Towards a Gay Communism

by Mario Mieli

  There are those who consider heterosexuality as the ‘normal’ solution to the Oedipus complex, and homosexuality simply as an ‘inverted’ solution. In this sense, homosexual men would have experienced a particular exasperation, deep torment and the feeling of being irredeemably betrayed by their mothers, leading them to drastically distance themselves from the female ‘object’. Given that the mother whom they love belongs exclusively to the hatred rival, the father, they would then renounce not only her but also any other woman, directing their desire solely towards the male. Freud offers us a similar interpretation, mutatis mutandis, in a ‘case’ of female homosexuality.89

  But what specific factors determine such a distancing from the sex of the loved parent, instead of a concentration of desire on him or her? In other words, what, from the Oedipal standpoint, is the original differentiation between gays and straights? For on the basis of the classical conception of the Oedipus complex in its ‘normal’ or ‘positive’ form, even those who become heterosexual feel themselves exasperated, betrayed, and tormented by the evident superiority and exclusiveness of the parental relationship, which prevents the realisation of the desired love relation between daughter and father, or son and mother. And yet, if they are male, they do not renounce the female sex in general as they have had to renounce the mother. On the contrary, it is on women that they fix the ‘object’ of their sexual impulse, while, if they are female, they focus their desire on the male sex, instead of withdrawing from it. Freud suspected the existence ‘of some special factor which definitely favours one side or the other [i.e. heterosexuality or homosexuality], and which perhaps has only waited for the appropriate moment in order to turn the choice of object in its direction’.90 But he did not even try to give evidence of this.

  According to many psychoanalysts, the entry into the Oedipal phase, the characteristics of the complex and its dissolution, are determined by the way that the oral and anal phases have been traversed. The English school of psychoanalysis stresses the importance of infantile oral aggression, its ‘projections’ and the function of these in the assertion of homosexuality. In his 1910 essay on Leonardo da Vinci, Freud viewed the oral ‘fixation’ on the penis as a direct displacement of the primary attachment to the breast. Homosexuality would then derive from a ‘fixation of the erotic needs on the mother’.91

  In 1921, Freud came to the following conclusion:

  The genesis of male homosexuality in a large class of cases is as follows. A young man has been unusually long and intensely fixated upon his mother in the sense of the Oedipus complex. But at last, after the end of puberty, the time comes for exchanging his mother for some other sexual object. Things take a sudden turn: the young man does not abandon his mother, but identifies himself with her; he transforms himself into her, and now looks about for objects which can replace his ego for him, and on which he can bestow such love and care as he has experienced from his mother. This is a frequent process, which can be confirmed as often as one likes, and which is naturally quite independent of any hypothesis that may be made as to the organic driving force and the motives of the sudden transformation.92

  Once again, then, Freud does not even touch on what is of particular interest to us here, i.e. the specific causes and mechanisms of this transformation that leads to identification with the mother and the assertion of homosexuality at puberty. I will return later, and in a more substantial manner, to these Freudian hypotheses, when I take up the ideological character of Franco Fornari’s adherence to them.93 For the moment I would only like to stress again the discrepancy in Freud’s thinking. His theory of sexuality upholds the existence in each person of homoerotic tendencies, particularly so in children (‘polymorphous and perverse’), and thus recognises a congenital homosexuality; and yet Freud then goes on, as in the text just quoted, to inquire as to the genesis of homosexuality. But if homosexuality is congenital in us all, there is clearly no sense in investigating its genesis. What is necessary, rather, is to investigate what it is that determines the repression of homosexual desire in most people, and makes possible its assertion in the minority.

  Identification with the mother, it is true, is something of which many male homosexuals are consciously aware, alongside their identification with the father (whereas heterosexual men are generally only conscious of their identification with the same-sex parent). This emphasises the transsexual ambiguity of our being in-becoming, closer to the underlying transsexuality than is the rigid monosexuality of straight people; our ambiguity is closer to the child’s way of being.

  It is not for nothing that we are gay, that we are crazy queers, and for a better world, I truly think that the ‘education’ of young people should be entrusted to gay men and women: let the little children come to us! 94

  I should also say that, while reading a poem by Pasolini, I was reminded of the Freudian interpretation that I have detailed here (though neither seeing nor searching for precise associations between Freud’s interpretation and this poem: the association is one that came from myself, immediately linking, in my memory, the one with the other.) Certainly this poem reflects a single case, one in which not all – and perhaps very few – homosexuals will recognise themselves, but its beauty is such as to contain within itself a profound truth (and one that at least for me, in a certain sense, worthwhile). For this reason, I’d like to transcribe it in its entirety. It is titled ‘Plea to my Mother’.

  It’s hard to express in the words of a son what,

  at heart, I’m not really like.

  You alone in all the world know what love

  has always come first in my heart.

  This is why there’s something terrible you should know:

  it’s from your grace that springs my sorrow.

  You are irreplaceable. This is why the life you blessed

  me with will always be condemned to loneliness.

  And I don’t want to be alone. I have an infinite

  thirst for love, for bodies pure and soulless.

  For the soul is in you, it is you, but you are

  my mother, and in your love are my fetters.

  I went through childhood enslaved to a sentiment,

  lofty and incurable, of overwhelming commitment.

  It was the only way to feel alive, the only color,

  the only form, and now it’s over.

  Still, we survive—in the confusion

  of a life reborn outside of reason.

  I beg you, oh, I beg you: don’t wish for death.

  I’m here, alone, with you, in an April to come.95

  I do not believe in the exclusive identification by homosexual men with their mothers (nor in the theory according to which gays are supposed to seek in their partner the substitute for their own ego). I believe, rather, as I have already said, that we are aware more than straight people of the identification with both parents, of the existence within us of both sexes. One thing, however, is certain: true love for his mother does prevent a man from accepting the heterosexual Norm that insults, objectifies and oppresses women. But this does not prevent us from loving other women, and I believe that the more homosexuality is liberated, the more it will be us gays who enjoy love and erotic intensity with women. Genuine love for the other sex cannot but be accompanied by the full desire, auto- and allo-erotic, for one’s own sex.96

  It is also true, moreover, that historical and social factors place us gays far closer to the condition of women than are male heterosexuals, even if we still enjoy, to a variable extent, certain privileges and gratifications that are decidedly male, at the social, psychological and even sexual levels, notwithstanding all the harshness of the persecution and marginalisation we face from society – and which, obviously, male homosexuals face because they are homosexual, not because they are male.

  But in a society where the subordination of the female sex is closely bound up with the erotic desire of the woman for the man (the greater part of women being heterosexual), and with male supremacy in
the heterosexual relation, couldn’t we put forward the hypothesis that those men who generally abstain from sexual relations with women and do not treat them as sexual objects, experiencing instead desire for the male, stand to a certain degree closer to the condition of women, at least in some of its aspects? A gay man knows very well what it’s like to go to bed with a straight man, someone who generally fucks women and from time to time goes with a queer just to ‘prove his very normal potency’ (or so he says). He knows what it means to be treated as a convenient hole, a sexual object on which the male, convinced of his own ‘superiority’, inflicts a mediocre, neurotic and egoistic desire. Many gay men, moreover, understand what it is to go around dressed ‘as a woman’, i.e. they know what it means to be considered as a second-class human being, as the second sex.

  The precise extent to which homosexual men live situations similar to those experienced by women is impossible to establish. These situations, moreover, vary from case to case, and among gay men themselves, the more ‘effeminate’, i.e. the queens, often suffer humiliation and violence that the most ‘virile’ gays who pass as straight can only imagine with horror. I am quite content, however, to be an obvious, ‘feminine’ queen: and the suffering that, in this society, comes with this forms the measure, or if you prefer the mirror, of the hard yet fragile and precious beauty of my life. It is a great destiny to possess and seek to live with clear awareness what the regular mass of people, in their accustomed idiocy, disparage and try to strangle. As a comrade from the French gay movement wrote: ‘We demand our “femininity”, the same thing that women reject, and at the same time we declare that these roles are devoid of sense’.97 And Daniele Morini admitted:

  It has been hard for me to recognise my desire as a queer for what it is. And even after breaking through two barriers (‘I can’t because I’m not homosexual’ / ‘I can’t because I’m too politicised to have an alienated desire’), I now face a further fear: that of discovering myself a woman with a desire explicitly tied to the male. The refusal to live an alienated role hides a fear of what might be revealed by living it to the full. Or perhaps the fear of being male?98

  In trying to grasp what it is that enables some people to strongly assert their homosexual desire, despite the social condemnation of homoeroticism, I believe that we have to take into consideration the complete Oedipus complex, i.e. both its so-called ‘normal’ or ‘positive’ and its ‘negative’ or ‘inverted’ aspects. We need, that is, to take account of the ‘triangular character of the Oedipus situation and the constitutional bisexuality of each individual’ (Freud) – or, as I would rather frame it, the constitutional transsexuality of the individual. To quote Freud again:

  Closer study usually discloses the more complete Oedipus complex, which is twofold, positive and negative, and is due to the bisexuality originally present in children: that is to say, a boy has not merely an ambivalent attitude towards his father and an affectionate objectchoice towards his mother, but at the same time he also behaves like a girl and displays an affectionate feminine attitude to his father and a corresponding jealousy and hostility towards his mother. It is this complicating element introduced by bisexuality that makes it so difficult to obtain a clear view of the facts in connection with the earliest object-choices and identifications, and still more difficult to describe them intelligibly.99

  In order to form a full idea of the Oedipus complex, therefore, we need to bear in mind both the child’s hetero- and homoerotic tendencies. If only the ‘positive’ aspect is taken into account, then infancy (and also puberty, which frequently involves a revival of the complex) will be interpreted in categories that are exclusively heterosexual. It is then impossible to grasp the full complexity of the Oedipal situation, given that infancy is ‘polymorphously perverse’, and not just heterosexual, or to understand the complexity of the pubertal stage, given that puberty, as is well known, displays a rich resurgence of gay desires, frequently more numerous and intense than heterosexual, in the context of the intensification of Eros that characterises this stage of development. For what reasons, then, need the young boy, given his ‘undifferentiated’ polymorphous disposition, be jealous of the mother and feel rivalry with the father, rather than the other way round as well? And why is the little girl jealous of her father instead of her mother? Psychoanalysis itself – as we shall see later on100 – sees jealousy among heterosexual adults as a veiled expression of homoerotic desire. (In the case of a man, for example, jealousy over a loved woman who is involved with someone else indicates that it is unconsciously he who desires this other man.) But childhood is far less disguised. Homosexuality is not yet repressed, and in the boy’s ‘positive’ Oedipal jealousy over the mother we must also recognise his desire for the father; the so-called ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ aspects of the complex are intertwined.

  Freud goes on to say:

  Analytic experience then shows that in a number of cases one or the other constituent disappears, except for barely distinguishable traces; so that the result is a series with the normal positive Oedipus complex at one end and the inverted negative one at the other, while its intermediate members exhibit the complete form with one or other of its two components preponderating. At the dissolution of the Oedipus complex the four trends of which it consists will group themselves in such a way as to produce a father identification and a mother-identification. The father identification will preserve the object-relation to the mother which belonged to the positive complex and will at the same time replace the object-relation to the father which belonged to the inverted complex: and the same will be true, mutatis mutandis, of the mother-identification. The relative intensity of the two identifications in any individual will reflect the preponderance in him of one or other of the two sexual dispositions.101

  I do not believe that the different patterns assumed by the two identifications depends simply on the greater or lesser weight of the two sexual dispositions (homo- and heterosexual). I am sure that it also depends on educastration, or the social and family repression that forcibly leads the boy to identify with the father and renounce the male ‘object’, and the girl to identify with the mother and renounce the female ‘object’.

  We can put forward the hypothesis, then, that those who become homosexual, thanks to the particular richness of their predisposition to homoeroticism, fail to renounce the male (father) object, if they are themselves male, or the female (mother) object, if they are female. And that the strength of the congenital homosexual disposition is reinforced by a certain tendency (whether conscious or not) on the part of the parent of the same sex to establish a homoerotic relation with the child, a special emotional bond.

  In general, because of the anti-homosexual taboo (and the taboo on incest), the object-choice that the son makes for the father is castrated, negated, by the father himself; and similarly with the girl and her mother. This ‘normally’ leads to the predominant identification of the boy with the father and the girl with the mother. As Freud explains it, identification serves as a substitute for the forbidden ‘object’ – and the ‘object’ most strictly forbidden is that of the ‘inverted’ Oedipus complex. Prevalent identification of this kind with the same-sex parent leads to maintaining only the heterosexual type of object-choice, because this is based above all on the repression of homoerotic desire and because the parent introjected by way of identification is heterosexual. This would then explain the repression of homosexuality in so-called ‘normal’ individuals.

  It would follow, then, that homosexual desire is not repressed in those who find a certain response to their homoerotic object cathexis in the same sex parent: those in whose infancy, therefore, the ‘negative’ or ‘inverted’ Oedipal tendency is not suddenly and brutally repressed, but finds a certain channel of expression in the dialectic of family relations. The renunciation of ‘objects’ of the ‘opposite’ sex would follow from a lack of need to identify with the same-sex parent, and hence with his heterosexual behaviour, as well as from
the sense of guilt, or the internalisation of the social condemnation, which befalls those who do not completely identify in this way with the prescribed patriarchal model of male or female, i.e. who do not fit the Norm. The sense of guilt leads to a feeling of inferiority vis-a-vis ‘normal’ people, those who are endowed with an object-choice that society deems higher, positive, ‘normal’, etc. We can thus put forward the hypothesis that the repression of desire for the other sex in homosexuals is actually due to the social condemnation of homosexuality, which leads the homosexual to feel guilty and hence unworthy of the choice defined as ‘normal’, i.e. an impossible candidate to please people of the other sex. Oppression, moreover, forces the homosexual to wage a constant struggle against both his external persecutors and his induced sense of guilt, the persecutor within, with a view to defending (alone against all) his ‘anomalous’ choice, his homoerotic desire, concentrating all his libidinal energy into this. The liberation of homosexuality in society and the extirpation of the sense of guilt (of false guilt) will therefore lead – I am convinced – to the rediscovery, on the part of gay people, of their erotic desire for people of the other sex, and the discovery of the particular attraction that persons of the other sex feel towards them.