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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tional and professional courses of action that could be understood as having to do with upward mobility. What would be the genesis of this kind of relation, unless, in fact, we are talking about what are basically the same dispositions?
Proust was already, in his own way, writing about what seemed to him the obvious and yet mysterious link between a sexual orientation and artistic dispositions: ‘‘I thought with curiosity of this combination in a single person of a physical blemish and a spiritual gift. M. de Charlus was not very dif-ferent from his brother, the Duc de Guermantes. . . . But it had su≈ced that nature should have upset the balance of his nervous system enough to make him prefer, to the women that his brother the Duke would have chosen, one of Virgil’s shepherds or Plato’s disciples, and at once qualities unknown to the Duc of Guermantes and often linked to this lack of equilibrium had made M. de Charlus an exquisite pianist, an amateur painter who was not devoid of taste, and an eloquent talker’’ (rtp, 2:985–86, my emphasis, translation modified). Let us set aside for the moment the Proustian explanation by way of an
‘‘imbalance in his nervous system’’ and the link between a psychological imbalance and an artistic temperament. Doubtless Proust owed such explanations to his readings of psychiatrists: is this not exactly the thesis presented by Max Nordau in his book, Degeneration, which devotes a number of pages to Wilde, or by Cesare Lombroso in The Man of Genius? Despite all that, Proust is clearly posing the question of the relation between certain dispositions which are linked in no self-evident way, and yet which are su≈ciently frequently found together so that their relation seems noteworthy.
This imbrication of the feeling of being ‘‘di√erent’’ with a yearning for an
‘‘artistic’’ life can be discovered in many an autobiography—for instance in that of Guy Hocquenghem, who wrote in 1988: ‘‘One’s childhood years are somewhat undefined; there’s the inspiration of a desire to di√erentiate yourself and an aspiration (a frenetic one) toward other atmospheres that together cause one’s chest to swell with unsatisfied regrets. It’s something like a cross between the promise to become a genius, to start a revolution, to become a saint or a great artist, or else to kill yourself at the first sign of adulthood.’’∫
This brings to mind the quandary Bourdieu points to in Distinction, when he wonders why there is such a strong correlation between the frequency with which one visits museums and the amount of time one has devoted to one’s schooling, given that there has been almost no time devoted to artistic education in those schools. We can recall how Bourdieu works to find an ex-
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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 planation for this correlation by studying the common genesis both of a happy and lasting relation to the educational system and of a love of art. He shows how the positioning of individual subjects within the established social order determines—even on the deepest levels of a given personality—the concomitant acquisition of aesthetic and educational dispositions, thereby reinscribing singular cases within a general pattern. We have posed here a question of the same order: how is this correlation between sexual and intellectual dispositions, one Proust ascribed to an anomaly of nature, produced? Doubtless, we must consider the entire process (both conscious and unconscious) of the formation of gay subjectivities, which means considering the e√ects that the established sexual order exercises on gay people and the place that they occupy in that order, in order to account for the individual forms of di√erentiation or divergence that awakened Proust’s ‘‘curiosity.’’ It is as if the process of subjection itself brought into being a will (already present prior to any conscious decision) to resist that process, to escape from it—to choose oneself the shape of one’s own subjectivity.Ω
5
Family and ‘‘Melancholy’
If friendship networks are crucially important for young gay men newly arrived in a city, they are equally so for older gay men, especially when they stop participating in bar life or cruising. The well-known theme of the
‘‘loneliness’’ of the aging gay man is not merely the product of a homophobic imagination: it corresponded for a long time to the lived experience of numerous individuals. ‘‘Gay culture’’ has allowed for the creation of lasting bonds of friendship. Friends are thus for gay men what we might call a
‘‘substitute family,’’ except that such an expression would seem to recognize what rather should be put into question: the legitimacy and ‘‘naturalness’’ of the heterosexual way of life. It is undeniable that the quasi-necessity to break away from the family milieu (or, more exactly, to give up a harmonious place within that family) obligates individuals to undertake the serious work of establishing friendships—and also provides them the occasion and the energy to devote to that work. Friends who have been met in gay locales replace both family relations that have been abandoned to a greater or lesser extent and relations in the workplace, which are so di≈cult for gay men and lesbians to establish and maintain, especially if they are trying to keep their sexuality secret.
This project of substituting chosen or constructed bonds for ‘‘natural’’
and familial ones is far from easy. It presupposes a simultaneous project of mourning, often a long and painful one, which, like all mourning processes, as Jacques Derrida rightly reminds us, is never finished.∞ One has to give up—
to a greater or lesser extent—life within the family circle; further, one has to accept, as constitutive of one’s own self, this more or less obligatory renunciation. Perhaps this explains, a contrario, why a certain number of gay men and lesbians experience such a strong desire to be recognized as legitimate couples or families by those close to them (notably by their families) and by
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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 society at large (and thus by the law). In such cases it is not simply a question of adopting heterosexual ‘‘models,’’ as is sometimes asserted (‘‘imitating the hets,’’ as would say those who prefer to remain outside any recognized institutional framework), but, more fundamentally, of recovering a grounding in a lost family and perhaps thereby of restoring the bonds with the family one has left, or of reentering ‘‘normal’’ life by joining once again the sequence of generations. Of course, this break with or distancing of the family (more or less fierce, more or less complete) is often initially felt as a moment of true liberation. Often (although not always) individuals, far from su√ering from the break with their families (except perhaps in specific kinds of moments, as in an illness), see in it a necessary precondition to their self-realization as gay or lesbian. But with the passage of time, especially once the most intense period of one’s sexual life (and thus the ways of life associated with it) is over, this separation becomes harder and harder for many to endure. The same is doubtless true for many heterosexuals who have broken with their family for any number of reasons, including upward social mobility, diverging political opinions, living as an unmarried couple in circles that do not accept such arrangements, or having as a partner someone from a stigmatized category (black, North African, Jewish, and so on). But this experience seems almost consubstantially attached to homosexuality.
One day it becomes time to try to reestablish family ties. This may be the beginning of a long process of reconciliation and reintegration, one that will take a lifetime. These attempts at reconciliation usually involve concessions on both sides—for example, the decision to leave sexuality in the realm of the unspoken: even if parents ‘‘know,’’ they act as if they do not. Sometimes the situations allow for more explicitness, when, for example, a gay man or a lesbian get their parents slowly to recognize the reality of their relationship with a partner, who is finally admitted into the family.
Surely there exists a specifically homosexual ‘‘melancholy.’’ (‘‘Melancholy’’ is meant here in the psychoanalytic sense o
f a never-ending process of mourning, one impossible to finish, and which, as Freud tells us, marks the process of ego-formation by way of a set of refused identifications.≤) Judith Butler mentions this idea of a melancholy specific to homosexuals in regard to the ‘‘choice’’ of a sexual object. She discusses the process of mourning of the rejected heterosexual object, one integrated as a rejected possibility into the process of ego-formation.≥ I would like to modify her
fa m i ly a n d ‘‘m e l a n c h o ly ’’
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analyses (which in my view are too dependent on the theoretical schemas of psychoanalysis) in order to shift to a more general sociological approach to the question of the relationship of individuals to family structure and to their social insertion.
This ‘‘melancholy’’ arises from the unending, unfinishable mourning of the loss homosexuality causes to homosexuals, that is to say, the loss of heterosexual ways of life, ways that are refused and rejected (or that you are obliged to reject because they reject you). Yet the model of social integration attached to these rejected ways of life continues to haunt the aspirations and the unconscious of many gay men and lesbians. Bergson says that an individual’s life is haunted by choices not made. In this case, the life of gay men—and of lesbians—is unquestionably haunted by ways of life and forms of relations to others that have been set aside or done without, willingly or not, because of their sexuality. This ‘‘melancholy’’ is linked to the loss of family ties (with parents, brothers, the family circle), but also to the sometimes unavowed dream of a family life, a dream certain people cannot bring themselves to give up, endeavoring as much as possible to create such a life for themselves over time, living as long-term couples, raising children (who may be the o√spring from a previous heterosexual existence or, in the case of women, the result of artificial insemination or the more ‘‘natural’’ intervention of a friend).
This ‘‘melancholy’’ is closely tied, for a certain number of gay men and lesbians, to the idea that they cannot have children. Such an idea is often o√ered in responses to the questionnaires of sociologists as an instance of an obstacle to self-acceptance as gay or lesbian, the idea of admitting that one is ‘‘permanently’’ gay or lesbian being perceived as synonymous with the obligation—an unimaginable one for certain people—to give up the hope of having children. One might wonder if this sensitive issue does not represent one of the most deeply rooted aspects of psychological ‘‘su√ering’’ in homosexuals of both sexes. Or perhaps one could choose to think of it as one manner of expressing a di√use form of su√ering di≈cult to express in any other way than by reference to conventional situations. In The Weight of the World, Pierre Bourdieu and the sociologists who worked with him have shown how ‘‘su√ering’’ is not linked merely to economic ‘‘conditions’’ but also to what they call the ‘‘positions’’ within the specific space in which one lives. In order to explain what he means by ‘‘positional su√ering,’’ Bourdieu mentions Patrick Süskind’s play, The Double Bass, which ‘‘presents an especially striking image of how painfully the social world may be experienced by
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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 people who, like the bass player in the orchestra, occupy an inferior, obscure position in a prestigious and privileged universe.’’∂ Surely homosexuality (even though, oddly enough, it is not considered in Bourdieu’s book) is one of those social ‘‘positions’’ that engenders a particular form of psychological
‘‘su√ering.’’ Moreover, it seems symptomatic that one of the problems encountered by the sociologists in conducting this huge project—a project that resembles a form of social psychoanalysis—grew out of the di≈culty in transforming the weight of this su√ering into speech. There was the further problem, within the speech produced, of grasping what is really being said among all the remarks that tend to obscure matters and all the things that are said so as to avoid saying what is crucial. This can help us to understand why the current demands of the lesbian and gay movement find themselves publicly expressed with such vehemence. It is not only because they express the legitimate desire to put an end to certain forms of discrimination or because the demands encounter discourses of such violent hostility, such hatred, such scorn, that reactions of anger and revolt seem inevitable. It is also because these demands stir up for many the deepest fibers of consciousness and of the unconscious, marked by all the wounds of childhood and adolescence of which I spoke above. They contain within themselves all of the passion produced by the ‘‘melancholy’’ from which the demands are meant to help one escape.∑
One might well think that this ‘‘melancholy’’ is constitutive of the gay ego to such an extent that it is present even in those who feel no inclination to recognize anything lacking in themselves simply because they do not participate in a family, and who, far from seeing in the family an ideal to strive for, rather hold it in contempt. The aggression that often characterizes this discourse of radical rejection of the family shows that the relation to the family is never simple and certainly never neutral. Mourning for the family is
‘‘interminable’’ for those who recognize the process. Even for those who refuse the entire process, it cannot be said that such mourning can simply be done away with, for it is finally in this ‘‘mourning’’ that a personality is constituted. The gay man or lesbian with the most hostility toward family models is still defined precisely by the rejection of an identification with those models. One might even think, given the social omnipresence of these models, that they even manage to shape the way in which one defines oneself against them. Judith Butler is certainly correct when she writes (in a somewhat di√erent context) that ‘‘what is repudiated and hence lost is preserved as a repudiated identification.’’∏
fa m i ly a n d ‘‘m e l a n c h o ly ’’
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This is why it seems to me worth one’s while to avoid creating an opposition between those gay men a≈liated with a way of life outside of any institutional or juridical recognition (many of them a≈liated with a free sexuality that welcomes multiple partners) and those gay men who prefer to live as a couple and who aspire to have this union legally recorded. Such an opposition, accepted by many gays in one or the other of these two ‘‘camps,’’
is one of the most pernicious traps set by a liberal form of homophobic discourse—a discourse that makes use of the fact that there are those who do not want to hear marriage spoken of in order to justify refusing that right to others who would like to obtain it. The dividing line between the two camps is far from clear and seems to disappear the closer one looks. First of all, the demand for gay marriage is not simply the expression of the aspiration of certain gay people to enter into the matrimonial institution—this would be a simple abdication of will in the face of heterosexual ways of life. Were gay marriage to become a reality, it would profoundly and permanently alter the institution itself. Indeed, if gay people today are able to demand the right to marriage, it is because the institution has already changed. The desacraliza-tion of marriage is what makes possible the claim that it should be open to same-sex couples.π
One might also point out that what might seem to be two irrevocably
opposed ways of life (sexual freedom on the one hand, marriage on the other) can sometimes simply be di√erent stages in the life of the same individuals. Those who participate in the former during a more or less lengthy period may as the years pass move toward the latter, as did the Baron Charlus, who, ‘‘tiring of the strangers whom he picked up, had gone to the opposite extreme, to what he used to imagine that he would always loathe, the imitation of conjugal life or of fatherhood’’ (rtp, 3:207). Or, alternatively, persons who had set up as couples at a young age may, after a breakup, discover the pleasures of multiple partners. This leaves unmentioned those who live as lasting couples without feeling obliged to give up multiple encounters. But the real reason one might think that these two ways o
f life are not mutually opposed, but rather mutually reinforcing, is that they are produced by the same set of determining factors, by the same set of
‘‘su√erings,’’ and are both ‘‘solutions’’ invented to escape from that su√ering. Sartre spoke on several occasions of homosexuality as a ‘‘solution’’
[ issue] invented by an individual to escape from an unbearable situation.
(This is why he compares homosexuality to literature, his model being, as usual, Genet.)∫ The idea that one ‘‘chooses’’ to be homosexual makes, of
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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 course, little sense and was refuted by Genet himself, who always replied that being homosexual was for him on the same order as having two feet and two hands. But, on a di√erent level entirely, one might recuperate this idea of homosexuality as a ‘‘solution’’ or a ‘‘way out’’ as a description not of the
Insult and the Making of the Gay Self Page 7
