Insult and the Making of the Gay Self

by Didier Eribon

  ‘‘original choice,’’ that is to say, the choice that each person can freely make of himself or herself and of his or her life. It is, of course, rather di≈cult today, after all we have learned from psychoanalysis, anthropology, linguistics, sociology, and so on, to ascribe fully to the Sartrian philosophy of freedom, which supposes that one’s consciousness is transparent to oneself, or, at least, that that consciousness is only limited by itself. We have seen how social, historical, and sexual structures are written into the body and the mind of individuals, producing determinations that cannot be taken in by an analysis that proceeds in terms of conscious choices. For instance, it can be observed that this gesture of coming out is not evenly distributed across social groups. Michael Pollak has shown that the probability that a gay man will assume his identity is much greater the higher the educational level he has attained.∞

  Nonetheless, this Sartrian idea of a choice that you make—a choice that you can or should make—as to what you are at any and every moment of your life, a choice that becomes crucial at the particularly determining moment when someone chooses what to be, launching a ‘‘project’’ directed toward the future, seems to me to describe remarkably well the profound rupture that occurs in gay lives at the moment a decision is made to change one’s relation to the world and to others. (Sartre presents this choice as one between ‘‘authenticity’’ and ‘‘inauthenticity.’’) The question, the stark di-lemma which one day or another confronts gay people, is this: either to say what you are or not to, either to choose to be yourself or to fail to do so because it is too di≈cult. This is a choice between a freedom you choose and a form of conduct based on ‘‘bad faith,’’ conduct that is the result of a refusal

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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 to face up to your freedom. Whatever class one may belong to—and even if the choice to be ‘‘free’’ is made easier by a high level of education or by coming from a certain background—all stigmatized individuals are inevitably confronted at some moment, be it in their daily life, at work, in their family circle, or with friends, by the question of whether to continue to hide what they are or to choose to assume that identity openly. Nietzsche famously wrote, ‘‘You shall become the person you are.’’ We should not forget that a few aphorisms later, he wrote that the fundamental freedom consists in ‘‘no longer being ashamed in front of oneself.’’≤

  For a gay man there is a constant question as to whether he should accept himself as such or live out his days in pain and shame. Now even if the mental structures of shame and domination cannot be fully grasped within the terms of a philosophy of consciousness, we must nonetheless leave open a place for an individual decision at the foundation of freedom and emancipation—even if it is clear that this individual choice is only made possible (save in a few very exceptional cases) by the existence of the social and cultural context created by ‘‘gay culture’’ and by the possibility of a kind of countersocialization that that culture enables, even if it does so at a distance.

  ‘‘To say ‘instant’ is to say fatal instant,’’ Sartre writes. It is true that the instant in which the choice is made involves one’s whole future. Sartre continues, ‘‘The instant is the reciprocal and contradictory envelopment of the before by the after. One is still what one is going to cease to be and already what one is going to become’’ (s t g, 2). This is a marvelously apt description of the temporal structure of a relation to the gay world. The decision no longer to pretend and the choice to be oneself open onto a new temporality—one’s entire future is changed. Here one could think of Sartre’s analysis of freedom as ‘‘anxiety,’’ for the ‘‘choice’’ is like a moment of madness that will change everything about the way one is. If young gay people experience a great deal of anxiety (in the ordinary sense of the word) at the age when the question of this choice presents itself (and it often worries the mind for many years), it is because the free act of a≈rming one’s freedom is tied up in a more profound kind of anxiety (here in the Sartrian sense of the term), meaning that the act of freedom has nothing but the freedom per se on which to support itself.

  Of course, this metaphor of the ‘‘instant’’ can lead one astray: it might encourage us to believe that a gay person participates in only one temporality. But in fact there is the temporality of the workplace, that of the family, that of one’s friendships, and so on. One’s coming out might happen

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  in one space and not in another. In any case, that coming out, which is often experienced as a leap into the void by those who finally take the step, has always been preceded by various hesitant attempts, roundabout and abortive admissions, and so on. There are the letters written but never sent; there are last minute changes of heart after one had promised to tell a friend, one’s mother, one’s brother, one’s sister, and so on. This can last for months or even years. Yet there will always be one day, one instant, when something—

  however partial, however limited—is said: the first time a friend is told or the first time pretense is abandoned. These kinds of statements can take many di√erent forms. Some people make them quite explicitly: ‘‘I have to tell you something.’’ Some people intentionally leave a book or magazine lying around. Some people simply introduce their partner.

  In that way an individual—who had been the ‘‘object’’ of someone else’s gaze, who had been made into an ‘‘object’’ by that stigmatizing gaze, who had been silenced and shamed by insult, and who had been devalorized by the dissymmetry in the social positioning of homosexuality—thus decides to turn around and become what it is that the gaze would see. He or she

  chooses to identify with that assigned identity. And it can thereby be overcome, exceeded, transformed, or reinterpreted. No longer need it be defined from outside. It can be reworked from inside. One can make of it what one will, free it from its reified state, make it the basis of one’s freedom. ‘‘To wrest from this gaze its constituent power’’ (s t g, 69), writes Sartre, and to reclaim the power to constitute oneself as part of one’s own freedom: this is the meaning behind his oft-cited phrase: ‘‘What is important is not what people make of us but what we ourselves make of what they have made of us’’ (s t g, 49).

  Of course, Sartre’s treatment of gay people in some of his writing (philosophy, novels, plays, political essays) can sometimes be quite distasteful. He has a tendency—for obvious historical reasons as well as because of unthought homophobic attitudes that one also finds in Simone de Beauvoir—to lump homosexuals (because they keep so many ‘‘secrets’’ about themselves, because they pretend, because they seem so rarely capable of choosing authenticity) with those who practice ‘‘bad faith.’’ One finds in Being and Nothingness, as in many other texts, intolerable statements on this subject. We are inevitably confronted here by the limits of a thought that remained in the grip of the prejudices of its moment.≥ It is only at the very end of his life that

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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 Sartre will make an e√ort to produce a more political analysis that involves a rejection of his previous statements.∂

  It is nonetheless still the case that his analyses of an ‘‘original project’’ or of the ‘‘fatal instant’’—analyses that purport to have a general applicability (for let us not forget that Sartre’s philosophical program in Being and Nothingness was to set out a ‘‘phenomenological ontology’’)—can be taken as wonderful descriptions of the lives of gay people and of the moment of choice that they must face—or refuse to face—if they wish to escape from the

  ‘‘ventriloquism’’ of which Paul Monette spoke. From this point of view it would not be unreasonable, given the context, to translate what Sartre calls

  ‘‘authenticity’’—the choice to be free—by ‘‘pride’’ in oneself. And then

  ‘‘shame,’’ ‘‘disguise,’’ and
‘‘pretense’’ can be taken to fall under the heading of ‘‘bad faith.’’

  It requires no distortion of Sartre’s texts to do this. The philosophical notions worked out in Being and Nothingness provide the foundation for his 1946 reflections in Anti-Semite and Jew ( Réflexions sur la question juive), and many of the thoughts in that work can readily be transposed to the ‘‘gay question.’’

  Perhaps this is not the place to discuss at length his famous statement: ‘‘The Jew is one whom other men consider to be a Jew.’’∑ Hannah Arendt’s criticisms of this idea are well known, even if they are not always pertinent.∏ Yet, given our concerns here, it is important to emphasize that Sartre o√ers the notion of a ‘‘situation’’ as an anchor for that which ‘‘serves to keep a semblance of unity in the Jewish community.’’ It is not the past, not religion, nor any territory that founds ‘‘being-Jewish’’: ‘‘If all of them deserve the name of Jew, it is because they have in common the situation of a Jew, that is, they live in a community which takes them for Jews.’’π Consequently, there is always the ‘‘necessity imposed upon the Jew . . . of assuming a phantom personality . . . that haunts him and which is nothing but himself—himself as others see him’’ (78). This ‘‘assumption’’ can happen in two opposing ways:

  Authenticity, it is almost needless to say, consists in having a true and lucid consciousness of the situation, in assuming the responsibilities and risks that it involves, in accepting it in pride or humiliation, sometimes in horror and hate. There is no doubt that authenticity demands much courage and more than courage. Thus it is not surprising that

  one finds it so rarely. . . . And the Jew does not escape this rule:

  authenticity for him is to live to the full his condition as Jew; inauthenticity is to deny it or to attempt to escape from it. (90–91)

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  It is because such a ‘‘phantom personality’’ haunts the gay man despite himself and because this ‘‘personality’’ is nothing other than ‘‘himself as others see him’’—or, what amounts to the same thing, himself occupying the specific derogatory place he is assigned in the sexual order—that every gay man must one day ‘‘assume’’ that personality, must choose to be what he is or else give up freedom and annihilate himself as a person in order to comply with the demands of the society that both insults him as a homosexual and denies him the right to declare that he is gay. ‘‘Inauthentic Jews,’’

  Sartre says, ‘‘are men whom other men take for Jews and who have decided to run away from this insupportable situation.’’∫ Thus is ‘‘inauthenticity’’ a form of submission to the social order and to oppressive structures, while

  ‘‘authenticity’’ is above all a refusal of this order. It is clear why Sartre is able to say that authenticity can only manifest itself ‘‘in revolt.’’Ω

  Authenticity is to be found in the decision to assume the burden of being what one is: to be gay not simply as it were en soi (which is to say according to the gaze of others, of society), but rather pour soi (that is, having assumed the identity for oneself as a project of freedom). That social gaze establishes for all gay people, even ones who are not out, the en soi of homosexuality: the image and the ‘‘role,’’ the ‘‘discreditable’’ identity, assigned to them. The gay man thus must make himself gay in order to escape from the violence that the society that makes him be gay also threatens him with. In a political text from the 1970s, for instance, Sartre will say that a Basque person must ‘‘make himself (or herself ) Basque [se faire basque]’’ in order to fight the oppression su√ered due to being Basque.∞≠ Someone could, of course, raise the objection that it is much easier to know what ‘‘being Basque’’ means than to know what ‘‘being gay’’ means. Indeed, much of the di≈culty with ‘‘authenticity’’ for a gay person lies in the di≈culty in identifying with an ‘‘identity’’

  that is necessarily plural, necessarily multiple: it is an identity without identity, or, better, an identity without an essence—an identity to be created.∞∞ In e√ect, for a person who has decided to have no further truck with all the kinds of psychological meanings imposed by social and cultural discourses on homosexuality (be they legal, medical, psychoanalytical, and so on), there is no ‘‘me,’’ no ‘‘ego,’’ to be that would preexist that which must be brought into existence. This is why Henning Bech can say that a gay person is a ‘‘born existentialist,’’ for existence (always) precedes essence: gay identity, as soon as it is chosen rather than merely submitted to, is never simply given.∞≤ In order to be constructed, it will refer to already existing, already visible models (in all their multiplicity). One can therefore say that the project of ‘‘mak-

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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 ing’’ oneself gay ( se faire gay) not only means creating oneself, but creating oneself in the light of, through the inspiration of, all the examples already available in society and in history. If there is to be an ‘‘identity,’’ it will be a personal identity made in relation to a collective one. It will invent itself in and through the ‘‘social types,’’ the ‘‘roles’’ that one ‘‘plays,’’ to whose existence one contributes in a form of collective recreation of gay subjectivity.

  There is always another ‘‘phantom personage’’ that haunts every gay

  person in contemporary society. It is not the one created by the ‘‘gaze’’ of the other, but the one opposed to that gaze, constructed in opposition to it by gay visibility itself. Consequently ‘‘making’’ oneself gay takes on a meaning much less metaphysical than that of the ‘‘authenticity’’ of which Sartre speaks: for it is simply a matter of identifying oneself with an already existing collective—even if the identity produced by that collective is itself never stable. It has evolved endlessly over the past century. (It seems probable that even over short time spans there have been profound changes, to the extent that a gay man from the late 1990s is remarkably di√erent from a gay man from the early 1970s.) Collective creation is forever moving beyond itself. It is profoundly unpredictable. It opens history to freedom.

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  Unrealizable Identity

  Whatever ‘‘roles’’ gay people take up, however they might transform them, these available ‘‘identities’’ all share the characteristic of—now and then, here or there—being in a compromised position vis-à-vis the social world around them. A gay person is never done with the necessity of choosing to be himself or herself in the face of a stigmatizing society. What Sartre calls

  ‘‘authenticity’’ can only be understood as an unending process of self-invention and self-construction.

  Coming out is a conversion experience. If it can be described as the act of a particular moment, of the instant in which a decision is made, we must add that such a decision will need to be made over and over again. Basically, coming out is a lifelong process. It will always be an open question as to where, when, and with whom it is possible not to hide what one is. The need to choose reappears in every new situation in life: when a teacher finds himself or herself in front of a new class or a di√erent lecture hall, when a student meets a dissertation director, when any gay man or lesbian sees a new doctor or a new employer, enters a new workplace, is admitted to a hospital, enters a retirement home, or finds him or herself in front of a newspaper salesman or a taxi driver who is saying something homophobic.∞

  Becoming socialized within a gay context (made up of bars, cruising

  places, and so on), a process that allows one to find friends who are themselves gay, can reinforce this strongly dichotomous structure: freedom within the confines of a carefully built up, chosen area and ‘‘discretion’’ within the space of the family and the workplace. Yet such a polarity exists even for the most open gay men and lesbians. Doubtless there is no gay person so ‘‘open’’

  that he or she has not, at one moment or another, made co
mpromises with the closet. This is why coming out is never done only once and for all. Rather it is a point of departure, a kind of ‘‘ruling ideal’’ that shapes one’s conduct

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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 but can never be fully attained. The closet is structured in such a way that you are never simply either in or out, but always both in and out, more or less in or more or less out depending on the particular instance and your own evolution. You can never be fully in the closet to the extent that, as we have seen, the closet can always become a sort of ‘‘open secret.’’ There is always at least one person who seems to know, whom you know knows, or whom you suspect

  must know. And you can never be fully out of the closet, for at any moment you can once again find yourself in the situation of having to disguise what you are or of simply not feeling like making things perfectly clear. Thus the decision no longer to pretend, to be open about what you are, can only be the beginning of a necessarily interminable process, in the sense in which Freud could speak of an ‘‘interminable analysis.’’

  It is not just a matter of lapses in the degree of individual courage it is necessary to summon up in life’s various situations—often (and quite stressfully) when you least expect it. Nor is it a question of an inevitable and provisory flagging of the psychological energy required by the will to be

  ‘‘out.’’ For it is indeed a tedious experience, to desire to be or to be required to be, permanently out. Often enough it is simply easier not to say the words, not to make the gesture, that would rea≈rm your coming out, once you have realized that the words will have to be said, the gesture made, again and again. Here we are dealing on a very deep level with the definition of the very structure of gay identity. As Henning Bech puts it, when you have made the choice no longer to pretend, you move ‘‘from the uneasiness of not being able to be [yourself ] as a homosexual . . . to the uneasiness of having to be