by Mario Mieli
Anxiety and Repression. Gay ‘Filthiness’
The particular behaviour and fantasies of homosexuals have their counterpart in the blindness and ignorance with which the majority of people respond to the entire sexual question, and the homosexual question in particular. Most of them are still far too unaware of the limitations involved in the opposition between the sexes, even though this may well play a substantial part in their own suffering. Why?
This lack of awareness is the product of the repression they have undergone, and it serves in turn to perpetuate this repression. A severe mental and social censorship conceals what has taken place: their original polymorphous, ‘perverse’ and undifferentiated erotic disposition was condemned and repressed in the course of infancy, so that the weight of condemnation gradually drags them down into the hell of the adult world, of which the hell of childhood is only the antechamber. Repressed, and thus constricted and deformed, the existence of this tendentiously polymorphous disposition has been relegated to the harsh prison of the unconscious, like the foot of a Chinese woman tortured during imperial times. Restrained by the censorial walls of this prison, each individual has to internalise the sexual values and customs of the heterosexual male model that are imposed by patriarchal society (and in our case, capitalist society in particular). In the words of Norman O. Brown:
The pattern of normal adult sexuality (in Freud’s terminology, genital organisation) is a tyranny of one component in infantile sexuality, a tyranny which suppresses some of the other components altogether and subordinates the rest to itself.6
The gay movement maintains that the tyranny of genital heterosexuality by no means completely suppresses the polymorphous tendencies of infantile sexuality but simply subjugates them to the yoke of repression. The struggle for the liberation of Eros can release even the most hidden of desires (for example the coprophagous and necrophilic).
In any case, genital tyranny produces anxiety and suffering in us all. The harsher the repression, the stronger the anxiety induced, in our experience, by persons, events and situations which conjure up the wide scope of the repressed contents and tend to disrupt the repression itself. Thus the homosexual is mistreated by the heterosexual because he ‘reawakens’ in him the homoerotic desire that has been forced to lie dormant for so long. This ‘reawakening’ is rarely complete, generally taking the form of an unsettling stirring, the presentiment of an earthquake that would threaten the rigid structure of his ego, based as this is on the repression of homoeroticism. The heterosexual insults, provokes and threatens the homosexual because he feels himself challenged by his presence, which besieges his ‘normal’ equilibrium by suggesting that he might himself be both object and subject of the gay desire.
According to Groddeck, as I have already pointed out, homosexuality is not completely repressed. Rather than repression, it is a question of a daily self-deception, a quasi-repression, a bad faith that leads the heterosexual to present himself as exclusively such, even though he knows in fact that he does have gay desires.7 It is symptomatic of this that so many men maintain they have never wanted sexual relations with other men; they fear this might please them too much, and that they might become gay themselves …
As a general rule, the heterosexual views the queer as ‘filthy’. This is due, above all, to the fact that the ‘normal’ individual sees reflected in the gay person the homoerotic component of his own desire, negated and repressed in its anal eroticism, urophilia, coprophilia, etc. ‘Normal’ people consider ‘filthy’ any sexual acts bound up with those erotic tendencies which repression has induced them to renounce, giving rise in them – via the induced guilt of their repressed desire – to a particular authoritarian morality, which induces further guilt in its turn. ‘Normal’ people become maniacs of a certain type of orderliness (of order itself), of a certain type of cleanliness and of the police.8
Homosexuals who go out cruising – and almost all gay men do so – know perfectly well that their pleasure very often involves them in breaking the law, disrupting order (even in those countries where homosexuality is not as such a criminal offence). We gays have almost invariably made love in the streets, in parks, in public toilets, in cinemas, museums, churches, in the Tuileries. We have been fucked behind barrack walls, we have sucked each other off kneeling in front of the tomb of Santa Croce, we have held splendid orgies under railway bridges. ‘Normal’ people can only see it as ‘filthy’ that we like to eat sperm and be fucked in the ass and that we perhaps do it in the churchyard of the Duomo, at noon, in front of people, and with them. Consider, for example, what the professor Franco Fornari said in reference to a challenge made against him during one of his lectures at the State University of Milan by the homosexuals of the ex-Fuori! Autonomous Collective (today called the Milanese Homosexual Collective): ‘Homosexuals cannot stop me from doing my job by pretending to have a debate over an argument that doesn’t concern my course: it’s as if a group of sausage-makers interrupted my lesson to discuss proscuitto and salami.’9
From a psychoanalytic perspective, what this reveals is how the association made in this case by Fornari between homosexuals and sausage-makers is far from casual, denouncing in reality his essentially derogatory conception of homoeroticism: if, in fact, the ‘proscuitto and salami’ are meat from pigs [porco], and hence filth [porcate],10 the homosexual-sausage-maker association allows Fornari to assert, indirectly, that homosexuals cannot come interrupt his class on psychology by forcing a debate about their filth. Moreover, the image of the salami obviously symbolizes a penis, while that of prosciutto the rear, the butt. In a word, Franco Fornari cannot tolerate that to his class have come those who want to discuss anal sex, those who are, according to him, filthy pigs.
One might note that Fornari, who in the pages of Corriere della Sera11 has written, in spite of his true incompetence, of prosciutto and salami as one does of homosexuality, should at the very least expect to be contested in the university, that place in which he appears publicly, by sausage-makers, who would surely come forward in defence of their own interests and their own real competence in matters of pork.
Lastly, one can’t forget that the sausage-maker slices and hacks apart the flesh of the pig. Fornari might therefore affirm: ‘How dare those miserable sausage-makers come in to the university and interrupt my class to teach me my own trade of butchering?’ But he would not say that: because in fact, what has so offended him was not the intervention of sausage-makers, which, beyond the pride of the butcher, could only prove an instinctive solidarity (the rivalry of the shopkeepers …), but rather an intervention by filthy pigs, or rather by homosexuals, by human beings who he can only fathom as if swine, ready for slaughter.
Fear of Castration and the Parable of War
Elvio Fachinelli asks what lies ‘at the root of the rejection of homosexuality (essentially of male homosexuality, given that female homosexuality today speaks a language that is very different and less significant, for reasons connected with the historic position of women)’.
It would be interesting to know why Fachinelli sees less significance in the ‘language’ of female homosexuality. Perhaps because he is a man and is thus concerned above all with his own rejection of male homosexuality. Anyway . . . let’s see what he says later.
It is essentially, on the part of the heterosexual male, the fear of losing his masculinity in contact with the homosexual, i.e. something very deeply bound up with his personal identity. For the homosexual, he feels almost as if his very position as a male were being challenged, and hence his individual self-definition; it is as if this proved unexpectedly precarious or insecure, far more so than it generally is. Hence the reactions of rejection and disparagement, hence the various wellknown behaviour patterns of aggressive hypermasculinity, which are often surprisingly accompanied by a certain solicitude for the homosexual in as much as he acts like a woman. If the homosexual falls into this trap (and falls easily, or willingly), the heterosexual can attack him all the more eas
ily and reassure himself in the process. We can say, therefore, that the homosexual reawakens, as a male who seems to have suffered castration, the fear of castration that is latent in every man. And as simultaneously both male (which he ultimately is) and female, he is often experienced by the heterosexual as endowed with a paradoxical castrating and assimilating capacity.12
What Fachinelli says here is on the whole a valid interpretation, even if I would see it as risky to consider it an explanation of what ‘lies at the root of the rejection of homosexuality’. Heterosexuals, as a general rule, tend to give over-hasty replies to the homosexual question (if rarely anything like as intelligent as this). We can add, however, that, if the homosexual usually reawakens the ‘fear of castration’ in the male heterosexual, this is also due to the fact that the heterosexual sees his own castration shown up by the gay man, i.e. the castration he has suffered with respect to his homoerotic desire. The heterosexual male fears losing his masculinity, and hence his heterosexual identity, because he knows this is all that remains to him of an Eros that has already been mutilated. And it is precisely because of this castration of his homosexual desire that he does not manage to understand homoeroticism as the totalising, satisfactory, full sexuality that it is, and so fears falling into a void were he to let himself be seduced into a gay experience. Since he knows his heterosexuality to be based on the loss of homosexuality (which does not necessarily mean he is consciously aware of this), the male is afraid of losing his heterosexual identity, should he abandon himself to his unknown homosexuality. In other words, he has internalised the evident if mysterious law of the system: either heterosexuality or homosexuality. Either-or.
According to the Milan Fuori! collective, the continuous violence inflicted on homosexuals,
just like that exercised against women, is indissolubly bound up with the male’s fear of losing his power over women. The man who goes to bed with another man is jeopardising his power, betraying the ‘solidarity’ among males, and this is why he brings all their repression down on himself.13
For many heterosexual men, the homosexual liberation struggle is a war waged against their Norm. Now in war, every army seeks ways of aiding desertion from the other side. And in these last few years, the number of heterosexual males who desert has steadily grown, experimenting with homosexuality and experiencing the emancipating influence of the gay movement.
In a conflict, however, someone who deserts is generally exposed to a greater risk (at least if the army from which he deserts is not completely and irreversibly in rout), the risk of dying a shameful and infamous death, being labelled a traitor and accused of cowardice. Hence any army that fights intelligently understands the importance of positively attracting deserters from the enemy to its own ranks, and carries out propaganda of disaffection directed at the enemy camp. Propaganda of this kind can prove a deadly weapon, able to destroy a whole army without firing a shot (think of the puppet army of South Vietnam, literally broken apart by desertion).
If, on the other hand, the deserter is uncertain of his fate, and expects to face the inextinguishable hatred of the other side, if he fears risking a cruel death, should he take refuge in the opposing army, or being degraded by deprecation for his cowardice (the fate that his own side would inflict), then he will refrain from putting his planned desertion into practice, however sadly, and remain with his old comrades, continuing to depend on them for his physical survival.
Clearly, any desertion is going to be met with a certain diffidence. It must be, at the very least, individual and unreserved. The deserter will be enrolled in a company of trusty veterans, and certainly not left together with other deserters. Above all, the desertion of an entire enemy unit that wants to maintain its integral character is a cause for suspicion: men’s awareness groups, for example, or the gangs of ‘neo-homosexual’ comrades, if we are to apply the metaphor to the present confrontation between gays and the heterosexual Norm, the deserters being those straight men ‘in crisis’ who can no longer fit completely into the army of normality and its ideology. Men’s awareness groups have no other purpose than to prolong their dithering between the sacred ‘normality’ of the system and a gay, total opposition to it. We look forward to their dissolution, and to the participation of their former members in the revolutionary homosexual movement, particularly in its pleasures, in our particular pleasures.
To return to the war, given that little boys are so fond of playing at toy soldiers (whereas we queens prefer to be played with by toy soldiers). In the case of a group desertion, it is an elementary security measure to break up the deserting unit and distribute it in small nuclei among one’s front line formations, those most experienced in combat (to put David Cooper in with the Gazolines, for example, or Franco Berardi with Our Lady of the Flowers).14 More must be expected of the deserter than of any other soldier, just as he needs to be ensured of the fullest support and solidarity of his new comrades.
To give a final example. Let us assume that straight men are fighting in an all too normal colonial army engaged in massacring a colonised (read ‘gay’) population, who are nevertheless reacting courageously with ever bolder guerilla actions. The hetero colonialist males, despite the fact that their army still controls the main centres and road junctions in the region, and has formidable technical instruments of repression at its command, are unable to carry on. They are sickened by the reprisals which they have had to take part in, and by the atrocities in which they have been accomplices. The last village that they razed to the ground prevented them from sleeping. And so, after having carried out a commendable work of dissatisfaction in their platoon, they decide to desert en masse, bringing all the weapons that they can smuggle out – first among these a perfect knowledge of the mentality and methods of their former army. They venture out into the jungle that surrounds the occupied cities, in which the guerrillas are forced to hide. They are both frightened and fascinated. What holds them back is their uncertainty that the guerrillas will spare them once they reach their camp. In other words, they have deserted from the colonialist army, but they’re still afraid of being fucked in the ass.
They take to the hills and begin to fight the colonialist army, and yet they still maintain operational autonomy, undertaking guerrilla actions and sabotage independently from the colonised guerrillas. The latter then have various options. They know very well that the presence of an independent white unit could have a decisive demoralising effect on the colonial army, and they are also aware that acceptance of a united struggle might involve innumerable dangers for the coordination and effectiveness of their actions. On the other hand, however, there is the risk that the deserters, still unrepentant colonialists, might degenerate into simple acts of brigandage against both armies: these are the bisexuals.
It would be opportune for the guerrillas to enter into negotiations with a view to co-opting the deserters. They can certainly agree that these should maintain their autonomy for a certain period of time, as long as they have not sufficiently given proof of their gayness; i.e. to see to what point the bisexuals, absolute heterosexuals until yesterday, are genuine deserters, and form part of the liberation struggle against the Norm.
The solution to this problem lies in the victory of the revolution, in the creation of communism, in the ending of all war, and the definitive withdrawal of all armies. Today, the revolution is being prepared, among other things, by the conflict between the gay movement and the Norm, and by the encounter between homosexuals and deserters from the army of normality. The heterosexual males ‘in crisis’ must understand that we do not want war: we are forced to struggle because we have always been persecuted, because the policemen of the heterosexual law have repressed us, because we look forward to the universal liberation of the gay desire, which can only be realised when your heterosexual identity is broken down. We are not struggling against you, but only against your ‘normality’. We have no intention of castrating you. We want on the contrary to free you from your castration compl
ex. Your ass has not really been amputated; it has only been accused [imputato], along with your entire body.
To come over to our side means, quite literally, to be fucked in the ass, and to discover that this is one of the most beautiful of pleasures. It means to marry your pleasure to mine without castrating chains, without matrimony. It means enjoyment without the Norm, without laws. It is only your inhibitions that prevent you from seeing that only by coming over to our side can we achieve our revolution. And communism can only be ours, i.e. belonging to us all, to those of us able to love: why would you want to be left out?
It is capital that still so insistently opposes you to us. What you have to fear is not being fucked in the ass, but rather remaining what you at present still are, heterosexual males as the Norm wants you to be, even in crisis, as if it was not high time to oppose yourselves forever to crisis, to castration, to guilt. As if it was not time to gayly reject the discontent that the present society has imposed on us, and to stop the totalitarian machine of capital in its tracks by realising new and totalising relations: and as we are bodies, erotic relations among us all.
You fear us on account of the taboo you have internalised, and which you still uphold. But this taboo is the mark of the system in you. And we don’t want to be led into the catastrophe that is threatening, nor do we want the struggle for liberation, which has only one genuine enemy, capital, to be crippled by your resistances, dogmas and ditherings, by your susceptibility to images and your submission to the Father-system. Your terror of homosexuality is the capitalist terror; it is the paternal terror, the terror of the father that you have not overcome.