Insult and the Making of the Gay Self

by Didier Eribon

  f r i e n d s h i p a s a way o f l i f e

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  conflicts between the refusal to submit and the calls permanently emitted by every social agency to return to the heteronormative order, be they in the form of the ordinary violence produced by the most banal situations of family or school life or the traumatizing brutality of insult and attacks.∂

  Gay as well as lesbian sociability is founded on a practice, even a ‘‘politics,’’ of friendship, on the necessity of making contacts, meeting people who could be friends, and slowly building a circle of chosen relationships.

  As Henning Bech puts it, ‘‘Being together with other homosexuals allows one to mirror oneself in them and find self-a≈rmation. It allows one to share and interpret one’s experiences. . . . The network of friends and the association [various kinds of gay social organizations—clubs, lodges, coali-tions, choirs, and so on], together with the pub or bar, are the most important social institutions in the homosexual’s life. Only through these is it possible to develop a more concrete and more positive identity as a homosexual.’’∑ One can here grasp the decisive importance such places hold: their primary function is to make encounters possible. (Thus one can also understand the necessity of guides to inform new ‘‘arrivals’’ of their existence and their whereabouts.)

  Proust, at the beginning of Cities of the Plain, makes a distinction between, on the one hand, ‘‘the solitaries’’ among homosexuals, who suppose ‘‘their vice to be more exceptional than it is’’ and who have ‘‘retired into solitude from the day on which they discovered it, after having carried it within themselves for a long time without knowing it,’’ and, on the other, those who have built up circles of friends with whom they meet in cafes, circles Proust compares to ‘‘professional organisations.’’ Yet he immediately adds that ‘‘it is, in fact, very rarely that the solitaries do not eventually merge themselves in some such organisation, sometimes from simple lassitude, or for convenience’’ (rtp, 2:642, 646). This literary snapshot might seem a bit faded with age, the reflection of a bygone time. But if one brackets what Proust says of the necessity for discretion to which these ‘‘organisations’’

  and groups of friends in cafes submit themselves (to a greater or lesser degree, it is true), and if one sets aside the particular vocabulary used by Proust, his entomological (even teratological) point of view, then it might seem that the structures of individual itineraries and of collective ways of life he describes are not so di√erent from what we know today.∏

  For today, as yesterday, a set of friends will form the center of a gay life,

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  i n s u lt a n d t h e m a k i n g o f t h e g ay s e l f and the gay person’s psychological (and also geographical) journey moves from solitude to socialization by means of meeting places (such as bars or parks). The gay way of life is founded on concentric circles of friendships as well as on the continually renewed e√ort to create these circles, to form these friendships. Chauncey’s book is a wonderful demonstration of this: while, from the beginning of the century onward, political authorities and the guardians of the social order described urban development as a ‘‘disorganizing’’ influence on traditional social bonds and a ‘‘destructuring’’ influence on individual psychologies, it was, for gays—and continues increasingly to be—an opening to social reorganization, the creation of new social bonds, and new forms of sociability, rendering possible a psychological restructuration around these bonds.π A shared participation in a stigmatized sexuality and the marginalization and exclusion implied by that sexuality form the basis for a specific world, inscribed just as much in the topography of cities as in the personalities of the individuals who have congregated in that world.

  Such individuals foster its existence and ensure its perpetuation from generation to generation. Michael Pollak described the gay world as ‘‘a group one is fated to join [un groupe de destin],’’ yet it seems preferable to me to speak of an invention, both collective and individual, of oneself.∫

  It thus makes little sense to speak of the ‘‘community’’ or of the ‘‘ghetto’’

  and so forth (these are all notions defined in regard to other categories—

  ethnic or religious—and are most often transposed to the gay and lesbian context without care or method) without linking them to the process of migration and the e√ects it produces, without linking them to the entire history of the departure for the big city and of the construction of a ‘‘gay world’’ produced by that history. The city, as the sociologist Robert Parks wrote in 1916, brings together a ‘‘mosaic of little [social] worlds.’’Ω This overlapping set of small worlds o√ers individuals the chance to belong to several universes simultaneously and, therefore, to have several social identities—professional, ethnic, religious, sexual—which are often sharply separated from each other. Thus a gay man can participate in the ‘‘gay world’’

  without losing his place in the heterosexual world: he will have two (or more) identities, one attached to his professional insertion in the social world (or to his ethnic origin) and another attached to his leisure time—one identity for the daytime, another for the night and the weekends. This often

  f r i e n d s h i p a s a way o f l i f e

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  produces the tensions inherent in a di≈cult ‘‘double life,’’ but it also permits a good many gay men to resist oppression and marginalization.∞≠

  Today’s gay visibility should not be taken as a sign that a certain number of people have only in recent years decided to define themselves by their sexuality. It is a sign that a larger and larger number of gay people have ceased hiding the ‘‘nocturnal’’ part of their life. If the ‘‘gay world’’ in which people had participated in more or less clandestine fashion is now more openly visible, this is not due to the fact that gays have suddenly decided to leave behind their previously homogenous and coherent social identities in order to a≈liate solely with their sexual identity. Rather, large numbers have ceased to hide the sexual identity that was just as defining for them as was their professional identity. Bars that open out onto the street with crowded terraces and windows displaying rainbow flags have taken the place of bars hidden in small streets with heavy doors equipped with a peep hole to allow the establishment to protect itself against unwished for invasions or attacks.

  If one wishes to analyze what the gay ‘‘community’’ is today—the simple evocation of which seems in France to provoke shivers of horror from

  upright-thinking people of all persuasions—all of this history of the sociability and of the ‘‘world’’ that gays constructed for themselves throughout the past century must be taken into account. For that very sociability, whose increasing commercialization or whose uniformity it is so easy to denounce these days, initially had and still has an emancipatory value, o√ering the possibility to young gays and lesbians to speed up the process of self-acceptance.∞∞

  The liberating e√ect of gay visibility probably extends even to those who do not participate in this ‘‘culture,’’ either because they are unable to (they do not live in a big city) or because they do not wish to (they choose to avoid the gay ‘‘scene’’). There is no doubt that the lives of gay men and lesbians as a whole have, over the past twenty years, evolved in a shared direction due to the visibility of a certain number of them, but evolved also in a way that is di√erentiated based on the degree of proximity to or distance from the central locations of subcultural life.∞≤ What counts is that homosexuality be sayable and showable. A gay man—or a gay couple—does not need to belong to the ‘‘gay scene’’ to profit from what has been gained through gay visibility and a≈rmation. A growing number of them can live more serenely, no

  longer entirely dissimulating who they are.

  If, as all of Foucault’s work insists (at least the early Foucault), a society

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  i n s u lt a n d t h e m a k i n g o f t h e g ay s e l f defines
itself by what it finds sayable and thinkable, we can assert that gay and lesbian visibility has had the e√ect of transforming the whole of society by the ways it has modified what can be seen, said, and thought. The gay movement, the opening outward and the intensification of ‘‘subcultural’’

  life, surely represents (along with feminism) one of the most intense questionings of the instituted order—the sexual and social order, but also the epistemological order—of the contemporary world.

  4

  Sexuality and Professions

  Gay lives often begin in a state of deferral. They only really begin when someone reinvents himself, leaving behind, at least partially, his ashamed secrecy and his silence, when he makes choices instead of merely putting up with things—for example, when he assembles a family for himself, made up of friends, former lovers, and friends of former lovers, thereby reconstructing his identity and leaving behind the stifling, narrow field of his family of origin with its tacit or explicit injunctions to be heterosexual. Such a flight does not, of course, necessarily entail a total rupture with one’s family, but rather the necessity of taking one’s distance from it. Before that, gay lives are only lived by proxy or in one’s imagination; they are lives in the o≈ng, both feared and longed for.

  Doubtless it is all of the wounds experienced during what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has splendidly described as ‘‘that long Babylonian exile known as queer childhood’’∞ that nourish the energies through which gay people create or recreate personalities for themselves—the same energies through which gay ‘‘culture’’ and ‘‘community’’ are created. It is a creative energy that begins by creating itself through flight. The capacity and the will to transform oneself and the necessary energy to do so are produced by the memories, but also by the permanent traces, the persistence of the feelings experienced during childhood and adolescence, feelings that have deeply structured the personal identity of many young gay people. Sedgwick rightly insists on the way in which the feelings of shame experienced in childhood form ‘‘a near-inexhaustible source of transformational energy’’ (4). How can the intensity of this shame be understood by those who have never experienced it? How can they understand the strength of the motivations produced by the desire to escape from it? And there are many other feelings or behaviors produced by the sexual ‘‘dissonance’’ within a family that might be

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  i n s u lt a n d t h e m a k i n g o f t h e g ay s e l f mentioned for the subsequent roles they play as ‘‘sources of energy’’ for someone’s project of self-restructuration. Take, for instance, the vague sentiment of being di√erent or marginal, of being ‘‘separate’’; take the invest-ment in literary or artistic models in the place of family or society-based models, because the former represent the only available recourse. The gay child—we need to be able to think here of ‘‘gay childhoods’’—first of all turned in on himself and organized his own psychology and his rapport with others around his secret and his silence. It is from this inner life that he draws the ability to transform himself. Perhaps this can help to explain the peculiar relation—one that has often been described—between gay men and books, between gay men and the world of culture. In a draft for Cities of the Plain ( Sodome et Gomorrhe), Proust evokes as a paradigmatic figure the ‘‘young boy made fun of by his brothers and friends’’ who

  walks alone for hours on the beach, sitting on boulders and question-

  ing the blue sea with a melancholy eye, an eye already full of worry and persistence, wondering if perhaps in this marine landscape with an

  azure sky—the same that already glittered in the days of Marathon and Salamis—he might not see advancing toward him on a rapid ski√ and

  ready to whisk him away, the very Antinous that he dreamed of all day long, and all night, as well, when any passerby could see him in the

  moonlight at the window of his villa, gazing out into the night, but

  hiding himself as soon as he was noticed—still too pure to imagine that a desire such as his could exist anywhere other than in the pages of a book.≤

  But what book would Proust be speaking of ? He also gives a description of the mechanism by which a particular relation to reading is established for gay men and by which they are led to identify with female characters: such is the only way for them to live out, by proxy, an emotional relation with another man: ‘‘Through an unconscious transposition, they associate with their bizarre desire everything that literature or art or life has contributed throughout the centuries to the e√ort to widen the notion of love as one would the bed of a river. . . . They await faithfully—as would a heroine in a novel by Walter Scott—the arrival of Rob Roy or of Ivanhoe.’’≥ Perhaps this is the source of the importance for gay men of culture in the large sense and of the fascination so often noted for ‘‘divas’’ and ‘‘stars,’’ whether of films, the press, literature, books, the arts, and so on.∂

  s e x ua l i t y a n d p r o f e s s i o n s

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  The flight from ‘‘heterosexual interpellation’’ of which I spoke in the previous chapter can even help to interpret a choice of profession as a fundamental component of one’s self-construction, of one’s personal identity. A certain number of studies, notably the recent article by Marie-Ange Shiltz, have put forward the hypothesis of a form of upward social mobility specific to gay men. It would seem that the migration to the big city is statistically linked to the e√ort of young gay men from more working-class backgrounds to escape from manual occupations and to orient themselves toward professions in which it is possible to imagine that they will benefit from a greater degree of tolerance, or, at least, which will enable them to live out their sexuality more easily. It would also seem that, more generally, there is an orientation toward ‘‘artistic’’ professions, or toward the more ‘‘artistic’’

  poles of other professions. This allows one to understand, as Michael Pollak suggested, the orientation toward occupations such as that of hairdresser, which would be situated at the most artistic pole of manual occupations.∑ In any case, migration to the big city seems to lead to rising educational or social trajectories, at least statistically speaking. Of course, given that the studies by Marie-Ange Schiltz (and those she conducted earlier with Michael Pollak) are based on the analysis of replies to questionnaires that were published in the gay press, her results rely on a spontaneously produced sample, which necessarily creates certain significant biases. (Only people who have already self-identified as gay are likely to take the step of buying a gay magazine, not to mention taking the further step of responding to a questionnaire found in that magazine.) This would explain the over-representation in the responses of men living in large cities and better circumstances. It is clear, in e√ect, that gay men in more working-class environments, in small towns, in rural areas, and in ethnic suburbs often find it impossible to acknowledge themselves as such and thereby to be taken into account in statistically based sociological studies. Yet, as Marie-Ange Schiltz has emphasized, the divergence between the voluntary re-

  sponse from the gay sample and responses obtained from the general population by other means is so significant that one can assume that the bias in the sample is not su≈cient in and of itself to explain the phenomenon.

  What conclusions shall we draw from what the statistical information

  reveals? There is doubtless some kind of intergenerational solidarity (even if it is not lived or experienced as such) between older gay men and the younger

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  i n s u lt a n d t h e m a k i n g o f t h e g ay s e l f ones they may help to escape from their social or familial surroundings, providing them with the occasion or the impulse to leave. (This phenomenon may well nourish the old myth about a gay free-masonry—‘‘they all help each other out.’’ But above all it reveals that the invisible chain of solidarity between gay people is created first and foremost through the aggregation of thousands of individual gestures.)∏ This undeniable
reality (whose e√ects are of course somewhat limited) could not on its own explain the phenomenon revealed by the sociological studies, which perhaps encourage us to wonder about a kind of pre-knowledge of oneself as homosexual before even entering into one’s sexuality. One is obliged to think that the observed tendency toward a scholastic achievement higher than the norm, the choice of certain kinds of professions (‘‘artistic’’ rather than manual), or, within certain kinds of careers or occupations, the di√erence that encourages gay people to become, for example, cultural rather than economic journalists or lawyers who specialize in the rights of authors rather than in business law, must come into play very early, even at the youngest of ages. One might also recall, among other possible givens, the penchant for reading (a more ‘‘feminine’’

  activity), which is associated with a penchant for interior as opposed to exterior spaces (staying home to read rather than going out to play soccer, when reading is considered by the masculinist ideologies of working-class milieux as an activity for ‘‘fairies’’ or ‘‘fags’’), and so on.π

  An anthropology of homosexuality would need to concern itself with this particular aspect of personal accounts, which one often comes across in autobiographies (even if it is not explicitly thematized). It is not enough simply to tabulate the distance from statistical averages of certain trajectories and certain incomes. Perhaps one should compare educational, social, and professional trajectories within a given family, those of a gay man and his heterosexual siblings. There is a crucial question to be asked that quan-titative and qualitative studies often leave to the side (it is, of course, not their central concern): what exactly is a social trajectory, and, in particular, what is an upward social trajectory—more exactly, what does it signify in particular for this or that individual? At what moment does such a thing come into play, at what age, and what are the signs of such a trajectory, what are its components? The point is not to establish some overly simplistic causality (being gay—even before the fact—somehow producing a will to succeed at school); rather it is a question of inquiring into the relation between the dispositions associated with a certain kind of sexuality (and a kind of psychology that goes along with it) and the dispositions that orient someone toward educa-