by Mario Mieli
For the time being, however, we are still a long way from reaching a revolutionary understanding with the ‘hustlers’, and it is still through them that the system punishes homosexuality, even with death – no less ferociously than the Nazis, but far more subtly and with greater effect. Today, the system no longer needs to exterminate gays en masse, it is enough to strike at some, for the most part in an extremely indirect manner, keeping its own hands ‘clean’, but still managing to impose on all others a reign of terror.
The most ‘developed’ countries, as we have seen, decidedly refrain from any direct bloody repression of homosexuality, providing instead a ‘comfortable’ if expensive ghetto. If you want a safe hustler, you can get one for $100 from the Model Escort Agency in Los Angeles. If homosexuals do not want to risk being beaten up or murdered, then they only need to pay: the King’s Sauna and Incognito Bar will open their doors. In this sense democracy is progressive when compared to Nazism: it makes greater profits from the commercialisation of homosexuality.
Capital, in fact, kills two birds with the same stone. On the one hand, it vents anti-gay social violence through the attacks of ‘criminals’ (who, as a general rule, are those ‘bisexuals’ whose homosexuality is most repressed). In this way the system offers many marginalised young kids the opportunity to let off steam by having a go at people whom the capitalist and phallocratic ideology relegates to a place even below their own, the ‘inverts’ (not to speak of women, slaves of the slaves). Capital thus makes a timely manoeuvre to divert from itself the anger and violence of the street, caused by the misery it has itself produced.
On the other hand, by inciting the hustlers, capital manages to terrorise the gay world proper. The system generally inhibits gays from defending themselves and making themselves respected (by fostering guilt and an inferiority complex), while it incites against them enemies who are genuinely formidable, i.e. criminalised proletarian youths for whom violence is part of everyday life. It is not hard to understand how, finding themselves defenceless in this way, gay people often seek protection from others, instead of from themselves: and where can they find it, if not in the system? This explains how in the USA, for example, one wing of the GLF wanted to increase the number of policemen patrolling cruising grounds, where homosexuals were regularly murdered. (Have you ever spent the night in Central Park? Or in the Circolo Massimo?)
The stereotype of the cowardly and reactionary homosexual, who looks for individual security within the system, in personal success and in L’Uomo Vogue – a stereotype which very many gays still identify with today – has its roots in the sum of humiliations and acts of violence that are suffered, and in the constant anxious tension provoked by the risk of enduring this. We gays know all too well how, on the street and in cruising grounds, in cinemas, parks, toilets, etc., we constantly face not only the risk of arrest, but also of being beaten up, robbed, ridiculed, humiliated and even killed; while in the intellectual and artistic milieu, or even among people with a bourgeois education, this risk is generally absent, or at least attenuated. It is one thing to be oppressed and exploited by one’s analyst, something else to be oppressed with a knife.
It is understandable, then, how many gay people fear revolution, seeing in it the revolt of their tormentors, and thus their own demise. Nor can we refute those who prefer things to remain as they are, rather than seeing in power those same proletarians who daily insult, attack and hypocritically reject gays. No matter whether these proletarians call themselves fascist, ‘communist’ or extra-parliamentary; in substance, their violent anti-homosexual attitude is all the same.
The system, however, is able to meet the ‘deviant’ half-way.
Behave yourself properly and live out your perversion in the little ghettoes we can control and regulate, and then we’ll protect you. If you go cruising in parks and public toilets, you’re just looking for trouble. Better stay at home! Better still, come to the Super Cock International Privacy Club, where you’ll find a restaurant, a strip-tease show, porno films, psychedelic toilets, and perhaps even a fire-escape.
The ‘Protectors’ of the Left
The leftists – above all the PCI, but equally all the organisations who proclaim themselves to be revolutionaries – were slow to adopt a similar attitude of ‘protection’ in their encounters with us gays (and only just now are things ‘changing’ . . .): they have always denied homosexuality without mediation, they have refused it while exalting the tough and virile figure of the productive – and evidently reproductive – worker. They have mocked homosexuals, defining them in terms of the corruption and decadence of bourgeois society, while they themselves, the left, do their part to fix gays into a position of the qualunquismo15 counterrevolutionary. At the same time, they sustain an image of the revolution that is grotesquely bigoted and repressive, founded on sacrifice and the hellish proletarian family, and caricaturally virile, founded on productive-reproductive labour and on brute militarised violence, all the while hailing the model of countries that define themselves as socialist yet which liquidate homosexuals in concentration camps or in ‘institutes for re-education’, as in Cuba or China, for example. It is scarcely surprising, then, that gay people saw only the system itself as their ‘salvation’.
When the homosexual liberation movement started in Italy, the left did their best to hush and discourage it. I remember one time when Luca Cafiero, at the head of a handful of katanghesi 16 from Movimento Studentesco, came to stop us from handing out Fuori! fliers at the entrance of the State University of Milan. Every one of us can itemise the interminable series of insults, provocations, and at times physical attacks that we’ve endured from leftist militants. Those of us who have temporarily been part of such groups know all too well the amount of humiliation and frustration that makes up the militancy of a queer in the heterosexual left. The leftists did everything they could to extinguish our movement: they were obstinate in labelling us ‘petit-bourgeois qualunquisti’ precisely from the moment in which, to the contrary, we started to come out in a revolutionary way. Already in 1971, Joe Fallisi could write that the left served, above all, ‘to modernize reformist politics and to impose (under the skies of Spectacle) the new ideological images of the “protester”, the “tough”, the “extra-parliamentary”, the “new partisan”’.17 And if the reformist politics of the left are phallocentric and heterosexual, their ideal protestor is the ‘tough guy with a big cock and muscles of steel’, who sets even the fascist bullies to flight.
[These extra-parliamentary groups] are formed from the wreckage of an old shipwreck, one which they themselves have patched up. They have risen back to the surface only because it is the real movement, the revolutionary movement, which slowly but inexorably returned. But if they reappear in the wake of this New Proletariat that today has just started to make itself evident – and which therefore does not yet have clear class consciousness – it is because they are the reflux of a reflux, and they do so only in order to recuperate it.18
It’s no accident that yesterday’s extra-parliamentary groups are today seated in Parliament.
Today, the real revolutionary movement includes, above all, the movement of women and homosexuals who struggle against the system and against the heterosexual phallocentrism that sustains it and chains to it the (male) proletariat himself. Conversely, the organisations of the left, fundamentally male and macho, heterosexual and anti-homosexual, make apologies for the public and private capitalist Norm, and hence for the system itself.
Fallisi reminds us that,
the first phase of the worker’s movement was the sectarian phase. And these associations and sects of the 19th century (Owenist, Fourierist, Icarian, Saint-Simonian, etc) were effectively the ‘yeast’ of the working class movement at its origin. Then, as soon as they had been left behind, they were obstacles that soon become reactionary. In sum, they were the childhood of the worker’s movement [. . .] But because they made possible the foundation of the First International, it was nece
ssary for the proletariat to move beyond that phase. Now, as in the last century, we need to overcome the stage of sects, the proletariat must overcome – truly – the stage of groupuscles.19 Albeit with the difference, compared with the situation a hundred years ago, that, today the official little groups (Stalinist, ‘anarchist’, Trotskyist, etc) are the acritical products of an anterior defeat, one that unfolded during the ’20s, so that they don’t even have the function of a revolutionary ‘yeast’ that the sects once had, and they cannot be the polarizers of radical situations, just those who come after, trailing in the wake, with all the stultifying weight of ideological mystifications. And because as they cannot comprehend the New Proletariat [. . .], they can only hope to recuperate it, proffering their sham gold of Politics, and ultimately they will only be discarded. When the real movement matures, when it is conscious-in-itself and reunified, it will pass swift judgment on all its so-called ‘representatives.’20
In short, from ’71 to today, times have changed. If the extra-parliamentarians ended up in parliament, it is, however, also true that the movement of revolutionary women has shaken society as a whole and has put in crisis even those groups who declare themselves to be revolutionaries yet are still to this day strongholds of masculinist bigotry. The same movement of homosexuals who are conscious, revolutionary, or at least open to a vision of a world different from the traditional one, can no longer be ignored by the politicians of the left. For the parties, big and small alike, it is now necessary to recuperate homosexuals too. I think that not even Stalin, by this point, would turn in his grave.
The heterosexual left tries a similar recuperation in their interactions with the homosexual question, albeit on a more minor scale than that of their confrontations with feminism. Until very recently, for the extra-parliamentary leftists the thieving and ‘fascist’ minister was obviously also ‘queer’. (‘Enough, enough, with pederastic clergy!’, they chanted in the streets during the demonstrations of ’68 and ’69.) Today, however, it might happen that a homosexual shows himself to be a ‘good comrade’, an ‘invaluable activist in the service of the proletariat’, while it is opportune that all the ‘good comrades’ keep in mind the inherent contradictions of the sexual sphere. The contrast is unmistakable. On one side the term ‘inverted’ is used as an insult. On the other, the wolf dresses in sheep’s clothing, preaching acceptance and comprehension for the homosexual comrades, those ‘wild dogs’ who often don’t feel like they belong in those so-called revolutionary groups who label Rumor and Colombo as queer, just as they call Andreotti a hunchback and Fanfani21 a dwarf, while Fanfani, that arch-swaggart,22 keeps up the morale of national morality, deprecating divorce as the bearer of vice: adultery, prostitution, abortion, juvenile delinquency, female homosexuality, druggy kids and pederasts . . .
In essence: if antifascism gathers in a single bunch the Christian Democrats, the Communist Party, the socialists, etc, and the ex-extraparliamentarians of the left, the united front against homosexuality (the Hetero Holy Alliance) truly reconciles ‘opposite extremes’ and rivals across the ‘democratic arc’. And if the Christian Democrats, in a climate of conspiring with fascism, makes a huge show of its own antifascism, so the ultra-left groups often behave themselves like real fascist rackets in their interactions with homosexuals, even as they also give a little nod of solidarity and tolerance.
For nearly all the militants in the groups, the homosexual question is of secondary importance and ‘superstructural’, only concerning a minority: ‘we must tolerate the homosexuals, so that they don’t bust our balls, making us discuss our heterosexuality and acting like we also take it in the ass’.
We could cite, for instance, an article that appeared in Il Manifesto and commented on the ‘proletarian festival’ days in Licola during September 1975:
One moment when everyone perked up their ears to the speakers playing on the radio all through the forest was when a comrade of the Fuori! collective from Milan was speaking. There had already been a lot of commotion around the stand of this collective early in the afternoon [. . .] The Milanese of Fuori! choose a life of provocation. Tricked out in a violent and exaggerated manner, with sequins and gold gleaming, they sell their paper, accosting people in an accusatory manner, saying to them: ‘You deny your own homosexuality’ The reactions were, to a small degree, panic and intolerance only to a small degree (in general, though this is another way of ignoring the problem), but mostly the comrades reacted by saying, ‘Look, I don’t give a shit what you do or what you want for me, all fine, provided that you stop bothering me.’23
This last type of reaction enables us to grasp, behind the appearance of a new and more open attitude, the actually closed mentality of the heterosexual ‘comrades’. And, as a general rule, I would reply: Dear comrade, have you ever wondered why you clam up when someone puts into question the repression of your homosexual desire? Your withered homosexuality? And don’t tell me: ‘You can do what you like among yourselves, but don’t interfere with me’, when you are not free to desire me, to make love with me, to enjoy sensual communication between your body and mine; when you rule out the possibility of having a sexual relation with me. If you are not free, then how can I be free? Revolutionary freedom is not something individual, but a relation of reciprocity: my homosexuality is your homosexuality. And as for the sequins, they are neither over the top nor violent, at least not any more than my desire to enjoy your homosexuality, our homosexuality, dear comrade …
‘Incredible, ineffable, and rather entertaining’, was, however, the ‘theoretical contribution’ of Lotta Continua’s paper (again still referring to the days in Licola):
A party always shows the contradictions within the people. We can give a few examples: the immense camp was lively all day, as seated under the tents and below the pines, people were playing music and cards, passing a joint or drinking house wine, with workers going up the booth of the feminists to ask for information, with huge throngs at that of the comrades from Fuori! At the debate over the proletarian struggles in Naples, a PCI worker starting criticizing the festival because there were too many signs and writings on music and homosexuality; and he was interrupted by one of the organized unemployed: ‘You cannot say this, because on our committee there’s a fag who fights the hardest of all.’24
To the contrary: I believe that homosexuals are revolutionary today in as much as we have overcome politics. The revolution for which we are fighting is, among other things, the negation of all male supremacist political rackets (based among other things on sublimated homosexuality), since it is the negation and overcoming of capital and its politics, which find their way into all groups of the left, which characterize them, sustain them, and make them counterrevolutionary.
On the other hand, my asshole doesn’t want to be political, because it is not for sale to any racket of the left in exchange for a bit of putrid opportunist and political ‘protection’. Meanwhile, the asshole of the ‘comrades’ in the groups will be revolutionary only when they have managed to enjoy them with others, and when they have stopped covering them up with the ideology of tolerance for the queers. As long as they hide behind the shield of politics, the heterosexual ‘comrades’ will not know what is hidden behind their thighs. ‘Politique d’abord’, wrote Cavour to the countess of Castiglione …25
As always, it is only rather belatedly, in comparison to the ‘enlightened’ bourgeoisie, that the leftist groups have begun to play the game of capitalist tolerance. From declared hangmen, a thousand times more repugnant than the hustlers and fascists, given all their (ideological) declarations of revolution, the militants of these groups have transformed themselves into ‘open’ interlocutors of homosexuals. In their minds, they act out fantasies about becoming well-meaning and tolerant protectors of the ‘deviant’, and in this way gratify their own virile image, already well on the decline, at a time when even the parishes of the ultra-left have suddenly to improvise ‘feminist’ speakers for ‘their’ women. Moreover, t
he fantasy of being protectors helps them to exorcise the problem of the repression of their homoerotic desire. Under it all, the activists of the left aspire, as always, to become good cops. But they don’t know that real cops often get in there more than they do, and that when this happens, they make love with us gays. When will there be a free homosexual outlet for the militants of the far left?
As good cops for the system, the little groups are doing their utmost to construct an ‘alternative’ ghetto for us ‘deviants’, and since they do not want to pollute their serious and militaristic organisations with anything gay, they prefer to concede us free access to the rubbish-heap of the counterculture. For the time being, however, the left is more stupid and clumsy than the system’s traditional Mafia, and in no position to create for us homosexuals attractive ghettoes comparable with those constructed by the capitalist ‘perversion’ industry.
Again, though, even for this counter-culture of ours it’s a bit too much to accept the presence of fags, and at the festivals for the ‘young proletariat’, there are provocations and attacks against women and us. The masculinist, aggressive, fatally broken, and heteromaniacal atmosphere of these festivals is for us seriously heavy: and anyone who says that we are ‘paranoid’ simply means that we are quick to grasp the intolerability of an environment created by people who can scarcely even tolerate us, by the hidden aggression of phallocentric ‘comrades’, and by the negation of homosexuality that – in the typical form of male bonding – both unites and divides them at the same time, and certainly divides them from us.
But times are finally changing. The groups are now giving us a certain space of our own: a weekly broadcast on the ‘free’ radio, and two or three regular pages in the underground press. This is a space well guarded by the cops of the left, whose function to reinforce the lack of confidence that gay people have in themselves and convince them of the need to put themselves in line with (and at the whim of) this or that powerful protector, especially since ‘if it wasn’t for the left, we would have fascism’ – a new scarecrow to replace that of revolution, so that everyone, homosexuals included, will remain well lined up, separate and tidy on the democratic and antifascist parliamentary benches.
