by Mario Mieli
Mieli’s vision of ‘transsexuality’ entailed breaking down the barriers that separate us from each other. It was the opposite of shoring up an identity. David Fernbach suggests, in his introduction to the 1980 edition, that for Mieli, ‘“transsexuality” and communism are one and the same’9 – a claim that already indicates just how differently he is deploying these terms in Towards a Gay Communism. The prefix transmeans across; by transsexuality Mieli refers to crossing the borders of sexual difference without normative heterosexuality. What motivates that crossing is desire, understood as Eros in the Freudian sense. He speaks of ‘gay communism’ because, in his political vision, the borders that separate socioeconomic classes also are traversed by ‘transsexual’ desire. In crossing these borders, Mieli’s ‘transsexuality’ dissolves hierarchies too. He regards this prospect not as a terrifying loss of boundaries but as a multiplication of pleasures, a radical expansion of access to what we all really want.
It may be worth noting that the word queer also shares an etymological root meaning ‘across’. Queer and trans, though far from identical, share an affinity that sometimes gets lost when the differences between them degenerate into identity politics, or when trans is consistently subordinated to queer. Local differences are important, as are the differences among Italian, British, North American, and other national traditions of sex/gender politics. A complete map of the criss-crossing influences remains to be drawn. But, following Mieli, I would suggest that the connections and affinities are ultimately more significant than the differences. Queer politics emerged in North America via recognition of a commonality between those who do not adhere to social norms based on their sexuality and those who do not fit a universalising idea of social subjectivity based on racial or class status. It is not that everyone excluded from heternormativity and its privileges is the same; but they share something politically precious in common. Like Mieli’s sweeping critique of society as we know it, queer politics aspires to connect sexual oppression with gender discrimination, racism, ethnic chauvinism, immigration status, and many other vectors of social exclusion. The capaciousness of queer as a rubric for political mobilising – its commitment to forging alliances between otherwise quite disparate constituencies – effectively countermands the boundedness of identity categories. And that is what Mieli meant by transsexual desire.
Where Mieli differs from many contemporary queer thinkers and activists is in his never forgetting the motive force of Eros. Foucault cautioned that ‘we must not think that by saying yes to sex, one says no to power,’ since the two are interwoven rather than opposed.10 Yet, if it is facile to resort to simple-minded formulations about the revolutionary power of sex, nevertheless it has seemed a little too convenient, in the academic precincts of queer theory, to lose sight of the erotic altogether. Sometimes one gets the impression that she is dealing with nuns. At North American academic conferences in queer studies, the piety is so overwhelming that it feels like being in church. In that context, Mieli offers a breath of fresh air.
Extrapolating from Freud’s universalisation of homosexual desire, Mieli claims that even straight men long to be queens: their machismo forms a closet concealing their true desire. Certainly there are heterosexual men who love to get fucked in the arse. But Mieli pushes the psychoanalytic theory of repression to implausible conclusions, and it is symptomatic that in reasoning thus he has recourse to Jungian archetypes involving the soul’s essential bisexuality. In the end, however, it is unimportant whether contemporary readers agree with the details of Mieli’s conceptual formulations. What matters is whether we still can be inspired by him. Towards a Gay Communism belongs to a visionary tradition of ecstatic utopianism. Showing familiarity with English literary history, Mieli manifests the revolutionary enthusiasm characteristic of bardic Anglophone poets from William Blake through Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg, all of whom articulated connections among non-normative sexuality, madness, and social critique. For Whitman and Ginsberg, as for Mieli, revolution begins with sex between men, preferably more than a couple. These poets’ Dionysian visions of radical democracy don’t provide a blueprint for social reorganisation; instead they offer avant-garde inspiration for it. In a similar vein, Towards a Gay Communism engages our attention not only as a fascinating document of its departed moment, but also as renewable inspiration for our contemporary desire to envision a future that is foreign to today.
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1. See Leo Bersani, ‘Is the Rectum a Grave?’ in Is the Rectum a Grave? And Other Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 3–30. The essay was originally published in 1987.
2. This is what (inspired by Mieli) I tried to elaborate in Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).
3. See, for example, José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009).
4. See Homosexuality and Psychoanalysis, ed. Tim Dean and Christopher Lane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), and Clinical Encounters in Sexuality: Psychoanalytic Practice and Queer Theory, ed. Noreen Giffney and Eve Watson (New York: Punctum Books, 2017).
5. Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 11.
6. See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).
7. Michel Foucault, La volonté de savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1976).
8. Michael Warner, The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life (New York: Free Press, 1999).
9. David Fernbach, ‘Introduction’, in Mieli, Homosexuality and Liberation: Elements of a Gay Critique (London: Gay Men’s Press, 1980), 12.
10. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Random House, 1978), 157.
Introduction
Massimo Prearo
I
In one of the rare pieces of footage1 in which Mario Mieli talks about the publication of this book, from 1977, the author is presented as a leader of the Italian gay movement and appears en travesti, as a way to strategically perform homosexual femininity. Mieli introduces the core of his theoretical and political views, that is, the erotic multitude of desire. The latter, described as transsexual desire, is a polymorphic drive that displaces the boundaries between the feminine and the masculine, and undoes, at the same time, all categories of sexual orientation. The erotic multitude of desire is, according to Mieli, a revolutionary tool against heterosexual patriarchy and its political regime.
Mieli’s choice of cross-dressing in public can be seen as strategic, not in the sense that it helps him to hide his personal life beneath the mask of fabulousness, but because it unravels the absurdity of the heterosexual norm which imposes gender and sexual roles that are generated by capital. People who knew him before he became an activist could testify to his passion for makeup, for his relentless enthusiasm, and for his eagerness to provoke. All of this resulted, for him, in a confrontation between everyday normality and the figure of the deviant that he himself embodied, thereby denouncing the hyper-dressed rigidity of femininity and masculinity. Later, the encounter between Mieli and the Gay Liberation Front in London (1970–71) marked the beginning of a quest that was not just personal, for it was experienced by him as a collective debate, if not as a political struggle. In London, Mieli participated in the assemblies of the movement, and discovered revolutionary forms of homosexual activism and socialisation that were grounded both in one’s own life and in the life of the self within the collective. To build a united front meant to reject the condition of marginality, in order not so much to assume a majoritarian, comfortable position, as to assert the refusal of the majority’s normalised point of view. This translated, for Mieli, into the full and radical embodiment of the marginalised position, for the sa
ke of contaminating the realm of heterosexuality through a homosexual standpoint.
The homosexual revolutionary moment, which started with the Stonewall riots of 1969, was in fact one of consciousness raising and it aimed to challenge everything – the heteronormative structure of society as well as all assimilationist projects promoted by pre-Stonewall movements, such as Mattachine Society or the French homophile movement Arcadie. These movements wanted to normalise ‘homosexuality’. To do so, they invited homosexuals to strive for more self-control and less craziness, faggotry, fairy, queen – and queer. The homosexual revolutionary project promoted by the post-’68 generation aimed, on the contrary, at breaking what Monique Wittig would call the straight contract, in order to rewrite the entire social vocabulary starting from the experience of homosexuals themselves.
In those same years, the Fronte Unitario Omosessuale Rivoluzionario Italiano (Unitarian Revolutionary Homosexual Front) emerged in Italy – more precisely, it was founded in 1971 in Milan, at writer Fernanda Pivano’s home. The shortened name and acronym of the movement was Fuori!, which means ‘out’ (as in ‘come out’), and it was crucial to Mieli’s activist formation. Their first public event in 1972 was organised to counter the first International Conference of Sexology in the city of Sanremo. Activists of the homosexual revolutionary French movement (FHAR) were also demonstrating alongside their Italian comrades. Archival pictures show Mieli and other members of Fuori! holding banners in front of the conference venue, with slogans such as ‘Homosexuals proudly come out’, ‘Put the electrodes in your brain’, and ‘This is the first and last conference on sexophobia’. As this is his first public appearance, Mieli is wearing a queer battledress with high-heel shoes, lipstick, a turban and glamorous sunglasses – words alone cannot bring about a revolution in the same way that a publicly and dangerously exposed body does.
Such a disturbing, intransigent and uncomfortable position is the one Mieli will assume all along. In his first article, titled ‘For a critique of the homosexual question’, published in the Fuori! magazine, Mieli underscores the continuities between the project of political emancipation pursued by the homosexual movement and the co-optative force of capitalist democracies:
In most capitalist countries, the freedom to be homosexual is recognized as a right. […] In fact, such legal freedom means freedom to be excluded, oppressed, repressed, ridiculed, become victims of moral and physical violence, and be isolated into ghettoes, which additionally are so dangerous and shabby in Italy.
And he goes on: ‘Thus, the homosexual is legally free in most advanced capitalist countries with a more or less democratic constitution, yet he still suffers as a member of the ghetto.’ Mieli understood the logics of capitalism as not limited to a repressive power that denies homosexual desire, but as a machine capable of metabolising all experiences that exceed the heterosexual norm and to recast them into the market, thanks to ‘leftist parties in Parliament [which] specialise in channeling all revolutionary initiatives towards the bourgeoisie’. According to him, formal and legal emancipation, i.e., political emancipation, ‘is a strange thing: the more you get of it, the more your hands are empty. In reality, it vanishes, but it remains codified in abstract laws, appeasing the conscience of bourgeois oppressors and giving legal recognition to the sad life (and shabby death) of hysterical fags’.2
The tone of his writings, which will later become a stylistic mark, was so merciless that many of his articles published in the Fuori! magazine were preceded by a note from the editorial staff taking distance from him. According to Mieli, the desire for emancipation is an illusion, an oasis in the desert, a fake reward for homosexuals, the siren song of capital. Yet, his theoretical and political reflections do not just review or rephrase in homosexual terms the communist project for revolution, but call for a mutation in homosexuals themselves, or, as Mieli puts it, for ‘a critical process’.
II
For Mieli, writing is a way of positioning himself within the space of homosexual revolutionary activism, which allows him to put into political practice his theoretical reflection, and, at the same time, to translate his political experience into theoretical research. In the meanwhile, Mieli starts studying philosophy at the University of Milan, broadening the activist experience to every sphere of his existence. Still, Mieli is not interested in covering the role of intellectuals within the movement, but rather in promoting a public and collective experience of the movement and his being in movement. Taking his own experience as a starting point, he steadily works to disseminate critical reflections suggesting both a critique based on the homosexual perspective, along with a critique of the homosexual perspective – in the same way as the collectives did during their meetings, where the specificities of the everyday life were analysed and collectively discussed to produce a transformative self-consciousness. In this sense, the publication of this book – a revised version of his MA dissertation – constitutes the culmination of this homosexual trajectory. Made of and producing a whole set of discourses, practices, and theories that have been thought and experienced within the movement, the homosexual revolutionary project acted in order to break through the boundaries of the revolutionary imaginary itself and eventually contaminate the left, the class struggle, the homosexual ghetto, and knowledge.
Towards a Gay Communism, more than being an essay or a political manifesto, is an experimental roadmap of sexual politics that alternates theoretical arguments and intuitions with virtually ethnographic observations about homosexual activism in the 1970s, along with experiential narratives, at the crossroads of autobiography and auto-fiction. From its first publication, the book’s polymorphic character has certainly contributed to propel the content and the author, already a leading figure of the Italian homosexual revolutionary movement at the time, into the legacy of gay and queer studies. The Spanish and the Dutch translations of Elementi di critica omosessuale (the original Italian title), in 1979 and 1981 respectively, and the first publication in English in 1980, in an edited version, are part of a prolific body of homosexual knowledge, and theoretical insights about homosexuality. In this liminal context of wanting theories and yet not studies, Mieli’s book is, however, paradoxically late and yet remarkably ahead of its time.
Despite being considered and celebrated as a common good by the homosexual movement, the philosophical and experiential nature of the book has largely prevented it from breaking through to academic circles. Indeed, already in 1968 and before Foucault’s History of sexuality (1976), Mary McIntosh, amongst other authors in the field of sociology, published her foregrounding essay ‘The Homosexual Role’, arguing for a social constructionist approach to sexuality that would soon become a source of inspiration for future works, such as the pioneering Coming Out: Homosexual Politics in Britain from the Nineteenth Century to the Present (Quartet Books, 1977) by Jeffrey Weeks. Although these works preserved an activist dimension, their academic-scientific-disciplinary nature inevitably introduced an objectifying methodology of analysis. In fact, they came to define ‘homosexuality’ (and all its declinations: practices, movements, communities, identities, etc.) through a scientific paradigm and, together with it, a system of concepts, theories, and models – while reforming and renewing the existing ones. Without denying its revolutionary impact at the epistemological level, the foucauldian method (as discussed in the foreword by Tim Dean) followed the same proceeding. Foucault studied the processes through which homosexuality is objectified to understand how the social, historical and political construction of homosexuality could bring about the existence of a homosexual subjectivity, not only by repressing or denying it, but rather producing it. It is precisely in this logic that lies his most original contribution.
From this point of view, Mieli’s book follows a different direction. Starting from a historical, philosophical and psychoanalytical analysis shedding light on the repression phenomenon of homosexuality, Towards a Gay Communism proposes an exploration of the experiential dimension of homo
sexuality in the historical context of the revolution and the ongoing capitalistic counter-revolution. While Mieli keeps trying, he does not aim for theoretical coherence, scientific ambition, or the willingness to turn his book into a critical step of an academic career. The knowledge from which Mieli is driven and which puts his reflection in motion is not made of concepts, but rather of experiences that the author elaborates, discusses, reformulates and disseminates:
In women as subjected to male ‘power’, in the proletariat subjected to capitalist exploitation, in the subjection of homosexuals to the Norm and in that of black people to white racism, we can recognise the concrete historical subjects in a position to overthrow the entire present social, sexual and racial dialectic.3
Probably, this is the reason why, in the late 1970s, the book is referenced in the emerging literature on homosexuality as an example of homosexual revolutionary knowledge, together with the texts of other authors, such as Guy Hocquenghem. Still, the experiential material on which Mieli builds a proposal of gay communism remains silenced in the academic debate. Not only because his erotic-political extremism could be considered inappropriate for the gentle writing of scientific knowledge, but also because the content of his critical thought does not aim at cultivating discussions within the academic environment. Rather, Mieli favours cross-fertilisation with the knowledge that already exists and circulates across the spaces of homosexuality: saunas, discos, cruising spots, factory or highway lavatories, as well as meetings, assemblies, streets and movements.
However, this is probably also the reason why Mieli’s book anticipates the recent developments of gay and lesbian studies, finding in the archipelago of queer theories, and especially in the philosophically and politically anti-social versions proposed by Leo Bersani or Lee Edelman,4 a new opportunity for discussion. On this library shelf, we find the major issues introduced by Mieli in the wake of the already quoted Guy Hochquengem’s Homosexual Desire (published in 1972): the central role of desire, anality as symbolic and as a practice of anti-sociality, along with homosexuality as a principle of anti-heteronormative negativity. The renewed interest for Mieli’s book, which is also brought about in this new full translation, does not represent the author’s public consecration in the realm of queer studies, but, once again, goes beyond the boundaries of academic and legitimate knowledge (while being often hampered and contested).5 It meets the theoretical, experimental practices of queer politics in the space of activists’ self-experimentation, in the workshops of drag king and drag queen, in the gender bender6 performances of contemporary artistic studios where Mieli’s transqueerfeminist thought achieves a powerful appeal.