LESBIAN/GAY/BISEXUAL/TRANSGENDER STRATEGY
SEMINAR
The
Homosexual Question
(excerpts
translated from Critique Communiste (Paris), no. 11/12, Dec. 1976 - Jan.
1977)
(Translation
note - Nicolas uses the
words homosexuel and homosexualité to refer to both sexual acts
and people. This translation uses "homosexual" to refer to sexual
acts and "gay" and/or "lesbian" to refer to people.)
1. The bourgeoisie's
process of sexual normalization
Before examining the nature of the specific
oppression of gay people, we would like to say a few words about the general
process of normalization of sexuality that this specific oppression is part of.
It seems better to us to speak of a process of normalization in sexual
matters rather than of "the" sexual norm. Strictly speaking, we can
speak of "the" norm in order to characterize the dominant behaviour
imposed/proposed at a particular moment in a given society, for either a social
class or a social layer. But the notion of a normalization process
enables us to grasp much better, on the one hand, the co-existence of different
norms corresponding to different social classes or layers in the same society,
and on the other hand, the dominant class's constant capacity to adapt and
recast behavioural norms according to the needs of the moment and the
relationship of forces. The notion of normalization process also enables us to
avoid posing the question of struggles on the terrain of sexuality in terms of
a counter-norm or anti-norm.
Besides, we also need to distinguish the
social discourse that is carried on about sexuality and the real sexual
practices of different classes and layers in society. What is important is to
grasp the linkages and contradictions that can exist between sexual practices
and the social discourse about sexuality. In fact the social discourse
determines how this or that sexual practice is experienced at a particular
moment, and is essential to understanding how individual people are led to
think about their own sexualities. If we take homosexuality for example, just
making an inventory of homosexual practices in a given population is not
enough. What is important is to determine how and why some of the people
engaged in homosexual practices identify as gay, and the consequences that this
has for their social relationships as a whole, while many other people who also
engage in homosexual practices refuse to see themselves as gay and are even
often among the most virulent practitioners of anti-gay oppression.
True, tendentially, the process of bourgeois
sexual normalization aims to maintain the imposition of a heterosexual norm in
the framework of the monogamous, patriarchal family. This ideal—and thus
necessarily unrealizable—norm governs sexual practices narrowly defined (the
ways in which people make love) as well as affectional behaviour (the ways in
which people experience themselves as men or women) and cultural reference
points (the way in which people think of themselves or portray themselves as
men or women).
To begin with, this sexual norm establishes
the set of social relationships corresponding in this society to the
difference between the sexes as something natural, physiological and obvious.
In fact the only thing that is objectively given is the existence of a
difference between the sexes, and in no way the social relationships erected on
this basis, which for their part are completely historical. Since the
bourgeoisie perpetuates, while reshaping, the age-old domination of men over
women, the sexual norm that it imposes is a phallocratic norm: the discourse
about sexuality is a discourse forged by men about men's sexuality. Women,
denied any power, are also cut off from knowledge. If a discourse is carried on
about women's sexuality, it is derived from men's sexuality and the problems
that women's sexuality can raise for men; it is never a discourse by women
about their own sexuality. In this way women's sexuality is completely denied
and negated.
Secondly, the bourgeois sexual norm posits
that only relationships between the two sexes are suitable and natural, since
only they are oriented towards procreation. The norm thus condemns
relationships between two individuals of the same sex as abnormal and against
nature.
The bourgeois sexual norm denies women's
sexuality and rejects homosexuality; it is also the negation of children's
sexuality. In any event the category of childhood is, if not created, at least
reinforced by bourgeois social discourse, which makes it into a category that
is excluded from society and closed up in the institutions of family and
school. The myth of the "green paradise of childhood love" is a poor
attempt to conceal the reality of children's prolonged dependence in capitalist
society, their infantilization, as well as the negation of their sexuality.
Children are thus subjected to a long, meticulous drilling of bodies and minds
which is supposed to make them fit the space that has been assigned to them in
the social machinery.
But while the sexual norm denies their desire
in the present, while they are children, it prepares them to flow into the
mould of a normal sexuality the day that they become adults. It turns them into
girls and boys ready to live as future fathers and future mothers. Throughout
their education they are endlessly presented with the single model of the
heterosexual couple: "They lived happily ever after and had lots of
children." And when reality turns out to rudely contradict the imposed,
normative social discourse, when children expresses and experience their own
desires, these desires are immediately denied and blamed on adults, who are
accused of corrupting minors. This is why anti-gay legal repression is
particularly harsh towards pedophiles. Pedophilia itself, marked by references
to this practice in ancient Greece, also often contributes to keeping children
in a position of inferiority, to the extent that it goes together with
paternalistic relationships. For this reason new relationships between adults
and children can only be built through a conscious struggle against all forms
of domination, from the most blatant to the most cunning.
Finally, the sexual norm oppresses even those
who seem to accept the flowing of their sexuality through the narrow channel
that the norm confines it to. There is in fact a permanent gap between
individuals' aspirations to flourish in social as well as sexual life and the
roles in which social discourse seeks to enclose them, by presenting a series
of static models that tend to impose the norm of the heterosexual couple
legitimized by the institution of marriage for the purpose of procreation. In
this way a continual social pressure weighs down on single people, but also on
childless married couples. The petrification of roles shows clearly how the
different levels on which the imposition of the norm takes place are
intertwined, and underscores the global character of men's domination over
women. The codification of individuals' sexual and affectional life by
bourgeois social discourse thus extends its effects to all aspects of daily
life, which it impregnates from end to end.
The sexual norm, like any other form of
ideology, does not exist as a separate entity. It is materialized in a whole
series of social institutions which fulfill other functions as well. It is
above all in the three main institutions that are in charge of individuals' education—family,
school and church—that the inculcation of the sexual norm is carried out. The
relations among these institutions evolve over time, and each one's specific
weight changes. For example, the role of the church has considerably diminished
with the secularization of social life, its institutional weight is less and
less, but Judeo-Christian ideology keeps a tight hold, albeit under the various
avatars of humanist ideology. Inversely, with the socialization of education,
the school has taken a preponderant place, nonetheless without this
socialization of education being sufficiently developed within the capitalist
system to reduce in a decisive way the role of the family, which remains an
indispensable pillar for the inculcation of the norm. In the case of men the
army "finishes off" their education with its cult of virility and
contempt for women.
Nevertheless these institutions do not manage
to catch everyone in their net. Many people cannot endure this recruitment
network. The institutions responsible for the inculcation of the sexual norm
thus have a relay: the repressive institutions, such as psychiatry and prisons,
which take charge of deviants.
Sexuality in a capitalist society is not only
the object of a normative, codified discourse; it is also a source of profit
through its commercialization. The sexual norm thus has the function of
channelling demand towards the commercial circuits created for this end.
Pornography and prostitution batten on sexual fantasy and deprivation.
Finally, the sexual norm, however specific it
may be, is integrated into a social discourse which is itself normative, in the
sense that it transmits the values specific to the dominant class: to begin
with, respect for private property and the work ethic. But there is also
linguistic normality: the reduction of language to its communicative function,
adequate for the expression of market relations, and the enclosure of other
forms of language in the realm of art—or of insanity; and normality in dress,
which both constrains the body and indicates individuals' assigned social
places. This is how social discourse tends to codify all relationships, so that
the dominant ideology stamps them all permanently with its mark.
This codification and normalization, which
penetrate all of everyday life, constitute what one could call a "process
of subjection", whose goal is to forge individuals suitable for
integration into capitalist relations of production and for their perpetuation.
In this sense the process of subjection constitutes a fundamental element of
the reproduction of capital, inasmuch as it is indispensable to shaping and
maintaining social agents in the framework of capitalist relations of
production. It is organically woven into the process of valorization of capital,
of capitalist exploitation narrowly defined (extraction of surplus-value
through exploitation of human surplus labour). In addition, the proletariat's
class consciousness, which is directly rooted in the struggle against
capitalist exploitation, must be extended to the analysis of all the extremely
diverse forms of this subjection process. In particular, the revolutionary
vanguard must make an effort to integrate analysis of the subjection process,
as it manifests itself today, into Marxism's theoretical arsenal and
redeploy this analysis on the various battlefronts.
This does not mean erecting a revolutionary
strategy focussed on a struggle against normality (in a broad sense) that would
bring together all oppressions and revolts. It means, starting from an
awareness of the imbrication between the process of capitalist exploitation and
the process of subjection, integrating the various struggles against all forms
of normality into the anti-capitalist struggle. A strategy centred purely on
the terrain of the struggle against normality would be doomed to endlessly
cutting off the constantly regenerated heads of an ungraspable Medusa, without
ever being able to strike it dead with a blow to its heart. Inversely, an
anti-capitalist strategy hemmed in within an economist struggle, not allowing
itself the means to intervene on the many battlefronts that have to do with the
subjection process, would meet enormous difficulties in starting from the
masses' radicalization and in mobilizing them in the struggle against capitalist
exploitation. This would in any case profoundly distort the dynamic of a
society in transition to socialism, which cannot content itself with
overturning the relations of production but aims to transform the whole of
social relations.
Between these two extreme scenarios, we
should not confuse the level of analyzing the subjection process with the level
of strategic inferences. The subjection process has in our opinion a coherence,
whose logic we have tried to sketch on the basis of the normalization process
at work throughout bourgeois social discourse (which because of this requires a
global approach). On the level of strategic inferences, on the other hand, we
are not trying to build a unified struggle against normality in all its forms.
Rather we are trying to intervene in a specific way on each terrain constituted
by this or that particular form of normality. At the same time we are
trying to link this struggle to the working class's struggle against capitalist
exploitation.
So while we need to understand the
fundamental mechanism by which the dominant norm functions in a capitalist
society, we must avoid restricting ourselves to this analysis alone, which is
far too schematic. We need to study how the normalization process takes place
in practice in a much more supple way: how it adapts itself to the requirements
of the economic system at various moments, to demographic needs (whether it is
a period of policies favouring higher birth rates or a period of Malthusian
policies), to new historical requirements (shifts in mores, which begin in
certain layers of the bourgeoisie and then spread little by little, and in a
diversified way, to all other social classes and strata), and to different
relationships of class forces. In short, it is necessary to historicize the
functioning of the bourgeois sexual norm through perpetual rearrangements
carried out by the normalization process.
2. The nature and history
of the specific oppression of homosexuality
1. Preliminary remark on
male and female homosexuality
Our analytical approach in terms of social
relations leads us first of all to make a clear distinction between male and
female homosexuality. The nature of oppression, the experiences and social
attitudes are substantially different in the two different cases. Male
homosexuality is recognized, but thrown out of society (often legally repressed
and considered in France as a "social plague"). As for lesbians, they
are subject to all aspects of women's oppression, to which an additional
discrimination is added because of their sexual orientation. But this
additional discrimination (which can be seen for example in lesbians' losing
custody of the children they are raising) seems to us to come second to the
oppression they experience as women. Besides, the dominant social discourse on
sexuality, which is essentially a male discourse about male sexuality, tends in
general to deny women's sexuality and consequently to consider lesbianism as
having no social importance, while male homosexuality is seen as a threat to
the family.
While this is the social attitude today
towards male homosexuality and lesbianism, this is no way means that one form
of sexuality is in our eyes more or less subversive than the other. No form of
sexuality is subversive in itself. Simply, because of the fact that oppression
is experienced in given conditions, this or that sexual behaviour can
come into conflict with the reigning sexual norms. Thus male homosexuality is
today, in most advanced capitalist countries and workers' states, objectively
in conflict with sexual norms, although this conflict is experienced
subjectively in a very different way in different social classes and layers and
results in very diversified levels and modes of radicalization.
As for female homosexuality, we must
doubtless make a distinction between those women who are still seen as gay and
those who, as they begin to arrive at a feminist consciousness, sometimes
experience homosexual relationships among them as new forms of inter-individual
relationship. In the latter case, the socially subversive impact does not come
so much from the homosexual relationship as from the challenge to the relations
of domination among individuals engendered by class society—although this
challenge only takes on its full force in the context of collective struggle.
For women who see themselves as gay, oppression as women goes together with
oppression as gay people. But their consciousness takes different forms
depending on which aspect of oppression is emphasized more: feminist consciousness
can be held back among some gay women by the feeling that their specific
oppression is not taken into account by the women's movement. This nonetheless
does not change the fact that these two forms of oppression are closely linked.
It is preferable to encourage combining feminist consciousness with
radicalization starting from specific oppression as a gay woman, rather than
accentuating differentiation by grafting the issue of female homosexuality onto
the issue of male homosexuality.
The distinction we are making between male
homosexuality and female homosexuality thus derives essentially from an
analysis from the standpoint of oppression. This is the only at all solid
analytical approach that we think we have at our disposal today. One could conceive
of an approach starting from an enquiry into what homosexual desire means and
questioning at the same time the nature of heterosexuality. For our part,
without rejecting that approach, we will not venture to undertake it. For one
thing, we have not mastered the theoretical tools necessary for such an
approach (among which we would put first of all the conceptual apparatuses of
psychoanalysis and anthropology). For another thing, questioning the nature of
heterosexuality and homosexuality does not seem immediately indispensable to us
for an initial discussion of oppression, which aims above all to pose the
problems of revolutionary Marxists' intervention on a specific terrain of
struggle. This conscious limitation does not preclude developing more deepgoing
theoretical work on the nature of homosexuality and heterosexuality, and on the
functioning of sexuality in general, later on, starting particularly from our
practical experience in the gay movement's struggle.
2. The objective and
subjective genesis of gay identity
From the moment when the bourgeoisie has
state power and extends its class hegemony to all of society, it imposes a
remodelling of all social relationships in order to perpetuate its class
domination. It also establishes a new social discourse in order to propagate
its own values. This social discourse of course incorporates many elements from
pre-capitalist ideological formations, but it inserts them into a new
configuration, instituting a new modality of human existence.
The hierarchy of feudal relations had as its
corollary the portrayal of human beings as God's creatures. Opposition to the
existing social order was punished by excommunication, a simultaneous expulsion
from the divine and human order—the human order being seen as only a reflection
and symbol of the divine. Capitalist society by contrast establishes human
beings as socio-economic agents, inserted into relations of production. This
desacralization, this secularization of the world and society, still kept for a
long time to the terms of the old social discourse that had ruled over all of
feudal society, while emptying it of its content. The Jacobins' Supreme Being
was no longer the sovereign God, guarantor both of the human order and of the
communion of souls through his representatives on earth: the pope and emperor
or king. He was much more the symbol of state power. Over time, with the spread
of atheism among the bourgeoisie as well as proletariat, opposition to the
existing social order would run more and more directly into the institution
that had become its only guarantor: the state.
More and more, too, what the state would
repress—despite its juridical discourse—was not so much this or that individual
act as non-integration into the existing social order. In this way entire
categories of excluded people, outside of society, would form on the system's
margins, thrown out of production. Some elements of the bourgeoisie could
dabble in this marginality for a time in search of adventure—without running
great risks, since like the prodigal son they always had a place saved for them
at the social banquet table. But it is a hell for those who are condemned to
it. For the mass of workers, it serves as a deterrent and a warning: Watch out,
if you don't stick to the straight and narrow, if you don't fit the place
assigned to you, you will find yourselves among these wretched people.
Homosexuality appears as one of these factors
of social non-integration in the eyes of the dominant class. It thus would both
perpetuate the taboo on homosexuality inherited from Judeo-Christianity and
establish homosexuality as a separate category, a homosexual identity. The
anti-homosexual taboo thus manifests itself in two combined forms: the
repression of the homosexual component of desire, and discrimination against
gay people, which throws them out of the social organism as
"deviants", "abnormal" or "sick". Any analysis
that starts only from the oppression of gays as a sexually oppressed minority,
without raising the issue of the latent, more or less repressed homosexuality in
each individual, seems to us seriously reductionist.
The sharp separation between the categories
of gay and straight crystallizes an arbitrary divide, which obscures the
continuity among various sexual practices and denies the undifferentiated
character of desire towards one sex or the other. As Freud shows, attraction to
the other sex is not any more natural or spontaneous than attraction to the
same sex. Reducing desire to a single component, the heterosexual one, is the
result of a process of normalization of sexuality by bourgeois ideology, which
aims, through education and the cultural models that it presents, to shape
individuals suited to fulfilling their social role in the framework of the
monogamous, patriarchal family.
We therefore oppose both the imposition of
this heterosexual norm and any attempt to propose any kind of gay
"anti-norm" or "counter-norm" that would tend to perpetuate
the divide between homosexuality and heterosexuality or to present these
categories as conflicting. Nevertheless we cannot overlook the fact that these
categories do correspond today to a certain social functioning, and above all
that one of them (homosexuality) is systematically devalued, leading to a
specific oppression of gay people.
The repression of latent homosexuality is
particularly noticeable in institutions that mainly bring together men (armies,
police, the Church, sports teams, some schools, prisons). It generally goes
together in these institutions with both an exclusion of and contempt for
women, reinforced by the cult of virility, and with harsh oppression of those
who announce their homosexuality, even though homosexual practices are often
widespread there, though without any right to free and open expression.
The anti-homosexual taboo is also very strong
in education, culture and the media, which either ban any reference to
homosexuality or present a caricatured, twisted image of it. This particularly
underhanded and insidious form of oppression means that gay people have great
difficulty in finding role models, inasmuch as they cannot identify with the
dominant social models. This, and not their homosexuality, is why many gay
people experience difficulty in adjusting to the demands of social life (in
particular at work). This (relative) social inadaptation is aggravated by other
aspects of oppression: confinement in a ghetto, discrimination in employment
and housing, police and youth gang attacks, and psychiatric repression.
We therefore reject the idea that
homosexuality is either "an unnatural act" (an idea inherited from
medieval Christian prejudices), a "sickness" (a theory put
forward by psychiatry, which tends to be taken up by for example some currents
of the French CP), or a "mark of bourgeois decadence" (a theory
passed on by traditional Stalinism). We also reject two theories encountered
very often among gay people, which seem to us unwarranted theorizations from
the social rejection and oppression of gays. The first, which served as a
theoretical foundation for the first gay movement at the end of the 19th
century, considers gays to be a "third sex". It seems to us without
scientific foundation, avoiding the issue of the homosexual component of desire
and latent homosexuality, theorizing the marginalization of gays in this
society, and in fact limiting their struggle to defending the democratic rights
of an oppressed minority. Although the "third sex" theory has been
more or less abandoned today in its primitive form, it underlies the explicit
or implicit references so widespread today to a gay "identity".
The second theory, linked to the wave of gay
radicalization following May '68, posits that homosexuality is intrinsically
revolutionary and subversive of any existing social order. This conception,
theorized in France by Guy Hocquenghem and taken up more or less confusedly by
the "current of desire", overlooks the social modelling of desire and
the class lines that divide gay people. It ends up misdirecting the gay
struggle against oppression into a struggle against straight people, often
coloured by phallocracy and misogyny. This current also usually rejects any
effort to ally with the workers' movement, using the betrayal of its
bureaucratic leaderships as a pretext for dismissing the whole working class as
reactionary.
The theories of homosexuality as a third sex
or of revolutionary homosexuality have something in common: both accept and
reinforce the divide between homosexuality and heterosexuality without
critiquing its historical genesis. Each contributes in its own way to
perpetuating the ideology of gay identity.
The ideology of gay identity, which consists
in theorizing a supposed gay specificity based only on their sexuality, has its
objective basis in the oppression of gay people in capitalist society, and
constitutes the specific gay form of alienation from the dominant ideology. The
ideology of gay identity has its material basis in the various forms of ghetto,
which are so many places of confinement for gay people. Nonetheless, while we
must wage an uncompromising ideological battle against the myth of gay
identity, it is necessary to understand why and how this ideology is formed and
maintained and how it is possible for the mass of gay people to move beyond it.
Historically, the ideology of gay identity
was formed throughout the 19th century, mainly through the pseudo-scientific
discourses of psychiatry and sexology, which ignored the Freudian contribution
about the undifferentiated character of desire with respect to its object (the
same sex or the other sex). This ideology has been internalized by gay people
themselves to the extent that, when they become aware of their desire, they
find no other way to express it than to identify with the caricatured model of
homosexuals presented by bourgeois imagery. Either gay people identify with
this model, and adapt their behaviour to the mutilating, limiting social role
allowed them, or they reject it without finding another they can identify with
and try to repress or deny their desire, which in many cases can lead to
madness or suicide. We can therefore say that because of the anti-homosexual
taboo there is a deep crisis of identification for all those who feel a strong
(not necessarily exclusive) attraction to individuals of the same sex. We must
note that this crisis of identification is felt particularly by workers
inasmuch as, because the model of identity is the bourgeoisie's and adapted to
the bourgeoisie's way of life, they are led all the more to reject it because
of their class consciousness.
In this way the adolescent who discovers that
his desire makes him different from other people does not understand at first
what is going on. The education that has been drilled into him gives him no
cultural reference point with which he could identify in a positive way. He can
only live with the feeling of being different until the day when, if he does
not completely repress his desire, he has the label thrown in his face that
will brand him for life: Faggot! Faced with this social indictment, he can only
retreat, try to deny and repress his desire, and try desperately to reconcile
himself to the heterosexual norm (how many marriages are built on this lie!);
withdraw into desolate chastity; or identify with the label that has been
pasted onto him, to identify for better or for worse as a homosexual. In this
case he finds himself caught, confined in the ghetto set aside for his kind.
3. The ghetto and various
forms of gay oppression
We need to undertake an analysis of the gay
ghetto starting from the material conditions it is founded on. On this basis we
need to study the specific ideology that it secretes, which brings us back to
the question of gay identity.
The first thing to note is that there is not
strictly speaking a gay ghetto, but several forms of enclosure which are
not homogeneous. Nonetheless, all these forms respond to a specific need
(rather than a desire): the hunt for partners, either the occasional search for
a nice quick fuck or the great search for Mr. Right/Prince Charming—often in
fact both at once. The various forms of ghetto correspond, though in a
non-mechanical way, to various social classes and layers. We can distinguish
two major categories: the commercialized ghetto (bars, bathhouses, private clubs)
and the non-market ghetto (tearooms and parks). In normal times repression is
directed at the latter, uncontrolled cruising grounds, and serves to channel
the hunt for partners into the commercial circuit.
The different lived experiences of these two
forms of ghetto lead to different ideologies. In the non-market ghetto, the
omnipresent threat of repression by the cops or fag-bashing gangs engenders a
great measure of guilt, and the tension prevailing there fosters an
aggressiveness that makes any form of communication other than a hasty,
once-off sexual consummation very difficult. Over time this state of tension
fosters a dependency among some gay men comparable to drug addiction. They
rationalize this as the thrill of danger and taste for adventure, while
recognizing in their hearts the sordid nature of this adventure.
In the commercialized ghetto, relationships
are marked fundamentally by their commodified character, ruling out any
communication among individuals other than those based on appearance: extreme
attention to clothes, the cult of beauty (limited to narrow stereotypes), and
affectation. The ideology that results is that you check everything at the door
that reminds anyone of the individual's insertion into his usual social
relationships, keeping only the signs bearing witness that you are a fag. This
is the form of ghetto where the ideology of gay identity is most deeply rooted.
It creates a sort of weird universe, where the only people who can feel fully
at home are those who do not feel too deeply the contradiction between this
closed world and their social life elsewhere. This is why here too one can find
men who pretend to be very much at ease in this milieu, although many men
experience it as suffocating.
The commercialized ghetto tends more and more
towards a hierarchy between "select" clubs for a refined public and
more lower-class clubs that cater to gays chased out of the non-market ghetto.
We can foresee that, if the current tendency to relative
"banalization" of homosexuality continues, the authorities will try
to suppress the non-market ghetto and clean up public spaces, while favouring
the extension of the commercialized ghetto, which in addition is easier for
them to control.
It goes without saying that while we are for
the disappearance of the ghetto, as a particularly disfiguring system of
alienation of the human relations that it establishes, we know at the same time
that the ghetto exists because of the rejection of homosexuality from the
larger society. The ghetto will exist as long as gay people are oppressed. Our
main responsibility is also to condemn all repression directed at gays who hang
out in the ghetto, whether by the cops or anyone else. On the basis of
solidarity in the struggle against repression, we can help radicalize gay
people who feel obliged to hang out in the ghetto. We can make them little by
little become conscious of how alienated the relationships they experience in
the ghetto are, and we can gradually bring them to break with the ideology of
gay identity.
The forms of anti-gay oppression are multiple
and varied. For us it is the taboo against homosexuality that is at the root
all the other manifestations of anti-gay oppression. But it is impossible to
attack the taboo against homosexuality directly as long as it pervades all
bourgeois institutions and all individual behaviour, in the same way that
phallocracy does. The struggle for the liquidation of the taboo against
homosexuality also must be waged through a struggle against all the specific
forms of oppression that result from it.
Unlike women's oppression, which is rooted
both in relations of capitalist exploitation (the double work day, unequal pay,
cut-rate education) and in the age-old heritage of phallocracy, the anti-gay
taboo has essentially ideological roots. It is also as a secondary effect that
gays are victims of discrimination in employment and housing. We must
nonetheless note that oppression often leads to a kind of "natural
selection", a channelling of gay people towards certain jobs (the civil
service and intellectual and artistic professions) rather than towards direct
production, because of the difficulties of adaptation to work requirements.
The most current form of oppression today
seems to us to be the state's attempts to control gay people by means of
medical and psychiatric institutions as well as by means of their channelling
and enclosure in the commercialized ghetto. Psychiatric repression is all the
more dangerous in that it can be presented as a form of help to gay people who
are asking to be treated because they consider themselves as "sick".
Channelling into the gay ghetto can also be served up as a liberal measure,
although it makes it easier to reinforce repression against the
non-commercialized ghetto.
Legal anti-gay repression plays a relatively
smaller role than in any other form of oppression. It would thus be as
misguided to found gay struggles against oppression on this basis alone as it
would be to neglect them as insignificant. In France legal anti-gay repression
is relatively recent. The Constitution of 1791 abolished the Old Regime's laws
against "sodomites", and there was no mention of gay people in the
Napoleonic Code. An anti-gay law was decreed in 1942 under the Pétain regime
and reaffirmed in 1946 under the first De Gaulle government. It was made worse
in 1961 by the Mirguet amendment, which defined homosexual relations between an
adult and a minor between 15 and 18 as a misdemeanour and relations with a
minor under 15 as a felony. In recent years several hundred people from the
working classes have been convicted for homosexual offenses. [...]
5. The changes under way
in the status of homosexuality in France and the trap of gay integration into
the bourgeois regime
Some representatives of the "current of
desire" (Guy Hocquenghem and P. Hahn, for example) are putting forward
today the idea of a "banalization" of homosexuality, i.e. its
integration into bourgeois society. While we resolutely oppose all the
illusions propagated by Hocquenghem about the revolutionary character of
"gay desire", and in no way share his nostalgia for a mythical time
when a gay man could be seen as a sort of adventuring hero moving from
aristocratic salons to the lower depths (like Vautrin, for example), we can
admit nonetheless that there is a kernel of truth in his theory of banalization
of homosexuality. Only a kernel of truth, inasmuch as this integration of
homosexuality into bourgeois society is far from being complete, and above all
is extremely differentiated in different social classes and layers. In some
layers of the bourgeoisie (artists and some intellectuals), the social
integration of gay people has been an accomplished fact for a long time: this
is in fact the only image of homosexuality that the bourgeoisie openly
recognizes, which it diffuses in the dominated classes. Today, after the
profound shaking of bourgeois values after May '68, and under the pressure of
many social layers' (youth, women, gays) entry into struggle, it has set a real
process in motion of broadening this integration of gays. It benefits from this
both by defusing a terrain of struggle that could be inconvenient for it and by
commercializing a fruitful market.
But this integration remains very limited. It
consists much more in a relaxation and extension of the ghetto, and a partial
lifting of the taboo imposed until now on homosexuality, than in a real
launching of social integration. We cannot rule out the eventuality that such a
real integration may be envisaged a few years from now, as is a little bit the
case in certain countries today. In our opinion, however, a process of this
kind would have to overcome some substantial ideological barriers, deeply
rooted in French society, before reaching its conclusion.
Nevertheless, a modification, however limited
it may still be, of the status of homosexuality is under way today in France.
This can be seen in Baudry's constrained TV appearances as well as in the
proliferation of magazines and movies on homosexuality, and even in the
emergence of gay movements. But it is just this modification in the status of
homosexuality that leads the most advanced gay activists to shift the terrain
of struggle, staying one step ahead of events, in order to sound the alarm in
advance about the trap of homosexuality's integration into the framework of
bourgeois society. For even if the bourgeoisie can grant gays a status of
formal equality with straights, and even go so far as to institutionalize gay
couples—reinforcing in this way the illusion of gay identity—it would be
infinitely more difficult for it to establish real equality. This would mean
recognizing the homosexual component in the whole of the social organism: it
would mean so radical a challenge to male status and virility that it would
lead to a deep upheaval in the family and the whole of bourgeois culture.
We believe that this real integration—this assimilation—of
homosexuality into the social organism is possible, but not under the
capitalist system. Only in a socialist society, in a period of tumultuous
overturning of all social relationships, can we imagine such a thing.
The critique of gay identity allows us to
pose the issue of homosexuality not just in relation to the oppression of those
who recognize and experience themselves as gay, but also in relation to
homosexuality as an element of all sexuality and thus as an element of
sexuality's repression in the whole of the social organism. This also allows us
to glimpse the possible status of homosexuality in a socialist society, and to
respond to those who think that the problem of homosexuality is linked
essentially to bourgeois society and will not arise in a socialist society.
While we can assume that the problem as gays
as an oppressed minority will disappear with the ending of oppression, we
cannot conclude from this that the homosexual element of desire will disappear.
On the contrary, a real ending of oppression will imply not only the abolition
of all legal discrimination against gays, but also the social
integration—assimilation—of homosexuality, which will require its materialized
recognition in cultural reference points radically different from those in
force today and its inclusion in children's upbringing. Such an upheaval can
only result from profound changes in workers' consciousness around sexuality.
The conscious struggle of women and gay people, which will be all the more
powerful to the extent that they rid themselves of the myth of gay identity,
will doubtless be necessary for a long time in order to bring about this
consciousness-raising, notably inside the working class.