Towards a Gay Communism

by Mario Mieli

  If ideology is unitary and anthropomorphic, the (in)human mask of capital, we, on the other hand, are today far too divided, and above all divided from one another, despite all being in the same underlying situation, suffocated by the weight of the system. We are divided, but it is capital that pits us against each other and divides us.

  By cultivating the deep specificities of each individual case of personal oppression, we can advance to the revolutionary consciousness that grasps in my specific case of oppression also yours (because you, too, hetero, are a negated gay), and in your specific case, also mine (because I, too, am a negated woman), so as to recognise in us all the negated human species, beyond all historically determinate separation and autonomy. Revolution can only form this recognition of our common repressed being, reflected today in separate forms in society, in those who live, in their daily life, through and against the suppression of a particular aspect of human ‘nature’111 (being a woman, homoerotic desire, etc.) that the system negates.

  The proletariat itself, and the struggle of women, blacks and us gays, have all indicated the fundamental importance, in the perspective of human emancipation, of everyone who – in relation to the absolutised values of ideology – is considered marginal, secondary, anomalous, or downright absurd. The life of the species resides there. If the ideology of power is absurd, the reality this veils can be discerned only by living what this ideology negates and relegates to a corner deemed absurd. Schizophrenia is a gate of access to revolutionary knowledge; and only loving a black person, knowing black people can truly lead to understanding why communism will be black, of all colours.

  A critical theory, growing as a function of a gay revolutionary project, cannot but take into account everything that is eccentric to the narrow confines of what the dominant subculture considers ‘normal’, permissible, rational. For us homosexuals, there is a clear alternative. Either to adapt to the established universe, and hence to marginalisation, to the ghetto and derision, adopting as our own values the hypocritical morality of heterosexual idiocy which the system requires (albeit with the inevitable variants, seeing as it’s hard to give up a cock in the ass), and hence to opt for a heteronomy. Or else to oppose ourselves to the Norm, and the society of which this is the reflection, and to overturn the entire imposed morality, specifying the particular character of our existential objectives from our own standpoint of marginalisation, from our ‘different’ being, as lesbian, bum-boy, gay, in open contrast to the one-dimensional rule of hetero monosexuality. In other words, to opt for our ‘homonomy’. As Sartre wrote about Gide:

  In the fundamental conflict between sexual anomaly and accepted normality, he took sides with the former against the latter, and has gradually eaten away the rigorous principles which impeded him like an acid. In spite of a thousand relapses, he has moved forward towards his morality; he has done his utmost to invent a new Table of the Law . . . he wanted to free himself from other peoples’ Good; he refused from the first to allow himself to be treated like a black sheep.112

  Gide’s position is not essentially different from that of all of us other homosexuals: it is a question of opposing the ‘normal’ morality and of choosing what is good and what is bad from our own marginalised point of view. If we aspire to liberation, we must reject the existing standards. It is a question of making a choice that rejects the Norm. But a gay moralisation of life, which combats misery, egoism, hypocrisy, and the repressive character and immorality of customary morality, cannot take place unless we uproot the sense of guilt, that false guilt which still ties so many of us to the status quo, to its ideology and its deathly principles, preventing us from moving with gay seriousness in the direction of a totalising revolutionary project.

  We know that the discovery of what is hidden by the label of ‘anomalous’, with which dominant ideology covers up so many expressions of life, helps to demonstrate the absurdity of this ideology. But the gradual accumulation of evidence against the alleged absolute value of capitalist science and morality is only a secondary result of the analysis of those questions and arguments which public opinion considers more or less taboo. Above all, it is a question of discovering what these questions disclose about our own underlying ‘nature’.

  A direct approach to the homosexual question shows the basic importance of the homoerotic impulse in any human being, and makes a contribution to tracing the issues inherent to its repression and its disguise. We know, in the words of Norman O. Brown, that ‘it is in our unconscious repressed desires that we shall find the essence of our being, the clue to our neurosis (as long as reality is repressive), and the clue to what we might become if reality ceased to repress’.113

  Homosexuality contains, and sometimes conceals, a mystery. One might say that this mystery is the man-woman, but this is unfortunately not enough to either describe or understand it. Our mystery, as much as we can know and intuit it, is far more than bi-sexual. And the world-oflife is the tonalli and the nagual: beyond totality lies everything else.114

  The revolutionary gay movement (con)tends to (re)conquer our deep mysterious being.115 Revealing the historical-existential secret that has up till now been gleaned and preserved in our marginal position, forced as we have been for millennia and for all the most oppressed years of our individual lives to remain secret, we homosexuals, with our voice and all the expressions of our presence, are beginning to reveal what is without doubt one of the fundamental mysteries of the world. Perhaps homosexuality is indeed the key to transsexuality; perhaps it does point towards that something which for thousands of years the repressive requirements of Kultur have struck down.

  The repression of homosexuality stands in direct proportion to its importance in human life and for human emancipation. If we want to look upon the massacre that has decimated us in the past, it is to better understand the ancient burden of condemnation that still hangs heavily inside each of us even today, to better understand the spectacular and ambiguous way in which this massacre is perpetuated in ‘our’ times: and in so doing, to reach a better awareness of the revolutionary force that is in us, in our desire.

  With its real domination, capital seeks to take possession of even the unconscious, that ‘human essence’ whose manifest expressions could not but be condemned to death by the systems of repression that preceded it. It may be successful, either because it is more difficult today for the unconscious to explode in an uncontrolled fashion, given the efficiency of conditioning, or because, by way of repressive desublimation, capital enables the unconscious to ‘emerge’ in alienated forms, in order to subsume it, to deprive men and women of it, and to deprive women and men of themselves. The logic of money and profit that determines the liberalisation of the so-called ‘perversions’ is not simply an economic fact: it promotes the submission to capital of the whole of human life.

  This demonstrates the arduous complexity of our revolutionary project, to recognise and express a humanity that transcends capital, without offering ourselves up to be devoured by it. In fact, if this should happen, then capital would simply puke us back up in its own forms, so that we may be nourished on this vomit to reproduce a new ‘humanity’, ever more digestible because it has already been digested.

  This is why we have to take extreme positions, not yielding a single inch on the things that really matter, nor abandoning the intransigent struggle for the liberation and conquest of every aspect of our being-in-becoming.

  It is due to the awareness of this that a number of homosexuals have stressed, in the last few years, the need to forge instruments for an autonomous (‘homonomous’) struggle of our own, working out our own theory and deepening the critique of capitalist liberalisation. The situation of those gays who see themselves taking part in a movement (historical, rather than simply formal) differs from that of André Gide in its collective character, in that the ‘system’ of homosexuality provides a belonging-together116 in which more and more people feel involved. For us, it is no longer a question of delineating a
n individual project antithetical to the prevailing morality, but rather of an intersubjective project conscious of our own gay responsibilities and goals, facing outwards to involve the whole of humanity. We homosexuals must liberate ourselves from the feeling of guilt (and this is one of the immediate goals of our struggle), so that homoeroticism spreads and is ‘contagious’. We have to make the water gush from the rock: to induce ‘absolute’ heterosexuals to discover their own homosexuality, and to contribute, through the confrontation and dialectical clash between the sexual tendency of the minority and that of the majority, to the attainment of a transsexuality, towards which the underlying polysexual ‘nature’ of desire itself points. If the prevailing form of monosexuality is heterosexuality, then a liberation of homoeroticism, this Cinderella of desire, forms an indispensable staging-post on the road to the liberation of Eros. The objective, once again, is not to obtain a greater acceptance of homoeroticisicm by the hetero-capitalist status quo, but rather to transform monosexuality into an Eros that is genuinely polymorphous and multiple; to translate into deeds and into enjoyment that transsexual polymorphism which exists in each one of us in a potential but as yet repressed form.

  To conduct our struggle in a truly ‘homonomous’, original, and originally subversive way, we lesbians and gay men have to suspend judgement on everything (the ideals, theories, analyses, compartmentalised models, etc.) that has up till now at once dragged us in and excluded us, insofar as it is a product of the heterosexual majority. We have the gay task of reinterpreting everything from our own vantage point, with a view to enriching and transforming the revolutionary conception of history, society and existence.

  We are sick to death of treading those ready-made trails that do not take us into account, of adhering to moral and theoretical systems which base their assumed reliability largely on our exclusion, on the banishment of homoeroticism (and we alone can clarify the way this happens and why). We are tired of simply fusing our forces with those who struggle for an ideal of the future which, even if utopian, appears to us as still too dangerously similar to this disgraceful present, since it does not take into account the homosexual question and its crucial bearing on the goal of complete human emancipation.

  Only we gays can understand that within what has been silenced in our history, in the terrible and sublime secrets of public toilets, under the weight of the chains with which the heterosexual society has bound and subdued us, there lies concealed the uniqueness of our (potential) contribution to revolution and to the creation of communism.

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  1. [Translator’s note: The term appears early in Freud’s ‘Three Essays’: ‘They may be amphigenic inverts, that is psychosexual hermaphrodites. In that case their sexual objects may equally well be of their own or of the opposite sex. This kind of inversion thus lacks the characteristic of exclusiveness.’ Freud, ‘Three Essays’, p. 136.]

  2. See Chapter 5, section 4.

  3. André Morali-Daninos, Sociologie des relations sexuelles; quoted in FHAR, Rapport contre la normalité, p. 70.

  4. Schérer, Emilio pervertito, p. 60.

  5. [Translator’s note: Ernesto is Umberto Saba’s unfinished novel from 1953, published posthumously in 1975, a queer Bildungsroman that focuses on the early affairs of Ernesto, a 16-year-old boy from Trieste.]

  6. [Translator’s note: This is a specific portmanteau Mieli uses: ‘donna-ogetto’. It could also be translated as the ‘objectified woman’, but given his reliance on a loosely Hegelian version of dialectics throughout, the specificity of a subject treated as object is important to underscore.]

  7. See Chapter 6, section 1.

  8. Francesco Saba Sardi, ‘La società omosessuale’, Venus 7, (November 1972), p. 37.

  9. When I was a child, I searched in vain for someone who would ‘entrap’ me.

  10. See Chapter 4, section 3.

  11. Freud, ‘Three Essays on The Theory of Sexuality’, p. 139.

  12. Robert J. Stoller, ‘Faits et Hypothèses’, Nouvelle Revue de Psychiatrie, no. 7, (1973).

  13. Géza Róheim, Héros phalliques et symboles maternels dans la mythologie australienne (Paris: Gallimard, 1970).

  14. Ford and Beach, Patterns of Sexual Behaviour; Marise Querlin, Women Without Men (London: Mayflower, 1968); Margaret Mead, Male and Female (New York: Perennial, 2006); Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture (London: Routledge, 1980); Bronislaw Malinowski, Sex and Repression in Savage Society (London: Routledge, 2015).

  15. Freud, ‘Three Essays on The Theory of Sexuality’, p. 139, note.

  16. John Lauritsen, Religious Roots of the Taboo on Homosexuality: A Materialist View (New York: Self-Published, 1974), p. 6.

  17. Pietro Agostino d’Avack, ‘L’omosessualità nel diritto canonico’, Ulisse xviii, 1 953, p. 682.

  18. Leviticus 18, 22; See ibid., 20, 13.

  Luciano Parinetto notes: ‘As the fact of prostatic orgasm can be demonstrated, it is impossible in fact to “lie with a man as with a woman”, except if the imaginary aspect alone is taken into account. But God-father-law is not concerned with the truth, only with duty, and this prescribes role-playing’ (‘Analreligion e dintorni. Appunti’, L’Erba Voglio 26, (June–July 1976), p. 20).

  19. Lauritsen, Religious Roots of the Taboo on Homosexuality, p. 6.

  20. Sigmund Freud, ‘Totem and Taboo’, Standard Edition, Vol. 13 (London: Vintage, 2001), p. 18.

  21. Carlo Diano, ‘L’Eros greco’, Ulisse xviii, (1953), pp. 698–708.

  22. Freud, ‘Totem and Taboo’, p. 25.

  23. Ibid., p. 27.

  24. Ibid., p. 32.

  25. Ibid., p. 31.

  26. Ibid., p. 32.

  27. [Editor’s note from original volume: The Latin sources don’t make it possible to establish with precision the date, contents, or even the name of this law. It might be reasonably supposed that it punished, through a fine, the seduction of freeborn minors or inter ingenuos relations, i.e. between adult Roman citizens. In the latter case, however, it’s likely that the penalty fell solely on the passive partner of a homosexual relation.]

  28. d’Avack, ‘L’omosessualità nel diritto canonico’, p. 682.

  29. [Editor’s note from original volume: The most recent studies maintain that the hypothesis of increased sanctions against homosexuals at the start of the imperial period was unfounded. See for instance E. Cantarella, Secondo natura, la bisessualità nel mondo antico (Milano: Rizzoli, 1995), pp. 182–5).]

  30. Ibid., p. 683.

  31. Quoted by John Lauritsen, Religious Roots of the Taboo on Homosexuality, p. 10.

  32. d’Avack, ‘L’omosessualità nel diritto canonico’ p. 682. [Translator’s note: This passage is provided in Latin by Mieli.]

  33. Ibid., p. 685.

  34. Thomas S. Szasz, The Manufacture of Madness (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), p. 164.

  35. Edward Westermarck, The Origin and Development of Moral Ideas, quoted by Lauritsen, Religious Roots of the Taboo on Homosexuality, p. 12.

  36. Szasz, The Manufacture of Madness, p. 164

  37. d’Avack, ‘L’omosessualità nel diritto canonico’, p. 681.

  38. Ibid.

  39. Ibid.

  40. Ibid., p. 697.

  41. Lauritsen, Religious Roots of the Taboo on Homosexuality, p. 12.

  42. Donatien Alphonse François de Sade, Aline et Valcour (Brussels: J. J. Gay, 1883), Vol 2, pp. 206–7.

  43. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (London: Allen Lane, 1973), p. 115.

  44. Marc Daniel and André Baudry, Gli omosessuali (Florence: Valecchi, 1974). See also Lauritsen, Religious Roots of the Taboo on Homosexuality.

  45. [Editor’s note from original volume: Homosexuals were confined on other islands as well, in particular the Tremiti. After 1985, thanks to the availability of new documentation, several historical studies have reconstructed a framework that reveals the repressive measures against homosexuality in the fascist period. In particular, see Nel nome della
razza: Il razzismo nella storia d’Italia 1870–1965, ed. Alberto Burgio (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1999).]

  46. This ministerial report is quoted by Salvatore Messina in ‘L’omosessualità nel diritto penale’, Ulisse xviii, (1953), p. 675.

  47. The World Health Organisation estimates that the number of ‘true’ homosexuals in Italy (in this psychonazi distinction between ‘true’ and ‘pseudo’ homosexuality) comes to some 2,475,000, i.e. about 4.5 per cent of the entire population, male and female. And on top of the 1,120,000 ‘true’ male homosexuals, I would assume at least some 5 million bisexual males in Italy, i.e. men who have sexual relations with both women and other men.

  48. Messina, ‘L’omosessualità nel diritto penale’, p. 473.

  49. [Translator’s note: Aldo Braibanti was a remarkable figure in Italian postwar culture, an anti-fascist partisan, poet, experimental theater director, expert on ants, and polymath intellectual who, amongst many other activities, made anti-Stalinist interventions within the PCI (before breaking with them) and worked with Carmelo Bene. In 1968, he was sentenced to nine years in prison (subsequently reduced in part for his past as a partisan fighter) on the obscure charge of ‘plagiary’ (plagio), a sort of spiritual kidnapping or psychic ‘plagiarism’. According to the charges, he allegedly seduced two young men successively to leave their families and live with him in a homosexual relationship, during which he psychically controlled them (the implication being that they would not have engaged in homosexual activities without his Mabuse-like influence). Braibanti was the first and only person to be tried and convicted under the plagio charge, which had been reintroduced by the fascists, and his farcical trial led to an outpouring of support from figures such as Pasolini, Bene, Umberto Eco, and others.]

  50. [Editor’s note from original volume: It isn’t certain if the intentions of the Italian Center of Sexology, a Catholic-oriented organisation, were really that of promoting a law to make homosexuality legally punishable. The stated aim of the meeting at San Remo was to focus on the most modern therapies for sexual deviance, which included the most humiliating and violent psychiatric treatments. It was on this occasion that the Italian gay movement organised its first public initiative, strongly contesting the meeting and gaining attention from mass media. As for laws against homosexuals, all the same, there was no more talk of it.]