by Mario Mieli
One particular iron rule seems often to apply in the ghetto. Lack of spontaneity, of naturalness and affection, is often made into a sacrosanct norm, ‘communication’ taking place by way of a series of witty quips, spectacular entrances and exits, arrows directed with unheard-of precision (unheard-of for heterosexuals). The ghetto queen is a past mistress not only of decking out herself and her apartment, in creating a certain atmosphere, in managing her own mask better than anyone else (which from daily use becomes an identification), she is also mistress of fazing other queens. Many homosexuals today wear the uniform of their persecutors, just as in the Nazi concentration camps. Only it is no longer the pink triangle that is in vogue, but rather a casing that covers the body from head to foot, a mask that conceals the physiognomy, a carapace that constrains the body like a crustacean.
The system has ghettoised and colonised us so deeply that it frequently leads us to reproduce, in a grotesque and tragicomic form, the same roles and the same spectacle as the society that excludes us. This is precisely why we gays can often see through the misery that surrounds ‘our’ ghetto, and at times with exceptional aesthetic sense and irony. And yet if the present society can come to terms with the ironic finesse that some of us display, and is entertained by the inverted homosexual reflection of its own image, at the same time it does not contain its disgust at the real ghetto (or what it sees of it), and attacks it in a racist fashion.
But the ghetto is not outside the society that has built it. It is an aspect of the system itself. Moreover, the awareness of marginalisation and the sense of guilt induced by social condemnation poison the ghetto, leading it to assume the same distorted sneer as the society that derides it. And if homosexuals are very often not attracted by one another, this is very largely due to the ghetto atmosphere, which is anti-homosexual, precisely because it’s held together by a false guilt and a very real marginalisation.
Homosexuals have been so much led always to see themselves as sick that at times they actually believe themselves to be so. This is our real sickness, the illusion of sickness that can even make people really sick. In a similar manner, people shut up for long enough in mental hospitals can end up showing the stereotyped signs of ‘madness’, i.e. the traces of the persecution they have experienced, its ‘therapy’ internalised in the form of sickness. Doctors (psychiatrists and anti-psychiatrists alike) are the real plague spreaders, and the real sickness is the ‘treatment’.
Often, the illusion of being in some way sick affects the homosexual to such a point that he tries to disguise his own being, a distortion that he is forced to live as a deformation. If we homosexuals sometimes appear ridiculous, pathetic or grotesque, this is because we are not allowed the alternative of feeling ourselves to be human beings. ‘Mad’ people, blacks, and poor people all bear on their brow the mark of the oppression they have undergone.
But this mark can be transformed into a sign of new life. The face of a transvestite can burn with the gayness of liberated desire, an energy pointing towards the creation of communism. The war against capital has not been lost. Ever more homosexuals today, instead of struggling in silence against themselves, in individual anxiety and the seclusion of the ghetto, are beginning to fight51 gayly with their eyes open, with bodies open, for the revolution.
It is no time now to conceal our homosexuality. We must live it always and everywhere, in the most open way possible – even at our jobs, too, if we are not to be accomplices of all who still oppress us. Anyone who is afraid of losing his job can come out with moderation, and if necessary, it is possible to maintain a certain reserve without making shabby compromises with the Norm. Things can still be clearly said without using so many words, and one can act in a way that is compatible with one’s ideas and desire while avoiding, for the time being, coming out explicitly, if this is impossible without getting sacked. True, the situation is far more difficult for gays in small towns in the provinces. But we can hope that soon the positive effects of the liberation movement will make themselves felt even here.
Given that people are forced to work in factories and offices, it is good that homosexual collectives should be formed here too. Union gives the strength to come out openly, and gay groups in schools and colleges are also steadily on the rise, even in Italy.
I have a friend who works in a bank, where he gets through the good and bad times with wit and wisdom. He recently marched past his colleagues and bosses, mimicking a parade of spring and summer fashions for bank clerks. His colleagues were entertained, and when one of them stupidly asked what the meaning of it all was, he replied: ‘I’m crazy’, leaving it to the others to wonder whether he really was crazy, or if he indeed takes it in the ass.
In this and who knows how many other ways, the cause of liberation makes headway, without heroism, without even risking the sack. Every queen does what she can, according to the situation in which she finds herself. The important thing is to do one’s best (i.e. to work out how one can obtain the best results), and to avoid being trapped by and resigning oneself to the Norm.
To spread homosexuality in one’s place of work, today, means spurring people to reject a labour that no longer has any reason to exist, and which largely consists of sublimated homoerotic desire. It is sufficient to enter an office or a factory to immediately sense how the degrading atmosphere of the workplace is pervaded with repressed and sublimated homosexuality. ‘Colleagues’ at work, while rigorously respecting the anti-homosexual taboo as capital would have them, make sexual advances to each other eight hours a day in the most extraordinary manner, as well as exhibiting themselves as rivals towards women. In this way, however, they only play the game of capital, establishing a false solidarity between men, a negative solidarity that sets them against women and against one another in the purposeless (and hardly gratifying) perspective of rivalry, of competition to be tougher, more masculine, more brutish, less fucked over in the general fucking over, which – despite the label – has no other purpose save enslavement to the capitalist machine, to alienated labour, and forced consent to the deadly repression of the human species, of the proletariat.
If the gay desire among ‘colleagues’ at work were liberated, they would then become genuine colleagues, able to recognise and satisfy the desire that has always bound them together; able to create, via their rediscovered mutual attraction, a new and genuine solidarity between both men and women; able to embody together, women and queers, the New Revolutionary Proletariat. Able to say ‘enough’ to labour and ‘yes’ to communism.
Subjection and the Revolutionary Subject
I believe it follows from the arguments put forward in these pages that only those who find themselves in opposition to the institutionalised Norm can play a fully critical role. In other words, only feminist self-consciousness and homosexual awareness52 can give life to a vision of the world that is completely different from the male heterosexual one, and to a clear and revolutionary interpretation of important themes that have been obscured for centuries, if not actually proscribed, by patriarchal dogma and the absolutising of the Norm. Women represent the basic opposition potential to male ‘power’, which, as we have seen, is in every way functional to the perpetuation of capitalism.
And if it is the male heterosexual code that prevents us achieving that qualitative leap leading to the liberation of transsexuality which desire fundamentally strives towards, we cannot avoid accepting the potential and now actual subversive force of homosexuality in the dialectic of sexual ‘tendencies’, just as we cannot deny the revolutionary position occupied by women in the dialectic of the sexes.
To those anti-psychiatrists who have worked to understand the repressed transsexual nature of desire, I would maintain that the liberation of a transsexuality that has up till now been unconscious cannot be obtained by a male and heterosexual redeployment of the classical psychoanalytic categories (substituting for Oedipus, for example, an Anti-Oedipus), but only by the revolution of women against male supremacy and th
e homosexual revolution against the heterosexual Norm. And only the standpoint of women and gays, above all of gay women, can indicate the very important nexus that exists between their subordination and the general social subordination, drawing the thread that unites class oppression, sexual oppression and the suppression of homosexuality.
In women as subjected to male ‘power’, in the proletariat subjected to capitalist exploitation, in the subjection of homosexuals to the Norm and in that of black people to white racism, we can recognise the concrete historical subjects in a position to overthrow the entire present social, sexual and racial dialectic, for the achievement of the ‘realm of freedom’. True human subjectivity is not to be found in that personification of the thing par excellence, i.e. capital and the phallus, but rather in the subject position of women, homosexuals, children, blacks, ‘schizophrenics’, old people, etc. to the power that exploits and oppresses them. This revolutionary or potentially revolutionary subjectivity arises from subjection.
There are here a series of serious contradictions, which have to be overcome so that the true Revolution can be achieved. Still today, in fact, the subversive potential of the majority is held in check by their adherence to one form of power or another. Too many proletarians, for example, and too many women as well, still keenly defend the heterosexual Norm, and hence male privilege and the domination of capital. And yet Elvio Fachinelli can already say: ‘We are not far from the day when the peaceful and moderately efficient heterosexual will find himself fired upon by his homosexual comrade’.53
But Fachinelli knows better than I do that the gun is a phallic symbol. We queens have no intention of shooting anyone to bits, even if we are prepared to defend ourselves as best we can, and will be better prepared in the future. Our revolution is opposed to capital and its Norm, and its goal is universal liberation. Death and gratuitous violence we can willingly leave to capital, and to those still in thrall to its inhuman ideology. Fachinelli, as a good heterosexual, fears gays armed with guns because he fears homosexual relations. It is only to be hoped that this heterosexual fear will be transformed into gay desire and not into terror, forcing us really to take up the gun. I believe the movement for the liberation of homosexuality is irreversible, in the broader context of human emancipation as a whole. It is up to all of us to make this emancipation a reality. There is certainly no time to lose.
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1. Larry Mitchell, The Faggots and Their Friends (unpublished) (New York, 1975).
2. See Mario Mieli, ‘London Gay Liberation Front, Angry Brigade, piume & paillettes’, in Fuori!, n. 5 (November 1972).
3. [Translator’s note: Caselli is an Italian record producer, Cederna a journalist and writer, Boratto an actress famous for parts in films such as Pasolini’s Salò, and Greer the Australian feminist writer and author of The Female Eunuch. Relevant for the point that Mieli is making here is that all four were seen to dress and cut their hair in ways considered ‘masculine’ or severe.]
4. [Translator’s note: Mieli writes une avance in French.]
5. See Chapter 6, section 1.
6. Brown, Life Against Death, p. 27.
7. Groddeck, The Book of the It, p. 231.
8. [Translator’s note: Mieli here plays on a set of linguistic echoes and double meanings: ordine means both ‘orderliness’ and ‘order’ (in the sense of ‘the forces of law and order’), while he sets up a pair between pulizia (cleanliness) and polizia (police).]
9. See ‘Omosessuali: parliamone in aula’, in Panorama, n. 502 (4 December 1975).
10. [Translator’s note: In Italian, as in English, the word porco (pig) can be used to disparage someone who is seen as gluttonous, filthy, and low, although the adjective porcate carries a stronger connotation of filth, excrement, and disgust than ‘piggish’ would in English.]
11. See the articles ‘Omosessualità e cultura’, in Corriere della Sera, (12 February 1975) and ‘Il difficile amore diverso’, (12 November 1975).
12. Elvio Fachinelli, ‘Travesti’, L’Erba Voglio 11, (May–June 1973), p. 38.
13. Di omosessualità si muore, a leaflet published by the Milan Fuori! collective on 25 October 1975, just one week before the death of Pasolini.
14. The Gazolines were the most outrageous group of queens and transvestites from the old Paris FHAR; Nostra Signora dei Fiori is a theatrical group within the Milan Homosexual Collective.
15. [Translator’s note: ‘El Degüello’ is a bugle call, most famous for its use by Mexican buglers in the Siege of the Alamo, where it signified that the attacking forces would show no mercy and give no quarter to those in the fort.]
16. Paul Lafargue, The Right to be Lazy (Chicago: C. H. Kerr, 1975), p. 38.
17. ‘Civilization and its Discontents’, Standard Edition Vol. 21 (London: Vintage, 2001), p. 104. According to the ‘mature’ Freud, notes Francesco Santini, ‘it is not just sexuality that civilisation represses and sublimates in economic activity, but also the death instinct, which is thus also put in the service of the reality principle and externalised in the aggressive conquest of nature. Man conquers and destroys his environment, and in this way avoids destroying himself, prolonging his journey towards death’. See ‘Note sull’avenire del nostro passato’, Comune Futura 1, (June 1975).
18. See Chapter 3, section 7.
19. Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization (New York: Vintage Books, 1962), p. 46.
20. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, p. 38.
21. Marx, Grundrisse, p. 705.
22. Ibid., pp. 705–6. (Marx’s emphases.)
23. Virginia Finzi Ghisi, ‘Le strutture dell’Eros’, an essay published as an appendix to the Italian edition of the French FHAR’s Rapport contre la normalité.
24. Frederick Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, pp. 71–2.
25. Ibid., p. 128.
26. Paul Lafargue, The Right to be Lazy, p. 66.
27. See Chapter 1, section 8.
28. Aldo Tagliaferri, Sulla dialettica tra sessualità e politica, in Sessualità e politica: Documenti del congresso internazionale di psicoanalisi, Milano 25-28 novembre 1975 (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1976), p. 225.
29. Fornari, Genitalità e culture, p. 27.
30. [Translator’s note: In Italian, the word is inculare, which would literally translate as ‘to put in the ass’, or even more literally, ‘to in-ass’. Mieli italicises the prefix of inculare to emphasise this sense, which cannot be conveyed by any single English word. He also uses a complex parenthetical – (inter)venergli – to suggest that someone coming (venire) inside you is also a form of ‘intervening’ in atomised subjectivity.]
31. Tagliaferri, Sulla dialettica, p. 226.
32. [Translator’s note: The word that I have translated as ‘forest’ throughout this section is selva, which might also be rendered as ‘woods’ or ‘woodland’. It is crucial to note, however, that the word shares etymological roots and a general tone with the word selvaggio, which means ‘wild’ or ‘savage’.]
33. Fornari, ‘Omosessualità e cultura’, p. 226.
34. Tagliaferri, Sulla dialettica, p. 228.
35. Freud, ‘Psycho-Analytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia’, p. 82.
36. Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1972), p. 129.
37. [Translator’s note: As is obvious, Mieli’s reworking of the Italian name for Narcissus into a revolutionary acronym is largely untranslatable. However, it is worth noting here one specific element of his language: the word nuclei, which might be rendered as ‘groups’ or ‘cells’, had a particular resonance in the 1970s, as the word was used by far-left groups to mark a horizontal, potentially proliferating form of organisation that would allow the formation of small cadres, rather than a single unified party form. Mieli’s imagined group name riffs especially off of Nuclei Armati Proletari (Armed Proletarian Groups/Cells), a radical organisation formed in Naples that was act
ive from 1974 to 1977. Inspired in particular by Frantz Fanon and George Jackson, NAP carried out a string of kidnappings, bombings, and assassinations, and they placed particular focus on the liberation of, and solidarity with, those who were incarcerated.]
38. Groddeck, The Book of the It, pp. 18–19.
39. Fornari, Genitalità e cultura, p. 67.
40. [Translator’s note: Mieli writes sense of humour in English in the original.]
41. Groddeck, The Book of the It, p. 234.
42. [Translator’s note: this final sentence is in English in the original.]
43. Freud, ‘A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis’, quoted by Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, p. 45.
44. Matriarchal society began to break down in the period that Engels, following Morgan, refers to as ‘barbarism’ (8000–3000 bc), giving way to ‘civilisation’. According to Engels: ‘The overthrow of mother right was the world-historical defeat of the female sex’ (Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, p. 120).
45. Francesco Santini, Comune Futura 1, p. 28.
46. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia (London: Verso, 2005), pp. 95–6.
47. See Piero Fassoni annd Mario Mieli, ‘Marcocco miraggio omosessuale’, Fuori! (4 October 1972), also ‘Les arabes et nous’, in Grande Encyclopédie des Homoséxualités, pp. 10–27, and the following articles. Very little is known in Europe of the situation of homosexuality among the Arab peoples, and the Islamic nations in general. In fact, homosexuality forms part of the Islamic religious tradition. In a contradictory fashion, this accepts active homosexuality while condemning the passive role. For the meddeb, the teacher in the Koranic school, it is quite proper to have sexual relations with his young disciples. Yet this should not give the impression that homosexuality only takes the form of sexual attraction towards adolescents. If this were the case, then the limitation of adults to an active role would be simpler to explain. The ephebe, in the patriarchal view of things, unites the woman and the man, and this determines his fixation to the passive role. The Arabs, however, are happy to fuck adult men as well, and frequently do so. It is as if the moral blame that their religion ascribes to a man who is fucked does not involve them, although they will often enough suggest the activity.
