by Mario Mieli
In the words of Georg Groddeck:
It is therefore not true that pain is an obstacle to pleasure. The truth is that on the contrary it is a condition of pleasure [. . .] To brand as perversions these two inescapable human desires which are implanted in every human being without exception, and which belong to his nature just as much as his skin and hair, was the colossal stupidity of a learned man. That it was repeated is intelligible. For thousands of years man has been educated in hypocrisy, and it has become second nature to him. Everyone is a sadist, everyone a masochist; everyone by reason of his nature must wish to give and to suffer pain; to that he is compelled by Eros.22
Today – it’s never too late! – liberation requires an awareness of sadistic and masochistic desires. The masochist cannot restrict himself to living out these tendencies hypocritically or with an inadequate consciousness, as the police apparatuses of the established left would like. The great history of love is filled with sadistic and masochistic fantasies, which should also find clear expression in our everyday life, in interpersonal relations and in our relations with animals, so that our reality does not remain essentially superficial, cut off from what lies beneath, but instead gets to the bottom of things, and even beyond.
Among us homosexuals, the propensity to form exclusive couples is far less strong than among straight people. And the values of gay promiscuity are many, most of all because it opens the individual up to a multiplicity and variety of relations, and hence positively gratifies the tendency that everyone has to polymorphism and ‘perversion’. It thereby facilitates the satisfactory course of any relationship between two people, because neither of them clings too desperately to the other, demanding that he should give up totalising relations with other people too. The revolutionary homosexual struggle demands the erotic and emotional recognition of every human being in the community and the world. Each of us is a prism, a sphere, is mobile, and beneath and beyond the contradictions that presently oppose and negate us, each of us fits potentially together with anyone else, in a ‘geometry’, both real and imaginary, of free intersubjectivity – like a wonderful kaleidoscope to which new and precious stones are steadily added: children and new arrivals of every kind, corpses, animals, plants, things, flowers, turds ...
Finally, if heterosexual jealousy displays a sharp if disguised form of homosexuality, a psychological defence against the genuine surfacing of a homoerotic desire, we can also frequently establish how the libidinal choice of an ‘object’ of ‘opposite’ sex reveals the presence of elements that unconsciously satisfy in a palliative fashion the latent homosexual tendency of the ‘subject’.
According to Freud, ‘everyone, even the most normal person, is capable of making a homosexual object-choice, and has done so at some time in his life, and either still adheres to it in his unconscious or else protects himself against it by vigorous counterattitudes’.23 It often happens that the homosexual choice is induced to opt for an ‘object’ of the other sex. In this case, the heterosexual ‘object’ partially satisfies the censored homoerotic component of desire. The converse is also true for us homosexuals.
Homosexuality, therefore, very often hides within heterosexuality. It is no accident that French feminists have maintained the homosexual character of all heterosexual relations that presently exist, so that Luce Irigaray can speak of ‘so-called heterosexuality’.
Violence against homosexuals as negative extroversion of censured homoerotic desire. The hypocrisy of the heterosexual male.
When someone provokes us he does not know that this is his desire starting to show . . .24
We have seen how, in the present society, sadism almost always presents itself in an alienated form. This happens, for example, when sadistic tendencies are accompanied by the repression of another component of desire and the complementary overvaluation of one particular expression of Eros. In the same way, we can recognise a form of alienated sadism, combined with an inverted homosexual impulse and an ostentatious display of heterosexuality, in the acts of aggression that straight people commit against us gays.
The witch-hunt against queers (and here the ‘casual’ association between the words recalls the particular connection that exists between the persecution of witches and the extermination of faggots) is nothing more than an expression of alienated sadism, alienated through its connection with a negative extraversion of repressed homosexual desire and the need to shore up heterosexuality with force, both internally and against overt homosexuals. Freud, however, wrote that ‘poets are right in liking to portray people who are in love without knowing it . . . or who think that they hate when in reality they love’.25
We homosexuals have to cope every day with more or less violent persecutors. We cannot be too careful, since those who might beat us up or murder us lurk on all sides, in the heart of the city and its periphery, in small provincial towns, in parks and even in the country. Are these aggressors just ‘common criminals’? We certainly have no intention of taking over this bigoted, summary, bourgeois and reactionary definition. And in that case, all heterosexual males would be common criminals, as their customary anti-homosexual attitude makes them permanent accomplices in the violence perpetrated against us.
The attackers and killers are pushed onto the scene (the ‘gay’ scene) and seduced and led to crime by prevailing morality, by the male supremacist and heterosexual ideology which the system upholds (and which upholds the system). It is capitalist morality that leads them to violence and aggression. If a government minister makes a speech attacking homosexuality as a social pest, while priests condemn ‘sinful and unnatural’ sexual practices from the pulpit, if it is customary to drag homosexuals from their insecure meeting places and haul them up before harsh and blatantly unjust courts, if self-appointed moral vigilantes see homosexuality as a form of ‘moral pollution’, if leftists see fags as a sign of bourgeois decadence,26 then is it any surprise that so many marginalized young proletarians kids, defined as ‘sub-proletarians’ by the Marxist dunces of the left, should take gays as their scapegoat? You’ve got to take it out on someone,27 and capital, cleverly, always manages to divert popular rage away from itself. The homosexual survives alone and practically defenceless against all and through all – when he does survive . . .
But if homoeroticism is a ‘vice’ as far as society is concerned, a ‘perversion’ and/or a ‘criminal deviation’, then the very oppression of homosexuality, the verbal and physical queer-bashing, and the rampant persecution that has always been launched at us offers to heterosexuals further indirect ways of expressing their own latent homoerotic impulses. This censored homosexuality is often externalised in the form of witless sadism, aggression that is either gratuitous, or ‘justified’ by stubborn and reactionary anti-gay prejudices.
Often – as Genet explains – to attack a homosexual is to put one’s heart at peace, considering that,
if a queer was like this, a creature so light, so fragile, so airy, so transparent, so delicate, so broken, so clear, so garrulous, so musical, so tender – one could kill it. Since it was made to be killed; like Venetian glass it waited only the big tough fist which could smash it without even being cut (save possibly for an insidious sliver, sharp, hypocritical, slitting and remaining under the skin). If this was a queer, it wasn’t a man. For the queer had no weight. He was a little cat, a bullfinch, a fawn, a blind-word, a dragonfly, whose very fragility is provocative and, in the end, it is precisely this exaggeration which inevitably invites its death.28
The very existence of the homosexual, his ‘anomaly’, his ‘depraved’ desire, and his weakness that comes from marginalisation and exclusion demand punishment in the eyes of the heterosexual, that shining knight of the Norm. In actual fact, however, ‘the punishment [is] a favour like the crime’.29 For if overt expressions of homoeroticism are ‘normally’ considered a crime, and if heterosexuals feel legitimate enjoyment in condemning them to punishment, this pleasure is at bottom a negative satisfaction of the repressed
wish to make love with a queer. ‘I cannot get off with him because I’m normal; so I beat him and rob him. His presence suggests to me a physical relationship that I can’t accept, so I respond to it with physical violence’. Paradoxically, however, we homosexuals can recognise the secret lover in those who mistreat and chastise us.
This anti-gay violence, which derives from the repression and blaming of homoeroticism, is also to be found among men who have occasionally had sexual relations with other men, and might even still do so (as we have already seen in the previous section). Stilitano, for example, the hardest of the hard, Genet’s ‘lover’, insults queens;30 and in prison the tough guys, the lords of the jail, the manly bullies who the queens secretly ‘contaminate’ through long cohabitation, put down homosexuality at the same time as they practise it, and are ever ready to meet an unwelcome advance with a punch in the mouth.31 The absurdity of their conception of sex and sex roles shows the deeply absurd essence of patriarchal ‘normality’. In the hypermasculine atmosphere of prison, only passive homosexuality is considered shameful, whereas ‘a male that fucks a male is a double male’.32 The ‘double male’ requires an inverted and abject appendage, a ‘surrogate cunt’, and he bases his glory and prestige on the subjection of others.
Kate Millett shows the strong similarity between the relation of butches and queens in prison, and the opposition between the sexes involved in ‘normal’ heterosexuality.33 In prison, where homosexual relations offer the only gratification for erotic desire apart from solitary masturbation, homosexuality itself generally takes the form of a mere reflection of the asymmetrical relationship of the heterosexual couple (which thus reveals its true face). Even in prison, the ‘heterosexual’ male remains privileged, behaving as a straight man, and basing his ‘power’ on the submission of the ‘weakest’, the queen.
But it is not always so. In his amazing film A Song of Love, for example, Genet has himself given us a most poetic and delicate (as well as quite sexy) picture of love between men in prison. And I myself, in an English prison, got on well – sometimes very well – with other prisoners.
Yet Genet always has the heterosexual equation in mind. In the ‘eternal couple of the criminal and the saint’,34 we are given the tragic-erotic representation of the eternal heterosexual couple of the totalitarian phallic male, who is always a criminal in his relations with women, and the woman who, given that she loves him, desires him and is subject to him, cannot but be a saint in her love life. But woman as the slave of man is in a certain respect similar to the effeminate queen, Genet himself, whom the macho ‘heterosexual’ at once fucks and demeans.
For Genet, the ‘eternal couple of thy criminal and the saint’ is above all the duo of the beautiful brute (‘un assassin si beau qui fait pâlir le jour’) and the homosexual who desires him and at the same time is negated by him, who is martyred in his passionate love because the criminal whom he loves is first and foremost his egoistic and violent oppressor, ‘indifferent and bright as a slaughterhouse knife’.35
Genet’s, play The Maids was conceived and written to be performed by men dressed as women.36 The negated femininity of the heterosexual man in his relation to women is represented very well by a fictitious femininity, reduced to a mere appearance. Today, this negated femininity is above all the being of women, who can really exist as women only beyond the negation criminally inflicted on her by men. Secondly, this femininity is also the repressed ‘feminine’ component of the man himself, and ‘Genet will make a relentless effort to discover a secret femininity in all the toughs who subdue him’.37 Finally, an oppressed femininity is present in Genet, in his desire to really become a woman, and in the concrete impossibility of this.
In the heterosexual phallocentric universe, femininity, for the man, is reduced to a mere aura of sanctity around the brute power of the phallus. As a general rule, for the heterosexual man (as Fornari typically writes in his narrow-minded apology for heterosexuality), ‘if the male genital did not exist, then the female genital would appear a meaningless organ’.38 It is only too clear that the phallus in the brain prevents the heterosexual man from seeing beyond his own dick: for him, society today is made up of cunts. If I did believe in the idea of a vanguard, I would say that the vanguard of the revolution would be made up of lesbians. In any case, the revolution will be lesbian.
The ‘common criminals’, then, only echo the anti-woman and anti-homosexual criminality that is common to all straight men. If someone murders a homosexual, he has simply acted, in the words of Paolo Volponi, ‘out of the collective sense of right, in the very name of our society and its norms, whether he has done so out of horror of homosexuality, or to punish it, with a pronounced feeling of social justice’. As Volponi goes on to say: ‘The murder is collective, representing and acting on behalf of a social feeling and passion and knows not only’ how to interpret the anti-gay tendency of all ‘normal people, but ‘also that he is supported and protected’ by them.39 All heterosexuals are responsible for the violence directed against us gays.
The heterosexual male, moreover, is distinguished by his hypocrisy. Mignon, the butch who ‘mounts’ Divine, refuses even to define himself as homosexual, even though Divine, with whom he makes love, is a man.40 But if femininity is reduced to an appearance here, with the queen serving the ‘double male’ as a mere surrogate for a woman, then so too is heterosexuality. The ‘double male’ feels himself heterosexual twice over, even more than ‘normal’: of this we can be sure because of his need to reassure himself and the way he’s always ready to break anyone’s teeth if they dare to call him a queer. His conviction of remaining heterosexual, even in a sexual relationship with a man, does not even clash with the male supremacist ideology he embraces, which is in itself hypocritical and absurd. If the butch who fucks the queen sees himself as heterosexually ‘normal’, his bad faith is not substantially different from that of those doctors who, as we saw in the first chapter, would define him without hesitation as only ‘pseudo-homosexual’.
In the same way, the ‘heterosexual’ man, married with children and who makes love with a transvestite or drag queen, believes himself 100 per cent ‘normal’, in the logic of heterosexuality: he is comforted by appearances, and in his eyes the transvestite is like a woman. In actual fact, when dressed for battle, female prostitutes and male transvestites are largely similar, at least in terms of this external appearance. It is not difficult, then, for a man to reproduce through himself the fetish of ‘woman’ that men like.
What really excites the transvestite’s client, however, is the man underneath that fetishistic representation of ‘woman’. Firstly, in his male supremacist view, femininity is simply a fetish, and so it excites him only fetishistically, which is to say as an object, as a hole. And secondly, what he is directly interested in is not an interpersonal relationship, but simply his narcissistic relationship with himself, even if in an alienated mode, through phallic fantasies and gratifications that overspill the narcissistic pleasure itself and require the partner-object as a pretext. So what in essence excites the transvestite’s client is simply his own self, but it is himself as he really desires to be, and discovered beneath the make-up and gown of the transvestite, to his eyes fetishistically attractive in a ‘feminine’ way. The homoerotic components of desire of those ‘heterosexuals’ who have sex with transvestites is too severely censored for them to openly desire a gay relationship (I know this myself, as a part-time transvestite). They can only escape their homosexuality through the parody of a heterosexual relation. But in this parody, they act out the tragedy of the repression of Eros.
The Torturer is the Victim’s Accomplice. Victimisation and Masochism
If, as I have shown, the heterosexual who attacks a gay man both discloses and exorcises his own homosexuality, then the aggressor, the torturer, stands in secret complicity with his victim. The concept of complicity here must be understood by bearing in mind the negative conversion of homoerotic desire into aggression on the part
of the heterosexual. Moreover, for him to become unconsciously complicit with the homosexual, his own victim, it is necessary for him to view homosexuality as a crime and the victim as guilty. It is clear that this imposition of guilt does not involve any real guilt on the victim’s part, he being a victim precisely because he is innocent, but it legitimates aggression on the part of the heterosexual. To recapitulate: the (hetero) torturer is the accomplice of the (gay) victim; and the idea of complicity thus refers to the unconscious attraction that the heterosexual has towards the homosexual, despite his conscious imposition to him of guilt. It refers to a homosexual act which does not take place, but which is unconsciously desired by the heterosexual, and which he subsequently translates into violence.
This view, then, is the reverse of the thesis maintained by Liliana Cavani in The Night Porter, a thesis that, while superficially similar, is in reality opposite (‘the victim is the accomplice of the torturer’). Still, might not the two theses be complementary?
Not necessarily. In the Nazi concentration camps, for example, the extermination of the pink triangles expressed a collective sadistic conversion of the SS’s homoerotic impulses (an alienated sadism insofar as it is bound up with the alienation of homosexuality), rather than a masochistic support by the homosexuals for their sadism.
All the same, it cannot be said that the homoerotic desires of the Nazi persecutors were always latent. If the SA were notoriously homosexual, many SS men, too, did not flinch from sexual relations with other men. In a social context in which gay desire was severely oppressed, we can understand how male homosexuality could find expression only on condition that it assumed hypermasculine and paradoxically anti-homosexual forms. As Francesco Saba Sardi has written: