by Tony Duvert
We warn children against the absurdity of virilization and feminization; we tell them what kind of degradation threatens them if they become hetero, what kind of inferiority and isolation. We teach them how to recognize perverts and thwart their advances. From the first word they hear until they become adults, all conversations, books, toys, films and cartoons, magazines, comic strips, television shows, advertisements, all instruction in every discipline encourage young people to become homosexual and make them spurn and detest the opposite.
As for adults, sometimes they broach the shocking subject of “sexual minorities.” You have to know how to talk about it. Some pride themselves on having hetero friends, but that affectation of tolerance often serves to mask their own perversion. Nevertheless, it is on homosexuality and pedophilia that all human communication still remains focused: books, films, television, radio, newspapers, the university, the sciences, philosophy, sexology, photography, painting, sports, documents about heads of State, the important men and women, interviews, theater, mime, pornography, fashion, games, vacations, stamp collecting, gastronomy, religion, training fleas, official art and marginal research. As a result, members of this society would find it hard to discover in their mind or body the most minute trace of desire for the opposite sex, and are thus unanimously convinced that homosexuality is dictated by Nature—the nature of humanity.
There are enormous difficulties when it comes to showing the mainstream public the brutal scenes of hetero-mania presented by the life of animals; a film in which lion cubs grow up between the paws of their parents had to be censored, it so outraged the first people who saw it. Representing the truth to the point of provocation, in fact, is forgetting that objectivity must engender harmony and not disorder. The National Association of Minors with Baby Teeth, a very powerful pressure group, registered a complaint against a documentary: an adult, attractive-looking bird was giving her beak to naked, featherless, toothless, helpless baby birds that were confined to their nest. Settled in advance, the case demonstrated that these images had been rigged, and their author, judged guilty of hetero-familialist propaganda, was given neurosurgery before being executed (sick people are not put to death).
However, scientific minds take a certain pleasure, perhaps an obscurely perverse one (we all retain a vestige of heterosexuality), in the study of the predilections, ideas, habits, pleasures and physical and psychic aberrations of pudendal hetero-mania (considered to be the model for all forms), in that population of pudendal hetero-maniacs who turn themselves over to science. The study is, say these researchers, a kind of plunge into the distant past of the earth before homo sapiens—since we have somewhat rectified prehistory and now understand that the appearance of the human genus must be dated from the day when our ancestors renounced the family and coitus between the sexes. In museums, those bizarre little bone needles that were used to practice primitive inseminations are on display, as are the mortars, pots, herbariums and capsules that from all evidence were used in manufacturing or holding the unguent for sodomy; they come from every period and every land and are very gracefully painted, polished, sculpted or carved. Such objects have been found in prehistoric sites and digs, which is sufficient proof that they were used by homo sapiens.
We have also corrected history, the arts and monuments, organized archeological documents, literary heritage, travel and exploration narratives, to eliminate what might lead to the belief that other societies or other times didn’t have the same customs, or tolerated any mixture between hetero-mania and homosexuality. What sense would there be in letting evidence from the past spread a form of depravity that the modern age has healed us of? Finally, the rare texts or objects that haven’t been suppressed are locked in the cellars of museums and the bowels of libraries. No researcher who values his career, no serious scientist, no historian worthy of the name would be able to make use of these documents to qualify or, for all the more reason, upset the official State, erudite and scholarly versions of world history and geography, as well as the travel narratives, which affirm that humanity everywhere, from the time it left the rank of animals, was exclusively and persistently homosexual.
There are more and more works, films, investigative reports, debates, writings related to science, characters in novels, shocking news items that show heterosexuality under the most degrading, odious, laughable light. Other than this, everything should extol homosexuality, idealize it, beautify it, depict its most humble individual nuances by millions and billions. Everything should encourage it ceaselessly, keep silent about its injustices, mediocrities, misdeeds, tricks, failings; we must justify its pressures, honor its duties; and what doesn’t conform to the myth of a universal, radiant homosexuality, as the only gauge of dignity and human freedom, is distorted, falsified, and must be minimized or destroyed.
Heteros, who are inexplicably sensitive to these social demands, all lie low, cultivate feelings of guilt and self-loathing, suicidal ideation. They’re trying to work out a decent version of their lifestyle and denounce those among them who aren’t presentable—those who feminize or virilize themselves too much, those who take it out on minors, who react aggressively to oppression by homos (they think they’re being clever in dubbing normal citizens, who have no need to be named, homos)—instead of trying to cooperate with society with mutual respect and trust, as they’re invited to do.
The boldest and wealthiest flaunt their lifestyle with phony demonstrations of fulfillment: they needn’t, because their cynicism appalls most people. These imposters can’t conceal the real marks of their vice. Because heteros are unbalanced, immature, enervated and joyless, unhappy, hypocritical, lonely; their dirty pleasures, whose details are repulsive to recount, are furtive and sinister and don’t even satisfy them. Their conjugality proves it; because when they have intercourse with someone, they get so little satisfaction out of it that they need to repeat it again with that same person for months, even years, at a time—sometimes for their entire life. A pathological fixation, a compulsive sexuality; do they hope that by appropriating a partner and polluting him or her thousands of times, they’ll at last experience a pleasure that these aberrant and abnormal copulations will never be able to procure?
We don’t know what to do with these wrecks. Here’s hoping that we expose their ways; as long as they’re not too prestigious or rich, we’ll drive them out of their jobs and homes (but usually they go willingly because they’re cowardly about practicing their vice and are afraid of censure). Their friends abandon them, neighbors grumble, children are afraid of them. The police bother them as often as they want; it’s a kind of social therapy that reduces perversion better than the medical approach, which is very inefficient and difficult to institute widely. We try to make it impossible for them to make contact with each other, and they commonly hang out for hours, looking morose and peering at passersby of the opposite sex while fantasizing that one of them will return their depraved glances, by using their technique for identifying one other. Such cruising in the worst neighborhoods exposes them to the moments of danger that one would expect, and hoodlums, interestingly enough, enjoy setting them straight; there’s no reason for us to prevent such aggressions, and sometimes even the police, who want to clean up a park overrun by too many hetero-maniacs (which shocks night strollers and ruins lawns) will set loose on them a gang of hoodlums they’ve picked up somewhere else. In this way, delinquency is made useful to society, to decency, to gardening.
Science proves that the awful existence in which perverts delight is an obvious sign of their abnormality. Certain writers have created exciting and shocking books about it. They invent theories that explain how a person becomes hetero-manic; but the truth is that you don’t become it, you remain it. It’s caused by being fixated on an infantile stage of sexuality, which keeps these sick people from developing beyond the dictates of mammalian instincts, and from ever knowing the fullness that we experience when we submit our sexuality to social requirements and sublimate our tendency to
pleasure the opposite sex into feelings of friendship, attaching every aspect of our libidinal impulses to our own gender. We know what a jungle society was when humans were prey to hetero-mania; what tortures are endured by children when they’re born to pariah couples and live shut up with them, terrified by the outside world, not even daring to go into the street and meet their contemporaries. In fact, every image of honor, contentment, virtue and peace is associated with homosexuality, while every notion of baseness, unhappiness, violence and vice with heteros. We denounce the destruction of the social fabric that would lead to a revival of their mores: moronic, caricatural women kept in thrall to male lust, exploited like dogs; brutal, crass, despotic men, divisive and combative with one another; subservient children, treated with contempt and beaten and turned into half-wits; the atomization of the human community into little cells that resemble animals’ burrows, where all that reign are mutual hatred, heartbreak, jealousy, tyranny, moroseness and neurosis. This is contrasted by the immense current of free desire in homosexual society that unites, on the one hand, all boys and all men to men, and on the other, all girls and all women to women, and where peace-loving, egalitarian, respectful and mellow relations prevail between the sexes and among the ages. That being the case, hetero dictates, allowed expression now and then because of an excess of tolerance, have only one effect: they describe to all—to a horrible, nauseating and nightmarish degree—the suffering humanity would experience if it were dominated by the heterosexual order.
I shouldn’t have showed off like this; as imbecilic and repulsive as I made that society, it seems better than ours. I transposed all our defects, but in that context they lost most of their effect. And there’s still one aspect of this transposition that seems unbelievable: the protests. We can only reproach homosexuality for imaginary failings, and defects caused by social exclusion; on the other hand, in a world in which eroticism was free, who would listen to our heteros defend a sexual order as harmful as theirs?
What is more, it’s impossible to conceive seriously of a homosexual society, meaning one that would prevent other kinds of sexuality. Such persecution would be paradoxical, a useless precaution, a form of intolerance without any reason for existing. Permissive and nomadic, homosexuality (except the petit-bourgeois kind, because those queers have been conditioned to caricature hetero norms) wouldn’t know how to become a source of public prohibitions. Therefore, such a society wouldn’t be “homosexual”; but it wouldn’t know anything about our atrophied and cloistered heterosexuality, either. The latter is constructed purely by repelling, severing, attacking eroticism; and only for heterosexuality does permissiveness mean falling into ruin.
This can be seen in our morals. Heterosexuality claims to be based on instinctual, biological laws—and this permits the belief that since it is in conformity with our body’s nature, it also satisfies our mind and is thus something spontaneous and sound. But we proliferate to infinity not only techniques of sexual education and correction, but also repressions, taboos, obscurity, lies, censures; we liberally disseminate warnings, medical controls, psychological counseling, people to tinker with couples or to buckle up families, castrators of children, manuals, investigations, journals, compensatory transactions, substitutes, compromises, adhesives, collars, ointments in order to look after or repair this need that nature inspires in us. Have we ever done so many things in order to ensure that we’ll sleep or eat? Perverts have a less restive sleep, a less delicate appetite; their sexuality is only a house of cards poorly cobbled together by frightened brains, but they manage without education, sex specialists, matrimonial agencies, dogma, learning, institutions, hospitals, civil liberties, incentives, rules, experts, subsidies, rewards, dignity, spaces, protection, publicity, well-being, security, friendship, welcome—and they survive, in spite of the repressions I described in reverse above, and to which I’d like to see hetero drives submitted in order to assess what would remain of them after a few years. I never stop marveling that nature is so vulnerable, whereas anti-nature is so resistant. That what is constructed in advance is constructed with such difficulty, and that what is only a small undertaking by the disabled seems so resistant to being destroyed. [I read that, during the war in Vietnam, psychologists for the American army had noticed that the recruits who came from the ranks of the socially persecuted (blacks, queers, and all who “deviate” from the correct proportions) resisted mote effectively and for a longer time than others when it came to situations of acute stress: dangerous outposts, isolation, nervous tension, various frustrations, enemy prisons, torture, forced indoctrination, malnutrition, sensory deprivation. It’s a remarkable effect of the training these subhumans received in civilian life from their peace-loving fellow citizens. But that was in the name of freedom. I don’t know if minorities with high incomes reveal themselves to be as accustomed to stress as those of the inferior classes. Finally, I hope that all this is false; if not, it will be necessary to increase the penalties of prison that, directly or by means of the group, punish the differences of race or morals in our country. Since they endure it so well.]
Can it really be true that official heterosexuality can satisfy nothing of what it claims to fulfill? Degenerate straights; straights who sodomize, suck, fondle; straight voyeurs, porn lovers, pedophiles, zoophiles, enthusiasts of coprophilia; straight couple-swappers, sadomasochists, cruisers, sex freaks, nymphos have no need, any more than queers, of a universe at their beck and call; their sexuality holds up very well without the least social reinforcement. Could it be that their sexuality is enough for them? It is, however, as condemned as homosexuality, and those in charge of sexual development dissuade young people as severely from one as from the other.
Thus, if hetero orthodoxy represents nature and satisfies humans, as it claims to do, if a majority of humans choose it spontaneously, as they themselves believe, if they stick with it freely, which is the opinion of their police, and are fulfilled by it, as their thousands of health care workers claim, society shouldn’t have to fear other forms of love and be threatened by their practice, their ability to prosper or any unbiased information about them being made available to children or adults. The example of heterosexuality as the dominant orientation doesn’t transform homophiles into heteros; their predilections are genuine enough not to be offended by the sight of others’ sexuality. But if freedom for homosexuals, their overt presence, their equitable and permanent access to all means of expression available, beginning with those that touch the masses (and that isn’t books), are refused because they would pervert the majority—which is, however, so certain of its ways that it crushes whoever doesn’t practice them—then what worth is there to these laws, this order, this nature, and what is their relationship to the spectrum of needs that man, by one kind of sexual behavior or another, attempts to appease? Therefore “spontaneous,” monogamous, familial heterosexuality, since it rejects the proof of the plurality of mores, is clearly obtained—like the political unanimity of totalitarian countries—at the price of an enormous arsenal of constraints and estrangements inflicted since childhood; it is nothing but baseness, deceit, dictatorship; and it will implode from it.
Look at me, climbing onto my soapbox. Curdled milk quivering in a bowl. The only people who speak in the name of mankind are those who could point a gun at them. I’ll never put myself in that situation. Therefore I’m returning to my misbehavior, the account of which is a better match for my character.
The curdled milk is from Lewis Carroll, I was forgetting. I still haven’t read The Life of Don Pabbs. The text I was reading while scratching my anus, at the beginning of the third chapter, was Diderot, and is called Sequel to the Preceding Conversation.
The family that lives in my house is small in number, and it’s a quiet one. The man has a farm close by in the country. Usually he’s not there. He brings his food back from there. His family occupies only the ground floor, as I’ve said. One room on that floor, partly adjoining one of mine, is used as a henhouse. You
can see these ladies sticking their beaks out of the window, shaking their combs and feathers through the ironwork scrolling. Right before dawn, the cock sounds very close by; its crowing, a weird yelp, resembles the drawn-out bark of a dog or coyote. Sounds of another cock, farther off, answer it. These cries coming from various distances map the city, placing me in the middle of a star with numerous points of unequal length, some of which are so drawn out that they get lost in the outer edges of the night.
It’s the only nocturnal sound except for the crickets in summer. This isn’t mute silence, however; it’s a vibration so strong that, sometimes, under the sounds made by my body—gurgles, cardiac beats, swallowing, air flowing through my nose, eyelids blinking, cartilage crunching—I imagine I hear an immense river flowing. So either the sound or the silence within this nocturnal calm places me on a vast current that flows through my room, a current whose origin and endpoint I’m unaware of. I spread out, floating on my back into a lyrical interlude.
No boys in the family. A mother and three girls. The first two are women, the third is just becoming a toddler. I imagine the result of a last attempt to produce a male heir. A failure. The farm, the house and, I think, a shop will belong to a son-in-law. That enlightens them as to what kind of husband the girls will have, better than the loves-me-loves-me-not method. The little one is pampered and spoiled to the extreme. She yells, sings and runs wild a lot, for my pleasure. The others are silent and cold, cordial but distant. However, when I was repairing the windows that look out onto the patio (my floor is very high up), one of the sisters went back and forth constantly in the courtyard and each time gave me a shy smile, with a hint of a wink that could melt the glass. Then could I be her glamour boy? No; but I’m certainly not any more disgusting to look at than you. Get your mirror. Later, girls realized that I was crazy and stopped wanting me for a husband.
