Insult and the Making of the Gay Self

by Didier Eribon

  ‘‘queens’’ finding sexual partners. Men belonging to the ‘‘race of queens,’’

  which is to say to the ‘‘third sex,’’ are certainly not attracted to each other. In fact they detest each other, as Proust never stops pointing out. They are

  ∫∏

  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 horrified by the e√eminacy that they find in the others. But either by necessity or by love they reciprocally choose to forget that the person they are sleeping with is not a real man but an ‘‘infamous queen.’’ Yet what should one call a member of the ‘‘third sex’’ who sleeps with another member of the

  ‘‘third sex,’’ a ‘‘hermaphrodite’’ who sleeps with another ‘‘hermaphrodite,’’

  if not, precisely, ‘‘homosexual’’?∞∫ In spite of himself, in spite of everything, the invert can only love one who is like him, while imagining him to be di√erent.

  There is an important di√erence between Ulrichs and Proust. The first intended to defend homosexuality. His was a militant project. He produced an entire theory of the ‘‘particular’’ nature that characterized a certain number of individuals, in order to enable himself to request the decriminalization of homosexuality. If ‘‘inversion’’ is ‘‘natural,’’ it can no longer be a

  ‘‘vice’’ or a sin. Proust’s intention, on the other hand, is to build his novelistic project around the revelation of a truth whose appearance he knows might seem monstrous, and he does nothing to make that appearance more palatable.∞Ω He will even say to Gide that he transposed into the ‘‘ shades of young women all the attractive, a√ectionate, and charming elements contained in his homosexual recollections, so that for Sodom he is left nothing but the grotesque and the abject.’’≤≠ Doubtless this is the reason why he was praised by critics for a good number of years for his way of showing, as a good ‘‘moralist,’’ the abjection of this infamous race.≤∞

  In Ulrichs we find an astonishing mixture of gay activism and of homophobic thought, and in Proust an equally astonishing mixture of an un-daunted will to speak of homosexuality and the necessity to present it in an inglorious light. In both of them together we find a mixture of a careful a≈rmation of the existence of homosexuals and an eternal obligation to portray them in reference to heterosexuality, to describe them in terms of inversion and the relationship between masculinity and femininity. All of this, as we shall see in the pages ahead, is a formative part of the history of homosexuality since the mid-nineteenth century, and part of the struggle for gay peoples to begin to speak for themselves.

  But what interests us at this point is to see to what an extent homosexual subjectivity is subservient to heterosexual modes of representation and to the normative violence exercised by them. Homosexuality is always referred back to a norm, even when it is homosexuals who speak. The word ‘‘queen’’

  i n v e r s i o n s

  ∫π

  ( tante) is not only an insult. It is also a social image and a psychological type that have been defined by the sexual order and by the inferiorization of homosexuality. In this context, the notion of inversion is nothing other than an insult dressed up in pseudo-scientific clothing. In its double meaning, it refers, on the one hand, to the idea that the masculine is superior to the feminine (and therefore to the idea that the man who loves women is superior to the man who loves men, who might be suspected of being a woman in any case). On the other hand, it refers to the idea that a relation that unites

  ‘‘di√erences’’ is superior to one that brings together things that are the same. Which amounts to saying, in both cases, that a heterosexual is superior to a homosexual—because he is heterosexual.

  Moreover, the way of thinking that sets up the di√erence between sexes as a norm, and same-sex love as a form of deviance or perversion, or, at best, a

  ‘‘special case’’—a way of thinking that has at certain times in history taken on the face of totalitarian violence and sometimes takes on today the face of liberal tolerance—is simply the expression of the social and sexual order that set up the world of insult in which gay people must live. As a way of thought, it is su≈ciently powerful that it often imposes itself on gay people themselves.

  The gay unconscious is also structured by the rules of heterosexual language. Only the political and cultural work of the collective reinvention of gay people by themselves could manage to perturb the immemorial cycle in which this unthought social heteronormativity reproduces itself.

  12

  On Sodomy

  With Proust and Ulrichs, one sees clearly how a reflection on homosexuality is inevitably and deeply marked by homophobic representations and often imprisoned in the very structures of the heterocentrist unconscious—for which sexuality is only possible when it involves the di√erence between and the complementarity of masculinity and femininity. This domination of the heterocentrist unconscious, from which Proust and Ulrichs, in their historical moments, probably did not have the tools to escape, has been given legitimacy by psychoanalysis, which provided it with a foundation that it claimed was scientific. From Freud to Lacan and on to Lacan’s disciples, this idea of the ‘‘di√erence of the sexes’’ has prospered and has imposed itself as an ideological principle that is never subjected to interrogation in all that is written about sexuality, and, obviously, about homosexuality. Homosexuality can only ever be seen as a sexuality or an a√ectivity from which something is missing; it is always confronted with the normality of ‘‘di√erence.’’ It is a

  ‘‘perversion,’’ an ‘‘arrested development’’ of an individual and his or her desires. It is an ‘‘incapacity’’ to recognize the ‘‘other.’’ And so on ad nau-seam. All these heterocentrist discourses, all these scientific mythologies which make heterosexuality into the norm and the point of view from which every situation must be viewed (aided by all the implausible ideological constructions that have been produced out of the theory of the ‘‘Oedipus complex’’), all contribute to the ongoing processes by which homosexuality is rendered inferior. They all contribute to the perpetuation of this inferiorization (even if Freud’s intentions had something admirable about them—

  given that he always wished to struggle against the repression inflicted on homosexuals). It is worth noting that there is not a single instance of a political position being taken against social and legal recognition for couples of the same sex, against equal legal treatment, that does not sooner or

  o n s o d o m y

  ∫Ω

  later invoke in its argument for continuing discrimination the great principle of the ‘‘di√erentiation of the sexes’’ and of its ‘‘institution’’ by the social order, providing thereby the very basis of culture, civilization, and so on.

  Clearly a specifically sexual kind of racism exists, one that refuses to consider love for the same sex as equivalent to love for the other sex. This racism is not directly or explicitly the product of an analysis in terms of the

  ‘‘inversion of genders,’’ even if that particular thematic is always lurking in the shadows of the homophobic unconscious, ready to jump back into play in any given paragraph. In this context, what is rejected or treated as inferior (for many nuances are possible) is simply ‘‘the love of the same.’’ In order to declare an opposition to the right to marriage, to adoption, to reproductive technologies, or simply to any kind of legal recognition for same-sex couples, it is su≈cient to call upon the idea or the presupposition that there is some kind of natural, biological, cultural, or ethical superiority of a couple that involves sexual duality over a couple that unites two who are ‘‘the same.’’

  Or one can simply denounce homosexuality as a refusal of ‘‘alterity,’’ a rejection of ‘‘di√erence,’’ and an ‘‘exclusion’’ of the opposite sex.

  Certainly the existence of this sexual racism directed at the inversion of the object is incontestable. It is even sometimes today the dominant note in homophobic discourse, nota
ble in its liberal and most euphemistic versions.

  Yet it remains true that it is in the condemnation of ‘‘interior’’ inversion, that is to say of a failure to conform to conventionally defined roles, that the most violently homophobic fantasies and the greatest hostility toward homosexuality find themselves constructed in Western societies. The constant and brutal hatred of e√eminacy in men, be it real or supposed, is doubtless matched by the hostility directed at women who are too ‘‘masculine.’’ The reactions to the ‘‘garçonnes’’ of the 1920s and 1930s would be good evidence of this.∞

  One might say that all of the transformations that, over the course of the past thirty or forty years, have a√ected the image that gay men seek to provide for themselves—notably the processes of bodily or gestural ‘‘masculinization,’’ the masculinization of codes of dress, and so on—have yet to successfully challenge the traditional representation of the gay man as a ‘‘fairy,’’ ‘‘queen,’’ ‘‘fruit,’’ ‘‘nelly,’’ or ‘‘nancy-boy,’’ all those feminizing words that signify homosexuality as gender inversion in a man. (‘‘Butch’’ or

  ‘‘bull dyke’’ or ‘‘diesel dyke’’ are perhaps equivalents for women.) It might occur to one to wonder about the illusion under which gay men may have been operating in imagining that it would su≈ce for them to wear boldly on

  Ω≠

  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 their sleeves the signs of their masculinity in order to transform stereotypes of homosexuality. George Mosse notes that, as early as the 1920s, the majority of gay magazines sought to provide ‘‘masculine’’ images to gay men.

  ‘‘The continuity of the normative ideal among homosexuals through a time of change can be illustrated by examples . . . taken from German gay love stories written between 1924 and 1979, in which ‘beautiful young men’ are invariably lithe, muscled, and blond, with faces hewn in stone. . . . Here, there was no di√erence between normative masculinity and its foes.’’≤ Yet despite all that, gay men were in all those years still perceived and still rendered in caricature and in homophobic discourse as e√eminate. In television sitcoms today, the requisite gay character may be bu√, but he is also still e√eminate. Little has changed since the time when Proust described gay men as women wearing a man’s body. Consequently, however that body chooses to present itself, however ‘‘manly’’ it has made itself, indeed even if it has constructed itself as a masculine body to the point of caricature, still nothing has changed in the social perception of the person inhabiting that body, whose psychology, seen according to normative categories, could only be feminine. For homosexuality between men implies a desire for a man, and therefore a necessarily feminine psychology. It hardly su≈ces to demonstrate the absurdity or the incoherence of such representations (two gay men who are attracted to each other are, in fact, di≈cult to perceive simultaneously as women attracted to a man) in order to make them disappear.

  Thus it is not hard to understand the force with which many gay men

  reject ‘‘femininity’’ and ‘‘e√eminacy.’’ Those men work so eagerly to distance themselves from such aspects of gay identity precisely because others, to the contrary, continue to take up such roles, to ‘‘camp it up.’’ (This is made clear by the permanence of a specific trait in the subculture which has endured across many periods and which consists in men speaking of themselves and other men in linguistically feminine forms.) Perhaps Michael Pollak was revealing his own wishes when he wrote, in an astonishingly prescriptive manner for someone usually so careful as regards scientific rigor, that this play with the feminine form and with femininity was the product of oppression and would disappear with it.≥ The idea that visibility and ‘‘emancipation’’ would bring with them an ‘‘end of oppression,’’ of repression, and of homophobia is already quite surprising in its own right. Yet beyond that, Pollak’s claim is still astounding, given that it seems to choose to ignore that a good portion of contemporary gay culture takes its very form from an attraction to femininity. Certainly there is another part of that culture that

  o n s o d o m y

  Ω∞

  might be described in opposing terms as arising from a strong allegiance to masculine values. Still, one need not go all the way back through all the centuries in which this attraction to the feminine is found (it was already being denounced by the canonical authors of classical Greece and Rome and has more recently provoked anger from feminists when they take it to be an attraction to the most caricatural images of femininity) in order to suppose that this cultural trait is su≈ciently omnipresent that it cannot simply be the fruit of the interiorization of homophobic representations.

  Camp and drag humor can certainly be described as a strategy of re-

  sistance to or reappropriation of the accusation of e√eminacy.∂ But above all, camp and drag express the creativity and inventiveness of a minority culture and the ways in which such a culture, through its own irony, o√ers the best critique of itself and of others. It is hard to see why this play with femininity should be described as the interiorization of a constraint. Why should it not be seen as one—and certainly it is only one, but, whether you like it or not, it certainly is one—of the characteristic traits of male homosexuality, of the ways in which a certain number of gay men like to think of themselves, like to carry themselves. Would it not rather be through an inability to think in these terms—which do not fit with normative conceptions of masculinity and femininity—that one would reveal oneself to be trapped by some kind of interiorized constraint?

  In any case, we can now see that the obsession with masculinity that has imposed itself throughout the past twenty years as one of the most visible features of an a≈liation to ‘‘gay culture’’ has hardly caused a play with femininity or even simply e√eminacy to disappear. Far from it. These two aspects can inhabit the same bar, the same nightclub, the same demonstration, and even the same individual.

  Despite all the e√orts of certain gay men to put an end to the ‘‘feminine’’

  image, despite their impatience with and their anger at those who renew or perpetuate this ‘‘bad image’’ in Gay Pride parades (as if the only ‘‘good’’

  image acceptable to the agents of the established order were not precisely that of a total submission to their norms, and therefore a renunciation of homosexuality), it seems obvious that, in the regard directed at gay men, there continues to be the idea that a gay man is someone who renounces his virility by accepting or being always susceptible to accepting the ‘‘passive’’

  role in the sexual act. Our most frequent insult makes that so blatantly clear that we need not dwell on the matter.∑ And if psychoanalytic studies show that the homophobia of male heterosexuals is often tied to the fear of (or the

  Ω≤

  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 fantasy of ) anal penetration, it will not be su≈cient, in order to overcome this hostility, as deeply anchored in the archaic region of the masculine brain as it is, indeed, as deeply anchored as it is in the very definition of masculinity, to point out that not all gay men practice sodomy. It will not su≈ce to let it be understood that many gay men are ‘‘tops.’’ (After all, if there are

  ‘‘tops’’ there are ‘‘bottoms,’’ which simply renews the stigmatization of homosexuality.)

  It might be more useful to reject the entire dichotomy of active/passive or top/bottom and then to analyze its ideological function as the structural principal of masculine domination of women, and, by extension, of heterosexual domination of homosexuals.∏ For example, Bourdieu analyzes the opposition between ‘‘front’’ and ‘‘back’’ as a structuring principle of the Kabyle cosmology. The front is the noble (and masculine) part, the back the shameful (and feminine) one. Now it is striking to find that it is always the ‘‘rear’’

  that becomes the focus of jokes and insults regarding gay men. In the caricatures published in the newspapers during t
he Eulenburg a√air, one sees the most high-ranking army o≈cers reviewing a lineup of soldiers who turn their backs to them and stick out their rumps.π How could one not think of these images when one reads in Proust of the comment made by the sculptor Ski in reference to Charlus during a train ride to La Raspelière: ‘‘ ‘Oh!’ the sculptor would whisper, seeing a young railwayman with the sweeping eye-lashes of a dancing girl at whom M. de Charlus could not help staring, ‘if the Baron begins making eyes at the conductor, we shall never get there, the train will start going backwards. Just look at the way he’s staring at him: this isn’t a pu√er-train but a poofter train [ce n’est plus un petit chemin de fer, où nous sommes, c’est un funiculeur]’ ’’ (rtp, 2:1075; my emphasis). We might just note in passing that the description of the young employee does anything but indicate that he might be ‘‘virile.’’ It thereby contradicts the idea so forcefully expressed in the opening pages of Cities of the Plain according to which the Baron, a case-study of the invert, is really a ‘‘woman’’ looking for a

  ‘‘man.’’ Perhaps this means that neither the phobia around sodomy nor the important place this fantasy occupies in the ritual jokes about gay people has much to do with ‘‘roles’’ (top or bottom, real or imagined) that the people about whom such jokes are made (here Charlus and the railway employee) might actually enact in any hypothetical sexual relation. Specifically regarding the sculptor’s expression, and treating it more directly, if the little train is no longer a ‘‘ chemin de fer’’ (railway) but a ‘‘ funiculeur’’ (a deformation of funiculaire, funicular railway, to make it rhyme with enculeur, buttfucker), we