Towards a Gay Communism
Page 19
51. Alfredo Cohen, Introduction to La politica del corpo, p. 18.
52. Guy Hocquenghem, Homosexual Desire, p. 65.
53. Thorsten Graf and Mimi Steglitz, ‘La repressione degli omosessuali nella società borghese’, Gay gay: storia e conscienza omosessuale (Milan: La Salamandra, 1975), p. 118.
54. Lauritsen and Thorstad, The Early Homosexual Rights Movement (1864–1935), p. 9.
55. Magnus Hirschfeld, Die Homosexualität des Mannes und des Weibes (Berlin: Louis Marcus, 1920). See also Sexualpathologie. Ein Lehrbuch für Ärzte und Studierende (Bonn: Marcus and Weber, 1922).
56. Ivan Goll, Sodoma e Berlino (Milan: Il formichiere, 1975).
57. Thorsten Graf and Mimi Steglitz, ‘La repressione degli omosessuali nella società borghese’, p. 92.
58. Kurt Hiller, one of the most prominent exponents of the homosexual equal rights movement, died in 1972 at the age of 87.
59. John Lauritsen and David Thorstad, The Early Homosexual Rights Movement (1864–1935), p. 44.
60. Ibid., pp. 44–5.
61. ‘Lo sterminio degli omosessuali nel Terzo Reich’, Fuori! 12, (Spring 1974).
62. John Lauritsen and David Thorstad, The Early Homosexual Rights Movement (1864–1935), pp. 32ff.
63. Philippe Jullian, Oscar Wilde (London: Paladin, 1971), p. 271.
64. Quoted by Guy Hocquenghem, Homosexual Desire, p. 66.
65. See S. Jwaya, ‘Nan sho k’ (‘Homosexuality in Japan’), Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen 4, (1902).
66. Kipp Dawson, Gay Liberation: A Socialist Perspective (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1975), p. 6.
67. Up until September 1975, there was an unwritten rule in the USA that the armed forces did not recruit homosexuals, and dismissed any soldiers who came out or gave themselves away. It was a real ‘proclamation’, then, when Leonard Matlovich, an air force captain, wrote to his commanding officer on 6 March 1975 stating that he was homosexual and had no intention of leaving the force. The result of the ensuing scandal was that Matlovich was successful. As from September 1975, in principle, the Pentagon decreed the abolition of the regulation providing for automatic expulsion of gays. But the abolition of this rule only confirmed what had long been tacitly acknowledged, i.e. that there are a high percentage of gays in the American armed forces. In many barracks, homosexuality is an everyday fact. Despite this, however, Oliver Sipple, the ex-marine famous for his action on 22 September 1975, when he deflected the gun that Sarah Jane Moore was pointing at President Ford, brought legal action for damages against several newspapers and magazines for claiming he was homosexual.
68. See Enrico Airone, ‘Spagna: fascismo!’, Fuori! 1, (June 1972). Even in Spain, however, homosexual liberation groups have more recently emerged.
69. In both 1955 and 1971, attempts were made by the socialist and liberal parties in Israel to legalise homosexuality. Both times, the initiative failed. Kurt Hiller wrote: ‘That representatives of an ethnic minority that has been horribly persecuted should themselves persecute an equally harmless and guiltless biological (sic!) minority – what sentiment could arise in a thinking person other than boundless contempt!’ (Quoted by John Lauritsen, Religious Roots of the Taboo on Homosexuality, p. 15).
70. See Mario Rossi, ‘Berlino: l’omosessualità scavalca il mura’, Fuori! 11, (Winter 1973). A description of the extremely hard conditions in which gay people live in East Germany and the Soviet Union can be found in an article by Thomas Reeves, ‘Red and Gay, Oppression East and West’, Fag Rag 6, (Autumn 1973).
71. [Translator’s note: Mieli writes this in English in the original.]
72. Quoted in John Lauritsen and David Thorstad, The Early Homosexual Rights Movement (1864–1935), p. 64.
73. See Amadeo Bordiga, Strutture economiche e sociali della Russia d’oggi (Milan: Editoriale Contra, 1966); and Russia e rivoluzione nella teoria marxista (Milan: Il formichiere, 1975).
74. Lauritsen and Thorstad, The Early Homosexual Rights Movement (1864–1935), pp. 64–5.
75. Ibid., p. 65.
76. See the drastically anti-homosexual declaration from Granma, the official newspaper of the Cuban Communist Party, 9 May 1971, and the reply of the New York Gay Revolution Party, both printed in Come Out, Spring–Summer 1971.
77. [Translator’s note: Mieli does not provide a source for his citation, but the passage is drawn from The Jewish Question, Bauer’s 1843 book most famous for the response (‘On the Jewish Question’) that Marx publishes the following year (and where he cites this very passage). Later in this volume (footnote 100), Mieli returns to ‘On the Jewish Question’ to mark it as the source of his distinction between ‘political emancipation’ and ‘human emancipation’.]
78. Francesco Saba Sardi, ‘La socièta omosessuale’, Venus 7, (November 1972), p. 36.
79. One of the most famous international gay guides, published in Amsterdam, is the Incognito Guide. Its title tells all, being the very motto of the ghetto into which one opens more or less hidden doors in almost all countries of the world. Where the ghetto is not organised by the ruling system, clandestine ghettoes exist. The Incognito Guide lists the public toilets where you can meet other homosexuals in Moscow, for example, and the most frequented parks and bars in Madrid.
80. Guy Hocquenghem, Homosexual Desire, p. 65. [Translator’s note from original translation: Translation modified.]
81. Avvenire, (16 January 1976).
82. See Chapter 1, section 5.
83. Avvenire, (16 January 1976).
84. Another Jesuit, Father Arturo Dalla Vedova, was arrested in Rome on 6 November 1975 for having written ‘pig’ and other derogatory expressions on posters put up in memory of Pasolini.
85. This priest was, after this, the founder of the first society of Arcigay (in Palermo in 1980) and the first coordinator of the network of societies that from 1985 gave life to the Arcigay national network. At the end of this work, Father Bisceglia returned to the Church.
86. Corriere della Sera, (17 May 1975).
87. Ibid.
88. Omelia Dragoni, ‘Una testimonianza’, Fuori! 12, (Spring 1974), p. 22.
89. See Paola Elio, ‘Omosessualità e religione’, ibid., pp. 13–16.
90. Monsignor Henri L’Heureux’s statement was reported on 6 January 1975 in the bulletin David et Jonathan, organ of the French Christian homophile movement.
91. See Ronald M. Enroth and Gerald E. Jamison, The Gay Church (Grand Rapids: Eermann, 1974); also Kay Tobin and Randy Wicker, The Gay Crusaders (New York: Arno Press, 1972).
92. See Charles Shively, ‘Wallflower at the Revolution’, Fag Rag 6, Boston, (Autumn 1973).
93. Philippe Jullian, Oscar Wilde, p. 264.
94. Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 75.
95. See Chapter 6, section 4.
96. [Translator’s note: Mieli’s reference here, used to signify an endlessly repeated tendency, is once again Biblical: in this case, Matthew 18:12, where Jesus responds to Peter’s question about how many times he should forgive a brother who sinned against him: ‘I do not say to you, up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven.’]
97. Corrado Levi, ‘II Lavoro di presa di coscienza. Problematiche e contributi dal lavoro di presa di coscienza del collettivo Fuori! di Milano, 1973’, Fuori! 12, (Spring 1974).
98. ‘Dibattito’, ibid.
99. Ibid.
100. Nicholas B. and Jean L., Homosexualité et militantisme: quelques réflexions de base (leaflet produced for the theoretical weekend held 13–14 September 1975). Arcadie is the name of the French integrationist homosexual movement.
101. Collettivo Redazionale di Fuori!, ‘Gli omosessuali e l’ utopia’, Almanacco Bompiani (1974). [Translator’s note: ‘The Leopard’ is a reference to the novel of that title by G. de Lampedusa and its hero, the aristocrat who skillfully prepares to adjust to the rise of the Italian bourgeoisie.]
102. Throughout this
book, I use the terms ‘political emancipation’ and ‘human emancipation’ in the sense given them by Karl Marx in The Jewish Question . ‘Political emancipation’ means integration into the system, while ‘human emancipation’ means genuine liberation, revolution and communism.
103. Freud, ‘Psycho-Analytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia’, Standard Edition, Vol. 12 (London: Vintage, 2001).
104. In 1970, Huey Newton, Minister of Defense of the Black Panther Party, wrote: ‘There is nothing to say that a homosexual cannot also be a revolutionary. And maybe I’m now injecting some of my prejudice by saying “even a homosexual can be a revolutionary”. Quite the contrary; maybe a homosexual could be the most revolutionary’; ‘A Letter from Huey’, Len Richmond and Gary Noguera (eds), The Gay Liberation Book, p. 142. See also Francesco Santini, ‘Sgombrar la strada’, Comune futura 2 (November 1976).
105. [Translator’s note: Contrary to their name, the Radical Party (Partito Radicale, or PR) was a largely reformist center-left party with libertarian overtones. Emerging in 1955, the PR lasted until 1989 but never received significant vote tallies.]
106. [Translator’s note: Mieli writes Weltanschauung in German in the original, placing both it and ‘one-dimensional man’ in italics, which serves in part to mark them as specific terms in the history of Marxism, the latter more recently current at the time of his writing, given the ubiquitous influence of Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man throughout the European New Left.]
107. Jacques Camatte, from ‘Note on the formal domination and real domination of capital’ (1972), included in Capital and Community, pp. 72–3.
108. Friedrich Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/
109. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, p. 158.
110. Karl Marx, Grundrisse, p. 693–4.
111. By human ‘nature’ I don’t mean something determinate, stable, unchanging, absolute or hidden. I have no exact idea of what precisely lies underneath and is natural, and would view human ‘nature’ rather in the materialistic sense as a becoming, i.e. in relation to the historical period and social context, thus together with the economic and sexual dialectic.
112. Jean-Paul Sartre, Baudelaire (London: Horizon, 1949), pp. 48–9.
113. Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: the Psychoanalytical Meaning of History (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1988), p. 23.
114. [Translator’s note: Mieli’s reference, of the tonalli and the nagual, are to concepts within indigenous Mesoamerican cultures: to the Nahuatl words, respectively, for the ‘daysign’ (i.e. marking the mystical significance of one’s day of birth but also, in Mieli’s context, a tight spiritual bond with a specific animal) and for a human with the magical capacity to shapeshift into animal form.]
115. [Translator’s note: Mieli uses here again that pun whose meaning is inevitably lost in translation. In Italian, the phrase is Il movimento gay rivoluzionario (com)batte per la (ri)conquista del nostro essere misterioso profondo, and as the verb battere means not only to strike but also to go out cruising for sex and to make oneself available, the sense here is of a double struggle, one that remains equally erotic and political, and always collective. See Footnote 4.]
116. [Translator’s note: Mieli uses the hybrid word co-inereza, which would literally translate to co-inherence or inherence-with.]
3
Heterosexual Men, or Rather Closet Queens
Sport
If heterosexual society and homosexuality are in conflict, even when this is legally disguised, as in the more permissive and democratic countries, and a peaceful coexistence is proclaimed, the contradiction is still reflected in the existential universe of each individual. If One-Dimensional Man is a divided self, then the present incompatibility between heterosexual and homoerotic desire makes a major contribution towards widening this split.
Given our original and underlying transsexuality, and recognising the polymorphous and ‘perverse’ disposition of the child to an eroticism that makes no exclusive distinction as to the sex of the ‘object’ of its libidinal impulse, it is clear that each one of us has a hidden erotic attraction towards the sex that is not (or is scarcely) the focus of our conscious desire. We do not intend to discuss here the extent to which the repression of a given component of desire can be stable and definitive: rather, we will take a look at some of the results of the sublimation of homosexuality and/or its conversion into ‘pathological syndromes’.
It is worth repeating: anyone who holds him- or herself to be 100 per cent heterosexual is hiding a big ‘percentage’ of censored gay desire. ‘The increasing number of obsessional homoerotics in modern society would then be the symptom of the partial failure of repression and “return” of the repressed material’.1 But a ‘failure’ for what? Clearly for the absolute heterosexual Norm and its paladins, among whom we must count Ferenczi himself.
We homosexuals, on the other hand, save for some very rare exceptions, are always at least somewhat aware of the persistence in us of an erotic desire for persons of the other sex. The standpoint of marginalisation or ‘deviance’ once again proves a ‘privileged’ one with respect to the comprehension of the ‘reality’ of things, of that reality which lies behind the appearance that the prevailing ideology proffers as ontological.2
It’s through the idea of a sublimation of homoerotic desire that many social and individual phenomena can actually be interpreted and understood. Sport, for example, isn’t just a peaceful extroversion of the death instinct, or as Konrad Lorenz has it, ‘a cathartic discharge of aggressive urge’.3 It is also a masked expression of homoerotic tendencies, often permitting physical contact between members of the same sex; and it translates the unconscious positive feeling of mutual attraction into a negative mode of antagonism and competition. In his film Women in Love, Ken Russell illustrated the mechanism of this conversion very well, along with its broad emotional scope, in the scene where the two male heroes wrestle naked in front of the fire.
Converted expressions of homosexual desire can be similarly recognised in the mania for sport and the worship of sporting stars: what lies behind and inside the myth of Rivera or Monzón?4
Proust asked himself, ‘why, when we admire in the face of this person a delicacy that touches our hearts, a grace, a natural gentleness such as men do not possess, should we be dismayed to learn that this young man runs after boxers?’5 But it is really no surprise that a tender and delicate man should be attracted to athletes, given that rougher and more virile men are too. And if someone should object that wanting to go to bed together is something else – true enough, but only because the homosexual desire is alienated, as a general rule, in sporting fans, who reject it and sublimate it in a fanatical fashion.
Oscar Wilde once scandalised a headmaster by quipping that ‘Football is all very well as a game for rough girls, but it is hardly suitable for delicate boys’.6 But Wilde’s irony here conceals the trauma often experienced by homosexual adolescents, who, unable to sublimate the erotic desire that they feel for their school friends, find it terribly frustrating to battle with them in competitive sports, and suffer terribly at times on this account. In ancient pederastic Greek society, love and gymnastics were not posed against each other. The officers of health and hygiene of our communities, on the other hand, do not easily release those who are said to be homosexual from obligatory physical education: a rare case, but it’s often in such small breaches that homosexuality is not considered pathological.
The homosexual idea of sport is very different from the traditional one. The gay schoolboy who detests physical education dreams of a world in which physical exercise, sexual satisfaction and affection are no longer separate and opposing spheres. He knows very well, in fact, that his schoolmates, while kicking each other, actually desire one another. Instead of punching and beating, play should rather consist in people offering themselves physically to one another,7 with the erotic character o
f sadomasochism being openly recognised and combined with affection. The struggle of bodies can very well end up in a kiss and forms of sex that are both tender and violent, and team meetings could well be transformed into a collective encounter in the scrum (a development already foreshadowed in rugby).
Today, the connection between Eros and sport is veiled with hypocrisy, even if hugging and kissing is already commonplace after a goal is scored. (What is the real goal?) And we know how in the locker room after the game, tousled and sweaty youths heatedly discuss their exploits in language full of sexual expressions, particularly the word ‘fuck’.
In the municipal Turkish baths of London’s East End, where young and not so young working-class heterosexuals regularly get together to massage each other’s naked bodies on the steam room benches, and the scent of mint and saffron fills the air, it is enough to close one’s eyes for a moment and simply listen, to be struck by the incessant repetition of ‘fucking’ this and that. The desire to fuck is so strong, and at the same time so tightly repressed, that it is continuously expressed in language and never concretely (or almost never, but my lips are sealed).
For its side, cunning capital is moving in to exploit the homosexuality that lies within and behind sport. The latest American sporting magazines, for example, publish gay ads in their back pages. And, in the more ‘advanced’ capitalist countries, fashion imposes on gays the attractive and provocative garb of the athlete. On a Sunday afternoon in New York’s Central Park, you get the impression that a cycle race is taking place: racing bikes, shorts and muscular thighs are de rigueur, the scene is perfectly set. Still, what goes on in the bushes, would undoubtedly surprise the heterosexual who happens by.