by Mario Mieli
Heterosexuality is not eternosexuality. Heterosexual procreation is not eternal, no matter the obstinacy with which reactionary heterosexuals, Fornari among them, strictly bind the absolutisation of the primacy of their genitality to a use that is arbitrary, anti-materialist, un-dialectic, and derived from a truly obscurantist concept of ‘nature’. Again and again, committed heterosexuals hail the dichotomy between ‘nature’ and ‘against nature’, as if to assure themselves – it’s a small step – that heterosexuality reigns supreme thanks for the grace of God. Oh my gay God!42
‘Normals’ Faced with Transvestites. Notes on the Family
So-called ‘normal’ people are so adapted to the male heterosexual code that they are in no position to understand, as a general rule, the relativity, contingency and limitation of the concept of ‘normality’.
Fornari played it well to give them nonsense to swill, from the pages of newspapers to those of his treatises. ‘Normal’ persons ask for nothing more than to have their own prejudices confirmed by some authority: they are ready to sing the praises of whoever, as long as that person sustains that Science, Culture, and Reality co-validates what the Norm sanctions. The ‘normals’ search for a tautological relation with ‘science’: they pretend that those who study predict that which has always constituted the ideological pre-given in which they can see reflected back their identity as ‘normal’.
Thus if heterosexuals have always seen homoeroticism as a vice, some psychologist will come along and maintain that homosexuals are ‘immature and confused’. ‘Perversions’ have to be stigmatised, today by a ‘scientific’ veil made up of the most insolent lies: ‘as if they exerted a seductive influence; as if at bottom a secret envy of those who enjoy them had to be strangled’.43
‘Normal’ people do not tolerate gays, and not just because, by our very presence, we display a dimension of pleasure that is covered by a taboo, but because we also confront anyone who meets us with the confusion of his monosexual existence, mutilated and beset by repression, induced to renunciation and adaptation to a ‘reality’ imposed by the system as the most normal of destinies.
We can observe, for example, the attitude of ‘normal’ people towards transvestites. Their general reaction is one of disgust, irritation, scandal. And laughter: we can well say that anyone who laughs at a transvestite is simply laughing at a distorted image of himself, like a reflection in a fairground mirror. In this absurd reflection he recognises, without admitting it, the absurdity of his own image, and responds to this absurdity with laughter. In effect, transvestism translates the tragedy contained in the polarity of the sexes onto the level of comedy.
It is not hard to grasp the common denominator that links, in a relationship of affinity, all the various attitudes people assume towards queens, and towards transvestites in particular. These reactions, whether of laughter or something far more dangerous, only express, in different degree and in differing qualitative forms, a desire extraverted under the negative sign of aggression and fear – or more precisely, anxiety. It is not really the queen or transvestite who is an object of fear for ‘normal’ people. We only represent the image that provides a medium between the orbit of their conscious observations and an obscure object of radical fear in their unconscious. This anxiety is converted into laughter, often accompanied by forms of verbal and even physical abuse.
The person who laughs at a transvestite is reacting to the faint intuition of this absurdity that he already has – as has every human being – and which the man dressed as a woman, who suddenly appears before him, externalises in the ‘absurdity’ of his external appearance. The encounter with the transvestite reawakens anxiety because it shakes to their foundations the rigidly dichotomous categories of the sexual duality, categories instilled into all of us by the male heterosexual culture, particularly by way of the family, which right from the start offers the child the opposition of father and mother, the ‘sacred’ personifications of the sexes in their relationship of master and slave. We all form and establish our conceptions of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ on the models of our parents, the one as virility, privilege and power, the other as femininity and subjection. To these models, which bind us to them thanks to the hallowed web of family ties that determines our personality, we adapt our conception of anyone who, in the course of life, we encounter or even merely think of. We think only in terms of ‘man’ or ‘woman’, to the point that we cannot even imagine anything but ‘men’ or ‘women’. In ourselves, too, we can recognise only the ‘man’ or the ‘woman’, despite our underlying transsexual nature and despite our formation in the family, where our existential misery is determined by our relationship to mother or father. The child of the master-slave relationship between the sexes sees in him- or herself only one single sex. This singleness does not seem contradicted by the evident fact that we are born from a fusion of the sexes. And yet we need only look in the mirror (during a trip) to see clearly in our features both our mother and our father. Monosexuality springs from the repression of transsexuality, and transsexuality is already denied before birth. Conception itself, in fact, proceeds from the totalitarian negation of the female sex by the proclaimed uniqueness of the phallus as sexual organ in coitus and its ‘power’ in the parental couple.
But the phallus does not coincide exactly with the penis, even if it is superimposed on it. While the penis is what distinguishes the male anatomically, the phallus represents the patriarchal absolutising of the idea (of male power) which the penis embodies, an idea that characterises all history to date as his-story. In a world of symbols, the ideal symbology of power assumes a phallic form.
Concretely, this ‘power’ is based on the repression of Eros, which is a repression of the mind, the body and the penis itself, and above all the negation of femininity. In the present prehistory, it is first and foremost a function of the oppression of women.
From the negation of the female sex in the heterosexual relationship, individuals are born either male or female, the former sexual (as bearers of the penis, the bodily vehicle of the unique sexual organ in the patriarchal phallic conception), the latter ‘female eunuchs’. Either, or. The tragedy is that ‘normal’ people cannot tolerate the transvestite showing up the grotesque aspects of this process, committing an act of sacrilege in confusing the sacred opposition between the sexes, given that he combines in himself both sexes, daring to impose a femininity which has been reduced to a mere appearance onto the reality of a male self. The transvestite sins very gravely, demanding vengeance from the guardians of the phallus.
If the child of the heterosexual relation is a male, he finds himself forced to suffocate his own ‘femininity’ and transsexuality, since educastration obliges him to identify with the masculine model of the father. The son has to identify with a mutilated parent, who has already negated his own ‘femininity’ and who bases his privilege in the family and in society precisely on his mutilation. The father is unaware of this process, or does not want to be aware of it, but presents as a ‘natural mutilation’ both the natural difference of women and their mutilation as the work of male ‘power’, which he, as the guardian of the order, perpetuates. The father negates the mother sexually, a fate to which she was already condemned from birth (since from the patriarchal standpoint she is only a second-class human being, lacking a penis); even before birth, since the repression of femininity and of women has prevailed for millennia.44 In his sexual relations with the mother, the father generally absolutises the passive role of the woman, her function as hole and receptacle for the phallus with which he is endowed, and which is presented, visibly active, as the sole sexual organ, establishing a symbolic form in which female sexuality – in fact all sexuality – is alienated. The child sees this clearly in all aspects of the relationship between the parents.
If the child is a girl, then the daughter of the heterosexual couple is condemned to view herself in the stereotype of ‘femininity’, as the negation of woman, and by way of education she is
forced to identify with the servile model of her mother. Educastration consists not only in the concealment of the clitoris, but also in the repression of homosexual desire and transsexuality, of woman’s whole erotic existence. Female (trans)sexuality has to be violently repressed so that the woman can appear ‘feminine’, can be subjected to the male and to the insults inflicted on her by his sexuality, the ‘only true sexuality.’ On the basis of the Norm, female sexuality cannot exist except as something subordinate. It must not exist in and for itself, but only outside itself, for someone else.
‘All this removes any surprise from the fact that historically, femininity has always been perceived as castration, so that according to Freud, at a certain moment the child sees the mother as a mutilated creature, and from then on always lives in fear of castration’.45 Or as Adorno puts it (and these are both only male views):
Whatever is in the context of bourgeois delusion called nature, is merely the scar of social mutilation. If the psychoanalytical theory is correct that women experience their physical constitution as a consequence of castration, their neurosis gives them an inkling of the truth. The woman who feels herself a wound when she bleeds knows more about herself than the one who imagines herself a flower because that suits her husband. The lie consists not only in the claim that nature exists where it has been tolerated or adapted, but what passes for nature in civilisation is by its very substance furthest from all nature, its own self-chosen object. The femininity which appeals to instinct, is always exactly what every woman has to force herself by violence – masculine violence – to become: a she-man.46
In the name of the phallus, the male is forced to deny the sensuality of his ass, and his erotic fullness in general. Ashamed of the ass for being a hole, and yet (in Sartre’s phrase) ‘the presence of an absence’ as much as the vagina and the woman’s ass, he comes to conceive it as ‘the absence of a presence’: i.e. he does not realise that he could enjoy his ass, and sees it as the greatest shame and dishonour to have its sexuality recognised and exercised on himself. The male sentiment of honour springs in fact from shame. The Arabs, among whom male homosexuality is almost universal, paradoxically view it as highly dishonourable for a man to be fucked. They abhor the ‘passive role’.47 This kind of discrimination, and the sexual fascism it involves, is very widespread also among the Italians, the Latin peoples in general, and very many others. ‘Double males’ are even to be found in Greenland.
Forced to murder his own ‘femininity’, so as to meet the imperative model of the father, the male child cannot love a woman for what she is, since he would then have to recognise the existence of female sexuality, finding in it a reflection of the ‘femininity’ within himself. He comes to love women above all as objectifications and holes, and hence does not really love them at all. He tends rather to subjugate them, in the same way that he has already subjugated the subterranean presence of ‘femininity’ in himself, on the altar of virility.
For him, heterosexual love is the negation of woman, the mutilation of the transsexual Eros. It is a tangle of projections and alienations. ‘You are my anima, I am your animus. With you I sense only having overcome isolation. I see nothing of you but that which you do not see of me.’ The system sanctions the negation of love, institutionalising it in the heterosexual Norm and hence in that ‘normality’ which is the law of the sole sexuality of the phallus. And it condemns homosexuality as a rebellion against the subjection of Eros to the order of production and reproduction, and against the institutions (in particular the family) that safeguard this order.
Far from murdering his father so as to espouse his mother, the son rather murders his own ‘femininity’ so as to identify with the father. He is subsequently forced to blind himself by repressing into the shades of the unconscious, the vision of the tragedy he was forced to perpetrate, so that the ‘femininity’ he condemned to death will not revive in the darkness of the established patriarchal destiny. For Freud, heterosexuality is the ‘normal dissolution’ of the Oedipus complex. Homosexuality, which is the inverted solution to the tragedy, the homosexuality which, as Ferenczi put it, is an ‘inversion on a mass scale’, is condemned and excluded because it involves the risk, for male ‘power’, that the real version of the tragedy will become clear, to be genuinely dissolved and overcome for ever more. ‘Only a particular love’, wrote Virginia Finzi Ghisi, ‘can perhaps show up the particular nature of the universal relation par excellence, i.e. the natural sexual relationship, the love of man and woman that reflects in the little magic circle of the family or couple the identical structure both founded on it and founding it, the structure of the big family (the office, factory, community, the world market).’ Homosexuality makes possible ‘the decomposition of the roles that the generalised natural relationship has crystallised, and the recomposition of new roles, complex and bizarre, and rich in shading: ‘All men are women and all women are men.’48
Homosexuality is a relation between persons of the same sex. Between women, it proclaims the autonomous existence of female sexuality, independent of the phallus. Between men, even though historically marked by phallocracy, homosexuality multiplies the sexual ‘uniqueness’ of the phallus, thus in a certain respect negating it, and discloses the availability of the ass for intercourse and erotic pleasure. Moreover:
In the homosexual relation between both men and women, power and its agency are put in question. Two social victors or two social vanquished find themselves equally forced to abandon and reassemble affection/power/absence of power, they cannot simply distribute them according to the social division of roles. This might seem very trivial, but it puts in crisis the foundations of the distributive order of the present society, its mode of politics, and the structure of political groups themselves.49
Repetition Compulsion. The Ghetto. Coming Out at Work.
The union of male bodies, though paradoxically the union of penises, undermines the authoritarian abstraction of the phallus. But male homosexuality can also present itself as doubly phallic, or – in the ideology of the ‘double male’ – as maximally repressed, an unreserved mimicry of the heterosexual model. In such a case, the sexual relation between men is an alienating lack of communication. Given that homosexuality is considered and socially treated as an ‘aberration’ – or rather, that passive homosexuality is deemed dishonourable and disreputable, as in the Islamic countries among others – the gay desire, made guilty in this way, can find a certain justification by fully adapting to the laws of male ‘power’, becoming an actual champion of this. Even lesbians can be forced into such behaviour.
It is necessary at this point to remember that the homosexual, just like the heterosexual, is subject to a fixation to norms and values, the heritage of Oedipal phallocentric educastration, and to the compulsion to repeat. Educastration, as Corrado Levi shows, ‘tends to predispose and crystallise the libido of us all, by continuous acts of repression and examination, into images and models that subsequently underlie successive behaviours, in the coerced tendency to seek these and act them out’.50 These images and models are all bound up with the values presently in force in the capitalist context.
The crystallising of desire onto acquired images tends to lead, and at times in an unambiguous way, to ruling out all other images that are different from these. Only certain images of man and woman are sought (whether heterosexual or homosexual), and we pursue physical types that we have associated with these images: young or old, blond or dark, with or without beard, bourgeois or proletarian, male or female, etc., tending to selectively rule out . . .
one of the two terms. The fixation of behaviour to family models, moreover, determines the type of relationship with the partner: ‘as a couple, a threesome, active, passive, paternal, maternal, filial, etc. Only through these filters and diaphragms can we then act, and see both ourselves and those persons we are involved with, who respond in their turn with analogous mechanisms’. Models, images and behaviour tend in general to be delineated in a perspecti
ve of male capitalist values: domination, subordination, property, hierarchy, etc., ‘and this is connected’, Corrado Levi concludes, ‘with both the contents of the models followed and the mechanism by which they are pursued’.
Yet if these filters and diaphragms, these mechanisms, are in part common to both heterosexuals and gays, it is also true that, on the basis of the flaw that our behaviour, as a transgression of the Norm, represents for the present society, we homosexuals are in a position to put them in question, by discovering in our own lives a deep gap between the rules transgressed and the norms still accepted, and by the contradiction this creates in the system of prevailing values. It may well be that the growth of our movement has not yet led us to a complete unfixing of the internalised models and the compulsion to repeat and pursue them. But it has at least led us to question them, developing in us the desire to experiment, and suggesting new and different behaviours alongside and as a gradual replacement for the repetitive and coerced ones. This has happened above all in the USA, where the gay movement is so far much stronger than in Europe, and has brought about a considerable change in the social and existential conditions of homosexuals (in some States in particular), despite the insufferable continuation of the rule of capital. In America above all, we can see the rebirth of sexual desire between gays, which in our part of the world is still to a large degree latent, the fantasy of the heterosexual male, the bête, the ‘supreme object’ of desire, being still very much alive in many of us.
But the situation in the ghetto is certainly far from rosy, in America and in Europe, Japan or Australia. Often, many of us still tend to oscillate between repression and exaggerated ostentation, putting (deliberately) in doubt the genuineness of our ‘effeminacy’. This leads to a situation in which all spontaneity and sincerity is outlawed, and replaced by the pantomime of ‘normality’ or an ‘abnormality’ which is simply its mirror image. The exponents of such spectacles often end up making the ghetto appear monstrous to our own eyes, not to mention to those more or less scandalised by the far more monstrous heterosexual society that surrounds it.