20. Amnesty International, Breaking the Silence.
pa rt ∞
A World of Insult
1. The Shock of Insult
1. Jouhandeau, De l’abjection, 145.
2. As Genet puts it in one of his poems, ‘‘a dizzying word, arriving from the foundations of the world, destroyed its happy order [un mot vertigineux, venu du fond du monde, abolit le bel ordre].’’ See Genet, ‘‘La Galère,’’ in Poèmes, 51. Sartre cites this verse in his book on Genet, whose second chapter is called precisely, ‘‘A Dizzying Word.’’ See Sartre, Saint Genet, 17. Hereafter cited as s t g .
3. Austin, How to Do Things with Words.
4. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 4–6.
5. See Go√man, Stigma.
2. The Flight to the City
1. Take, for example, three of the most important works of gay literature of recent years: Hollinghurst, The Swimming Pool Library; Peck, Martin and John; Bartlett, Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall.
2. See Hirigoyen, Le Harcèlement moral.
3. Schiltz, ‘‘Parcours de jeunes homosexuels dans le contexte du vih,’’ 1503.
4. ‘‘San Francisco is a refugee camp for homosexuals. We have fled from every part of the nation, and like refugees elsewhere, we came not because it is so great here, but because it is so bad there.’’ Wittmann, ‘‘A Gay Manifesto,’’ 330.
5. Bérubé, Coming Out Under Fire.
6. D’Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities.
7. See Chauncey, Gay New York, 233–35, 271–73.
8. Ibid., 271.
9. On this point, see Bech, When Men Meet, 148–51.
10. On Germany, see Isherwood, Christopher and His Kind. For a more general view, see Tamagne, Recherches sur l’homosexualité dans la France, l’Angleterre et l’Allemagne
n o t e s t o pa rt o n e , s e c t i o n 3
≥∑π
du début des années vingt à la fin des années trente, 1:105 √. [Translator’s note: Since the publication of Eribon’s book, Tamagne’s dissertation has been published as a book: Histoire de l’homosexualité en Europe: Paris, Londres, Berlin (Paris: Seuil, 2000).] On Foucault and Dumézil, see Eribon, Michel Foucault, 29–30, 73–98, 187–98; Michel Foucault et ses contemporains, 105–38, 266–87; and Faut-il brûler Dumézil? .
11. Bech, When Men Meet, 98.
12. Hirschfeld, Le Troisième sexe, 5–6.
13. On the moment of arrival in the city, see the opening pages of Bartlett’s Who Was That Man?
14. See Chauncey, Gay New York. On Berlin, London, and Paris in the 1920s and 30s, see Tamagne, Recherches sur l’homosexualité dans la France, esp. 1:242–96.
15. Hirschfeld, Le Troisième sexe, 5.
16. Chauncey’s entire book can be read as a history of these fluctuations, of this give and take—partly deliberate, partly enforced—between secrecy and openness.
17. Descriptions of Paris’s gay subculture at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries can be found in the novels of Jean Lorrain and the autobiographical texts of Francis Carco.
3. Friendship as a Way of Life
1. Go√man, Stigma, 100.
2. Sedgwick, Between Men, ix.
3. Rich, ‘‘Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,’’ 23–75.
4. It is hard to know in which category to place the normative violence one finds in so much of the psychological or psychoanalytic literature: all the methods they suggest to inhibit boys from becoming too ‘‘e√eminate’’ or girls too ‘‘masculine,’’
all the discussions about ‘‘roles’’ and ‘‘identifications’’ (for boys, identification with a father), about the necessity of ‘‘gender di√erence,’’ etc., all the pseudo-therapeutic advice given to help bring ‘‘deviant’’ children back to the correct heterosexually normative developmental path, back to orthodox gender behavior, are of a piece with the insults (to be experienced by such children a bit later) that are directed at ‘‘fairies’’ and ‘‘fruits’’ or ‘‘dykes.’’ For an analysis of this ‘‘soft’’ discursive violence, see Sedgwick, ‘‘How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay,’’ 154–64.
5. Bech, When Men Meet, 116–17.
6. Discretion had, of course, already lost a lot of ground. Proust speaks of
‘‘extremists who allow a bracelet to slip down from beneath a cu√, or sometimes a necklace to gleam in the gap of a collar, who by their persistent stares, their cooings, their laughter, their mutual caresses, oblige a band of students to depart in hot haste’’ (rtp, 3:642).
≥∑∫
n o t e s t o pa rt o n e , s e c t i o n 3
7. See Chauncey, Gay New York, 133. Analogous remarks can be found in a great number of medical or police documents in France from the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth.
8. It has always seemed to me (perhaps I am wrong) that the ideas used by Pollak in his extremely important book, Les Homosexuels et le sida—which, ten years after its publication, remains one of the few books published in France in which one finds a rigorous analysis of the lived experiences of gay men in the 1970s and 1980s—
emerge from what we might call a ‘‘dominated point of view’’ on homosexuality, the point of view of those who accept without questioning them the representations produced by domination itself. To speak as he does of a ‘‘fated grouping’’ (‘‘for lack of a better term,’’ he adds, without wondering what that ‘‘better’’ might be), amounts to a neglect of or an underestimation of certain parts of the process in question: both the creative energy (first of all self- creative) and the collective and individual constructive force put into identities and subjectivities. It also seems impossible to present the ways of life constructed by gay people as a fate or a destiny unless one considers that heterosexuality and family life are the normal and legitimate ways of life. For what is in fact at stake for gay people is an escape from the fate or destiny they had been assigned in a world to which they could not fully belong. It also does not seem possible to describe as a ‘‘freely chosen segregation’’
something that is rather the result of concentrations and mixtures—temporary and volatile ones—in the same place (neighborhoods, bars, and so on) of individuals who live out their homosexuality in quite di√erent ways. What is the precise nature of the ‘‘group’’ that they form? This is a question that needs to be asked. It is strange, for example, to find Pollak using the word ‘‘ghetto’’ without ever asking about the ideological baggage attached to such a word once it is imported into social scientific discourse—especially given that the reality such a word is meant to refer to only involves a minority of (self-identified) gay people. Pollak never asks if all those who frequent the ‘‘ghetto’’ have the same relation to whatever it is that the word designates.
This nonanalytical way of employing rather suspect notions is all the more surprising given that Pollak himself insisted on the ways in which the sociology of homosexuality had evolved since the 1960s, leaving behind ideas such as ‘‘deviancy,’’ ‘‘stigmatization,’’ or ‘‘marginality’’ (the concepts used by Erving Go√man or Howard Becker), but especially by replacing the question ‘‘why?’’ by the question
‘‘how?’’—that is, by turning away from studies of the etiology of sexual orientation to analyses of ways of life. In an article written at the same time as his book, Pollak writes that it should be a question of studying homosexuals and their ways of life not simply in terms of the ‘‘interiorization of social constraints weighing upon them,’’ but rather in terms of a ‘‘relatively autonomous sociability.’’ As he so rightly puts it, ‘‘they are as much a self-construction as a social one.’’ See Michael Pollak,
n o t e s t o pa rt o n e , s e c t i o n 4
≥∑Ω
‘‘Un Sujet inclassable,’’ 12. This raises a further problem: the descriptive sociology of ‘‘ways of life’’ that are considered in terms of self-construc
tions has become a crucial part of the understanding of gay sociability (due in large measure to the fact that these new works were to a large extent produced by gay people); yet it has in turn largely abandoned the question of ‘‘subjectivation,’’ limiting itself to purely descriptive approaches to practices and behaviors.
This is why it is necessary to return to Go√man’s notions, to examine them in the light of ‘‘constructivist’’ conceptions, as opposed to abandoning them to the history of the social sciences. (The notions of ‘‘stigma,’’ ‘‘stigmatization,’’ and
‘‘stigmatizable’’ seem to me particularly useful.) If the works of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick or Judith Butler (among others) seem so important to me, it is because they help us to escape from the false alternatives Pollak presents (if not ‘‘interiorization of social constraints’’ then ‘‘self-construction’’), because in fact those two levels of gay and lesbian reality are inseparable and need to be thought together. It is precisely this kind of false alternative that all of Bourdieu’s work has tried to go beyond. (This is particularly clear in Masculine Domination. ) One can only regret that Pollak’s work, so indebted to Bourdieu’s, was brought to a halt before being able to develop a general anthropology of homosexuality, something he would certainly have been able to achieve had he used the Bourdieu of both The Logic of Practice and Distinction.
9. Robert Park, ‘‘The City: Suggestions for the Investigation of Human Behavior in the Urban Environment’’ (1916), cited in Chauncey, Gay New York, 134.
10. See Chauncey, Gay New York, 133.
11. The studies done in Chicago by Gilbert Herdt and Andrew Boxer show how the collective visibility present in big cities allows young gays and lesbians to assume their homosexuality at an earlier age. See Herdt and Boxer, Children of Horizon.
12. See Lynch, ‘‘Nonghetto Gays, 165–201.
4. Sexuality and Professions
1. Sedgwick, ‘‘Queer Performativity,’’ 4.
2. Proust, ‘‘Esquisse I’’ for Sodome et Gomorrhe, in A la recherche du temps perdu, 3:933. Hereafter cited as Recherche.
3. Recherche, 3:931. One finds a modified version of this theme in the published versions of Cities of the Plain, in rtp, 2:646–47. We might also note here, while speaking of Proust, that the whole beginning of Remembrance of Things Past bears a strong resemblance to the paradigmatic story of a gay childhood.
4. See, in Paul Monette’s autobiography, the story of a small-town adolescence filled with a true passion for female movie stars, whose lives and acts he follows in
≥∏≠
n o t e s t o pa rt o n e , s e c t i o n 4
the newspapers: Becoming a Man, 66–67. See also the novel by Josselin, Quand j’étais star. It is thus a bit surprising to find Proust writing, in one of the variants of Cities of the Plain, that if the Baron Charlus, when he was an adolescent, decorated his bedroom with photographs of actresses, it was perhaps because he was not yet homosexual or did not yet realize that he was. It would make more sense to think, given Proust’s own descriptions, that he did this precisely because he was homosexual: the women in question were not objects of desire, but objects of identification. (See Recherche, 3:1283–84: ‘‘I later learned from the rest of this family that I came to know so well that when M. de Charlus was an adolescent, the mirror and the walls of his bedroom were hidden under chromolithographs of actresses. Must one then place at the beginning of this life a taste that would not be found in its later periods, as when dark-haired men can show childhood photographs of themselves in which they were blond?’’)
A few lines later, Proust will end up referring to this ‘‘purely esthetic love for women’’ (1284). Perhaps the simplest explanation for it is that it is the only available way for an adolescent boy, in a world in which the heterosexual norm is so strong, to express for himself and in the presence of others his attraction for men, as Proust’s reference to Ivanhoe so well illustrated. But it is also true that the identification with certain highly theatrical feminine ‘‘roles’’ seems to have been, through many historical periods, so characteristic of certain homosexual behaviors (those certain behaviors being scorned by many other homosexuals who detest these phantasmagorics), and so permanent a feature that it would be worth studying seriously.
5. See, on this point, and on homosexuality in general as an important factor in the choice of a profession, Pollak, Les Homosexuels et le sida. For more recent updates of his observations, see Schiltz, ‘‘Parcours de jeunes homosexuels dans le contexte du vih,’’ and also the works cited in the bibliography to her article. Pierre Bourdieu (in Homo Academicus) speaks of a masculine pole and a feminine pole within the field of academic disciplines. It would be interesting to investigate in what ways gay men and lesbians are distributed along the axis running between these two poles.
6. George Chauncey evokes this phenomenon when he describes the arrival of newcomers in the city: those who preceded them advise them not only about gaining access to the gay subculture, but also more generally as to their professional and social lives. The ‘‘gay world’’ fills the functions of a mutual assistance network, without ever being organized or thought of as such. It goes without saying, of course, that these helpful acts only rarely correspond to the celebrated literary representations that may have been given of them, as in the pact Vautrin proposes to Lucien de Rubempré in Lost Illusions or the proposition to serve as his guide in life that Charlus makes to the narrator of Remembrance of Things Past in The Guermantes Way.
n o t e s t o pa rt o n e , s e c t i o n 5
≥∏∞
7. I obviously do not mean to suggest that every gay man avoided sports as a child or an adolescent. My goal is to define the structuring polarities that permit one to recognize certain phenomena (and only certain ones) that have been attested to by sociological or historical studies or by studies of ideas or representations. It goes without saying that these phenomena do not cover all the available sets of experiences that define homosexuality at a given moment or in a given social space.
8. Hocquenghem, L’Amphithéâtre des morts, 23.
9. Of course there is no single, unique set of experiences that captures the case of every gay man. The preceding considerations of the city and of occupations cannot apply to everyone who engages in same-sex practices. If it is possible to describe a certain number of phenomena (statistically attested ones), one must always be aware that, alongside what one is describing, other forms coexist that cannot be explained in the same terms. I am perfectly aware, for instance, that working-class gay men exist. (Who could think the contrary?) Yet that does not, on its own, invalidate the statistical findings of the sociologists nor the kinds of stories attested to in various autobiographies. We could even think of studying the dif-ferentiations that exist in regard to culture between working-class gay men and straight ones.
5. Family and ‘‘Melancholy’’
1. See Derrida, Feu la cendre.
2. See Freud, ‘‘The Dependent Relationships of the Ego,’’ chapter 5 of The Ego and the Id, 38–49.
3. See Butler, Bodies That Matter, 112–13, and The Psychic Life of Power, 132–98.
4. Bourdieu, ‘‘The Space of Points of View,’’ in Bourdieu et al., The Weight of the World, 4.
5. Surely these wounds and this ‘‘melancholy’’ combine together to compose the feelings of sadness, of ‘‘spleen,’’ that many gay men claim to experience so regularly. Perhaps they also explain the draw of tragic figures in art and literature or of artists who sing of tragedy and distress. (Think of the admiration for Callas, for example, or for the French singer Barbara, whose performances drew crowds of gay men.)
6. Butler, The Psychic Life of Power, 137.
7. See, on this point, the analysis of Prieur and Halvorsen, ‘‘Le Droit à l’indif-férence,’’ 6–15. See also Prieur, ‘‘Le Mariage homosexuel est-il concevable?’’ 72–79.
8. See, for example, s t g : ‘‘I maintain that inversion . . . is
a solution that a child discovers when he is su√ocating’’ (78). See also Sartre, ‘‘De la vocation d’écrivain’’:
‘‘Literature, like pederasty, is a virtual solution, invented in certain situations, and not even envisioned in others in which it would be of no assistance’’ (697).
≥∏≤
n o t e s t o pa rt o n e , s e c t i o n 6
6. The City and Conservative Discourse
1. See, as mentioned earlier, Wittmann, ‘‘A Gay Manifesto.’’
2. Chauncey, Gay New York, 26. See also the entirety of chapter 5, 131–49.
3. The idea of such an ‘‘ecological niche’’ is the starting point of an intellectually rather impoverished book by Gabriel Rotello—a rather detestable one, as well, given its revolting moralism and its hate-filled puritanism in regards to gay sexuality and gay ways of life. Yet its initial observation is hard to argue with. Rotello, Sexual Ecology.
4. See Pinell and de Busscher, ‘‘La Création des associations de lutte contre le sida,’’ 316–23. See also Fillieule, ‘‘Mobilisation gay en temps de sida,’’ 81–96.
Already in 1988, Michael Pollak was calling attention to the fact that even if certain gay ‘‘activists’’ (notably certain journalists writing for the gay press) had demonstrated great reticence before admitting that there was an epidemic (something that can be explained in large measure by the explosion of homophobia unleashed at the outset of the epidemic), it was still among those reading that press, gays involved in the gay subculture, that prevention measures were adopted most rapidly. See, for example, the chart published on the final (unnumbered) page of his book, Les Homosexuels et le sida.
5. Aron clearly expressed this sentiment in his public ‘‘confession’’ a year before he died: ‘‘Mon sida,’’ Le Nouvel Observateur, October 30, 1987.
6. Lucey, ‘‘Balzac’s Queer Cousins and Their Friends,’’ 177.
Insult and the Making of the Gay Self Page 50