Towards a Gay Communism

by Mario Mieli

  18. Ferenczi, ‘On the Part Played by Homosexuality in the Psychogenesis of Paranoia’, p. 157.

  19. See Roberto Calasso’s essay ‘Nota sui lettori di Schreber’, published as an appendix to the Italian edition of Schreber’s Memoirs. [Translator’s note from first English edition: The English edition of this amazing book is published as Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (London Bloomsbury, 2001).]

  20. Ferenczi, ‘On the Part Played by Homosexuality in the Psychogenesis of Paranoia’, p. 167.

  21. Freud, ‘Psycho-Analytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia’, p. 59.

  22. Arieti, Interpretazione della schizofrenia, p. 28.

  23. Arieti, Interpretazione della schizofrenia, p. 131.

  24. Freud, ‘Psycho-Analytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia’, p. 46.

  25. Ibid., p. 43

  26. Hocquenghem, Homosexual Desire, p. 55.

  27. [Translator’s note: An eknoic state refers to a delusional state that is the consequence of affective excitability that reaches ecstatic levels.]

  28. Norman O. Brown, Love’s Body, p. 159.

  29. Reich, Character Analysis (London: Prentice Hall International, 1955), p. 399.

  30. Groddeck, The Book of the It (London, 1979), p. 11.

  31. Psychiatrists involved in the ‘anti-psychiatry’ movement confront ‘schizophrenia’ with the same mental framework as that with which an eighteenth-century Enlightenment philosopher might have confronted the communist theme of human emancipation. A revolutionary critique of ‘anti-psychiatry’, and in particular the ideas of David Cooper, can be found in Giorgio Cesarano, Manuale di sopravvivenza (Bari: Dedalo, 1974).

  32. Theodor Lidz and Stephen Fleck, ‘Schizofrenia, integrazione personale e funzione della famiglia’, Eziologia della schizofrenia (ed. D. Jackson), Milan, 1964, p. 414.

  33. Jacques Camatte, II capitale totale, p. 193.

  34. [Editor’s note from original volume: On 10 July 1976, a cloud of dioxin escaped from the Icmesa plant in Seveso, in the province of Milan, causing an ecological disaster.]

  35. Reich, Character Analysis, p. 400.

  36. Gilles Deleuze, ‘Capitalismo e schizofrenia’, L’altra pazzia: mappa antologica della psichiatria alternativa (Milan: Feltrinelli,1975), p. 66.

  37. Deleuze, Semeiotica e Psicanalisi, p. 9.

  38. Jung, ‘Psychology of the Unconscious’, p. 65.

  39. Freud, ‘Hysterical Phantasies and their Relation to Bisexuality’, Standard Edition, Vol. 9 (London: Vintage, 2001), pp. 155–66.

  40. Harry Benjamin, The Transsexual Phenomenon, p. 14.

  41. Casablanca is the site of a celebrated ‘sex-change’ clinic, the Du Parc clinic, directed by a French surgeon.

  42. Plato, Phaedrus (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), pp. 46–7 (244).

  43. Plato, Symposium (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1951), p. 79 (201d).

  44. Plato, Phaedrus.

  45. Freud, ‘The Ego and the Id’, p. 36.

  46. Ferenczi, ‘Philosophy and Psycho-Analysis’, Final Contributions to the Problems and Methods of Psycho-Analysis (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), p. 328.

  47. Edgar Allen Poe, The Tell-Tale Heart (and other stories) (London: J. Lehmann, 1948), p. 25.

  48. Ko Hung, Pao Phu Tzu, quoted by Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), Vol. 2, p. 438.

  49. See Chapter 6, section 1.

  50. On 4 November 1976, at the congress of Lotta Continua held in Rimini, a woman comrade made the following remark to the male militants: ‘You refuse to ask yourselves where it is that your intolerance towards homosexuals comes from. It is the product of the fear that you have of traumatic penetration. You are terrified of the same thing that you do to us, and don’t want it to happen to you. You don’t know what it means to have your body expropriated, but you’re still scared of it’. See Antonio Padellaro, ‘La polemica delle femministe spacca in due Lotta Continua’, Corriere della Sera, (9 November 1976).

  51. Groddeck, The Book of the It, p. 230.

  52. Relatively few years, though, in the face of eternity.

  53. [Translator’s note: Myra Breckinridge is the titular character of a Gore Vidal novel by the same name, which is the story of a trans woman. She was played by Raquel Welch in the 1970 film adaptation.]

  54. Meo Cataldo, Marciapiede (Milan, 1976), p. 17.

  6

  Towards a Gay Communism

  Transvestism, Homosexuality and ‘Homosexualisation’

  There is more to be learned from wearing a dress for a day, than there is from wearing a suit for life.1

  As we have seen, ‘schizophrenia’ sheds light on the transsexual substratum of the psyche, our bodily being-in-becoming (the mind is part of the body, and the body as a whole is far from completely monosexual). We have also established that it is via the liberation of homoeroticism, among other things, that transsexuality is concretely attained; and however much homosexuality is put down by the system today, we gays are among those persons most aware of the transsexual ‘nature’ that lies within us all. Fantasies of a transsexual character often spring to our consciousness, and many of us have had more or less transsexual experiences.

  Which is not to exclude the fact that many transsexuals (and transvestites) today are predominantly hetero. For example, Rachel, the American founder of the Transvestites and Transsexuals Group of the London section of the Gay Liberation Front, defines herself as a ‘lesbian’, but – from the genital-anatomical point of view – is male. In other words: despite being equipped with sexual characteristics that are both primarily and secondarily coded as male, Rachel feels herself to be, and understands herself as, a woman, and so she acts and dresses as such (her style recalls that of many feminists, and Rachel is a feminist). As a lesbian, she is homosexual, but she is also heterosexual, because s/he likes women, and is even married and only rarely has sexual relations with men, who she finds unattractive in so far as they are usually phallocratic and obsessed with virility. When she lived in London, she was also considered a ‘woman’ by the comrades of the Women’s Liberation Front: as far as I know, Rachel was the only person I know of male sex admitted to the meetings of the English feminists. Judith, her wife, is homosexual, and, with the exception made for Rachel (but Rachel, in reality, truly constitutes an exception), she has sexual relations only with women.2

  ‘Heterosexuals’ aware of their transsexuality, however, are at present far less numerous than gays who have undertaken the transsexual trip. This is because heterosexuals, as a general rule, have adapted to their mutilated role of man or woman as something ‘normal’, obvious and taken for granted, whereas we gays almost invariably experience it as a burden that we have to be exclusively men or women, and suffer from the resistance with which we, and our desire, are opposed by heterosexuals of the same sex as ourselves. The hermaphrodite fantasy, dream and ideal occupy a major place in the gay existential universe.

  Society attacks transsexuals or those who might appear as such with special violence: the butch lesbians, the fags, and the ‘effeminate’ male homosexual bear a greater brunt of public execration and contempt, and are frequently criticised even by those reactionary homosexuals who are better adapted to the system, the ‘straight gays’ who have managed to pass as ‘normal’ or heterosexual. These reactionary homosexuals (these homo-cops) insist that outrageous queens and transvestites ‘trash the gay scene and the image of homosexuality in the eyes of all’. For our part, we outrageous gays see them as queens disguised as straight, as disgraced people who are forced to camouflage themselves, to act a ‘natural’ life in the role imposed by the system, and to justify their position as consenting slaves with ideological arguments. They wonder ‘what it is the gay movement wants, what it is fighting for, because nowadays our society accepts diversity. True, even today we can’t make love freely wherever we feel like it, on the buses or on the sidewalks of Via Corso: but then again, not even
heteros are allowed to do that. So things aren’t that bad. Well, misery loves company …

  Many feminists criticise us queens because we often tend in our dress and behaviour to copy the stereotyped ‘feminine’ fetish that women have to fight. But if a woman dressed like Caterina Caselli or like Camilla Cederna is normal for the system today, a man dressed like Caterina Boratto or Germaine Greer3 is quite abnormal, as far as ‘normal’ people are concerned, and so our transvestism has a clear revolutionary character. There is no harm in us fags having our bit of fantasy: we demand the freedom to dress as we like, to choose a definite style one day and an ambiguous one the day after, to wear both feathers and ties, leopardskin and rompers, the leather queen’s chains, black leather and whip, the greasy rags of the street porter or a tulle maternity dress. We enjoy the bizarre, digging into (pre)history, the dustbins and uniforms of yesterday, today and tomorrow, the trumpery, costumes and symbols that best express the mood of the moment. As Antonio Donato puts it, we want to communicate by our clothing, too, the ‘schizophrenia’ that underlies social life, hidden behind the censorious screen of the unrecognised transvestism of everyday. From our vantage point, in fact, it is ‘normal’ people who are the true transvestites. Just as the absolute heterosexuality that is so proudly flaunted masks the polymorphous but sadly inhibited disposition of their desire, so their standard outfits hide and debase the marvellous human being that lies suppressed within. Our transvestism is condemned because it shows up for all to see the funereal reality of the general transvestism, which has to remain silent, and is simply taken for granted.

  Far from being particularly odd, the transvestite exposes how tragically ridiculous the great majority of people are in their monstrous uniforms of man and ‘woman’. Ever taken a ride on the underground? If the transvestite seems ridiculous to the ‘normal’ person who encounters him, far more ridiculous and sad, for the transvestite, is the nudity of the person, so properly dressed, who laughs in his face.

  For a man, to dress as a ‘woman’ does not necessarily mean projecting the ‘woman-object’; above all, because he is not a woman, and the male fetishism imposed by capital decrees that he should be dressed quite differently, reified in a quite different guise, dressed as a man or at least in unisex. Besides, a frock can be very comfortable, fresh and light when it’s hot, and warm and cosy when it’s cold. We can’t just assume that women who normally go around dressed as men, swathed tightly in jeans, feel more comfortable than a queen dressed up as a witch, with full-bodied cloak and wide-brimmed hat.

  But a man can also get pleasure from wearing a very uncomfortable ‘feminine’ garb. It can be exciting, and quite trippy, for a gay man to wear high heels, elaborate make-up, suspender belt and satin panties. Once again, those feminists who attack us gays, and in particular transvestites, for dressing as the ‘woman-object’, are serving to guilt-trip us for gay humour, the transsexual aesthetic, and the craziness of crazy queens: they introduce a new morality that is, in fact, the very old anti-gay morality, simply given a new gloss by modern categories and stuffed with an ideological feminism, ideological because it provides a cover for the anti-homosexual taboo, for the fear of homosexuality, for the intention to reform the Norm without eliminating it.

  Heterosexual feminists fail to hit the mark when they discuss homosexuality. And we queens, moreover, have no intention of being put down by women any more than by men. In the course of our lives, many of the educastrated educastrators we have encountered have been women, and there are certainly far more women still opposed to homosexuality today than there are gay men who are male supremacist and enslaved by the dominant ideology. Many women have abused and do abuse us, they have ridiculed and do ridicule us, they have oppressed and do oppress us. These women cannot but be opposed to us, and we cannot but ‘oppose’ them, if we intend, from the gay standpoint, to wage a struggle for universal liberation (a struggle, therefore, which involves them as well, fighting against their prejudices, with a view to dissolving all anti-gay resistances). I have already shown how the contradiction between men and women and the contradiction between heterosexuality and homosexuality are intertwined. And so if feminists cannot but oppose the persistence of male supremacy among us queens, we cannot but challenge fundamentally the heterosexual ‘normality’ with which the women’s movement is still suffused, despite the new fashion or ideology of ‘homosexuality’ that has become widespread in it.

  Franco Berardi (Bifo), a heterosexual man, speaks of the ‘homosexualisation’ of the women’s movement, a ‘homosexualisation’ (the term could hardly sound less gay) which he supports, as a heterosexual male in crisis (but not too much so). And yet Bifo’s ‘homosexualisation’ has little in common with the struggle of us queens for the liberation of the gay desire. The concept of ‘homosexualisation’ is all too reminiscent, beneath the ‘feminist’ camouflage of Men’s Liberation, of the male supremacist bisexuality of the hustlers. But Bifo will not understand, in fact he cannot understand. To do so, he would have to savour the fragrance of the urinals, and feel in his own person the full weight of oppression that bears down on the shoulders of us gays. For the moment, please, let us speak about homosexuality, we who have come out in the open; homosexual is something one uncovers, not something one becomes. I would like to get her in bed, that Bifo, and confront her ‘homosexualisation’ with my homosexuality. And this is a gay desire – it is an advance,4 not a concept.

  There are also feminists for whom the ‘new homosexuality’ discovered by the women’s movement is not the same thing as lesbianism, which – they hold – is still marked by a male model. Some of them say they came to accept homosexuality after realising the impossibility of going on with relationships with men, and that the homosexual choice is a necessary one for women as long as their struggle has not yet radically changed men and therefore their relations with them. Once again, homosexuality is presented as a substitute choice, a palliative, a surrogate sexual dimension in which the libido withdrawn from male ‘objects’ is politically channelled.

  This is what the new ‘homosexual’ fashion among feminists amounts to, a fashion that is quickly recuperated by the system (the Corriere della Sera has articles about it on its feature page), and which, despite appearances, is simply a new form of the old anti-gay exorcism. The ‘new homosexuality’ of feminism is worth little more than the ‘homosexualisation’ of someone like Bifo. It boasts a ‘homo’ mask, but this actually serves to (un)veil the genuinely latent gay desire, and above all the conscious heterosexual desire that wears the mask. If this mystification is the ‘new homosexuality’ of women, or at least of certain feminists, then it is quite true that it has little in common with lesbianism. Lesbians are right if they refuse to identify with the general heterosexual atmosphere of the feminist movement, and continue to organise in autonomous (‘homonomous’) groups.

  When there are women who criticise us gays if we dress as ‘women’, we should not ignore the pulpit from which this preaching comes. I have never been attacked by a lesbian for my make-up, my floral gowns or my silver heels. It is true, of course, that, if for centuries women have been forced by male power to dress up in an oppressive manner, the great creators of fashion, the couturiers, hair-stylists, etc. have almost always been gay men. But the homosexual fantasy has simply been exploited by the system – it still is5 – in order to oppress women and adorn them in the way that men want to see them. For centuries, the system has exploited the work of homosexuals to subjugate women, just as it has made abundant use of women to oppress gays (any gay man need only recall his mother). For this reason, if it is very important for women today to reject certain ways of dress, i.e. being dressed and undressed by men, it is equally important that gays should recapture and reinvent for themselves the aesthetic that they were obliged for centuries to project onto women.

  If Marlene Dietrich in her glitter is an emblem of the oppression of women, she is at the same time a gay symbol, she is gay, and her image, her voice, her seq
uins form part of a homosexual culture, a desire that we queens recognise in ourselves. It is true that for a woman today to present herself like a Vogue cover girl is in general anti-feminist and reactionary. But for a gay man to dress as he pleases, boldly expressing a fantasy which capital has relegated to the reified pages of Vogue, has a certain revolutionary cutting edge, even today. We are fed up with dressing as men. We ask our sisters in the women’s movement, then, don’t burn the clothes that you cast off. They might be useful to someone, and we have in fact always longed for them. In due course, moreover, we shall invite you all to our great coming-out ball.

  There can be no doubt that queens, ‘effeminate’ homosexuals and transvestites are among those men closest to transsexuality (even if frequently, because of oppression, they live their transsexual desire in alienated forms, infected by false guilt). Queens and transvestites are those ‘men’ who, even though they are ‘men’, understand better what it means to be a woman in this society, where the men most disparaged are not the brutes, phallocrats or violent individualists, but rather those who most resemble women. It is precisely the harsh condemnation of ‘effeminacy’ that sometimes leads gay men to behave in a way that is functional to the system, to become their own jailors. They then balance their ‘abnormal’ adoration for the male, the tough guy, the hoodlum, with a ‘normal’ and neurotic anti-woman attitude, which is counterrevolutionary and male supremacist. But the homosexual struggle is abolishing this historical figure of the queen enslaved by the system (the ‘queer men’ whom Larry Mitchell distinguishes from ‘faggots’), and creating new homosexuals, whom the liberation of homoeroticism and transsexual desire brings ever closer to women, new homosexuals who are the true comrades of women, to the point that they can see no other way of life except among other homosexuals and among women, given the increasingly detestable character of heterosexual males. Whenever we gays see ‘normal’ males discussing one another, or rather tearing one another to pieces, whenever we see them butting against one another, with a profusion of fucks!, as if they were fucking, then we truly do think they have understood fuck all, at least if they are still unaware of the homoerotic desire that pushes them towards one another yet confuses them because it is repressed. And if the gay struggle elevates the acidic and put-down queen (acidic even when she’s not on acid), transforming her into a folle, a gay comrade who is ever more transsexual, it also negates the heterosexual man, since it tends towards the liberation of the queen that is in him too.