Towards a Gay Communism

by Mario Mieli

  As we shall see, manifest transsexualism does not necessarily involve a particular propensity for homosexuality. There are many heterosexual transsexuals. But when, for example, these are males who feel themselves to be women, but who also sexually desire other women, their heterosexuality is then, in a certain sense, homosexuality. Far from being particularly absurd, transsexualism overthrows the presently separate and counterposed categories of that sexuality considered ‘normal,’ revealing it to be, in fact, a ridiculous constraint.

  In any case, through those people who recognise themselves as transsexuals today, we can glimpse the transsexuality (bisexuality) that is latent in everyone. Their particular condition has brought them more or less close to an awareness, potentially a revolutionary one, of the fact that every human being, embryologically bisexual, maintains for his or her whole life, both in biological and psychological aspects, the presence of the other sex. I believe that the resolution of the present separate and antithetical categories of sexuality will be transsexual, and that transsexuality discloses the synthesis, one and many, of the expressions of a liberated Eros. I shall often return to this argument later on.17

  For the time being, I simply want to stress how ‘our hormonal bisexuality is amply demonstrated,’18 and how the determination of ‘definitive’ and manifest sex membership at birth generally signifies only the ‘predominance’ of this sex in the individual, and does not eliminate altogether the ‘opposite’ sexual presence.

  From the phylogenic standpoint, registration of such biological, anatomical and endocrinological data leads to the conception of ‘an originally bisexual physical disposition [which] has, in the course of evolution, become modified into a unisexual one, leaving behind only a few traces of the sex that has become atrophied’.19

  The transposition of this conception into the mental field was of particularly great importance, leading to the interpretation of homosexuality ‘in all its varieties as the expression of a psychical hermaphrodism.’20 But if the theory of psychical hermaphrodism helped psychoanalysis to demonstrate the possibility of so-called sexual ‘inversion’, it also raised very far-reaching questions as to the fixation of the sexual drive in so-called ‘normal’ people onto ‘objects’ of the ‘opposite’ sex. ‘Thus from the point of view of psychoanalysis the exclusive sexual interest felt by men for women is also a problem that needs elucidating and is not a self-evident fact based upon an attraction that is ultimately of a chemical nature.’21 According to Groddeck, it is more difficult to explain why heterosexual impulses are averted than to understand why there exist in all people homosexual tendencies, which as he sees it, ‘necessarily follows upon self-love’.22

  Is there a close relationship, then, between hermaphrodism, physical and mental, and homosexuality? Yes, in that homosexuality is congenital in everyone and hence expresses the polymorphism of our underlying transsexual and hermaphrodite being. In the same way, too, the erotic tendencies directed towards the ‘opposite’ sex form part of our polymorphism, so that these are equally expressions of this underlying hermaphrodism. Both homosexual desire and desire for the other sex derive from the transsexual nature of our underlying being.

  This is shown all the more clearly in the fact that heterosexuality is itself often accompanied by what the doctors, in repressive language, call ‘morphological and hormonal disturbances’. Continuing to borrow this hateful medical jargon, heterosexual men can also be ‘hypomasculine’ and ‘effeminate’. The hormonal characteristic that accompanies these forms of ‘hypomasculinity’ is ‘a collapse of the androgen/estrogen ratio, as a result of a fall in the numerator and a rise in the denominator’.23 Manifest heterosexuality, therefore, is often accompanied by clear expressions of physical hermaphrodism.

  On the other hand, despite the stereotype that identifies the gay man as ‘effeminate’, a high percentage of manifest homosexuals do not show any particular form of ‘hypomasculinity’ or ‘effeminacy’. To sum up, there is no direct correspondence between ‘hypomasculinity’ and male homosexuality, nor between ‘hypofemininity’ and female homosexuality. ‘Masculine’ women may be decidedly heterosexual, and very ‘feminine’ women can be gay.

  As for the presumed relationship between ‘mental effeminacy’ and male homosexuality, and conversely for women, Freud noted:

  The literature of homosexuality usually fails to distinguish clearly enough between the questions of the choice of object on the one hand, and of the sexual characteristics and sexual attitude of the subject on the other, as though the answer to the former necessarily involved the answers to the latter. Experience, however, proves the contrary: a man with predominantly male characteristics and also masculine in his erotic life may still be inverted in respect to his object, loving only men instead of women. A man in whose character feminine attributes obviously predominate, who may, indeed, behave in love like a woman, might be expected, from this feminine attitude, to choose a man for his love-object; but he may nevertheless be heterosexual, and show no more inversion in respect to his object than an average normal man. The same is true of women; here also mental sexual character and object-choice do not necessarily coincide. The mystery of homosexuality is therefore by no means so simple as it is commonly depicted in popular expositions – ‘a feminine mind, bound therefore to love a man, but unhappily attached to a masculine body; a masculine mind, irresistibly attracted to women, but, alas! imprisoned in a feminine body’.24

  To put it more simply, contrary to every stereotype, a macho guy can just as well be a queen, while a man with a slender and refined body can be an inveterate womaniser. A pure young girl can be a lesbian, and a strapping schoolmistress can be hopelessly heterosexual. That is the way of the world.

  In conclusion, we can say that neither manifest homosexuality nor heterosexuality necessarily correspond to any specific mental, somatic, or hormonal characteristics; both the gay desire and the desire for the other sex are expressions of our underlying transsexual being, in tendency polymorphous, but constrained by oppression to adapt to a monosexuality that mutilates it. But the repressive society only considers one type of monosexuality as ‘normal’, the heterosexual kind, and imposes educastration with the aim of exclusively conditioning heterosexuality. The Norm, therefore, is heterosexual.

  The Assertion of Heterosexuality and the Misconception of the Woman Within

  The theory of bisexuality was originally postulated by psychiatry as the basis for an etiology of ‘sexual inversion’. We have seen how psychoanalysis, which took over this theory, was nevertheless soon forced to investigate the causes for this fixation of desire on ‘objects’ of the opposite sex on the part of people considered sexually ‘normal’ by society. The question that now arises is: why, in the course of development, the individual passes from an ‘undifferentiated’ erotic disposition directed towards both sexes, such as is characteristic of the infantile libido, to a fixation (whether hetero- or homosexual) on one sex alone as the ‘object’ of desire? ‘The question, then, is how to opt for a unisexuality.’ (Jacques Camatte)

  The immediate reply is that this happens by the work of educastration, or by the influence on the individual of society and the ‘external’ world in which a monosexual Norm prevails, transmitting the repression from generation to generation. In any event, the monosexual Norm is decidedly heterosexual, and the educastration that seeks to universally affirm this makes it that, among the majority of people, monosexuality presently takes the form of heterosexuality. The Norm is based on the mutilation of Eros, and in particular on the condemnation of homosexuality. It is clear from this that only when we understand why the homoerotic impulse is repressed in the majority, by the whole mechanism of society, will we be able to grasp how the exclusive or at least highly predominant assertion of heterosexual desire in the majority comes about. On the other hand, the problem of the repression of homosexuality is also clearly connected, today, with the assertion of an exclusively or at least prevalently homoerotic desire in us gay
men and women, because, historically, it is the repression of homoeroticism that contributes so greatly to characterising the present-day expressions of manifest homosexuality.

  We know how the little boy is forced in growing up to develop, above all else, those tendencies that are an expression of his psychological ‘masculinity’. It is society that forces him to do this in the first place via the family, just as, through education and the family, society forces the little girl to develop those aspects of her personality that are expressions of psychological ‘femininity’. In this way, educastration tends above all else to negate the mental and biological hermaphrodism that is present in us all, in order to make the little girl into a woman and the little boy into a man according to the counterposed models of heterosexual polarity. The psychological ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’ that are respectively demanded from the little boy and girl in the process of education (which is above all a relation of subordination to the parents, and more generally, to all adults), simply reflect the contingent and mutilated historical forms which society makes into something absolute, and which are based on the subjection and oppression of women, the estrangement of the human being from itself, and the negation of human community.25

  The little boy is forced by society and the family to take his father as a model for his own life. He must aspire to be like him in every respect, but he can only do so at the cost of the full flowering of his own potential, i.e. by a mutilation. The father, in fact, has already suffered educastration, so that the son can only identify with him at the price of his own mutilation.

  Gradually, through this identification, the child, like his father, comes to project onto the mother and other women the ‘feminine’ elements that exist within his own psyche, elements that are not to be admitted to consciousness, leading him to be ashamed of them, despite the deep attraction that they hold as fundamental components of his own being. This is responsible for one of the greatest disasters that has happened to our species: the refusal by the man to recognise the ‘woman’ in himself, i.e. to recognise his transsexuality.

  In Jung’s words, the father becomes the model for the son’s persona: ‘The persona is a complicated system of relations between individual consciousness and society, fittingly enough a kind of mask, designed on the one hand to make a definite impression upon others, and, on the other, to conceal the true nature of the individual.’26

  Through this identification with the father, society forces the little boy to construct for himself an artificial personality, in keeping with the Norm prevailing in the ‘external’ world, and also providing a defence against the dangers of this world, the pitfalls that threaten on the stage where personas interact.

  And yet: ‘The construction of a collectively suitable persona means a formidable concession to the external world, a genuine self-sacrifice which drives the ego straight into identification with the persona, so that people really do exist who believe they are what they pretend to be.’27 The son cannot identify with the father, and hence cannot construct a personality like his, except by sacrificing himself, his transsexuality and in particular his ‘femininity’: ‘The repression of feminine traits and inclinations naturally causes these contrasexual demands to accumulate in the unconscious.’

  A drastic repression of homosexuality takes place already in early childhood. The father (re)presents himself as a decisively heterosexual persona, rejecting overt erotic contact with the son (who for his part, however, desires without undifferentiation, and hence also desires the father). Other adult males, in deference to the taboo against paedophilia, similarly reject sexual relations with the little boy. In an analogous way, the mother and adult women reject sexual relations with girl children, even if the mother does generally maintain a greater erotic intimacy with children of both sexes than does the father. Sexual relations between children themselves are also repressed, and in particular homosexual relations.

  The anti-homosexual taboo, which is particularly severe, very soon leads the little boy to recognise that homosexuality is forbidden, that it may only be spoken of, if at all, in a derogatory sense, and that you must be ashamed of your gay impulses, just like your ‘femininity’. In the eyes of the child, homosexuality soon comes to be seen as associated with ‘feminine’ tendencies. It is only culturally, however, that sexual attraction between males is linked with femininity – though this culture negatively influences the child right from his birth.

  The repression of homosexuality is revealed by the harshness with which the child is forced to reject his gay desire, and hence to repress it (though of course this does not always succeed).

  Identification with the father is largely based on the repression of erotic desire for him. This identification forms a kind of introjection of the father, and in this respect alleviates or facilitates his rejection as a sexual object. According to Freud, ‘the character of the ego is a precipitate of abandoned object-cathexes’, and ‘it contains the history of these object-choices’.28 ‘When the ego assumes the features of the object, it is forcing itself, so to speak, upon the id as a love-object and is trying to make good the id’s loss by saying: “Look, you can love me too – I am so like the object”.’29

  With the rejection of the father as an ‘object’ of love for the child, and the replacement of this with identification, homosexual love is transformed into narcissistic libido. This transformation, determined by the incest taboo as well as by the condemnation of homosexuality, lies at the root of the ‘normal’, heterosexual, anti-homosexual ego, at the root of its ego-ism. The heterosexual male, repressing his gay desire, introjects homosexual ‘objects’ and sets himself up as the sole ‘homosexual object’, transforming homosexuality into autoeroticism and imposing his autoeroticism on women in heterosexual relations. But this is an alienated autoeroticism, based on the renunciation of the father as sexual ‘object’ and more generally on the repression of the gay desire and the sacrifice of the ‘feminine’ components that are associated with homosexuality and incompatible with identification with the father and the Norm. It is this alienated male autoeroticism that women increasingly reject; it involves a focussing of male desire for the male, making him into a blind and egoistic condensation of masculinity that seeks to impose itself on women, who embody the femininity that he has negated and is ashamed of in himself. Heterosexual males see in women that portion of themselves which they have been forced from infancy to conceal and repress, and this is why they ‘love’ women in such a sadly inadequate way.

  The ‘normal’ male ego, then, is largely determined by a series of abandoned homosexual object-cathexes, these being transformed into narcissistic libido and subsequently directed at heterosexual goals. Onto these heterosexual ‘objects’ the male projects the ‘femininity’ he has had to repress. The woman, then, is subject to the male in two ways: the man forces on her both his masculinity (a condensation of alienated homosexual desire) and his own ‘femininity’. Woman is not recognised as an autonomous being, but comes to be historically defined entirely in relation to the male, on the basis of a complete heteronomy; and heterosexuality, as it presents itself today, is based on this heteronomy and tends to perpetuate it. The Norm maintained by a repressive society marked by male supremacy cannot but be heterosexual.

  As an Italian feminist has written:

  Femininity is a drag show, it is the male projection of an idea of woman after he has censored and suffocated her, expelled her and put her in a gynaeceum. This representation is all his work, a whole system of representations, a historical scene that he seeks to direct . . . In all this, there is still no such thing as woman . . . Women, historically, do not yet exist, and the goal of the women’s movement is to give women a specific historical reality.30

  To return, then, to the little boy. Since he has to repress them, his ‘feminine’ mental traits are projected, i.e. transferred, onto a person of female sex, generally the mother. A kind of ‘homosexual’ intimacy is established between mother and son
: the mother is the only one who can understand and intuit her son’s need for a ‘feminine life’, and she can in part satisfy this (among other things, the demand for kindness, tenderness, protection, to be loved, to have his needs catered for). Forced to repress his ‘feminine’ component in order to identify with the father, the boy is obliged to also repress his own propensity to be giving, tender, sensual, maternal.31 This particularly leads him to seek tenderness, affection, sensuality, the giving and maternal side in his mother. And this is why, in adulthood, men force women into a corresponding role.