by Mario Mieli
The homosexual has been forced to internalise the social condemnation of homoeroticism, a condemnation that might any day strike at him. ‘Normal’ people, however, have adapted to the anti-gay taboo – internalising this condemnation in the most drastic fashion, and personifying the heterosexual Norm. They cannot refrain from ascribing guilt to anyone who transgresses the Norm, since such a person lives what they have repressed, and so by repression, discrimination and violence, they induce the homosexual to believe himself guilty. It is heteros who foment the sense of guilt in gays.
Corrado Levi shows how the feeling of guilt that often afflicts the gay person ‘has repercussions in a kind of inhibition in his behaviour in general’. In the course of consciousness-raising meetings held in Milan,
the connections between homosexuality and self-punishment became clear . . . and how this was stirred up by the police, the father, etc. The detailed analysis of the sense of guilt led to identifying and thus isolating our internalisation of the prevailing morality and values, which we can therefore proceed to repudiate together with the sense of guilt.
A gradual elimination of false guilt
is a result proceeding in parallel with the analysis and overcoming of the prevailing values, norms and behaviours. The sense of guilt is tied up with transgressions of the aims towards which the repression of homosexuality, which we are subjected to from childhood, is designed, and which in adulthood then becomes self-repression (with the compulsion to repeat), in the context of the present deformation of the individual by Oedipal-patriarchal education. And it is reinforced by the guilt that is imposed on sex and the body by the Judeo-Christian culture. It is symptomatic, to take only one effect of this sense of guilt, to note how many times, discovering themselves different from certain prevailing values and behaviours, the sense of guilt leads people to adopt other prevailing values and behaviours in a very rigid form, as a compensation for these transgression.98
We can thus understand how a homosexual, led by the system to feel guilt because he transgresses the anti-gay taboo, often tries in some form or other to vindicate himself in the eyes of society, to adapt to all its rules and become conservative and reactionary, repressive and death-dealing in his turn. The homosexual can thus be transformed into an instrument of capital. ‘We know very well’, observes Angelo Pezzana, ‘that those homosexuals who have positions of power are precisely the people who combat homosexual liberation’.99
Apropos the ‘discreet face of the pédés’, some comrades in the French Groupe de Libération Homosexuel wrote:
Just as the black American movement had to struggle against the black bourgeoisie, which was violently opposed to the ghetto revolts and which mimicked the racist white society, in the same way we cannot say that any homosexual whatsover is a priori on our side, ‘even if …’ Because if every homosexual experiences sexual repression, this comes about in different ways according to his social position, his conditioning, and his ideas. What does he do at work? What does he do in his daily life? France under Giscard permits its homosexuals to live and survive with dignity, with Arcadie, in hypocrisy and disguise. This type of established homosexual is among the first to oppose our revolt. He is generally one of our enemies.100
The burden of condemnation that is internalised, and the conditions of unfreedom and desperation in which we live, still induce too many homosexuals to content themselves with one form of adaptation or another, to cultivate the fascist dress, home and smile of L’Uomo Vogue (which at one time I myself tried to adopt and identify with), and/or to aspire to the attainment of further civil rights. The system only profits from this: ‘The system is the Leopard inciting us to try and change everything in such a way that it all remains the same’.101
Even those gays involved in the liberation movement are not all fully aware of the need to wage the struggle in a totalising and revolutionary perspective, towards human emancipation instead of just political emancipation;102 relatively few are aware as yet of the revolutionary disruption potentially contained in their condition, and of what they must do to translate this into deeds.
At the present time, the movement is made up of both revolutionary and integrationist homosexuals; the activities of the groups, moreover, often conflict with one another. But it is through such difficulties and contrasts that the movement dialectically grows and is transformed. Beyond the formal political distinctions between one organisation and another, one collective and the next, beyond the differences of interpretation and content, the gay movement as a whole is the historical movement for the liberation of homosexuality, even if it cannot but reflect, for the time being, the contradictions and limitations of the general social situation, which is predominantly counter-revolutionary.
The organisational structure of the gay groups themselves, while more elastic and gay, and less authoritarian, than the traditional or ultra-left political rackets, often remains, all the same, substantially hierarchical (even if the collectives scarcely ever recognise official hierarchy of any type). The effective homosexual leaders often tend – and sometimes unconsciously – to lead ‘their’ groups like little gangs to be more or less kept to heel, and on which they base their own prestige and personal power. Still essentially political figures, they are as such patriarchal and reactionary, beneath all the feathers and glitter.
Besides, a certain inertia and the insufficient level of gay subversive consciousness on the part of many members of the group, tends to assign ‘leader’ roles to a few people, and to confirm them in these roles, for all the discussions against authoritarianism and charismatic leaders that are held within the collectives, discussions which often boil down to dialectical clashes that are in actual fact a power play between rival leaders.
It is also the case that many homosexuals, consumed and obscured by the induced sense of guilt, the internalisation of the social condemnation, when they meet for the first time in liberation groups are suddenly assailed with remorse, often unconsciously, by the internal superego, which condemns them for having dared to disobey the social superego that has established their marginalisation and is opposed to a revolutionary awareness. Like the sons of Freud’s mystical primitive father, who after uniting in a homosexual bond find the strength to kill him, but are then overtaken by remorse and establish in memory and substitution for the father the totem, the phallic fetish, so the homosexuals who meet in liberation groups are largely powerless against the attack from the superego that immediately assails them, and find themselves forced to establish in their midst leaders, phallic and charismatic figures who ‘command’ them, personifying the authority of the superego that binds every individual member of the group with the sense of guilt.
On the one hand, we must not apologise for all the existing homosexual organisations. Only a critical attitude to their history, their formation and development, can shed light both on the importance of the gay-communist perspective, and on the revolutionary that is present, potentially or in actual fact, inside them.
On the other hand, even if not all of us gays are for the revolution, it is impossible to understand the homosexual question without making constant reference to the concrete individuals who set this in motion by their struggle and research. They provide us with keys for a revolutionary reading of the historical and social problematics that bear on homosexuality, of the ideological (and) psychoanalytic disquisitions on the ‘perversions’, even when they are themselves far from revolutionary. No one can better interpret the Freudian analysis of the Schreber case,103 for example, than someone who has himself tried to establish what it means to be a crazy queen, to be condemned as such, to revolt against repression and the internalised form of the condemnation. And a queen may be reformist, but he’s always still a queen.
Oscar Wilde has been labelled both a camp conservative and a decadent socialist, but from the standpoint of homosexual liberation he was, willing or not, a revolutionary. It is true that today the system is infinitely better prepared to recuperate the
moderate expressions of homosexual struggle than it was a century ago. Thus the sense of guilt that shows clearly through in the works of Wilde, and at times even dominates these, is less serious than the present sense of guilt that leads many gays into reformism, if we consider the present self-interested propensity that capital displays towards tolerance, compared with the very severe persecution of homoeroticism in nineteenth-century England.
The most radical expression of the homosexual liberation movement, both practical and theoretical, took place in the wake of the workers’ and students’ struggles of 1968 and 1969 in Europe, and in the USA of the deep revolt stamped on American society, and particularly on the minds of young Americans, by the insurrections of black ghettoes and the temporary revolutionary assertion of the black movement.104 At the same time, moreover, both in America and Europe the formation of gay groups was deeply influenced by the radicalisation and expansion of the feminist movement to be seen in the late 1960s. The subsequent reflux of these struggles, the counter-revolutionary stabilisation of capitalist power and the stagnation of social and existential discontent, have all notably contributed to a fragmentation of the gay movement.
In France, it became clear in 1974 that the Front Homosexuel d’Action Révolutionnaire, known as the most extreme of the European groups, had to all intents dissolved. This did not mean that the homosexual movement in France was dead. It was rather transformed and divided into smaller groups (the most important of which is presently the Groupe de Libération Homosexuel), which, from differing positions and without any pretence at uniformity for the sake of formal unity, are waging a struggle around objectives that are largely shared.
In Britain, the Gay Liberation Front, which had its heyday in 1971–2, gradually adapted itself to the confines of a para-reformist struggle, bringing it closer to the politics of the Campaign for Homosexual Equality, the British integrationist organisation. But this does not mean that there are not still revolutionary collectives existing in England.
In the USA, the leading role that was once held by the GLF is now occupied by more moderate groups such as the National Gay Task Force, particularly strong in New York, and the Gay Activists Alliance, an organisation that broke away from the GLF as early as 1969. This first split was provoked by disagreements within GLF between the more radical elements, who openly supported the Black Panthers and favoured an intensification of struggle, and the reformists, disposed to a politics that was showy but cautious, and who were against the gay movement giving support to other liberation struggles. In America, too, however, there are still various revolutionary homosexual collectives who do not form official organisations, but are the most advanced expressions of the real movement.
In Italy, the federation of Fuori! with the Radical Party105 clearly indicates the assertion of a counter-revolutionary, reformist political line in the homosexual movement. Symptomatic of this was the participation of Fuori!, which presented its own candidates on the Radical list, in the elections of June 1976, and the pathetic tone of the electoral campaign. In Italy, however, revolutionary homosexual groups have emerged in various cities, among them the Milan Homosexual Collective and the autonomous collectives in Florence, Pavia, Venice, Padua, Naples, Catania, Cagliari, etc.
We may say, then, that if reformist homosexuals aspire to parliament, revolutionaries do not accept compromises with the political racketeers of the system, whether parliamentary or ultra-left. They continue to struggle for themselves as revolutionaries (and) homosexuals, knowing that only the firmest intransigence, the closest solidarity and the rejection of all politicking and casuistic manoeuvres can keep them free from capitalist recuperation, and actually promote the achievement of liberation.
Ideology. The Homosexual Revolutionary Project
Revolutionary criticism has shown how the ideology based on the capitalist mode of production, on the alienation of labour and the reification of the human subject, involves the absurd absolutisation of contingent historical values and the hypostasis of opinions (scientific, ethico-moral, socio-political, psychological) that are in reality relative and transitory. This ideology upholds the ‘naturalness’ of the present system and mode of production: it absolutises it in an ahistorical manner, thereby concealing its underlying transience. What is hypostatised here by ideology as ‘normal’ and normative is nothing but the visible version of what in reality changes, transforms, and develops together with the development of the means and mode of production, with the dynamic of the contradiction between capital and the human species, with the entire movement of society. But much as capital has so far withstood the revolutionary movement, and managed to repress it, so too its ideology has survived the upsurge and progressive spread of the theory of the proletariat, with respect to which it has sought – and often partially managed – a recuperation, without ever grasping the essence of it.
At 120 years’ distance from the Communist Manifesto, people’s heads are still filled with ideological absurdity. The ideology of wage-labour still marks the Weltanschauung of one-dimensional man,106 even though capital has reached the stage of real domination, in which,
Thus it is no longer merely labour, a defined and particular moment of human, activity, that is subsumed and incorporated into capital, but the whole lifeprocess of man. Capital’s process of incarnation [Einverleibung] which began in the West about five centuries ago, is now complete. Capital is now the common being [Gemeinwesen], oppressor of man […] Capital incorporates the human brain, appropriates it to itself, with the development of cybernetics; with computing, it creates its own language, on which human language must model itself etc. Now it is not only the proletarians – those who produce surplus-value – who are subsumed under capital, but all men, the greater part of whom is proletarianized. It is the real domination over society, a domination in which all men becomes the slaves of capital [.]107
For its part, the bourgeoisie is ‘demonstrated to be a superfluous class’ because nearly all ‘its social functions are now performed by salaried employees’ (Engels).108 This real domination is characterised by the immanent tendency towards socialisation which transforms capitalism into state capitalism, while the state, as a ‘committee for running the common affairs of the bourgeoisie’, itself becomes a capitalist enterprise. This general slavery tends to present itself as (participation in) the management of production by the workers: the waged are transformed into automatons who manage and administer the very system that enslaves them. Meanwhile, the substitution of living labour by science and technology ‘becomes the universal form of material production . . . [and] circumscribes an entire culture; it projects a historical totality – a “world”.’109
The increase of the productive force of labour and the greatest possible negation of necessary labour is the necessary tendency of capital [. . .] The transformation of the means of labour into machinery is the realization of this tendency. In machinery, objectified labour materially confronts living labour as a ruling power and as an active subsumption of the latter under itself, not only by appropriating it, but in the real production process itself; the relation of capital as value which appropriates value-creating activity is, in fixed capital existing as machinery, posited at the same time as the relation of the use value of capital to the use value of labour capacity; further, the value objectified in machinery appears as a presupposition against which the value-creating power of the individual labour capacity is an infinitesimal, vanishing magnitude[.]110
The necessary economic premises for the creation of communism are thus completely developed (and overdeveloped): capitalism itself has reduced necessary labour to a minimum. But people continue to work for capital (which now takes charge of all the activity that the proletariat performs in the factory), they continue to survive for capital’s sake. This real domination so much subsumes human life into itself, and determines people’s thinking to such an extent, that even now – when it would be enough to stop the system’s machinery for the species to be able to
rediscover itself, its own biological salvation and communist freedom – the revolution is still held back from asserting itself.
Ideology leads people to think according to the inhuman criteria of capital and puts the brakes on the growth of a universal and communist human consciousness that would oppose once and for all the cancerous domination of this ‘automated monster’.
The struggle of women and the theoretical expressions of their movement have made it clear how ideology is phallocentric, hinging as much on the subjugation of the female sex to the male as on the capitalist mode of production. And as dominant ideology is specifically white and Eurocentric, it has been literally set aflame by the struggles of black people: rising up in the ghettoes of America in the 1960s and destroying the cities of capital, they have reopened for the species the prospect of communist revolution, the perspective of human emancipation.
Lastly, that ideology is heterosexual is something that we homosexuals have shown for the first time, in a disruptive way, over the course of the last few years, from the founding of the New York Gay Liberation Front in summer 1969 through to today.
But through all its specific and persisting characteristics (bourgeois, male, Eurocentric, heterosexual), what we must recognise in this ideology above all today is capital itself, its real domination. Today, ideology is unitary and strikes all differently in the same mode. We have to get rid of it, in order to give life and thought back their free and human ‘form’ and ‘essence’, at present reified in the deadly cogs of the capital-machine. The ‘privileges’ that society cherishes today are revealed in substance as exclusively functional to the perpetuation of the system; the bourgeois, white, heterosexual male is also almost always an obtuse and unfortunate solipsist, the most despicable puppet of the status quo, which negates in him the woman, the black, the queer, and the human being.