by Mario Mieli
At times, too, the bodybuilding cult has provided a medium linking sport with manifest homosexuality. A British magazine of the 1950s, for example, advertised itself as: ‘The finest, most thrilling International Physique Photo magazine. Packed with superb pictures of the World’s most flawless physiques. Hi-Fi reproduction on glossy art paper. Plus inspiring articles by today’s Champion body-builders’.8 Inside, photographs of nude males in the pose of Greek statues: ‘Stars from all over the world’. Another issue of the same magazine was titled ‘Men and Sex’, even though there was not a single article inside on male sexuality. Apparently there was no need to justify the title.
Alcohol, patriotism, and other drugs. Male Bonding and Friendship
In the same way as sport, patriotic enthusiasm allows a converted expression of latent homosexual desire:
Bleuler refused to accept that alcohol destroys sublimations. To support this view, he cited the tendency to a ‘patriotic’ sublimation that is frequently encountered after the consumption of alcohol. But when a drunken man induces those around him to join in expressions of ‘patriotic’ enthusiasm, we would rather see this as an ill-disguised homoeroticism than as sublimation.9
The Italian Alpine division must have felt that something hit the mark when they demanded (and obtained) the confiscation of Pasolini’s Salò, or 120 Days of Sodom on the grounds that the film showed their troops in a scene deemed ‘morbid and perverted’.
Looking more closely at drink, Ferenczi also maintained that ‘the alcohol played here only the part of an agent destroying sublimation, through the effect of which the [patient’s] true sexual constitution, namely the preference for a member of the same sex, became evident’.10 It is plenty well known how drunkenness releases homoerotic impulses in many who are heterosexual par excellence. Once a man gets drunk, he will fall prey without difficulty to gay seduction.
Marijuana, hash, LSD, etc., and in fact all ‘mind-expanding’ drugs frequently bring straight people face to face with their homoerotic desire and/or the problem of its repression, especially if they find themselves in the company of homosexuals. They can then either abandon themselves to the formerly repressed impulse, to experience, or else resist this and end up in ‘paranoia’.11
Moreover, just as Ferenczi recognised the ill-disguised presence of homosexual desire in expressions of patriotism, so we can similarly see the same thing behind all male bonding, the military and police variety above all, as well as other forms of friendship between people of the same sex. According to Freud:
After the stage of heterosexual object-choice has been reached, the homosexual tendencies are not, as might be expected, done away with or brought to a stop; they are merely deflected from their sexual aim and applied to fresh uses. They now combine with portions of the ego-instincts and, as attached components, help to constitute the social instincts, thus contributing an erotic factor to friendship and comradeship, to esprit de corps and to the love of mankind in general.12
The ‘bosom buddy’ of childhood and adolescence is in fact the ‘object’ of the child’s desire, in the broad sense and hence also sexual. Mutual and collective masturbation among school friends expresses the erotic charge that ties them together, even if it is generally only the very young gay boy who can openly and without hypocrisy indulge in sexual relations with his peers. The others are already aware of the suppression of homoeroticism, and accept erotic play with their friends only as a palliative masturbatory outlet (‘girls won‘t let us’), refusing to admit the deep homosexual desire that unites them.
Among adults, heterosexual male friends, colleagues, mates or comrades all fail to conceal from the gay eye the homosexual substratum of their relationships. Business partnerships, political rackets, gangs, bars and men’s clubs are the unhealthy sites of latent homosexuality, for which they provide only a wretched gratification. Here, men exhibit the symbolic phallus, confirming their own fixation on the cock while speaking of ‘women’ or ‘cunts’, vigorously slapping one another on the back and issuing tacit requests to get fucked in the ass: ‘Dickhead! Nutsack!’ Clearly, men speak amongst themselves of male sexuality, and if they are heterosexual, then their homosexual desire can get worked out only in language.
Male bonding is the grotesque staging of a paralysed and embittered homosexuality, which can be grasped, in the negative, in the denial of women, whom they speak of phallocratically, without any genuine consideration, reducing them to a hole and therefore to that which is not. The suppression of homoeroticism is here always bound up with the oppression of women by men. Negated homosexual desire makes its resurgence via the negation of woman. In male language, woman is totally transformed, she becomes woman-for-man, a fetish-medium between men, the alienated go-between for men whose sole and constant preoccupation is the incessant assertion of a fetishistic, overweening, individualistic, male-bonding, and negative virility. Virility is simply the neurotic and cumbersome introjection by men of a homosexual desire for one another which is both very strong and tightly censored: it coarsens and hardens the male human being, transforming him into a crude caricature of maleness. There is nothing more ridiculous and wholly fragile than this would-be virile heterosexual who boasts of his violent and ‘absolute’ potency and in this way only negates himself, forcibly repressing the human being – particularly the ‘woman’ and the queer – within himself, and making himself a cop for the phallic power system. There is nothing more feeble than this ‘virile’ male who beneath it all fears impotence and castration, since in reality he already is, as an absolute male, a mutilated human being.
To quote Ferenczi once again:
With male neurotics who feel themselves unkindly treated by the physician homosexual obsessions may appear, which often refer to the person of the latter. This is a proof, which might almost be called experimental, that friendship is essentially sublimated homosexuality, which in case of denial is apt to regress on to its primitive level.13
In all relations of friendship between male heterosexuals, the homosexuality that is latent and inhibited finds expression in the form of obsessive heterosexuality. The heterosexual is obsessed with the need to prove to his friend his exclusive attraction towards women, and to exorcise the homosexuality on which his friendship with the other man is based. Friendship, therefore, cannot be genuine: it is founded on a misconception and a mutual (anti-)homosexual complicity (or rather, on mute homosexual complicity, on alienated homosexuality). The liberation of homoeroticism, therefore, is not just the negation of homosexuality as it presently is, but also the supersession of the present forms of friendship between people of the same sex. If homosexuality comes out, then a certain type of ‘friendship’ cannot but give way to new erotic relations and open emotions.
Hetero-queens. The Cult of the Gay Superstar
Hetero-queenery, too, must be seen as a phenomenon closely connected with the sublimation of homoerotism. The hetero-queen is a heterosexual who, while unaware of the gay component of his own desire, and thus not having homosexual relations, has all the ways (if not the savoir faire) of a queen.
We can see this, for example, in the radical chic14 of the left, the Stalinist-Maoist dress of L’Uomo Vogue as pioneered by Luca Cafiero15 and others; the ‘plum-coloured jacket with wide reveres’ and the handbag – ‘which, now that everybody carries one, is no longer necessarily a gay symbol’16 – of the working-class militant of Lotta Continua; the jeans and leather of the Autonomists, a fetish taken over from the leatherqueens, which objectifies and sublimates their homosexual desire; the (queens/fags) and radical chic.] Arbasinian17 preciousness undergirding Sergio Finzi or ‘Little Hans’; the pinstripes and cigar of Verdiglione who, so tanned, would cut quite the figure, cognac in hand, at the Napoleon (the refined club for wellheeled homosexuals in central London).
For their part, even the very critics of the left often exhibit the radical chic variant of hetero-queenery. Take, for instance, the glossy paper, ‘elegance’ and ‘unscrupulous’ intell
ectual show-off evident in the publications of certain Situationist theorists (like Simonetti or the disguises of Sanguinetti or the bunch of frescoes and the novella of the thirties titled Madness that Pinni Galante brought me one time I was recovering in hospital). All these expressions of hetero-queenery reveal, to the eyes of conscious homosexuals, the queen within so many men whom no one would suspect of being gay. The Situationist critique of the society of the spectacle, in the language of certain Situationists, becomes itself spectacular, to the point that they come to act out through this mask their real desire for, and to be, queer.
Besides sport and sporting mania, patriotic enthusiasm, male bonding and friendship, hetero-queenery and radical chic, a certain quantity of unconscious homosexual desire is also channelled into the myths of singers and movie stars. This phenomenon is ever more common, to the point that in the USA and Britain, in particular, the latest idols of popular music rouse their massed teenage fans to delirium by a repertoire of sinuous movements, ‘transsexual’ vocal modulations, ostentatiously effeminate clothing and sophisticated make-up – by the patent ambiguity, in short, which they display, from the Rolling Stones to Roxy Music, Lou Reed and David Bowie. This phenomenon has reached paradoxical heights. The New York Dolls, for instance, a group of young men who come (or came) on stage in full drag, are completely heterosexual, and yet at least in its intent, their show is not in fact a parody of homosexuality and transvestism, but rather an exaltation. The great majority of their audience are heterosexual too, and yet the success of these singers is rightly attributed to their undisguised exhibition of a ‘complex-free’ homosexuality. Nor do their audience worship them as something ridiculous, but precisely because they appear provocatively gay.
This is a case of a repressive desublimation that is immediately resublimated. Capital liberalises desire while channelling it into a consumerist outlet. Far from being genuinely liberated, homosexuality thus plays a key role in the totalitarian capitalist spectacle. Nowadays, there is no commercial ‘artistic’ expression which does not take into account, to a greater or lesser extent, the homoerotic content of desire. But in the ‘age of its technical reproducibility,’ the ‘work of art’ makes a high contribution to the commodification of homoeroticism.
As a general and conformist rule, a homosexual is seen as justified if they are an artist, since according to popular conception, artists are always outrageous, non-conformist, and mad, so they might as well be ‘inverted’ as well. In the eyes of ‘normal’ people, art, in the last analysis, redeems the anomaly of sexual depravation: ‘even Michelangelo, Leonardo, Shakespeare, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Proust, Cocteau, etc. were like that’. Similarly, homosexuality is tolerated, as an exception, when accompanied by an ‘artistic’ expression, because it can then be relegated to the sphere of imagination, fantasy, and sublimation, and it does not directly interfere with relations that are currently considered ‘normal’. Homoeroticism is all very well in the cinema, in books, and in painting, but not in bed, and above all: ‘Not in my bed, for the love of God and the Blessed Virgin Mary!’
Capital makes us wallow in this form of tolerance. But if homosexuality really ‘circulated’ freely (as the ideology of permissiveness claims) as ‘common currency’, the consequences would be such as to seriously (or rather, gaily) endanger the heterosexual institutions and the unstable equilibrium on which the capitalist state is founded. And this is why the ‘liberal’ state is liberal only up to a certain point.
For the present system, to liberalise means above all to prevent and block any genuine liberation. And the liberalisation of homosexuality, as I have already shown, is in the first place its commodification, driven by capital – often via the medium of ‘artistic’ expression – in such the industries of the gay ghetto in cinema, publishing, clothing: in short, in the industries of fashion.
But if homosexuality, like feminism, is currently in fashion, its commodification does not alter social custom18 substantially. Or rather, if there has been a change in custom, this has only taken place at a snail’s pace, whereas ephemeral fashions assert and outmode themselves at a gallop. The streets of London are thronged with young heterosexual couples who are dressed, made-up and coiffured in the manner of their gay rock-star idols. But they are still heterosexual couples and – apart from a few rare exceptions who only prove the rule – so they remain.
Homosexuality has thus been elevated to a myth, on the condition, paradoxically, that the homosexual essence is kept hidden. The heterosexual rock fan idolises his star, and pays for his success, because in his eyes only a star can swish his hips with his head held high and mascara-smudged eyes. Like a mirror framed by glitter, the rock idol reflects the fascinated light of the homoerotic libido that his audience projects onto him. The cult of the gay superstar is the reverse side of the two-faced mask that heterosexuals wear in front of homosexuality. The face they usually show is immediate disdain and disparagement for the fag who stands at the corner of the street, who dares to smile at them in the underground.
Jealousy, Masochism and Sadism;
The Homosexuality Within Heterosexuality
I already indicated in the first chapter the recognition by psychoanalysis of a veiled homoerotic desire in some mechanisms specific to so-called ‘normal’ jealousy (‘competitive’ jealousy, as Freud also described it): ‘That is to say, a man will not only feel pain about the woman he loves and hatred of the man who is his rival, but also grief about the man, whom he loves unconsciously, and hatred of the woman as his rival; and the latter set of feelings will add to the intensity of his jealousy.’19
It is particularly jealousy of the ‘delusional’ kind, which also contains elements of the two other types, ‘competitive’ and ‘projected’, that reveals most blatantly the homoerotic substrate that is common to all three:
It too has its origin in repressed impulses towards unfaithfulness; but the object in these cases is of the same sex as the subject. Delusional jealousy is what is left of a homosexuality that has run its course, and it rightly takes its position among the classical forms of paranoia. As an attempt at defence against an unduly strong homosexual impulse it may, in a man, be described in the formula: ‘I do not love him, she loves him!’20
And according to Ferenczi, ‘jealousy of men signifie[s] only the projection of [one’s] own erotic pleasure in the male sex’.21
Jealousy, therefore, is envy: envy of the woman able to get off with the other man. In spoken language, you often hear the idea of jealousy confused with the idea of envy: to say ‘I’m jealous of you because you’ve got a beautiful car’ is the vice versa of what you cannot say, that is: ‘I am envious of you, my dear, because you do it with the butcher’s boy’.
The achievement of homosexual awareness and the liberation of gay desire shatters the closed world of the traditional heterosexual couple, and above all, dispels the murky fog of possible betrayals, infidelities and jealousies that weigh upon it, poisoning our days and nights. Jealousy too, therefore, is based on a serious misunderstanding of homosexual desire. It gnaws at the liver of the heterosexual male if his woman gets off with another man, because he is unaware that if he, too, were to make love with this other man, with other men in general, then he would have taken the most important step towards overcoming his tribulations and transforming jealousy into enjoyment. It may well be true that jealousy today often involves an indirect expression of masochistic tendencies, and thus in a certain respect is a pleasure in itself. But it is also true that masochism can be enjoyed in a more satisfactory, conscious, direct and communicative way.
Giuliano De Fusco has pointed out to me that a person aware of his masochism exerts himself to bring out the ‘contradiction’ in his partner, by which he means the inhibited sadism, or, in the wider sense, the sadistic and masochistic impulses of those who do not recognise their own sadomasochistic propensity. The true masochist is adept at inducing his partner to liberate his aggression and become aware of it. This involves an increase in e
motion and enjoyment for both parties, and the masochist ultimately manages to see the person as he ‘really’ is, uninhibitedly. In a love relation, the genuine masochist sees himself the object of an amorous aggression, permitting him to directly and openly enjoy the pleasure of jealousy; ‘betrayal’ becomes an act of love, since it reveals aggression and hence enhances pleasure and passion.
But conscious sadomasochism is certainly not the same thing as the sadomasochism implicit in the ‘normal’ couple. As Giuliano De Fusco observes, this relationship reflects the alienated and alienating sadomasochism with which capitalist society is permeated, which is authoritarian and repressive, and which, by negating the human being, sadistically negates also his sadism, imposing on him a subhuman and humiliating condition, and debasing his masochism.
Just as a loving desire for people of the other sex is today reduced by the system to a stunted and phallocratic heterosexuality, while desire for people of the same sex is severely repressed by a society that transforms this into an instrument of capitalist power, by forcing it to remain latent or desublimating it in an alienating manner, so too are the sadistic and masochistic tendencies divided, repressed, and exploited by capital, which distorts them so as to make them serve its own rule. The revolution will also be the (pro)positive liberation of sadism and masochism, and a free community in which masochistic and sadistic desires will find open expression and take on a new and transformed form, quite different from the ‘sado-masochism’ of today. With masochism and sadism, too, the revolutionary critique also attacks the prejudice that sees sadism and masochism as simply ‘perversions’, mere distortions of Eros, denying their intrinsic importance, their ability to bridge the gulf between Eros and Thanatos, between good and evil, and to overcome – in practical and emotional life – the dichotomy of opposites founded on repression.
