by Mario Mieli
The other sex (woman) is a hole. It matters little whether this hole belongs to a female or a male body, since as a hole it is simply a nothing, merely a possible complement to the phallus, which in this patriarchal conception is everything. But this is solely the male refusal to recognise woman. Woman exists, and is woman, only beyond the role of a zero that the phallocratic system imposes on her.
Even in its ‘interpretation’ (or rather misinterpretation and mystification) of the sexual relation between men, the phallocentric worldview is absurd and the bearer of absurdities, precisely because it negates woman, and hence the human being, who is far from reducible to the mutilated monosexual role imposed by our repressive society and civilisation.
Yet the idea that only those men who take the ‘passive’ role in anal intercourse are really homosexual is extremely widespread, and brings to light the immediate association, in the phallocentric mind, between gay men and women. ‘The “active” partner in anal intercourse is essentially heterosexual; so the “passive” partner belongs to the other sex. But the other sex is the female, and so only the “passive” partner in anal sex between two men is homosexual, and the homosexual man is a woman.’ In its patent absurdity, however, this male supremacist view reveals, when considered from the gay and critical standpoint, how homosexual men who get fucked are closer to transsexuality, and tend to overcome the polarity between the two sexes. If the rediscovery of transsexuality necessarily involves the liberation of anal eroticism, as well as homoeroticism, it is also true that only the present and long-standing repression of Eros leads us to think of the concepts of transsexuality, anality, homosexuality, bisexuality, etc, as separate. In actual fact, liberation means overcoming these presently divided categories, which only reflect conceptually the alienation of the human species from itself by the work of the capital-phallus. Liberation leads to the conquest of a new manner of being and becoming, both one and many, whether from the individual standpoint (the aspects of sexuality no longer being repressively separated, or in a state of mutual exclusion), or from the universal standpoint, since liberation leads to recognising individuals in their community (one and many) and in the world, and thus to resolving the contradiction between self and others, self and non-self. The revolutionary liberation of Eros and life cannot take place without a collective explosion of the unconscious, which is in very large measure itself a collective one. And the explosion of the id expands and ‘dissolves’ the boundaries of the ego. In other words, the ego no longer arrogates to itself the monopoly of subjectivity. Life is seen as reciprocal and communal. In the darkness of our underlying being, there lies dormant a species that is transsexual, and the desire for transsexuality and community. Communist intersubjectivity will be transsexual – but I shall come back to this point later on.
For the time being, we must return to the male supremacist fixation that makes homosexuality out to be heterosexuality. Kinsey, once again, wrote:
Some males who are being regularly fellated by other males without, however, performing fellatio themselves, may insist that they are exclusively heterosexual and that they have never been involved in a homosexual relation. Their consciences are cleared and they may avoid trouble with society and with the police by perpetrating the additional fiction that they are incapable of responding to a relation with a male unless they fantasy themselves in contact with a female. Even clinicians have allowed themselves to be diverted by such pretensions. The actual histories, however, show few if any cases of sexual relations between males which could be considered anything but homosexual.5
Among all those ‘heterosexuals’ who refuse to see their erotic contacts with other men as homosexual, the ‘double males’ stand first in line. And the ideology of the double male is very dear, as a general rule, to those young ‘hustlers’6 who act as prostitutes to gay men.
The Murder of Pasolini
The death of Pasolini has kicked up a storm of interventions on homosexuality: but so far, what has been said and written has been disgraceful and unheard of (or more precisely: heard all too well), with the exception of what has been established by comrades of the homosexual liberation movement. Roberto Polce, of the Milan Homosexual Collective, recorded the following exchange near the State University of Milan on Monday, 3 November 1975:7
‘Poor guy! They had good reason to do it, though, because it kills when they try to stick it in your ass, huh?’
(Laughter)
‘But do you know that now they think that carrying four caramels in your pocket is like carrying a concealed weapon?’
‘Four caramels? What does that have to do with anything?’
‘Everything! Four caramels are all you need to lure in a few young
boys …’
(Laughter)
‘That said, even if he was an ass, when it came to writing and making movies, he was no idiot!’
‘It’s true. He sure could do that, you’ve got to admit. When you go to see one of his films, you leave the theater feeling all worked over.’8
The same day, on the walls of the University of Rome was written, in huge letters: ‘You did well to murder that fag.’ Drawn beside it was a stick figure stylisation of Pasolini.
Once more in the street: ‘How do you say Pasolini in English? Ass?’ At this point, it seems relevant to return to the communique from
Fuori! (the Turinese collective) that appeared in Corriere della Sera on 13 November 1975:
THEY KILLED PASOLINI. HOMOSEXUALS ACCUSE THIS.
Pasolini was just one of the thousands of homosexuals who get blackmailed, assaulted, ‘suicided’, and massacre. He was not murdered because he was a man of culture, politics, or poetry, but because he was homosexual. The homosexual is seen to be weak, blackmailable; crimes against homosexuals find too much justification and unspoken consensus.
HOMOSEXUALS ACCUSE THIS.
We accuse the radio, the television, and the newspapers, guilty once again of passing off as criminal news or a by-product of generalized rampant violence what in fact testifies to the violence exercised daily against those who, because they are homosexual, are marginalized, humiliated, and oppressed.
WE ACCUSE those intellectuals and politicians who in their statements of mourning have objectively falsified the real meaning of the murder of Pasolini; that this was above all the murder of a homosexual, a crime equal to thousands of others in which unknown homosexuals lose their lives and to which no one pays any mind or makes a big deal. We accuse all those citizens who are complicit in furthering this climate of ignorance and terror that circulates around the figure of the homosexual. They are as guilty of the death of Pasolini as the murderer himself.
REMEMBER AND MOURN Pier Paolo Pasolini, in the name of the millions of anonymous homosexuals who are constrained every day to live a life filled with fear and violence.9
We still don’t know – and we won’t know any time soon … – what really happened that night in Ostia. Nor is it certain if the killer acted alone or with others. There are those who see in Pasolini’s a political crime: Pasolini was ‘inconvenient’ because he was a man of the left, not just because he was homosexual. And I don’t think it’s worth much to add my own dark hypotheses – however ‘original’ they may be – to all the others. Because in any case, I think Pasolini was killed by one or more of those ‘street boys’, or by one or more ‘prostitutes’. There could be plenty of different motives for the crime, it could have been carrying out an order; what is certain is that Pasolini was killed in this situation because he was homosexual, because only homosexuals find themselves in situations like that. And – as the Fuori! text spells out – in situations like that, homosexuals are killed every day.
Many heterosexuals are asking: ‘Who is the culprit? Pasolini for having a sexual liaison with a minor? Or the minor for having killed him?’ And, to resolve the question, they have decided: ‘Both are guilty. One is a corruptor. The other a killer. It couldn’t have ended differently.’
The mor
e ‘open’ journalists on the left, who have refused this image of the corruptor, are posing in their own way another ‘problem of consciousness’: ‘Who is the authentic victim? The murdered bourgeois? Or perhaps the subproletariat induced to commit crime?’ But they reach no clarifying conclusion: the repression of gay desire prevents them from confronting the fundamental problem, that of a conflict linked to the suppression of homoeroticism (rather than that of class differences between Pasolini and he who killed him).
Consider what Roberto Polce wrote, in an article on Pasolini’s death:
It seems to me that two things are essentially unclear: 1) there exist two equally fundamental contradictions, that of class and that of gender; 2) it is necessary to keep the two distinct in order to be able to give a correct interpretation to any event.
So: many have said that Pelosi was subproletariat while Pasolini represented the boss, for which he was killed – poor guy. We must have compassion, but we must have even greater compassion and solidarity than must be shown towards the boy. We must say that yes, it is true that the boy is part of a subaltern class and was/is a victim of the ruling class, but it is also true that, taking full account of the ideology of the social classes that exploit and repress him, as a supposed heterosexual he hurled his violence against a homosexual who, like women, is within the structure of sexual contradiction always the victim, the loser, the one who gets killed. And a heterosexual who does violence to a homosexual always represents in this case, regardless of his class, the one who holds the power and who abuses it . . .
And we say that heterosexual ‘power’ is one face of capitalist power. [Having received news of Pasolini’s death] when we still knew nothing of what the investigation would reveal, we said to ourselves: it’s clear enough what happened – the sixteen year old supposedly heterosexual (but in reality homosexual even if repressed) boy from the slums [one of those ‘heteros’ of which Kinsey writes, who denies their own homosexuality while all the while having homosexual relations]10 went with Pasolini in his car under some pretense, agreed upon or not, and was all too ready to explode at him, responding in an attempt to offset his sense of guilt derived from the collapse, even if minimal, of the model of normalcy imposed on him with violence since childhood. In beating and punishing Pasolini, the boy was unconsciously convinced that he was indirectly punishing and torturing his own homosexuality. In murdering him, he unconsciously believed he was murdering his homosexual side, eliminating it once and for all.
When the inquiries went ahead, this discourse was itself clarified. The hypothesis outlined above came to seem consistent with the facts because Pelosi was revealed to quite likely have a hustler, i.e. a homosexual who fucks for money, even if only at the beginning: a queer who doesn’t have the strength to freely live out his homosexuality, shaking himself free of the rules of patriarchal society he was forced to swallow since childhood (in a proletarian neighborhood where virility and adhesion to bourgeois norms are everything). And being young and good-looking, he was able [to] satisfy his sexual urges while getting paid, thereby giving economic justification to his queerness, striving in this way to suffocate his sense of guilt for the acts that he had been taught were abnormal and outside of the Norm […] We know well enough because all this has happened. Because Pasolini was killed. […] A homosexual was murdered, not by a violent and delinquent boy from the slums but by the phallocratic patriarchal system, by the bourgeoisie and their terroristic ideology. This time it is on the front pages of the paper, but only because he was famous and a great artist. One can go beyond his homosexuality and pardon it like some extravagant weakness or sickness, provided that the one who bears its stigma is a big name Somebody. But if the one who gets killed was one of us, just a fag, a fag and nothing more, then it is nothing but silence and squalor sketched in a couple lines, wedged between news of a purse-snatching and the story of a family who died from mushroom poisoning. And if Pasolini was inconvenient (as they like to say) THEN WE ARE ALL THE MORE SO. We’re sick of this shit. We are plotting the revolution, and we’re bringing all our weapons, all our fury and violence. So listen up: there weren’t two monsters, nor was there one monster and one victim (played interchangeably by Pier Paolo and Pino la Rana). There was just two victims. Two victims of the same violence that plays out everywhere and assumes every form, dons every mask, whether subtle and hidden or unmistakable and clear as day.11
We’re dealing with the violence of the system: and the only monster is the ‘automated monster’, capital itself. (Just as monstrous are all those who, more or less directly, apologise for a crime perpetrated by capital against a homosexual, for those innumerable crimes that capital has always carried out or encouraged against us.)
So in memory of Pasolini, homosexual director: enough with the permissible but guilt-tripped homosexuality between street kids and the fires of Canterbury; between an Oedipus, a pig, a theorem, and Salò;12 between Death in Venice and the death of Visconti’s Ludwig at the bottom of a lake. Instead, we shout: ‘LONG LIVE THE REVOLUTIONARY ASS IN CINERAMA!’13
Hustlers
As we have seen, besides all those who consider themselves and are generally considered to be homosexuals, and on whom the repressive consciousness of straight people inflicts a particular stereotype, there are many other homosexuals who are far more repressed as far as their sexuality goes, and particularly their homosexuality. These include the ‘double males’, and all those male heterosexuals who have often had, or still have, homosexual relations, even while constantly maintaining their heterosexuality. Many of them live on the margins of the homosexual ‘world’ proper, on which they become parasites and – often – executioners. These are the prostitutes, the ‘hustlers’, or rather all those working-class youths who prostitute themselves to gay men, and whom the journalists of capital (and its left wing in particular) today designate as ‘subproletarian’ so as to avoid recognising in their actions and ‘lifestyle’ a specific expression of the proletariat subjected to the system.
‘Hustlers’ are homosexual but do not consider themselves such, in so far as they generally also feel a form of attraction towards the female sex, or at least towards their objectification of it. Their homosexuality is sufficiently repressed that they tend generally to restrict themselves to the ‘active’ role (which is in reality passive par excellence), and to mystify even this, they make out that their main interest is not pleasure, but rather the money they can extort from their ‘effeminate’ partner. These young men’s rejection of their own homoeroticism runs very deep: capital and the ideology of heterosexual primacy have instilled in them a disparagement for homosexuality in general, and for queens in particular.
The system cheats them in two ways. Besides castrating them economically and socially right from birth, it gives them palliative gratifications that are bound up with phallic privilege, gratifications that lead them to behave in a way that is functional to the rule of capital. Enslaved in this way, their anger and hate are directed not against the system but rather against those who appear even lower than themselves: women and queers.
Masculinism shows itself to be the most serious obstacle to the communist revolution: it divides the proletariat, and almost always makes working-class heterosexual men into guardians of the repressive sexual Norm which capital needs in order to perpetuate its domination over the species. These working-class heterosexuals have been corrupted: they accept payment in the system’s wretched phallocratic coin in return for holding in check the transsexual revolutionary potential of women, children and homosexuals, in exchange for the gratification that they receive. The ‘hustlers’ are no more corrupted than the worker enrolled in the Communist Party, who insults ‘queers’, mistreats his wife and beats his children.
But, to take up the discourse of Roberto Polce, the rejection by those so-called ‘hustlers’ of their homoeroticism derives not only from their internalisation of the dominant ideology and from the violently and openly male supremacist ‘culture’ of the
streets, but also from their need to forcibly deny the evidence of their continuous homosexual relations. The misery and violence seen daily on the streets, the sum of the frustrations they undergo, their economic struggle for survival, and the anxious need to deny their own homosexuality, all this spurs them to vent themselves in one way or another. And today, there is no scapegoat more immediate, more susceptible to a bullying attack, than the homosexual himself, i.e. the other homosexual, the overt queen.
By attacking homosexuals, ‘hustlers’ demonstrate that they are not only parasites on the gay world, but also its executioners, carrying out the sentences that the system has already pronounced by its marginalisation and condemnation of homosexuality, which is confined in more or less clandestine and insecure ghettoes, or generally kept apart and separate from the rest of society.
Even in this case, of course, there are exceptions that prove the rule: not all ‘hustlers’ are hateful, violent and phallocratic. (Remember, for instance, Harold’s ‘rule’?)14 There are even some who are sympathetic. And yet, as a homosexual, all I can say is that these are essentially just somewhat less bad.
In any case, if things are to get better, we must hope that ever more ‘hustlers’ will transform themselves into unrestrained drag queens, after being seduced by us gays in the liberation movement. Anyone who believes that homosexual relations cannot result in births will be confounded: in fact a growing number of gays come to see the light.
So, once the ‘hustlers’ have been transformed into comrades, we will also be able to all go whore ourselves, however temporarily, to ‘infect’ the last self-assured heteros left in the world, joining utility to the delightful and the revolutionary. Because as long as anality remains sublimated to money, as long as capital has not yet been brought to ruin, then the gay movement needs some cash, in order to buy Chanel n. 5 and some curlers when we want to make ourselves beautiful and there’s no looting on the horizon, just a young proletarian party in Parco Lambro or a soirée at Covent Garden.