by Mario Mieli
There are even doctors who refuse to consider male prostitutes as ‘true homosexuals’, and would rather class these as ‘amoral psychopaths’ (Tullio Bazzi). But in this case, males who prostitute themselves to women could similarly not be considered true heterosexuals. Are they too, then, to be classed as ‘amoral psychopaths’?
In any case, we see hustlers of this kind as homosexuals who, because of the oppression of homoeroticism and the poverty in which they are forced to live, are only able to give expression to their homoerotic impulses when they can justify this, to themselves and to others, by the need to make money (however much of a pretext this might be).63
In conclusion, we should note the view of those who only consider homosexuality as a ‘psychoneurosis’ of people who, instead of being proud of their condition, are ashamed of it, who fear it and try to escape from it. But then it would follow that we could also define as psychoneurotic those heterosexuals who so desperately seek to deny that they have homosexual impulses, since it is precisely this intransigent denial that reveals their fear of recognising homosexuality in themselves, which they cannot accept; what is neurotic about them is that they are closet queens. Those homosexuals who are afraid of being so are neurotic, but so is the heterosexual society which rejects homoeroticism, deeming it shameful and abject, condemning it to latency or marginalisation. Those homosexuals who would prefer to be straight are the mirror image of a society that represses homoeroticism.
But when a gay person does accept himself, then psychotherapy has to recognise that ‘the results are virtually zero with those rare subjects who are prepared for such a cure’.64 Some people might ask how it is possible for a homosexual to accept his condition, and at the same time undergo therapy designed to change this. Evidently it is sufficient for the doctors that a gay person is not freaking out day and night because of his homosexuality, to define him as ‘self-accepting’ and to proceed frequently to try and ‘cure’ him. But a gay person who really does accept himself, who loves himself for what he is and what he does, and who loves other gay people, would never consent to any kind of ‘cure’ that sought to transform him into a heterosexual (not even if Delphine Seyrig65 was to be the nurse).
In any case: Even the orthodox psychoanalysts, generally so optimistic as to the possibilities of their method, are fairly sceptical in this regard. Stekel held that he had ‘never seen a homosexual cured by psychoanalysis’, and Nacht (1950) conceded that this condition ‘is inaccessible to any kind of psychotherapy’.66
Clearly, you can’t be cured of a disease that you haven’t got.
So-Called ‘Therapy’
We have still to deal with the view of those who hazard a correlation between homosexual behaviour and hormonal balance, though as Dennis Altman points out, ‘a correlation is far from being a cause’.67 I have already noted how a so-called hormonal ‘imbalance’ can be found equally among heterosexuals as homosexuals. And as Dr Dreyfus reluctantly concedes, ‘the doses of successive hormones systematically given to inverts have in no way enabled us to establish a specific hormonal formula for homosexuality’.68
Yet this has not prevented such doctors, more frequently than might be thought, from dabbling Nazi-style in experiments of hormonal ‘therapy’ for homosexuality. And yet the same Dr Dreyfus is forced to admit: ‘Unfortunately I have not seen a case of male homosexuality, whatever might be its biological substrate, cured by the influence of hormonal treatment alone, however vigorously this is pursued’.69
A lot of these doctors are not only criminals but imbeciles as well. Many frequently tend to confuse homosexuality with ‘masculinity’ in women and ‘effeminacy’ in men. And this despite the fact that Freud, as we have seen, already concluded that ‘the degree of physical hermaphrodism is to a great extent independent of psychical hermaphrodism’.70 Thus we end up with confessions such as that of Robert Stoller, a Los Angeles psychiatrist, who wrote: ‘Masculine homosexual men are an exception I cannot discuss since I do not yet understand them’.71 Exception after exception! But ‘masculine’ homosexual men, particularly in the USA, are just as common as ‘effeminate’ ones, even if the latter, naturally enough, are more readily observed.
It is clear that whenever a psychoanalyst departs from Freud and views homosexuality as pathological in and of itself, he develops a propensity to view ‘therapy’ as both possible and desirable. He sees ‘a widespread error of pessimism among analysts about the possibility of therapeutic intervention in the case of homosexuality’ (Gian Franco Tedeschi).
Freud, however, refusing to view homosexuality as a pathological syndrome, underscored how, in the psychotherapists’s office, to bring about the ‘repression of genital inversion, or homosexuality, is no simple thing.’ He writes:
I have found success possible only in specially favourable circumstances, and even then the success essentially consisted in making access to the opposite sex (which had hitherto been barred) possible to a person restricted to homosexuality, thus restoring his full bisexual functions. After that it lay within him to choose whether he wished to abandon the path that is banned by society and in some cases he has done so. One must remember that normal sexuality too depends upon a restriction in the choice of object. In general, to undertake to convert a fully developed homosexual into a heterosexual does not offer much more prospect of success than the reverse, except that for good practical reasons the latter is never attempted.72
After this candid admission, Freud concludes:
As a rule the homosexual is not able to give up the object which provides him with pleasure, and one cannot convince him that if he made the change he would rediscover in the other object the pleasure that he has renounced. If he comes to be treated at all, it is mostly through the pressure of external motives, such as the social disadvantages and dangers attaching to his choice of object, and such components of the instinct of self-preservation prove themselves too weak in the struggle against the sexual impulsions.73
Elsewhere, writing to the mother of one of his American ‘patients’, Freud stressed:
In a certain number of cases we succeed in developing the blighted germs of heterosexual tendencies which are present in every homosexual, in the majority of cases it is no more possible . . . What analysis can do for your son runs in a different line. If he is unhappy, neurotic, torn by conflicts, inhibited in his social life, analysis may bring him harmony, peace of mind, full efficiency . . .74
This letter is perhaps the least reactionary of the positions taken by Freud on the subject of homosexuality. But psychonazis such as Ferenczi, Ernest Jones, G. B. Hadden, Irving Bieber, Enninio Gius, etc. all distanced themselves from Freud’s own tolerance. Freud sat cowardly on the fence and never washed his hands of them.
A few years later, Wilhelm Reich threw the Freudian view completely overboard, maintaining that ‘any homosexual may cease to feel his inclinations under a very exact psychological treatment, whereas a normally developed individual never becomes homosexual under the same treatment’.75 On the whole Angelo Pezzana is right to conclude that ‘what Reich wrote on homosexuality rivals the keenest of our contemporary sexual fascists’.76
And yet despite Reich and his followers, a growing number of young people of both sexes, previously exclusively heterosexual, have moved in the other direction with the development of the feminist and gay movements: in other words, ever more people are ceasing to repress their homosexual desires. The ‘good practical reasons’ for which Freud did not deem it suitable to lead a heterosexual to homosexuality, are collapsing. Homoeroticism is eroding the barriers of repression and spilling out. Thanks to the struggle of gay people, the whole world is becoming a bit more gay. Many young heterosexuals are finding that letting themselves be the object of homosexual ‘contagion’ is the most helpful therapy to solving many of their problems. ‘Gay is healthy’ was one of the first slogans of the American Gay Liberation Front.
But the executioners are not giving in. Many contemporary psychiatrists pers
ist in dedicating themselves to ‘curing’ people ‘affected’ with homosexuality, having recourse not just to hormone treatment, but also to psychotropic drugs and psychotherapy, electric shock and (why not?) aversion therapy.77 Their crimes are severe indeed, and capital permits them to act with impunity, just as only yesterday capital promoted the monstrous medical experiments of the SS.
At the same time, what is labelled ‘perverse’ still appears absolutely and shamefully aberrant in the eyes of the great majority, and as such susceptible to (im)moral and (un)civil condemnation. Public opinion, slave that it is to the ideology of the epoch, is unable to see the historically relative character of definitions of ‘perversion’. In this case, as elsewhere, ‘the natural normativity of society is ideology, in so far as it comes to be hypostasized as a natural and immodifiable given’ (Adorno).
Those who invoke harsh penal sanctions against homosexuality today are no doubt unaware that until a few decades ago, the legislation of many industrialised countries condemned certain sexual acts such as masturbation, fellatio and cunnilingus, which are today considered quite ‘normal’.78 But people who disparage homosexuals as ‘inverts’ are evidently untroubled as to the supposedly absolute value of their own prejudices. The great mass of people, in fact, think in this way, and the opinion of the majority of ‘child-men’ and ‘child philosophers’ (Herman Hesse) pass itself off as a valid and therefore absolute judgment. Capitalist ideology is decidedly anti-homosexual: psychiatry and psychoanalysis, which have asserted and developed themselves through channels of bourgeois culture, almost invariably repeat its commonplaces. The natural character of the social and sexual status quo, as upheld by the dominant ideology, is not really put in question in scientific research. It is true that there does exist today an anti-psychiatry and an anti-psychoanalyis. But these have themselves essentially retreated into the one-dimensionality of contemporary scientific thinking, which the homosexual liberation movement is helping to criticise. They have simply passed back into the chameleon-like flatness that marks the real domination of capital.79
The Dogma of Procreation
In Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), Freud comes to the conclusion that, ‘psycho-analysis has not yet produced a complete explanation of the origin of inversion.’80 Yet to me it appears no less contradictory to investigate the origin of homosexuality when he had by then discovered that homosexuality is congenital. Only in a later work will Freud come to admit that, ‘Such an achievement – the removal of genital inversion or homosexuality – is in my experience never an easy matter.’81
On the other hand, it’s without doubt that we homosexuals don’t suffer from ‘inversion’ but from the social persecution perpetrated against us: ‘The homosexual suffer from oppression, not from his homosexuality!’ (Domenico Tallone).
It’s evident, therefore, that far more than the ‘origin’ of our homosexuality, we are concerned to investigate and shed light on the motives for its persecution, with a view to making clearer and more effective the battle we are waging against this. If people try and develop an aetiology of homosexual behaviour, why don’t they also investigate the reasons for the fixation of desire, on the part of the majority, on ‘objects’ of the ‘opposite’ sex? The two questions are complementary, and neither can be resolved without the other. Indeed, an all-round aetiological research, which would also take the second question into account, instead of avoiding dealing with it on the pretext that it concerns an erotic disposition and behaviour that are defined as ‘normal’, could well make a valid contribution to discovering the reasons that lie behind the persecution of homosexuality. As René Schérer said, we need not ask why a human being can become homosexual, but rather ‘why education has led him to establish a difference between the sexes in their capacity to provide pleasure, such that an exclusive heterosexuality can develop out of the absolute ambivalence of infancy?’82 The usual way in which heterosexuality is presented as ‘normal’ is through the equation of love = procreation. Nothing could be more fallacious; erotic desire and reproduction of the species in no way coincide. To consider sexuality as having procreation as its goal is to apply a teleological-heterosexual – and thus inadequate – schema of interpretation to the complex multiplicity of the erotic function in human existence. As Georg Groddeck wrote:
For the attempt to refer all erotic phenomena to the instinct of reproduction is one of the greatest stupidities of our time. Every bough of apple blossom, every flower and every work of man is evidence against so narrow an interpretation of the purposes of Nature. Of the twenty-thousand ova capable of being fertilized which are born with the girl child, only a few hundred are left by the time she has reached puberty, and of these, to take a high figure, a dozen come to fruition; and of the many millions of the man’s spermatozoa, countless troops perish without even reaching a woman’s body. People babble a great deal of nonsense.83
Procreation proceeds from a sexual act that is far from exhausting the entire vast range of desire, the full scope of its gradations. It was central to Gide’s argument in his Corydon that, ‘the sensual pleasure, which the act of impregnation brings to each sex, is not, as you know, necessarily and exclusively linked with that act . . . It is not fertilisation that animals seek, but simply sensual pleasure. They seek pleasure, and achieve fertilisation by a fluke’.84
Just as with the animals, so to consider procreation as the goal of human sexuality is to mystify heterosexual intercourse, attributing to it a ‘metaphysical purpose’. It means misconstruing a pleasure which is in the first place an end in itself, or rather, the end of which is the satisfaction of the sexual impulse. It is an act of hypocrisy.
In nature, sex is not exclusively directed to reproduction. Among very many species of animals, for example, while females come on heat only for short periods of the year (oestrus cycle), males do not undergo such pauses. And then, precisely when they are on heat, many female animals frequently develop homosexual relations. The sow acts the boar, the mare acts the stallion, the cow acts the bull, etc., mounting other females, and frequently even males.85
Many people see in sexuality an end (that of procreation), but they refuse to recognise how this teleology is a form within their own judgement. And misunderstanding it in this way, they tend to absolutise it, imputing to nature a historically determined peculiarity of human thinking, a specific form of judgment at work precisely in that moment where, conversely, we need to suspend judgement in order to understand what really lies in Eros, beyond all prejudices, with a view to being able to live and enjoy this in freedom.
The persecution of homosexuality is situated within the wider frame of sexual repression in general. The dogma of procreation, seen as the one true goal of sexuality, historically arose as the crowning ideological achievement of the effective reduction of Eros to monogamous heterosexuality, and at the same time, as a justification for the condemnation delivered by society against all other libidinal tendencies, so that they come to be sublimated in the economic sphere. If it became necessary to explicitly stress that the purpose of sexuality was reproduction, this was in order to conceal the true purpose of sexual repression: the exploitation of women and men in production. We shall return to this fundamental argument later on.86
In any case, we can see how absurd it is today to continue rejecting homosexuality as alien to procreation, when our planet is suffering among other things from overpopulation. Overpopulation is determined above all by the oppressive persistence of the anti-gay taboo.
The procreation dogma also forms part of patriarchal religion and culture. It is the expression of a male society, in which women, who are the real subjects of procreation (men do not generate, just fuck), are oppressively bound to a subordinate role.
Adriana Guardigli has drawn my attention to the fact that only women can really understand and know what procreation involves, and how reproduction is linked with sexuality. By oppressing women and sexuality, society represses the procreative instinct that
forms part of Eros, and the female Eros in particular. Perhaps the present ambivalent (love and hate) relations between parents and children are equally bound up with the repression of this instinct.
The dogma of procreation, therefore, doesn’t only express the repression of sexuality in general. It marks also – and in particular – the alienation of the instinct towards procreation, which has been repressed by the species and emerges only in the form of extraordinary ‘reminiscences’ of the experiences of maternity.
Oedipus or The Other
Work in this field is pioneer work. I have often made mistakes and had many times to forget what I had learned. But I know, and am content to know that as surely as light comes out of darkness, so truth is born of error. – Jung87
Ultimately, no one has yet succeeded in working out why some people become gay and others straight. Yet it is not difficult to see why the majority of people are straight, and only relatively few gay. This, as I have shown, is a function of the social oppression which tends to reduce the original polymorphous richness of Eros (transsexuality) to a rigid heterosexuality. But why some individuals still become gay, despite the very strong condemnation of homosexual tendencies, is something that we do not as yet understand. Just as all the various hypotheses so far formulated as to the historical origin of the anti-homosexual taboo still do not give us an exhaustive and certain explanation, so too it is very difficult to establish what induces us gays not to identify with the Norm and to recognise our desire in homosexuality.
Homosexuality is as old as the species, in fact even older, and yet ever renewed, even if today we are still just taking the first steps towards understanding it. And since the voices of gay people have generally been condemned to silence, only very few speak to us out of the past. We could make a comprehensive review here of the various opinions of psychoanalysts/psychonazis as to the reasons leading to the prevalent assertion of homosexual desire. But this has already been done by others,88 and with little to show in the way of results. In general, they draw on psychoanalysis in an attempt to give a ‘scientific basis’, somehow or other, for their more or less contradictory judgements on homosexuality. I prefer, rather, to shed a critical light on this argument in the practical perspective of liberation, and will therefore restrict myself to considering two or three of these theories involving the relationship between homosexuality and the Oedipus complex; theories which, for one reason or another, I find particularly interesting.