters his classroom, he worries about whether he will find the two letters ‘‘pd’’ written on the blackboard.∞ To him it seems impossible even to imagine the consequences of any such labeling, any such definitive accusation and stigmatization.≤ Such a story reveals a great deal about the reality of gay and lesbian existences outside of the big cities, and even within them. One book from the United States designates the teaching profession as the ‘‘last closet.’’≥ This deft title is nonetheless probably inexact, for the list of professions in which it is impossible to cease hiding one’s homosexuality remains quite a long one. It certainly includes the more ‘‘advanced’’ sectors of the workforce (computer science, for instance, or international banking), sectors in which one is nonetheless quite likely to hear complaints about other k
inds of ‘‘resistance to change.’’ But certainly the teaching profession is high on the list. It would be interesting to be able to read the stories of teachers—or laborers, employees, bureaucrats, salespeople, and so on—who are obliged to lead a double life, often conducting their ‘‘sex life’’ in the big city nearest to their workplace. Such a situation decreases the likelihood of any satisfactory intimate relationship, makes any such relationship di≈cult to manage; it limits many people (for there are many who are obliged to lead a ‘‘clandestine’’ second life) to a dissociated and unhappy existence. Such people must devote large amounts of energy to preserving the barrier between their two lives, trying to avoid being seen by a colleague near a gay bar or cruising area or in the company of someone a little less closeted, and therefore more compromising, than they are.∂ Gide recounts an exemplary scene of this nature, one whose equivalent any gay person will doubtless have experienced. Walking along a Parisian boulevard one day, he bumps into Oscar Wilde, who has just been let out of prison, and to whom he had demonstrated the faithfulness of his friendship by going to visit him in Normandy as soon as Wilde arrived in France:

  I heard my name called. I turned about: it was Wilde. Ah! how

  changed he was! . . . Wilde was sitting at a table on the terrace of a café. . . . I was going to sit down facing him, that is, in such a way as to turn my back to the passers-by, but Wilde, perturbed by this gesture,

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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 which he thought was due to an absurd shame (he was not, alas!

  completely mistaken):

  ‘‘Oh! sit down here, near me,’’ he said, pointing to a chair beside

  him; ‘‘I’m so alone these days!’’ . . .

  ‘‘When, in times gone by, I used to meet Verlaine, I didn’t blush for him,’’ he went on, with an attempt at pride.∑