Insult and the Making of the Gay Self

by Didier Eribon

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  have really no way of knowing who would be the enculeur and who would be the enculé, if, in fact, that sexual practice would take place were the two to meet.

  But the spiciness in this example of what Proust calls a ‘‘malicious witticism’’ ( mauvaise plaisanterie) lies in its implication that there necessarily would be an enculeur and an enculé, for the perfidious aspect of the remark about the train going backwards refers explicitly to a backside, to an inversion of the proper direction. The joker thus has no reason to be precise, no reason to provide any details about the stigmatized relation: for him to succeed in making people laugh it su≈ces that he suggest that two inverts together will in fact practice sodomy and that consequently one of them will necessarily be a bottom. What makes the joke work is the idea that the ‘‘homosexual’’ is potentially and fantasmatically passive in a sodomitical relation. Given that he wants to present Charlus as the paradigmatic invert, Proust is obliged to attribute this sexuality to him, despite the incoherence that this induces in the psychological description of the character. (How, for instance, given this context, are we to take his attraction for very young fellows such as the sons of Mme de Surgis, by whom he is so captivated at one point in Cities of the Plain? ) Yet there is no end of remarks that intend to suggest to the reader the type of sexuality the baron is supposed to practice. Consider, for example, this exclamation of Jupien’s after his sexual encounter with the baron at the outset of this volume: ‘‘What a big bum you have’’ (2:632). Now this is the very moment at which the narrator discovers that the baron, given that he loves men, is a ‘‘woman’’: ‘‘I now understood, moreover, why earlier, when I had seen him coming away from Mme de Villeparisis’s, I had managed to arrive at the conclusion that M. de Charlus looked like a woman: he was one!’’ (2:637). Either Proust or his narrator insists, of course, on bringing this observation into contradiction with the self-proclaimed virility of the baron: ‘‘I could not help thinking how angry M. de Charlus would have been could he have known that he was being watched; for what was suggested to me by the sight of this man who was so enamoured of, who so prided

  himself upon, his virility, to whom all other men seemed odiously e√eminate, what he suddenly suggested to me, to such an extent had he momentarily assumed the features, the expression, the smile thereof, was a woman’’

  (2:626). We should notice, as I have already suggested, that this text is peppered with contradictions. For Charlus is described, a few lines further along, as a ‘‘male’’ bird attracted to a ‘‘female’’ one.∫ Yet what at this moment might seem to be only temporary, that is, Charlus’s true feminine nature

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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 here coming to the surface, is slowly going to reveal itself to be a more durable and ongoing inscription on his body. This is why, later, at the same time as he mentions how much Charlus has aged, Proust is able to describe him as a man covered in makeup and powder, ‘‘waddling along’’ with an

  ‘‘almost symbolic behind,’’ as if, with the coming of age, the truth about a man revealed itself—not only regarding the virility he had been able to lay claim to earlier (when he could still hide his ‘‘femininity’’), but also regarding his ‘‘inversion’’ and the practices it implies (2:890).

  Precisely because the ‘‘passive’’ role, real or imagined, is always considered degrading, it becomes impossible in certain cultures to think of relations between men as ‘‘homosexual’’—for this would imply that either of the partners might be passive. Rather, these relations are thought of as like the relation of a ‘‘man’’ and a ‘‘woman,’’ the active man playing the truly masculine, dominant role, and the false man/real woman, playing the passive, dominated, feminine role. One can see, in reading George Chauncey’s book on New York between the end of the nineteenth century and the 1930s, how, among the popular classes and in certain immigrant cultures, only those who performed the ‘‘passive’’ role were considered homosexual or, more exactly, ‘‘inverts’’ or ‘‘fairies.’’ The active partner, on the other hand, was not obliged to think of his sexuality in relation to the sex of his partner, only in relation to the role he played and the gender persona he displayed. Thus it was not the sex of one’s partner that determined sexual identity, but one’s role within the sex act. The so-called active partner was not homosexual, but a man. Here there is strictly speaking no ‘‘homosexuality,’’ for that notion implies, precisely, that both partners are to be considered homosexual and that the relationship is to be thought of as bringing together two people attracted to the same sex. Whereas in the cultures that Chauncey describes, one finds not a homosexual relation, but a relation between a ‘‘normal’’ and an ‘‘e√eminate’’ man, between a ‘‘wolf ’’ and a ‘‘fairy,’’ between what in French would be called a jules and a tante, a mec and a folle.

  This way of representing roles and the identities assigned to them can be found, even more extremely, in the relations studied by Annick Prieur between Mexican transvestite prostitutes and their clients.Ω These transvestites from the Mexican popular classes define themselves as ‘‘homosexual’’ ( jotos or jotas) and dress as women to seduce ‘‘men’’ who doubtless would not be able to have relations with persons of the same sex were it not arranged in

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  such a way that sexual di√erence was to be, and would continue to be, maintained. It is precisely this exacerbation of the di√erence in roles, this di√erential construction of ‘‘gender,’’ that enables homosexual relations in certain social sectors—for, as Prieur, like Chauncey, emphasizes, things are di√erent for the middle classes. In the popular classes homosexual relations are possible to the extent, and only to the extent, that they take on the appearance of heterosexual ones. But it is obviously not only sexual di√erence that is at stake here—or gender di√erence. It is also sexual or gender hierarchy, the domination of masculinity over femininity. This is why, while they are rather well integrated into their own world, the jotas nonetheless live surrounded by insults, attacks, and repeated dramas that can even go so far as violent deaths. They are permanent victims of aggression because they are men who dress as women or who pretend to be women. (A very particular case of aggression arises when they have been attempting to make a partner believe that they really are women, and he then discovers the truth.) But Prieur also emphasizes that some of the macho ‘‘men’’ who have relations with the jotas sometimes engage in the passive role in sodomy (the jota taking the active role). This, of course, can only happen as long as it is agreed that no one will know of it. What is important is not so much what happens in bed as what is known of what happens in bed. Appearances must be kept up.

  There can be little doubt, however disagreeable the idea might seem, that even today for certain gay men, even in those countries where the phenomenon of gay emancipation has developed, there persists a vague idea that those who are ‘‘tops’’ are not really gay, or are less so than those who are

  ‘‘bottoms.’’ This is the case even if, in those societies and in those periods where the category of ‘‘homosexuality’’ has established itself, there turns out to be no di√erence for either of the partners as regards the stigmatizing gaze—which considers any and all homosexuals as potentially enculés. It is even possible to find, when one considers certain discourses or certain images circulating in the gay world, that there persists the more or less conscious, more or less explicit idea that the partner who takes the ‘‘active’’

  role might as well be bisexual or heterosexual. (Even though studies show that frequently a bisexual man seeks the role of ‘‘bottom’’ in homosexual encounters, which turns out also to be the case for heterosexual men who seek out a homosexual experience.)∞≠

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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 It is surprising to discover how permane
ntly, how systematically, the

  ‘‘passivity’’ of a man is situated at the extreme end of the continuum of stigmatized practices. It demonstrates how old modes of perception and categorization, such as the ones Chauncey describes, survive and retain a certain durability within the contemporary mental structures of gay men themselves. As they do within the whole of the population: this is confirmed by the continually recurring surprise (this is already a theme in Gide’s Corydon) upon discovering that this or that man who had seemed so ‘‘masculine,’’ so ‘‘virile,’’ is, in fact, despite all that, gay.

  Pierre Bourdieu suggests that the cognitive structures of the traditional world of the Mediterranean that he studies in his work on Kabylia can o√er a kind of magnifying glass view of the statutory situation of women in our own societies, and, in any case, a ‘‘hyperbolic realization of all male fantasies.’’∞∞ In the same way, the structuring of roles and identities in the societies described by Annick Prieur or George Chauncey (which are not all that dissimilar to the one studied by Bourdieu—all of them call to mind the antique Mediterranean world as it is analyzed by Dover, Veyne, or Foucault) accentuate traits that can be found in more or less attenuated form in societies as di√erentiated and heterogeneous as our own. This may explain the seemingly congealed permanence of the repertory of insults directed at gay men, notably that one referred to in Proust’s novel, concerning the direction in which the little train is moving.

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  Subjectivity and Private Life

  Numerous stories—even if we shouldn’t assume them to account for the

  totality and the full multiplicity of gay and lesbian experience—recount how for many gay men and lesbians, the sense of one’s ‘‘sexual orientation’’ dates from earliest childhood. The American psychoanalyst Richard Isay emphasizes that both his clinical work and his research lead him to believe that while homosexuality, like heterosexuality, may have di√erent ways of manifesting itself, it is nonetheless ‘‘present from earliest childhood.’’∞ Cocteau declares something similar in 1928, in the first lines of The White Book: ‘‘As far back as I can remember and even at the age when the mind still has no power over the senses, I find traces of my love for boys.’’≤ Christopher Isherwood remembers his school years when he ‘‘had fallen in love with many boys.’’≥ And, still limiting ourselves to literary testimonies, we could also cite Jean Genet’s remarks, in an interview from 1964: ‘‘Do we know why we are homosexuals? Homosexuality was, in a manner of speaking, imposed on me, like the color of my eyes, or the number of feet I have. As a child, I was aware of being attracted by boys.’’ And, in an interview for the bbc in 1985, ‘‘I have always been di√erent [ J’ai toujours été à part].’’∂

  This feeling of being ‘‘di√erent,’’ of not fitting in, is surely a determinant part in the construction of a personal identity, in the construction of one’s self. Here we can perhaps find a key to one of the problems brought up earlier: the question of an orientation toward literary or artistic professions or toward the literary or artistic aspects of other professions. These professional choices permit one to continue to live out a kind of marginality familiar since childhood, providing in any case a little distance or di√erence.

  They also allow for a kind of loosened relation to social time, by which I mean the possibility of a kind of perpetual adolescence created by the reproduction of this constitutive marginality. Perhaps there is also in play an

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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 identification that dates from very early childhood (when it may not even have been conscious) with persons who o√ered models of free lives that escaped from certain norms, whereas the social roles o√ered by the family or

  ‘‘professional life’’ seemed rather what needed to be resolutely avoided.

  In Becoming a Man, the story of his childhood and adolescence, the American writer Paul Monette also describes himself as having been a ‘‘fag’’ from his earliest days. He too mentions the extent to which he felt di√erent: ‘‘I was such a cipher in prep school, so out of my league in every way.’’∑ It is telling that he opens his book with the discovery, upon entering adulthood, that he was not alone, that many other gay men shared his experiences, men who had also believed themselves to be unique. Monette’s childhood experiences include insults and physical attacks by his classmates on another boy deemed to be ‘‘e√eminate.’’ He recounts the constant fear of being discovered himself and his constant strategizing to avoid discovery. What is most striking in the scene of violence that he describes (in which he struggled to appear indi√erent, not to watch, not to pay attention) is the cowardly relief he feels once it is over. At that point he was able to tell himself that, given that he himself had been passed over, it meant that he was capable of carrying o√ his disguise and of passing as a ‘‘regular boy’’ (34–35). Monette calls this double game ‘‘ventriloquism’’: a game that consists of a gay man pretending that’s not what he is, that leads him to speak the ‘‘legitimate,’’

  dominant language, a language which, in fact, is not his own. This is why he can write, at the outset of his book, more than twenty years after the experiences in question: ‘‘I still shiver with a kind of astonished delight when a gay brother or sister tells of that narrow escape from the co≈n world of the closet. Yes yes yes, goes the voice in my head, it was just like that for me’’ (2).

  What is described in Monette’s troubling pages is an entire psychological structure in which can be discovered a kind of phenomenology of the lived experience of gay people (at least gay men). These pages brilliantly portray how a gay subjectivity is formed through a process of self-education, through a severe self-discipline that can never be relaxed, that must scrutinize every move, with the goal of appearing to be ‘‘as normal as everyone else.’’ The long-term e√ects of insult and hatred (here in the form of physical violence) write themselves into the body; they act by way of your own submission to the injunction they carry, your own consent to the order they enforce—

  that your personality and your desires must remain hidden, that the line must be toed. They command you always to act ‘‘as if.’’ They necessitate a permanent e√ort to ensure that none of your emotions, feelings, or desires are ever

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  revealed. ‘‘Such obedient slaves we make,’’ Monette exclaims, when he is speaking of the years of his youth, but also of the years leading up to the great emancipation movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s (2).

  Go√man accurately describes the necessity for an individual who belongs to a stigmatized category but who wishes to hide his ‘‘failing,’’ to be ‘‘alive to the social situation as a scanner of possibilities.’’ Such a person is ‘‘therefore likely to be alienated from the simpler world in which those around him apparently dwell,’’ because ‘‘new contingencies always arise, making former concealing devices inadequate.’’∏ Such an e√ort at disguise, such an obligation to lie, even to those to whom one is close, to one’s relatives, produces an

  ‘‘intolerable’’ strain, which cannot fail to have profound e√ects on an individual personality, on a given subjectivity (90). Go√man emphasizes the fact that ‘‘the stigma and the e√ort to conceal it or remedy it become ‘fixed’ as part of personal identity’’ (65). One should add that this is an essential part of that identity, providing both its interior and its exterior physiognomy.

  Understandably, a gay man who decides to identify as gay and to accept himself as such will be much less marked in his daily life by the strain that Go√man evokes—and much less dependent on the identity produced by that strain. The self-identified gay man is freer, less imprisoned by a homosexual identity than is the individual obliged to be attentive to every moment and every situation for fear of ‘‘betraying’’ what he is to those around him. To say that one is gay is thus to free oneself from the weight that bears down
on those who struggle to conceal that identity. Thus one is less dependent on or less enclosed in that ‘‘identity’’ and freer in one’s relations to other people (to other gay people as well as to people in general).

  The obligation to lie e√ectively involves keeping a large segment of yourself enclosed in secrecy. It amounts to setting up a psychological ghetto in which to conceal your sexual and a√ective identity—a good portion of that which defines your personality—preserving it from any exterior gaze and from the threat of insult, injury, and devalorization. But, as we have seen, the closet only o√ers a tenuous form of security, one that is always under threat and frequently only fictive. The gay man who secludes his ‘‘secret’’ in a corner of his consciousness can never be sure that others will not discover it.

  The secret might already be known to a certain number of people who

  already make fun of him when he is not around—as the example of Charlus and of the public spectacle of his private secret makes clear. The obligation to enclose one’s private life in the interior ghetto of a divided mind leaves an individual open to public speculation, gossip, rumor, insinuation, and

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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 mockery. This rendering private is thus truly a structure of oppression for gay men and lesbians. More often than not it is imposed upon them, and more often than not they also choose to submit to it. They shape their personalities and their behavior according to it.

  To shake o√ this interiorized yoke of domination implies, along with the decision no longer to tolerate it, a serious e√ort at getting rid of old mental and behavioral habits: to be able to say that one is gay involves an unlearning of all the pretenses that had been so assiduously learned and practiced with such vigilance and for so long.π Every gay man starts o√ learning to lie.∫ He now has to learn a new language, a new way of speaking, new forms of self-presentation.Ω Here we can clearly see that there are no such things as