by Mario Mieli
Under Nazi rule, in fact, it was a specific type of homosexual, weak and ‘decadent’, who was the object of persecution, certainly not the rough barrack-room bugger. The mincing queen of the boulevards and gay ghettoes was taken away; he was not sufficiently war-like. The rough SA or blond SS man, however, so loved by their sergeant or Sturmbannführer, were deemed more virile and militaristic, more worthy of trust and membership in their ‘service’, if they did not abandon themselves to frivolous affairs with women.41
Those who were slain were the homosexuals who did not fit the hypermasculine uniformity of Nazism and who, by the very nature of things, by their physical appearance and mentality, were excluded from the phallic, fanatical and war-like display of the regime, which demanded men, in the absolute sense, or, more precisely, ‘double males’. Indeed, the extermination of homosexuals under the Third Reich offers the clearest picture, the very quintessence, of the infernal quotidian persecution inflicted on gays by capitalist society. If today it is a collective homoerotic desire, unconscious insofar as it is repressed, that is externalised in the forms of verbal and physical aggression against the openly gay, then under Nazisim it was frequently men who were themselves manifest homosexuals, but chained to the system and infested by its violent and martial ideology, who served as the instruments of deadly repression of homoeroticism. The system set homosexuality against homosexuality: and it still does so today, albeit in a more subtle and hypocritical fashion.
And yet the image of the more or less impassive tough guy, the ‘torturer’, is still a widespread erotic fantasy among us gays. Genet is no exception: it is impossible to deny that manifest homosexuality is frequently bound up with forms of masochism. But how could it be otherwise, in the context of a violently anti-homosexual Norm? How could you go after a heterosexual man, with his ‘normal’ sadism, without putting your own masochism to the fore? For it is clear that we queens do not just desire other queens, but feel erotic attraction for ‘all’ people of our own sex, whether homosexual or not.
Many of us, indeed, prefer straight men as sexual ‘objects’. What attracts us in them is their maleness, and in general we find heterosexual men more male because heterosexuality, based as it is on the marked differentiation between the sexes, tends to make the man male in an absolute sense, the opposite of the female. Supported and gratified by the Norm, the heterosexual often appears to us like Nietzsche’s ‘sensually healthy and beautiful beast of prey’. French queens call these heterosexual males whom they so adore ‘bêtes’, and they are certainly beastly in both senses of the word.
Thus we frequently desire someone whom we cannot love, the very prototype of the ‘normal’ straight man who persecutes us. There is undoubtedly an inherent contradiction in the very strong sexual attraction we experience for men who particularly detest us, the personifications of phallocentric power. As Daniele Morini of the Milan Homosexual Collectives wrote: ‘Paradoxically, I really discover my body only in contact with my imagination of the male. It is easy to see that the content of this imagination is alienated and that my partners are reactionary fantasies.’42
The erotic fantasies that spring to our consciousness very often reflect those stereotyped figures embodying the heterosexual Norm that has modelled society and the species. Our prevalent desire for the bête is in a certain sense the internalisation of the figure and role of the oppressor. To exclusively or especially desire the straight man means supporting those who oppress us, and contributes to perpetuating the reactionary characteristics that historically distinguish him.
But the struggle for homosexual liberation leads to disinvesting and transforming precisely the most immediate ‘objects’ of homosexual desire; above all, it liberates desire and multiplies its streams, helping us to overcome any such exclusive erotic fixation. On top of this, it provides the homosexual with a sense of dignity which gradually leads him to abandon alienating relations with straight men, and/or to assist these men to change in a new and positive direction, retrieving the humanity and, above all, the femininity that is suffocated by their bitter and phallocratic attitude. The homosexual, by liberating himself, sets the heterosexual an example of gay strength and dignity, of a new way of being human, which is no longer based on interpersonal negation, but on mutual understanding, desire and satisfaction. The homosexual can lead the straight man into a relationship that is genuinely gay, and not some clumsy imitation of heterosexual fucking. The struggle of revolutionary homosexuals against straight men seeks to transform these ‘objects’ of desire into free and open human beings, no longer intransigently and exclusively heterosexual, no longer alien, but rather like ourselves; so that we can truly make love with them, with one another, and can find in gay, uninhibited and free intersubjective relations the collective strength required to subvert the system as a whole. This positive goal inspires the gay struggle against heterosexual men, who are themselves inevitably chained to the status quo.
The homosexual who, in his anger, neither goes nor sees beyond the objective of a drastic negation of the male, remains caught in a contradictory trap, even if his ‘dictatorial’ attitude has a certain historical justification. The contradiction stems from the fact that it is neither possible to negate the straight man definitively, while at the same time continuing to desire him, nor to abolish this sexual attraction voluntaristically. Doing so, we risk suffocating ourselves and our imagination, because this straight man is already inside of us, from the moment that we desire him sexually. We cannot kill him, because in so doing we would kill ourselves. We cannot fall into the illusions of William Wilson who struck his double, or of Dorian Gray, who died by stabbing his own portrait. We need rather to reanimate the human being who lies frozen beneath the virile sclerosis of the heterosexual male, freeing him (and ourselves) from the phallic ‘spell’. In this sense, the desire of the homosexual for the heterosexual is revolutionary: in spreading homosexuality, it unchains Eros.
Revolutionary homosexuals have decided to no longer play the role of victim and have begun to reject, once and for all, being simply an exception that proves the rule. The task facing us is to abolish forever a Norm which debases and oppresses us. The role of victim is no longer gratifying enough, nor indeed has it ever been. (Even if it would still be worth our while to write a detailed martyrology of gay persecution.) We intend to enjoy freely, without interference, our own homosexuality and that of others, just as our own (and others’) masochistic tendencies. But this does not mean continuing to play the victim’s role. For if the victim’s counterpart is the sadistic libertine, the counterpart of the masochist is not a sadist – a Mars in leather, haughty and resplendent as a god. The sadism of De Sade was not the masochism of Sacher Masoch, even if there can be no sadism without collateral masochistic expressions, nor a masochism devoid of sadistic impulses. It is not by accident that we speak of sadomasochism as a unity. And yet the traditional sadistic libertine does not select a masochistic victim (what point would there be in hurting someone who enjoyed it?), nor the masochist a sadistic dominator. ‘It is too readily assumed’, writes Deleuze, ‘that the symptoms have only to be transposed and the instincts reversed for Masoch to be turned into Sade, according to the principle of the unity of opposites’.43
On the terrain of liberation, however, a sexual encounter between prevalently sadistic and prevalently masochistic people really is possible. The liberation of sadomasochism and the liberation of homosexuality will overcome the traditional counterposed roles of sadism and masochism. Deleuze’s investigation of these tendencies appears somewhat restricted, for in a certain sense he hypostatises forms of masochism and sadism that have only a contingent and historical existence. This is what Larry Rosàn of the American Eulenspiegel Society wrote in an editorial titled ‘Gaudeamus Igitur’:
We know there are natural sadistic and masochistic elements in a very large proportion of people. And the majority of us are aware that the attraction of a naturally sadistic or masochistic personality is far greate
r, from the point of view of pleasure, than the mere exploitation of those patterns of domination and submission that are inveterate and sustained by our society, such as ‘police against prisoners’, ‘rich against poor’, and so on. There is a profound psychological difference between the ‘true personality of a slave’ and a ‘potentially rebel prisoner’ who is only the unwilling victim of circumstance. This is why Eulenspiegel stresses voluntary relations. As we see it, ‘limitation to voluntary partners’ is not an exception to our freedom, but rather a part of it. We want to be free from submitting to social authority, or to those persons who use us as unwilling victims! (And in fact we sado-masochists, in particular those of us who are sadistic dominators, are actually more vulnerable than others to sudden repression on the part of the state and the police, that corrupt and obscure abyss of primitive and conflictual sado-masochist desires, jealous and resentful of us for freely celebrating and enjoying the mystique of sado-masochism.)44
Those homosexuals who are effectively and predominantly masochistic are therefore forced to combat the negative role of victim that the system inflicts on them. It is no accident that masochists are to be found among the most radical protagonists of the gay movement, the most decisive opponents of homosexual victimisation and anti-gay social violence. Indeed, it is those homosexuals who adapt to the role of victim out of inertia and a sense of guilt that we recognise as the real victims, rather than the masochists who under it all are enjoying themselves. (Even if it should not be ruled out that long adaptation to suffering might bring out in many people masochistic impulses that were formerly repressed.)
The question of homosexual masochism is indeed an intricate one. It frequently presents itself in an alienated form, as a result of false guilt and the internalised condemnation, and is still confused with the evident mechanism of sadistic extraversion of latent homoerotic impulses on the part of heterosexuals. Clearly the homosexual question is less explored and less understood by the heterosexual Norm. We gays know a lot about the straight couple (we still often have a parent on our back, and also, whether we like it or not, in our head), while ‘normal’ people base their ideas on the repression of homosexuality. The act of legitimising the persecution of those who are ‘deviant’, or nowadays the act of tolerating them, dispenses ‘normal’ people from investigating the reasons that spur them either to persecution, or else to the new convenient solution of ‘tolerance’. ‘The social consensus around their own form of sexuality does not spur them to question it, and through it the whole of their private life’ (Corrado Levi).
For us who are ‘deviant’, understanding the reasons for our oppression is indispensable if we are to find the correct direction in which to lead our struggle for liberation. Just as only the feminist standpoint can show the patriarchal essence of our present civilisation, and only revolutionary criticism can shed light on the real ‘nature’ of the rule of capital, so can only the gay standpoint discern the real content of the Norm to which we are opposed, and recognise in the concrete human subjects who uphold this Norm the contradiction implicit in the Norm itself. Heterosexuals are what they are, and exclusively so, because they deny the homosexuality that is latent within them, sublimating it and/or converting it into aggression.
Sublimated homoeroticism as the guarantee of social cohesion.
Homosexuality in Dante
Freud emphasised only the peaceful sublimation of homoerotic desire. ‘After the stage of heterosexual object-choice has been reached, the homosexual tendencies are not [. . .] done away with [. . .] they are merely deflected from their sexual aim and applied to fresh uses’.45 He indicated an underlying homosexual content in those types of sublimation that are translated into dedication to the community and to public interests: ‘In the light of psychoanalysis we are accustomed to regard social feeling as a sublimation of homosexual attitudes towards objects.’46
Freud accordingly deemed the sublimation of homosexuality to be publicly useful. His conception derived, by generalisation, from establishing the existence of a good number of homosexuals who were distinguished by a special development of the social instincts and their devotion to public welfare. According to Freud, this dedication was explained by the fact that ‘the behaviour towards men in general of a man who sees in other men potential love-objects must be different from that of a man who looks upon other men in the first instance as rivals in regard to women’.47 Homosexual desire is transformed into a force of social cohesion. By accepting the sublimation of homoeroticism in social sentiments, the law of the jungle is restrained and transformed, given that heterosexual society is a system of rivalry, jealousy and competition.
But the sublimation of homoeroticism is based historically on its suppression: it is the bulwark of social cohesion for a system which directly or indirectly condemns overt expressions of homosexuality. If homosexuality is liberated, it will cease to sustain this system, come into conflict with it and contribute to its collapse. At the same time, a liberated homosexuality is an important condition for the creation of communism, which is the (re)conquest of human community. And the realisation of this true community is inconceivable without the liberation of homoeroticism, which is universal, and which alone can guarantee genuinely totalising relations between persons of the same sex. (Communism is the rediscovery of bodies and their fundamental communicative function, their polymorphous potential for love.)
The ‘particular’ development, highlighted by Freud, of the social instincts among open homosexuals calls to mind Dante’s Divine Comedy where, amongst the ‘sodomites’ condemned to Hell, we find numerous prestigious and influential public figures:
All these, in brief, were clerks and men of worth
In letters and in scholarship – none more so;
And all defiled by one same taint on earth.48
Dante generally speaks of them in elegiac tones: (‘Stamped on my mind, and now stabbing my heart, / The dear, benign, paternal image of you’),49 despite their being judged guilty of a sin so grave and mortal that it goes unnamed (‘pecatum illud horribile inter Christianos non nominandum’). The two Cantos of the Inferno devoted to the ‘sodomites’ (XV and XVI) feature not even a single word that explicitly defines the nature of the crime ‘against nature’ that cost them their damnation (indeed, ‘Sodom’ is mentioned only in Canto XI, where Virgil explains the order of the lower circles). They are exemplary men (such as Brunetto Latini, described as one who in his lifetime taught Dante himself ‘the art by which men grow immortal’50), but who committed a terrible fault which was itself enough to see them cast forever into the bowels of Hell.
A band of ‘sodomites’, however, appear also in Purgatory (‘Paradise waits for you …’); hence Dante does not view the sin ‘against nature’ as necessarily irredeemable. This is genuinely surprising, if we take account of the exceptionally harsh legal and religious penalties that homosexuals faced in Tuscany and the whole of medieval Europe;51 nor does Dante explain why these people are expiating in Purgatory the crime for which ‘Caesar, in a triumph once heard them call “Regina” against him’,52 whilst others, including Brunetto’s ‘dear, benign, paternal image’, belonged to the ‘troop’ of those who would suffer forever the infernal torments.
Besides, if in Inferno the ‘sodomites’ occupy the pit and are thus separated from the ‘lustful’ (i.e. heterosexuals, contained in the second circle), in Purgatory both ‘sodomites’ and heterosexuals meet up and gaily embrace:
I see there every shade on either side make haste and kiss another, not stopping, content with brief greeting; so within their dark troop one ant touches muzzle with the other, perhaps to enquire of their way and fortune.53
Plenty gay, too, is the image with which Dante describes, in Inferno, the first band of ‘sodomites’ who meet him and his guide:
Hurrying close to the bank, a troop of shades
Met us, who eyed us much as passers-by
Eye one another when the daylight fades
To dusk and a
new moon is in the sky,
And knitting up their brows they squinnied at us
Like an old tailor at the needle’s eye.54
How often, still today, at night, and in our gay cruising places, do we still squinny in the same way? And, above all, check out the new arrivals? ‘So was there cruising in the Middle Ages, then?’ Without doubt, chérie.
Dante transposed into the highest of poetry the homosexual desire latent in him (that said, because of the poverty of historical references in our possession, we’re not authorised to consider his a rare case of completely sublimated homosexuality). On the subject of the ‘sodomites’ he goes on to write:
Could I have kept the fire off, there below,
I’d have leapt down to them, and I declare
I think my tutor would have let me go;
But I’d have burnt and baked me so, that fear
Quite vanquished the good-will which made me yearn
To clasp them to my bosom then and there.55
A gay interpretation might read what lies behind the metaphor of these verses:
Could I have kept off the persecution for homosexuality (the fire: in Dante’s time homosexuals were condemned to be burned), I would have been buggered along with them (or by them, with them), and I think that Virgil would have tolerated it, allowed it (would have suffered it: it’s well-known that Virgil was a queer;56 sofferto, from sofferère or sofferire derived from the Latin suffere, composed from sub, under and ferre, to bear: Virgil would have borne Dante below, where he would have inducted him into homosexuality); but because I would have suffered the pain of persecution (I’d have burnt and baked me so), fear conquered the desire (good-will) that made me eager (made me yearn)57 to embrace him.