by Mario Mieli
Homosexuality (from the Latin homo and sexus) – a sexual perversion consisting in unnatural attraction to persons of the same sex. The penal statutes of the USSR, the socialist countries, and even some bourgeois states, provide for the punishment of homosexuality (muzhelozhestvo – sodomy between males).75
There can be no doubt that persecution is far sharper today in the Soviet Union, Cuba76 or Poland than in England, France or Italy. We have seen how, in almost all the countries dominated by capital, more tolerant legislation has been introduced: and yet all the same, tolerance is still the negation of liberty. Tolerance is repressive. Capital offers ‘the spectacle of a life which is free, but which revokes its freedom by law, hence declaring it to be an appearance, and on the other hand contradicting its free laws by its action’ (Bruno Bauer).77
In actual fact, the ‘freedom’ that is guaranteed homosexuals by the law is reducible to the freedom to be the excluded, the oppressed, and the exploited, to be the objects of moral and often physical violence, and to be isolated in a ghetto that is generally dangerous and almost always blatantly squalid. As Francesco Saba Sardi writes:
Late capitalist society, while it may extend to homosexuality the legal sanction of tolerance, still imposes on homosexuals a mark of infamy, ridicule or compassion, confining them to a more or less gilded ghetto in which the homosexual is induced to act out his role in a caricatured way. Just as the Jew, in the ghetto or concentration camp, became the Jew of the anti-Semitic and Nazi campaign, so this smarmy and cunning Jew, the masochistic Jew, has his counterpart today, at least in certain respects, in the ‘queen’.78
In one of the European countries where homosexuals have attained the highest degree of political emancipation, Holland, they still remain marginalised, relegated to a functional ghetto, and imprisoned in the gilded cage that is gay Amsterdam. (Even if, we must add, you can enjoy yourself far better and more relaxedly in the Amsterdam saunas than in the toilets of the Piazza del Duomo in Milan …)79
Besides, and this should always be stressed, repression in the countries of capitalist domination remains very severe, despite the official legalisation of homosexuality:
In cases of indecency, action may be taken against someone who does not repel an indecent caress quickly enough . . . one simply needs to stay too long in a street urinal to be convicted of indecency . . . [and] policemen may go as far as incitement (in Turkish baths, for instance) in order to provoke the offence. Repression does not merely delight in poking into people’s underpants, it seeks the outrage, it provokes it in order to condemn it (such police behaviour is frequent in the USA).80
Agents provocateurs of this kind also infest the gay community in England, Germany, France and Italy, almost everywhere in fact. On one occasion in London, I was all but seduced by a very attractive policeman who came into the toilet at Shepherd’s Bush dressed in black leather and started masturbating, his handcuffs at the ready to catch the queens.
The Church: From Obscurantist to ‘Progressive’
Despite the massive anti-erotic campaign waged by the system, despite the obtuse despotism of the heterosexual Norm, the countries dominated by capital have seen in the last few years the first stirrings of a very slow maturing, on the part of many people, around the homosexual question. This is true even if, in the same measure that people start to speak of homosexuality, the ashamed ignorance and the mass of reactionary prejudice that characterise the general approach of ‘normal’ people towards those who are ‘different’ also come to light, and the distance between those who openly reject homoeroticism and those who are more tolerant and ‘progressive’ in reality proves to be very small.
The Catholic Church, for centuries the harsh judge of ‘sodomites’, has decisively confirmed its backward positions. The Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, in its Declaration on Certain Questions of Sexual Ethics (January 1976), took pains to distinguish between ‘homosexuals whose inclination, deriving from bad education, lack of normal sexual development, contracted habit, bad example or other similar cause, is transitory or at least not incurable, and those homosexuals who are definitively such by virtue of a kind of innate instinct or pathological constitution judged incurable’.81
As can be seen here, the Church still uses the psychonazi distinction between ‘spurious homosexuality’ or ‘pseudo homosexuality’ and ‘true homosexuality’.82 It is not by chance that Father Roberto Tucci, director of Radio Vatican, ‘recognised in the Declaration, with reference to homosexuality, a greater attention to certain scientific findings’.83
The Declaration fails to mention again the ‘first kind’ of homosexuals (those whose ‘aberrations’ are ‘transitory or at least not incurable’), perhaps because they are unwilling to give aid and succour to all the pseudo ‘pseudo-homosexuals’ among the clergy, and even ensconced on its leading bodies.
As far as the second category are concerned, i.e. the incurable ‘true homosexuals’, the Sacred Congregation recommends that ‘in pastoral activity’ they should be
received with understanding and sustained in the hope of overcoming their personal difficulty and social disadvantage. Their guilt is to be judged with caution; but no pastoral method should be used which . . . accords them a moral justification. According to the objective moral order, homosexual relations are acts lacking the essential and indispensable moral criterion.
Homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered, and they can in no case receive any kind of approval.
Reactionary judgements of this kind, however, actually promote the homosexual liberation movement. For if on the one hand they perpetuate the guilt of the Catholic homosexual who sticks obstinately to his faith, on the other hand they lead a growing number of Catholic gays to abandon the Church, break with a religious tradition that is sullenly repressive and adopt a view of the world and of life that is different, less conformist, and hence potentially more disposed towards a revolutionary awareness.
But for quite a few years now, the Church (or capital) has been inventing structures of recuperation, even in dealing with gays who are less subdued by religious morality. Today, the Church is also the Church of dissent. Thus some members of the clergy are beginning to take up positions in favour of an ‘emancipation’ of homosexuals, opposing the stigma of an ‘unnatural’ sin that is traditionally imposed on gays by the Church.
Among the Franciscans, there is the case of Father Vittorino Joannes.84 Father Marco Bisceglia,85 a priest in Lavello (near Potenza), whom the local bishop deprived of his parish, maintains that it is not homosexuals ‘who are destined for Hell, but rather those who exclude, insult, deride them and drive them to despair and suicide’.86 The former nun Marisa Galli, known already for the dissent she expressed on the question of divorce, candidly stated:
As an Italian Catholic believer, I feel guilty for the evil we have inflicted on so many homosexual brothers with our attitude, in such contradiction to the message of the gospel. They really have the right to denounce us for our slanders. The treasures of the Vatican would not be enough to compensate those whom we have injured with our prejudices, our sexual illiteracy and our ignorant and conscious cruelty.87
No, the treasures of the Vatican would not be enough. Too many ‘sodomites’ have died over the centuries on the fires of the Holy Inquisition; and too many homosexuals believe, still today, because of what the Church assures them, that they are ‘sick people who therefore need to be cured; and that anyone who speaks in favour of homosexuality, even if this is his own reality, commits a sin against God by going against nature’ (Ornella Dragoni).88
Outside Italy, and particularly in Holland, noted independent Catholic theologians, such as Pfeurten, Oraison, Biet, Gottschalk, and the least obnoxious of them, van de Spijker,89 have re-examined the entire Church attitude towards homoeroticism from a ‘progressive’ standpoint. For his part, Monsignor L’Heureux, the bishop of Perpignan, declared in a radio broadcast on 18 October 1974:
It is absolutely neces
sary to reach a clear definition on this question, in order to make possible a pastoral activity that can aid homosexuals to attain the sacraments more readily, to fill themselves more deeply with the word of God, to meet collectively; whether among themselves or with others, in order to reflect on the necessities of the Christian life, and finally not to blame themselves for acts they might be led to commit, and which might seem abnormal in relation to the Christian tradition.90
We should note how, for the first time here, by using the conditional ‘might seem’ (paraître), a Catholic bishop has opened the possibility of a new reflection on homosexuality in moral theology. But this paternalistic attitude is a false facade. Above all, Monsignor L’Heureux is concerned to aid homosexuals ‘not to blame themselves’, even though it is clear that it is not in fact homosexuals who blame themselves, but rather that they are blamed by society in general and the Church in particular. Selfreproach, when it is present, simply reflects the condemnation inflicted by external persecution.
More precisely, Monsignor L’Heureux says that homosexuals should be helped ‘not to blame themselves for acts they might be led to commit’. Why ‘might be’ and not ‘are’? And ‘led’ by whom or what? Taken as a whole, in fact, this sentence has a decidedly ambiguous ring to it. And when read in the context of the entire declaration, it can well be interpreted as an invitation to gays to extirpate the roots of their guilt by renouncing homosexual ‘practices’ (‘not to blame themselves for acts’). What the bishop of Perpignan grants with one hand, he withdraws with the other, just like a magic trick. And what he pushes for above all is simply the integration of homosexuals into ecclesiastical structures.
The Protestant denominations have recently adopted still less conformist attitudes, in the same operation of recuperating homosexuality once it surfaces. For some two years, for example, the general meetings of the London Gay Liberation Front were regularly held at Notting Hill Gate in the All Saints church hall, and the meetings of the transvestites and transsexuals group actually in the sacristy. There are also churches that organise religious services expressly for gays, above all in the USA. On the other hand, those churches that do not insist on ecclesiastical celibacy are generally more disposed to admit more or less openly the homosexuality of many priests – and this with less hypocrisy than the Catholic Church. In the USA there are more than twenty branches of the Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches, a special church for homosexuals, led by Rev. Troy Perry. Troy Perry has also celebrated a good number of gay marriages.91
The prospect of marriage between homosexuals is of still greater interest to the system than to even the gay reformists. In the USA, the press, which passed over almost in silence the massacre of thirty-one homosexuals in New Orleans in 1973 (one of so many slaughters by the hetero-state), published several articles in the course of that year celebrating marriage between two women or two men.92 In Sweden and Norway, the press and TV discuss the right of homosexuals to marry, while the moderate gay organisations confine their demands to complete acceptance on the part of society. The heterosexual status quo, by way of its ‘progressive’ wing, is working for a total integration of homosexuality, its re-entry into the structure of the family – by the back door, of course.
Repressive Desublimation, Protection, Exploitation, False Guilt, and Reformism
It is impossible to avoid bringing to light this implicit, or even explicit, intention to recuperate homosexuals that lies behind the new ‘progressive’ attitude of certain churches and states. It is necessary also to stress how the slow evolution of religious morality and of certain strata of public opinion towards more understanding and tolerant positions tends toward the partial substitution of the traditional form of aggression towards us gays for one of protection. But if aggression is phallocratic and protection paternalist, phallocracy and paternalism are just two sides of the same patriarchal coin. As Oscar Wilde said during his trial: ‘The one disgraceful, unpardonable and to all time contemptible action of my life was my allowing myself to be forced into appealing to Society for help and protection . . .’93
The protection of homosexuals, ‘permissive’ morality, tolerance and political emancipation obtained within certain limits in the countries of capital’s real domination: all this reveals itself in substance to be functional within the programme of homosexuality’s commercialisation and exploitation by capitalist enterprise. The commercialisation of the ghetto pays well: bars, clubs, hotels, discos, saunas, cinemas and pornography provide important footholds for those seeking to exploit the ‘third sex’. Capital carries out a repressive desublimation of homosexuality. ‘Sexuality is liberated (or rather liberalised) in socially constructive forms. This notion implies that there are repressive modes of desublimation’.94
The system deploys the same manoeuvre with respect to other so-called ‘perversions’. Voyeurism, for example, is one of the most profitable ‘perversions’ for capital (cinema, pornography, etc.), while remaining in reality repressive. People go to the cinema to see a commodity make love, and this involves a repressive desublimation of the voyeuristic component of our desire, instead of us watching one another make love, enjoying and understanding ourselves and fusing voyeurism with other forms of pleasure. Repressive desublimation and commercial exploitation are inseparable; Eros remains focussed on work and the production of alienating commodities, to the extent that its repressive desublimation provides a market for these.95
Tolerance, on the other hand – ‘repressive tolerance’, as Marcuse calls it – only confirms our marginalisation. In fact, to tolerate the homosexual minority, without the majority questioning the repression of their own homoerotic desire, means recognising the right of those who are ‘deviant’ to live on the basis of their ‘deviance’ and hence to be marginalised. And this favours the highly increased exploitation of homosexuals on the part of the system that marginalises them.
In the Italian cities, in Spain, Greece, Portugal and other countries noted for their generally backward customs, a semi clandestine industry of the ‘third sex’ flourishes, based on ties of strict convenience between entrepreneurs, the police and organised crime. In the United States, too, the great majority of bars where gay people meet are controlled by the Mafia. Paradoxically, the laws of the State of New York still consider homosexuality as such a crime, though New York City, along with Tokyo and San Francisco, contains what is undoubtedly one of the most extensive, most magnetic and best organised of homosexual ghettoes in the world (including its nearby outcrops of Fire Island and Provincetown). Further evidence of the ‘rational character of capitalist irrationality’ (Marcuse) is given by the link that exists between economic organisations revolving around the exploitation of homoeroticism, and the judicial system. What is prohibited can be sold at a higher price.
What we need to bear in mind, above all, is the effective linkage, in society under the real domination of capital, between aggression and protection, as two sides of the same relationship to us gays. Between violence and protection, there is no middle zone. In the last instance, the homosexual must be the object of aggression, so that he can then be protected and effectively exploited. On the other hand, protection and integration provide gays with palliative gratifications as well as inuring them to submission and weakening the force of their protest (and apparently, its very motivations). It is clear that neither aggressors nor protectors are aware of the mechanisms that exist between violence and protection, nor are they concerned to become so. Protection constitutes the medium that links aggression to exploitation, a fact which only revolutionary gays have properly understood.
Unfortunately, even today the majority of homosexuals remain trapped in illusions of political emancipation within the existing capitalist and inhuman structures of the establishment. Far from being surprising, this must be viewed as the product of thousands of years of habituation to the Norm (both ‘normal’ and normative), which induces homosexuals, the transgressors, to feel guilty. In the hope of
integration, many gays indulge the fantasy of having the father system forgive sins that they have not in fact committed. But the sense of guilt is essentially functional to perpetuating capital’s domination (‘Don’t travel without a ticket …’), and liberalisation and tolerance themselves provide footholds for the guilty feeling of those who are content merely to be tolerated, the better to be exploited. A homosexual has to feel in a certain sense guilty, in order to put up with the anguish and anxiety of the ghetto, and to renounce any genuine freedom. Capital, on the other hand, cannot forgive any sin. First and foremost, since there are no sinners, and secondly, because capital is seventy times seven96 an industry of sin. The ideal of political emancipation does not involve any qualitative leap vis-à-vis the conditions of marginalisation and exploitation in which homosexuals are presently placed, nor a repudiation of the sense of guilt which would shed light on those really responsible for homosexual suffering. It is time for homosexuals to regain the energies that this guilt has confiscated, and channel them into a genuinely emancipatory struggle, both pleasurable and subversive.
The sense of guilt that the system induces in us is a false guilt, but at the same time it is the most intransigent enemy to homosexual liberation. We have to root it out, and to do this we must recognise it in its many and varied habitual disguises. To be aware of it is already to confront it, instead of continuing to be blindly dominated by it.
This false guilt is the hitman of the system within us, the agent of death that torments us incessantly. As Corrado Levi has written: ‘Our sickness is not that of being homosexual, but of having the sense of guilt. This has been induced and maintained in us by the father, and by those heterosexuals afraid of their own homosexuality’.97
