by Mario Mieli
In the Soviet Union, where aversion therapy for homosexuals is equally widespread, the most fashionable form at present involves the injection of apomorphine. See for example the article ‘Rapporto sui comportamenti sessuali in Urss: deviazionista!’, Espresso, 30 May 1976, which is based largely on Female Sexual Pathology by A.M. Sviadosch, head of the sexual pathology laboratory in Leningrad: ‘A 1 per cent solution of apomorphine hydrochloride is used. Five minutes after the injection, the drug produces a feeling of nausea, accompanied by heart palpitations and a certain lack of breath and vomiting. The patient is not informed as to the effects of the apomorphine, but believes they are due to a medicine given to him to combat his homosexual tendencies. All ideas and images bearing on the object of his homosexual attachment and acts are consequently rejected as unpleasant. At the start of the treatment, one or two-tenths of a milligram of apomorphine in a 1 per cent solution are injected. Three or four minutes after the injection, indifference towards the partner and homosexual acts sets in. He is then told to look at a photograph of his partner or else to imagine homosexual relations with him. The feeling of nausea and vomiting caused by the apomorphine is thus associated with the homosexual relationship, which acquires a negative connotation . . . The apomorphine therapy should be combined with suggestions and advice, firstly to convince the patient that he is indifferent towards his partner and homosexual acts, later that he feels disgusted by them. This method has been successfully used to eliminate homosexuality in active male subjects.’
As one might note, the Soviet psychonazis nonchalantly use the word ‘sick’ to define the homosexual; and the editors of L’Espresso behave themselves, as is their habit, in a reactionary fashion, limiting themselves to reporting – without adding critical comments – extracts of the Soviet text, translated with the usual disgusting laughter. Evidently the ‘progressive’ Italian homophobe will take pleasure in reading this: in Russia, at least, they treat the queers as they should!
Therefore, I’d also like to strangle the soviet doctors (and the editors of L’Espresso). But I haven’t got enough hands: our homegrown Maoists would go to pieces if they considered how in China homosexuals are shot if they are caught in flagrante after a period of several years of forced ‘reeducation’, a punishment carried out even when Saint Mao was himself living.
78. See for example Nell Kimball, Her Life as an American Madam (New York: Granada, 1971).
79. [Translator’s note: See my preface for a discussion of his particular use of this figure of the ‘flat’ and ‘chameleon-like’ – i.e. the capacity for variable adaption to changing conditions yet without substantive/‘deep’ transformations – as a way to understand the process and phase of ‘real domination’.]
80. Freud, ‘Three Essays’, p. 144, n. 1.
81. Freud, ‘The Psychogenesis of a Case of Female Homosexuality’, p. 151.
82. René Schérer, Emilio pervertito (Milan: Emme edizioni, 1976), p. 74.
83. Groddeck, The Book of the It, p. 108.
84. André Gide, Corydon (London: Secker & Warburg,1952), p. 47.
85. See Enrico Fulchignoni, ‘L’omosessualitil nelle donne’, Ulisse xviii, (1953), p. 709.
86. In Chapter 6, section 4.
87. Carl G. Jung, ‘Psychology of the Unconscious’, Collected Works, Vol. 7 (London: Routledge, 1953), p. 116.
88. See for example Erminio Gius, Una messa a punto dell’omosessualità (Turin: Marietti, 1972). This is one of the most reactionary works on homoeroticism published in Italy in recent years. The author is a priest (more or less), teaching in the psychology faculty at the university of Padua. Among other ‘scientific’ views that he quotes is that of Gino Olivari,* for example, a quack who has spent years engaged on the most absurd experiments in ‘therapy’ for homosexuality.
* [Editor’s note from original volume: Gino Olivari (1899–1988) was a singular figure, a scholar and missionary dedicated to the cause of helping homosexuals. From the start of the 1950s, he worked to ‘cure’ homosexuals of their condition and to publish studies that argued, like many ‘therapists’ of those years, that the best way to make a homosexual heterosexual was to make them go to bed with a woman. At the same time, he fought against repressive laws and against the demonisation of homosexuals, facing a trial as a result. From the start of the 1960s, his encounter with the gay movement contributed to his partially modifying his antiquated theories.]
89. Freud, ‘The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman’, pp. 156–8.
90. Ibid., p. 158.
91. Freud, ‘Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood’, Standard Edition, Vol. 11 (London: Vintage, 2001), p. 99, note. In his ‘Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy’ (the case of ‘little Hans’), Freud put forward the following hypothesis: ‘In those who later become homosexuals we meet with the same predominance in infancy of the genital zone (and especially of the penis) as in normal persons. Indeed it is the high esteem felt by the homosexual for the male organ which decides his fate. In his childhood he chooses women as his sexual object, so long as he assumes that they too possess what in his eyes is an indispensable part of the body; when he becomes convinced that women have deceived him in this particular, they cease to be acceptable to him as a sexual object. He cannot forego a penis in any one who is to attract him to sexual intercourse; and if circumstances are favourable he will fix his libido upon the “woman with a penis”, a youth of feminine appearance. Homosexuals, then, are persons who, owing to the erotogenic importance of their own genitals, cannot do without a similar feature in their sexual object’ (Standard Edition, Vol. 10 [London: Vintage, 2001], p. 109). Freud’s error here lies in the extension of the above hypothesis to apply, quite falsely, to all ‘cases’ of homosexuality, though this does not mean that it is necessarily invalid in some. In many of his works, Freud tends to offer the most ‘definitive’ possible interpretation of the homosexual phenomenon, and yet these interpretations show a wide variation. And none can be considered The Truth simply because it was put forward by the father of psychoanalysis. They should be viewed rather as hypotheses, sometimes in fact as mere opinions. We can only use psychoanalysis as an instrument for shedding light on the homosexual question if we compare the different hypotheses and attempt a synthesis guided by the critical revolutionary spirit.
92. Sigmund Freud, ‘Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego’, Standard Edition, Vol. 18 (London: Vintage, 2001), p. 108.
93. See Chapter 6, section 5.
94. [Translator’s note: Mieli’s reference is to Christ’s words in Matthew 19:14: ‘Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.’]
95. ‘Plea to my Mother’, trans. Stephen Sartarelli in The Selected Poetry of Pier Paolo Pasolini: A Bilingual Edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), pp. 315–17.
96. See Chapter 5, section 4.
97. Où est passé mon chromosome?’, FHAR, Rapport contre la normalité (Paris: Editions Champ Libre, 1971), p. 66.
98. Daniele Morini, ‘La Bella e la Bestia’, Il Vespasiano degli omosessuali, published by the Collettivi omosessuali milanesi, (June 1976), p. 16.
99. Freud, ‘The Ego and the Id’, pp. 31 and 33.
100. See Chapter 3, section 4.
101. Freud, ‘The Ego and the Id’, p. 34.
102. [Translator’s note: Mieli does not provide a source for this quotation.]
103. Alcune Femministe Milanesi, ‘Pratica dell’inconscio e movimento delle donne’, L’Erba Voglio 18-19, (Oct. 1974–Jan. 1975), pp. 12–23.
104. Gilles Deleuze, in a contribution to the workshop held on 8–9 May 1973 in Milan by the collective of Semeiotica e Psicanalisi; Psicanalisi e politica (Milan, 1973), p. 45.
105. Guy Hocquenghem, Homosexual Desire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), p. 106.
106. Ibid., p. 107.
107. Deleuze, Semeiotica e Psicanalisi, p. 45.
2
Fire and Brimstone, or How Homosexuals Became Gay
The Homosexual Antithesis and the Norm. The Staging of ‘Love’
It can be said that there is a real relation of opposition between heterosexuality and homosexuality, in society as in every individual existence. Just as there is a dialectic between the sexes, so there is also a dialectic between sexual tendencies and forms of behaviour. The antithetical relation that exists between heterosexuality and homosexuality must be deeply analysed: in fact, the direct path to the overcoming of monosexuality and the affirmation of the female sex and of transsexuality necessarily passes straight through the development of this contradiction between hetero- and homoeroticism.
Save for some rare exceptions, which only confirm the rule, heterosexuality and homosexuality are mutually exclusive. These exceptions are the ‘cases’ of, strictly speaking, bisexuality (i.e. of ‘amphigenic inversion’1), ‘cases’ in fact of people who experience conscious sexual attraction towards both sexes, and ‘freely’ indulge their bisexual desire. (Today, however, the fact of feeling attracted to both sexes is not in itself sufficient for overcoming the bipolar contradiction between the sexes, for overcoming bi-sexuality.) These bisexuals, however, are almost all either predominantly heterosexual or predominantly homosexual. The former usually behave in a way that essentially conforms to the Norm (they are exceptions, we can say, who only confirm the Norm), while the latter, as a general rule, can be more easily identified with ‘homosexuals of strict observance’ (as Francesco Pertegato calls them) than with the predominantly heterosexual bisexuals.
Bisexuality may be viewed as a compromise, often a rather poor one, between the repressive Norm and transsexuality. But you don’t make a revolution through compromises. A revolutionary homosexual today, who might well have sexual relations with women, will certainly not define himself as bisexual, among other reasons because, if by bisexuality is meant the sum of heterosexuality and homosexuality, he will refuse to define his relations with women as heterosexual. He will rather say that his encounters with women are unfortunately still tainted in large part by heterosexual conditioning, a conditioning that he seeks to combat and overcome. Heterosexuality, in fact, is the Norm based on the repression of Eros, and a gay revolutionary who does not accept the Norm will certainly not conduct his erotic relations with women in the heterosexual, and hence ‘normal’, sense. He will far prefer to eliminate the heavy residues of heterosexuality that still encumber these. We shall take up this line of argument again below.2
In any case, among the majority of people today, manifest heterosexual desire rules out homosexual desire, and vice versa. And yet the specific predominance of the one does not exist without the simultaneous and antithetical latent presence of the other. Heterosexuality cannot be considered socially ‘normal’ if homosexuality is not judged a ‘perversion’. The condition of homosexuals is the mirror image of a society that sees itself as heterosexual.
On the one hand, it is heterosexuality that holds ‘power’, we might say; heterosexuality is the Norm which the system upholds. Homosexuality, on the other hand, plays the role of the negative, the antithesis with respect to this institutionalised normality. As Andre Morali-Daninos wrote in a popular work:
Were homosexuality to receive, even in theory, a show of approval, were it allowed to break away even partially from the framework of pathology, we would soon arrive at the abolition of the heterosexual couple and of the family, which are the foundations of the Western society in which we live.3
Given that the parental couple on which the family is based is a heterosexual relation, the education of children and young people is necessarily stamped in a heterosexual mould. The goal of educastration is the formation of a new heterosexual bond; every human being is constricted and mutilated by the dictatorship of heterosexual genitality. (And genitality, in the language of the sexophobe-sexologists, properly designates the penetration of the female sex organ by the male, with the purpose of procreation.)
The ideology of heterosexual primacy affects the minds of very many so-called ‘revolutionaries’. It is sufficient to read a book like The Grammar of Living, for example, to see how people like David Cooper are still tied to a conception of heterosexuality as the principal expression of Eros. Heterosexual ideology also structured the thinking of Wilhelm Reich, convinced as he was of the need for an ‘evolution’ that would abolish the earlier stages (pregenital, anal and homosexual) in order to attain the perfect heterosexual genital orgasm. Schérer wrote about Reich that, ‘in spite of the breadth of his body of work, his theory remains illuminated by, and obstinately committed to, frontal sexuality’.4 Too many people claim to ‘liberate sexuality’ without putting the ideology of heterosexual primacy in question. The anus, in particular, remains proscribed. (The male anus, that is.)
Religion consecrates in matrimony the same heterosexual relationship that the state institutionalises. In this society, the conception of ‘love’ that is so heavily propagated is purely heterosexual in character. Erotic ‘romanticism’ – in the broad sense – is almost always heterosexual: Death in Venice is a rare exception, and even today, Ernesto5 is seen as scandalous. And if homoeroticism is banned from society, or at best merely tolerated, then the ideal of heterosexual ‘love’ is broadcast in every possible way. Yet this much trumpeted ‘love’ is not love at all. Capital propagates the alienation of love; the so-called ‘normal’ couple is based on an alienated amorous bond, since the objectified and stereotyped woman is not woman but rather the negation of woman, and the phallic and deficient male is not man but the negation of both man and woman. The spectacle of heterosexuality cannot be identified with any deep amorous desire. Heterosexuality as it presents itself today is nothing but the dominant ‘normal’ form of a mutilated Eros. As well as the negation of homoeroticism, it is above all the negation of love between persons of different sex.
The capitalist spectacle represents the maximum estrangement reached by the human species in the stage of its prehistory. And yet it is precisely the general spectacle character of contemporary society that leads those who reject it to recognise the hallmarks of a stage production in all the absolutisation of present and past: to understand how ideology passes off heterosexuality as the sole, ‘natural’ and eternal form of Eros. The revolutionary critique of the society of the spectacle will unmask the ideology of heterosexual primacy.
A deep and loving desire moves, and can be glimpsed, beneath, through, and beyond the present contradictory expressions of ‘love’. Perhaps love is the tendency towards overcoming the individualist, solipsist, idealist and ‘normal’ delusion; love is the tendency to annihilate the outworn neurotic and ego-istic categories of ‘subject’ and ‘object’. Feuerbach, in his way, had an inkling of this. Marx too.
The spectacular advertisement of alienated heterosexuality cannot but be anti-gay, whether explicitly or implicitly, given that the repression of homosexuality is indispensable to determining this type of heterosexuality. But if press, advertising and the mass media as a whole are constantly celebrating heterosexuality, fashion clearly reflects the homosexual taste that is prostituted to capitalist production and exploited by the system.
The woman-object6 – sexy, ‘captivating’, well-dressed, well-made-up, hair styled to perfection, an empty simulacrum that is put on the market as a commodity designed for heterosexual fantasy – is the creation of a male homosexual aesthetic fantasy. It is aesthetic in the original Greek sense (αισθησις), tailored to the sensual desire for the woman which is almost universally latent in us manifest homosexuals. What excites straight men is the image of an artificial ‘woman’ springing from the censorship of erotic desire for the female that generally characterises male homosexuals (photographers, fashion designers, hair stylists, make-up artists, film directors). More than a real woman, heterosexual men desire a disguised homosexual fantasy of ‘woman’, and this is what they masturbate over. Tiziana V. maintains that the woman-object created by designers, hairdr
essers, and others is nothing other than a phallus disguised as a woman, or better, a woman disguised as a phallus. If this is true, the heterosexual desire for this woman-object and for this feminine appearance is really a homosexual desire, the desire for cock. Manolo Pellegrini has drawn my attention to the way that the reified woman of pornographic magazines (of the Playboy type), photographed and posed as a general rule by gay photographers, is characterised by a stiffness of form (erect breasts, firm and protuding buttocks), whereas women generally tend more than men to a softness of form, a relaxation of bodily tissues. What is the source of this desire by the gay photographer to depict, and by the heterosexual man to desire, a stiff, erect, firm body, such as is rarely met with in reality, if not the secret intention on the gay man’s part to display a male body, stiff and hard like an erect penis, and the secret desire for this on the heterosexual’s part?
‘Heterosexuality’, therefore, is further imposed even in its subjection of homosexual taste and fantasy.7 Heterosexuality is imposed even when its content bears the clear sign of homosexuality. Heterosexuality triumphs.
By contrast, love between people of the same sex represents a taboo. It is not talked about much, not taken into account. If it is mentioned at all, this is almost a slip of the tongue. It is discussed only in terms of disparagement, commiseration, condemnation, disgust (or tolerance), in the way that people speak about a disease, a vice or a noxious social pest. Heterosexual society is marked, in the words of Franceso Saba Sardi, by a profound
form of ‘racism,’ when confronted with the homosexual and deviants in general, prescribing the very language that it uses: the signifiers and allusions that are resorted to in denoting the ‘queen’, the ‘dyke’, the ‘queer’, the ‘fag’, and so on. The abundance of synonyms, and the euphemisms that always accompany them, bear witness to the attraction and the contorted curiosity that the phenomenon generates, not to mention the inevitable tendency to use what the English call ‘lavatory humour’ in confronting such deviants, a humour that is denigrating and scornful. The same kind of jokes are told about both mad people and homosexuals.8