Diary of an Innocent

by Tony Duvert

  That is the reason why, if I educated my brat, I’d try not to shut him away but would instead make him ubiquitous, not restraining him but granting him every freedom, provided, obviously, that he practiced it in the company of his most conformist peers; and I’d surrender him to all influences, with the condition that they were like political propaganda on television whose importance is proportionate to the number of individuals who buy into it. The only thing I’d forbid him would be to seek isolation, to prefer himself to others, to cultivate a predilection, desire, a demand, a dream, a rebellion, an eccentricity that wasn’t part of the majority. And if I noticed in him the strength to conflict with others—having come from I don’t know where (unless from some early psychosis)—I’d go drown him immediately.

  The most serious consideration of all: his chances for being happy. In the name of that, I’ll believe that each peculiarity of mind or behavior, each whim that is not in demand, each initiative that hasn’t been provoked, each hesitation in the face of practical certainties, will be equivalent to a cancer, a plague, paralysis, a canker, the atrophy of an organ or member; all of which would build up in my pupil until he became disfigured, deformed, repulsive, oozing pus and teeming with viruses, and be thrown out with the trash. When someone suffers from an incurable disease, it’s just, if he wants it, to give him death. My student would be incapable of knowing what hell awaited him, and how that makes euthanasia that much more worthy; but I’d kill him, anyway.

  Contemporary education confirms this as well. In a democracy, it explains, each can develop his personality freely, but if you want to be happy and truly become adjusted, it’s better to be like everybody else. [See Good Sex Illustrated.] A faulty brain like mine, of course, sees bizarre insinuations in such a principle. If a man who’s different from others is rejected by them, it’s because well-adjusted individuals who resemble everyone else enjoy persecuting those who do not. A strange proof of being adjusted. It leads to the conclusion that the essential element of happiness resides in crushing the other; and that, the more balanced, normal and adjusted you are, the more intolerant, nasty, intractable and stupid you become. Therefore, must you be like everyone else because the majority actually do possesses happiness, or simply because the majority dominates so aggressively that, if you’re not a part of it, you suffer more than you would if you were a part of it? Teachers don’t have the answer. But they use the words equality, health, justice, freedom, wisdom; they tell on which side all these virtues are located; they say that such a side has the startling distinction of being unforgiving when it comes to the other sides. However, they do not say that the key to human happiness, in whatever society you happen to be, is being a part of themost imbecilic, yelping with the wickedest or backing up the strongest; and if they don’t yet dare to put it all in black and white, their students understand quite well without needing things spelled out.

  Besides, the ferocity of this lucky majority is obviously just a legitimate protection of its happiness against the rabid few trying to cause it harm. Our suffering comes from a defect in consistency of taste, behavior, appearance, age and state of mind; and therefore, everything that can level differences is good. Extensive conditioning, of course, identity in the acts that all perform at the same moment, including thoughts, resentments, admirations; laughing together at the same things, adopting the same values, eliminating conflicts and resolving revolts, suppressing those incapable of adapting, rehabilitating those who don’t produce; prisons, asylums, old folks’ homes, community centers and hospices for the old; prison camps for the disabled; places where immigrants can rot; penitentiaries to hold orphans; throwing into permanent institutional limbo every person whose race, color, age, past, activity, health, morals, opinions, habits or dissent would sully the harmony of normality. We do this, and only underdeveloped nations aren’t yet in possession of all these instruments of happiness. The only thing that’s imperfect is our conditioning: some manage to escape the forge and fall through the cracks. If we can remedy that, unity, tranquility, the certainty of things will finally be established; future generations will inherit a perfect society, and the five billion years that separate us from the end of the world will move forward without a jolt.

  If, some night, an irksome individual keeps me from sleeping by making a racket and I complain, and he tells me that this racket happens to be the most beautiful music on earth, I’ll reply with every right that it is time for sleep, not for beauty. Even though happiness, when it comes to him, is like sleeping forever. Nothing is more legitimate than protecting it against those sick people who are stricken with insomnia.

  I can therefore clearly see what separates the happy majority from minorities: the former only suffer from the existence of the latter; whereas the latter suffer from themselves and—mere handful though they be—prevent unadulterated contentment from reigning. This is why you have to resemble others to be happy, and hunt down differences to stay that way.

  What I’ve been writing also proves that I underestimate myself, and that, when I want to, I’m capable of reasoning as well as the next person. Could it be that, in claiming my vices are incurable, I’m only looking for an excuse and actually could straighten out and get back on the right track, even without help? I don’t dare answer that question. Instead I have the depressing impression that among my number of perversions is my tendency to imagine myself normal, and that if I’m not correcting myself, it’s because I’m sincerely convinced that I already resemble whomever it could be. But why am I so often the only one with that opinion? It will take years before I understand it.

  My bad morals, to limit the discussion to those, seem infinitely commonplace to me, and I can easily conceive of a society that would impose them under the aegis of the average values and the majority ideas that are currently condemning them in our society. Even slight alterations would not be necessary.

  In this average, petit-bourgeois homosexual society I’m imagining, common sense would affirm, for example, that since man is superior to animals, he must free himself from the instinct compelling him to fornicate with the opposite sex the way animals do (the lowest toady from the Church or some professional organization can understand that argument). It could be added that restraining sex to procreation is simply absurd, since no one has ever totally devoted the entire sixty or eighty years of sexuality he has available when born to reproduction (as is commonly claimed in this society, I may add). Those who put pleasure into the sole category of procreation are, consequently, idiots, or out of their mind. And this immense reservoir of sexual desire with which only humans have been provided (though no one knows why) must serve a higher, more extended kind of relations. It is also said that copulation lowers woman to the rank of object and victim; that were abusing her when we make use of the morphological features she inherited from our bestial past; that its monstrous to inflict penetration on a human being who won’t be able to do it back now or ever. This is ethical thought, without any exaggeration or the addition of novel, specious reasoning. The rest is, of course, a matter of social choice. One comes to the conclusion that the way to emancipate man and woman from the inequitable horrors of coitus, and to divert our too abundant desires to the benefit of social unity, is to impose homosexuality en masse. It follows that a law founded on these principles will curb the crime of bestiality—in other words, heterosexual acts. (After several centuries of the death penalty, psychiatry and relentless agitprop, we’re becoming a bit more liberal, as we should.)

  Moreover, if we may borrow the aphorism of a famous biologist, we can say that the adult is only the form that the child is forced to adopt in order to reproduce himself. And although hygienic practices have created a situation in which, instead of dying a few years after having become adults, we live as such a lot longer than we do in the previous stage, we ought not forget where the high point of human perfection is located (be it intelligence, liberty, invention, sociability, a communal spirit, good cheer, kindness, courage, spontaneity, ge
nerosity, sweetness, mischievousness, emotional richness, solidarity, loyalty, beauty, etc.); namely, in childhood. All individuals of less than thirteen or fourteen are thus the model of what one should love after that age. It’s allowable for adults of both sexes to infantilize their person, notably, by bleaching and curling their hair and making it soft, silky and luxurious; using makeup to create large, expressive eyes and long, delicate eyelashes; employing rouge and lipstick to give the impression of an infant’s coloring; removing hair from the face and body and exfoliating the skin; scraping or massaging flesh; tanning it and slimming it down; washing throughout the day to smell less like an adult; using one’s voice at a higher register and changing all its timbres; stamping feet or yelling shrilly; copying the literalness, innocence and energy of childish gestures, their postures, their ways of climbing into bed, sitting, eating, looking, answering, laughing, crying, hugging; getting into the habit of making faces that are excessive or trivial, candid or contrary, stupid or dreamy, sensual or rebellious; in brief, caricaturing childhood, like only women are forced to do in our society.

  (And we know what object of desire they are when they’ve done a good job at it; yet how feared or neglected they become if they seem like adults.)

  Reproduction is to occur by planned schedules of insemination, homosexuality being (no scientist would deny this) a way of controlling births that is infinitely more convenient and reliable than Western pills or the Eastern hammer and sickle. Children belong to no one; adults who agree to supply their sperm or loan their uterus and then keep for themselves the children that result are accused of infanticide and put to death. Animal stupidity illustrates that no mind can advance in a sphere as small as pater-mater. Therefore, if you want a child to raise, he has to be free to go where he wants, speak to whom he wants, get organized as he wants, learn what he wants; and, through his hundreds of encounters, chats, associations, initiatives, risks, experiences, sleepovers and friendships with people of all ages, cultures, places, races and professions, he can match his mind to the yardstick of society. Refusing him this is to murder him, to turn him into a cretin who fears others and doesn’t know how to control himself, who doesn’t notice the links among things, has no light to shed on the life of the social body and won’t be able to furnish any apt solution to the problems it poses. He’ll become stultified in the miserable occupation to which he clings, and every difference, every novelty will render him nasty, every object, possessive, every desire, withdrawn and underhanded. This is why we liken to assassins those adults who indulge in the crime of the reconstitution of family (and a child who undergoes this is worth even less than a corpse).

  Once such a civilization is effectively in place, it will allow a minority that is incapable of being raised to practice pederasty the freedom to look for hetero pleasures between adults, without it being considered a crime. Of course, it will be necessary to hide it. But it’s easy to spot heteros: you can sense it. When they look at you, their eyes contain a mixture of guilt, dissimulation and sexual craving, something dishonest and shameful. When they’re with men, they only watch the women going by—and if they’re women, they stare at males exactly like a male would, but with a slimy, pathetic expression. We don’t condone these depraved individuals; if they accost you, denounce, execrate them, put them right; if there are two of them together, mock them, reprimand, threaten and separate them, put them in quarantine, exclude them from the group. Whether treated that way or not, they seem ill at ease; there’s nothing frank about them, nothing clear, nothing natural; no relaxed, open and trusting relationship with others. They aren’t a part of anything.

  When they get together in their particular enclave, they do grotesque parodies; the women, by feminizing themselves, imitating the coquetry of tarts; the men, by acting virile with the clumsiness of gorillas. They need these transvestisms to be desired, because they aren’t even convinced of being attractive to one another. It’s also their pathological hate of homosexual norms, the panicked fear they feel in the presence of people of their sex, that compel them to take on these disguises and twisted expressions, without which men and women would resemble each other too much; but hetero does mean “other,” referring as it does to the Greek term heteros (they help themselves to Greek), and it’s one of their ways of fabricating differences for themselves so that they can be sure they’re really practicing their vice and not normal love.

  You can imagine what sexual, affective and intellectual deficiencies create this obligation to tamper with themselves so that each becomes the fantasized opposite of the other; like crazy people who decided to associate by using only the left leg and arm of one and the right leg and arm of the other, despite the fact that each has all his or her members.

  These disabilities make them incapable of understanding other people (they claim they’re heterophiles, but the other always seems frightening and faraway to them) and of carrying out most collective tasks, since they divide everything they touch. Among objects, ideas, feelings, acts, even the sickest people still do distinguish the part that is to be reserved for one sex and the part that is destined for the other. A few undetected heteros in a group are enough for the homosexual organization of labor to fall apart—to the despair of everyone—until the cause is discovered and the divisive influence expelled.

  In general, they demonstrate great contempt for children, and some bestial reflex makes them want to dominate them and appropriate them for themselves. They don’t hesitate to order them around, and even hit them. Such offenses, such influences render the young incapable of acting in a responsible manner in society; those who were once the victims of heteros will demonstrate now and then certain deficiencies, which include servility, ignorance and aggression.

  In compensation, their disabilities are an aid to early detection. When a doofus who likes nothing and feels nothing tyrannizes others or obsessively tries to obey them, or a lass who acts scatterbrained and makes spelling mistakes or a blubberer or affected little girl who never has sex with anybody is spotted among children, a psychological exam immediately reveals the reason for it, which, fortunately, is not always as dreadful as hetero-mania. Because the latter is incurable; electric shock or a frontal lobotomy supress it, but these cause permanent mental decay; the sick people become slow-witted rather than true homosexuals.

  To prevent inveterate heteros from contaminating normal society, they’re allowed a few bars or clubs where they can meet. However, the police and neighbors harass them enough to make most of them—except for the wealthiest or most debauched—afraid of going there. There are dragnets at the meeting places they’ve improvised for themselves in the city: parks, railroad stations, shady hotels, carnival fairgrounds. We’ve had to destroy a number of public toilets because male and female heteros, taking advantage of the anonymity and rapid traffic, see in these facilities an efficient and risk-free way of meeting, recognizing one another and exhibiting their sexual organs to each another, and even a place to satisfy appetites they’ve curbed for too long. What normal citizen would choose to take refuge for his pleasures in a place so disgusting? But heteros have lost all dignity, any solution at all pleases them, any expedient attracts them and, actually, the more dangerous, degrading and unwholesome, the more they delight in it.

  The police send plainclothes officers to loiter in the remaining public toilets, plants who pretend to be heterosexual. This permits imprisoning a few of these perverts; because no law condemns their existence, there’s a strong need to invent other means to bring them to justice. Internal Affairs takes care of this.

  Of course, they’re prohibited from going around in public together, because the example would be too dangerous for our youth. And the sight of these men taking a woman by the hand or touching her neck would turn the stomachs of people passing by. There’d quickly be a brawl, trouble, fighting. Certainly they’re allowed to walk around outside, and even in pairs if they really want to; in fact, if they don’t look at each other, don’t touch, don’t
kiss, avoid any suspicious word or gesture, they’ll have no reprisals to worry about. Such minimal constraint is all that is expected of them from the time they are children to their death; yet even that makes them duplicitous and obsessed with embracing and feeling each other up. They do it without any consideration; and far from practicing that pleasant, tender courtship with which homosexual love so beautifully adorns our public benches, cafes, subways, heteros throw themselves on one another like animals. Thank God, it’s away from most eyes.

  Starting with the early stages of life, with the first people who bend over newborns’ cradles and caress them, masturbate them, tickle their uncontrolled anuses, we instill the habit of homosexual contact. It’s necessary to be vigilant, and to spare nothing to make their eroticism overcome the stages of bestial genitality. You speak about their body, their beauty, make them appreciate the sweetness of obscene words, bring them into contact with many individuals of every age to accustom them to plurality so that they can determine for themselves the kinds of company they prefer. However, if they seem too attached to members of the opposite sex, you break off these dangerous friendships as quickly as possible.

  Later, they discover that homosexual pleasure is the cement of all harmony and every activity. They are put severely on guard against the exclusive relations of the couple, which is an antisocial vestige of hetero-mania, a narcissistic and narrow-minded vice. You accustom them to blending sexual pleasure with the collective situations in which life places them: work, culture, leisure activities. Each year, we reward (with praise, candy, a crown of roses) those children who’ve had sex with the most citizens (some equitable proportion of whom should be ugly, infirm or senile) and in this way offer each the example of the perfect adaptation of their sexuality to civic duty. Thus, the sordid idea of privatizing sex, refusing another or remaining chaste won’t occur to anyone.