Homos

Leo Bersani

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 1996
• ISBN:
  9780674252523
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria LGBT

Acclaimed for his intricate, incisive, and often controversial explorations of art, literature, and society, Leo Bersani now addresses homosexuality in America.Hardly a day goes by without the media focusing an often sympathetic beam on gay life--and, with AIDS, on gay death. Gay plays on Broadway, big book awards to authors writing on gay subjects, Hollywood movies with gay themes, gay and lesbian studies at dozens of universities, openly gay columnists and even editors at national mainstream publications, political leaders speaking in favor of gay rights: it seems that straight America has finally begun to listen to homosexual America.Still, Bersani notes, not only has homophobia grown more virulent, but many gay men and lesbians themselves are reluctant to be identified as homosexuals. In Homos, he studies the historical, political, and philosophical grounds for the current distrust, within the gay community, of self-identifying moves, for the paradoxical desire to be invisibly visible. While acknowledging the dangers of any kind of group identification (if you can be singled out, you can be disciplined), Bersani argues for a bolder presentation of what it means to be gay. In their justifiable suspicion of labels, gay men and lesbians have nearly disappeared into their own sophisticated awareness of how they have been socially constructed. By downplaying their sexuality, gays risk self-immolation--they will melt into the stifling culture they had wanted to contest.In his chapters on contemporary queer theory, on Foucault and psychoanalysis, on the politics of sadomasochism, and on the image of "the gay outlaw" in works by Gide, Proust, and Genet, Bersani raises the exciting possibility that same-sex desire by its very nature can disrupt oppressive social orders. His spectacular theory of "homo-ness" will be of interest to straights as well as gays, for it designates a mode of connecting to the world embodied in, but not reducible to, a sexual preference. The gay identity Bersani advocates is more of a force--as such, rather cool to the modest goal of social tolerance for diverse lifestyles--which can lead to a massive redefining of sociality itself, and of what we might expect from human communities.

1

The Gay Presence

Never before have gay men and women been so visible. If, as the citizens of Queer Nation have proclaimed, “we are everywhere,” this should be understood as more than a defiant response to those who would sequester or, better, eradicate us; indeed, homophobic America itself appears to have an insatiable appetite for our presence. As a result, the social project inherent in the nineteenth-century invention of “the homosexual” can perhaps now be realized: visibility is a precondition of surveillance, disciplinary intervention, and, at the limit, gender-cleansing. The classification into character types of how people imagine and pursue their bodies’ pleasures greatly reduced the heterogeneity of erotic behavior. A psychology of desire, as Foucault forcefully argued, drew those readable psychic maps on which human beings had to be assigned their places before territory could be occupied. Psychology in this argument discovered nothing; the questions it asked created the answers necessary to the social strategies that produced the questionnaire. Confession is a form of ventriloquism.

It is true that these strategies also had the reverse effect of producing, within the very entities mapped for control, resistance. The interiority of the strategically constructed target (the homosexual personality, for example) displayed unexpected resources for redrawing its own boundaries. This should not have come as a surprise. Interiority is a breeding ground not only for essences but also for a mobility incompatible with all essentializing definitions. To be a homosexual turned out to be something quite different from being the one targeted in the essentializing imperative. And yet, however shifty the target might be, a target had still become visible. From the point of view of the policing agents, that shiftiness was only an unfortunate but somewhat negligible by-product of their social blueprint. Once we agreed to be seen, we also agreed to being policed.

Given how ambiguous increased visibility can be, it is worth taking a closer look at both the agents and the modes of this new gay presence in America. On the one hand, there is—so it would seem—ample reason for celebration. Until recently, homosexuality was largely a coerced confession; we were to make ourselves visible so that we could be “treated”—therapeutically and juridically. Now the more we tell about ourselves, the more we are congratulated for being ourselves. Hardly a day goes by without the media focusing their appreciative beam on gay life—and gay death. In May 1993 Andrew Kopkind began a lead article in the Nation by proclaiming: “The gay moment is unavoidable. It fills the media, charges politics, saturates popular and elite culture.” Kopkind’s piece is in large part an impressive list of triumphs: “Broadway is bursting with gay plays, big book awards go to gay authors, even Hollywood is developing movies with gay themes”; gay and lesbian studies are on the curricula of hundreds of colleges; “out” gays have prominent positions in the professions; newspapers all over the country (including the New York Times) have openly gay columnists writing on gay issues; “TV is entering the gay nineties”; and, perhaps most impressive—especially after twelve years of homophobic Republicanism and “despite distressing back-sliding”—we have “the first pro-gay White House.”¹

The point of Kopkind’s clarifying piece was that the piece itself was not an exceptional event. A mere two months later, on July 5, the Nation neatly dubbed an issue almost entirely devoted to gay questions The Queer Nation. With its appointment of Andrew Sullivan as editor, the New Republic has the first out gay editor of a more or less mainstream national magazine, and on May 10, 1993, Sullivan published a special issue called Straight America, Gay America. The New York Times is almost overcompensating for its former reticence by giving startlingly generous news and editorial coverage to gay subjects. (The Times even complained editorially after the April 25, 1993, equal-rights march on Washington that most of the marchers seemed determined to give straight America respectable images of homosexuality.) And in its issue of June 21, 1993, the New Yorker carried both a short piece by the novelist and New Yorker contributor Harold Brodkey announcing that he has AIDS and a much longer article on the murder of a millionaire corporate real-estate lawyer, David Schwartz, by a young hustler in a seedy Bronx motel. This piece was primarily a discussion of the closety atmosphere (homosexuality is ok as long as it remains invisible) at high-level corporate firms, an atmosphere at once uncongenial to the joyous self-outings celebrated by Kopkind and at least partially undercut and thereby readied for participation in those celebrations by the impersonal corporate outing performed by the reportage itself.

All the reports mentioned so far appeared during the few months preceding my account of them. The account represents nothing more than what I remember having recently read with some interest, and though more articles may have been published on gay issues during this time than during most other two-month periods, I don’t think anyone would argue that in April and May of 1993 homosexuals were getting significantly more attention than they had in, say, the year or two before. After all, reports such as Kopkind’s “The Gay Moment” give gays visibility by reporting on those areas—the arts, publishing, politics—in which gays are already visible. And I have barely mentioned what I know best: the flourishing academic industry of gay and lesbian studies. A recently published thick anthology of essays from this new interdisciplinary field includes a forbiddingly dense bibliography. There have been moments at some universities—Berkeley is one—when, to read a bulletin board of upcoming lectures and colloquia, a visitor might think that all the humanities departments had been merged into a single gay and lesbian studies program. Liberal straights respectfully attend lectures at which their own sexual preferences are confidently assigned to the erotic junkheap of compulsory heterosexuality—a practice into which millions of human beings have apparently been forced and from which they are now invited to liberate themselves.

A serious objection to my random survey of gay triumphs is of course that they are limited to elitist audiences. Indeed, the gay movement itself has been reproached for its easy victories—won by and over privileged groups in American society. How engrossed is the Heartland in the New York Times, Broadway, the Nation, the New Republic, the New Yorker, academic colloquia, and sympathetic reports on the MacNeil-Lehrer newshour? This brings us to the other side of the gay coin (though my argument will be that the victories themselves are in many ways a cop-out). Homophobic virulence in America has increased in direct proportion to the wider acceptance of homosexuals. The principal target of the religious right has been displaced from abortion to homosexuals. If our physical numbers were considerably less at the Republican than at the Democratic 1992 presidential convention, in another sense we were at least as present at the former as at the latter. It was widely reported that the Republican platform ended up more conservative than the party’s leaders, although another way of putting it would be that the party’s leaders were only too happy to let the fanatics do the dirty work—and that handing the convention over to Pat Robertson and his cohorts was an effective way of testing the viability of hate as a message in the subsequent campaign. In any case, the Republican platform, arguing from within the Judeo-Christian tradition that it proudly advertised as the inspiration for its viciousness, opposed same-sex marriages and adoption, gave the party’s support to the ban on gays in the military, called for a law criminalizing the “deliberate” spread of the HIV virus, and announced that condoms and needle exchanges do not prevent AIDS.

How much homophobia in America has been or will be affected by the Clinton presidency remains to be seen. While it was probably a tactical mistake on Clinton’s part to raise the issue of gays in the military during the first week of his presidency, his doing so certainly has added—hilariously and appallingly—to our visibility (both real and fantasmatic). I was not alone in being astonished by the prominence of shower rooms in the erotic imagination of heterosexual American males. Fear on the battlefield is apparently mild compared to the terror of being “looked at” (and you know what that means for most males). Men who refuse to believe that women mean it when they say no have now begun to express a visceral sympathy for the sexually besieged woman. The New York Times reported on April 3, 1993, that a radar instructor who chose not to fly with an openly gay sailor, Keith Meinhold, feared that Meinhold’s “presence in the cockpit would distract him from his responsibilities.” The instructor “compared his ‘shock’ at learning there was a gay sailor in his midst to a woman discovering ‘a man in the ladies’ restroom.’” Note the curious scatological transsexualism in our radar instructor’s (let us hope momentary) identification of his cockpit with a ladies’ restroom.² In this strange scenario, the potential gay attacker becomes the male intruder on female privacy, and the “original” straight man is meta-morphosed, through another man’s imagined sexual attention, into the offended, harassed, or even violated woman. Men’s sympathy for the women they harass can go no further, although gay men are bound to be angered by the scenario as yet another example of straight men’s untroubled assumptions that gays find them sexually irresistible—an assumption voiced in recent months just as often by jowly retired admirals as by more or less cute twenty-year-olds. Shower-room rape or forced fellatio are of course not the only scourges to be visited on the military with the lifting of the ban. In the animated cartoon of our military leaders’ and portly senators’ fantasies, the HIV virus, even if gay soldiers remain virtuously, stoically, between their own sheets, will make its insidious way from cot to cot in the erotically suffocating and disease-breeding space of homo- and heterosexual military cohabitation.

The compromise policy that was finally adopted (“Don’t ask, don’t tell, don’t pursue”) suggests that even more dangerous than the presence of gays in the military (everyone knows they’re already there) is the prospect of their saying they’re there. In what way? The homoeroticism inherent in military life certainly risks being exposed to those who would at once deny and enjoy it when self-confessed homos from within the ranks go public. But perhaps the most serious danger in gay Marines being open about their gayness is that they might begin, like some of their gay civilian brothers, to play at being Marines. Not that they would make fun of the Marines. On the contrary: they may find ways of being so Marine-like that they will no longer be “real” Marines. D. A. Miller has a marvelous passage in Bringing Out Roland Barthes on “the different priorities of the macho straight male body and the so-called gym body of the gay male culture”: “Even the most macho gay image tends to modify cultural fantasy about the male body if only by suspending the main response that the armored body seems developed to induce: if this is still the body that can fuck you, etc., it is no longer—quite the contrary—the body you don’t fuck with.”³ And Jacques Lacan, in an analogous if considerably less celebratory observation, notes that virile displays always seem feminine.⁴ What passes for the real thing self-destructs from within its theatricalized replication. The imaginary negates the real to which it purportedly adheres. In imagining what he presumably already is (both gay and a Marine), the gay Marine may learn the invaluable lesson that identity is not serious (as if what he is imitating never existed before it was imitated).

Nothing is more inimical to military life than that lesson. So the major (and as far as I’m concerned desirable) menace of gays who speak their gayness is less to the straight soldiers and sailors whose readiness for discipline and combat would, it is feared, crumble in the debilitating excitement of the gay confessional, but rather to the gay soldiers and sailors themselves. The military might lose them as they begin to move about in their roles, to voice and to advertise their versatile (ever hardening and ever melting) masculinity in a context where masculinity is not supposed to move. The gay soldier letting out his gayness may begin to see its theatricalities as incompatible with the monolithic theatricality of military masculinity. Gays might then begin to abandon the armed forces by the thousands—which could sap the morale of their deserted straight comrades and furnish recruits for a new type of antimilitarism (yet to be defined), one somewhere “between” or “outside” both pacifism and guerrilla terrorism.

Nothing has made gay men more visible than AIDS. If we are looked at more than we have ever been looked at before—for the most part proudly by ourselves, sympathetically or malevolently by straight America—it is because AIDS has made us fascinating. While apprehensiveness about HIV led thousands of gay men to become habitués of health clubs, the “gym body of the gay male culture” can no longer be merely admired in the club’s floor-to-ceiling mirrors; now every blemish is scrutinized for a fearsome resemblance to molluscum contagiosum or, worse, KS, and a scrutiny of body bulk and muscle definition may send us rushing to the weight machine rather than back to the free weights. And we have, sadly, become used to more or less discreet, more or less urgent questions in the eyes of those who don’t dare put the questions into words: is he HIV-positive? What symptoms does he have? How long before . . .? Thanks largely to television and movies, the entire country has been able to take in (while of course distancing itself from) images of our wasted bodies. The normal fear of homosexuality has been promoted to a compelling terror as a secret fantasy becomes a public spectacle: the spectacle of men dying from what I called in “Is the Rectum a Grave?” the suicidal ecstasy of taking their sex like a woman.

In the face of all this, there is, we might at first think, something mysterious about gay exuberance. As the epidemic spreads, as more and more of our friends die, as the medical establishment finally begins to suggest that the antiviral therapy it has been pushing is ineffective, gays have never been gayer. In the early days of the epidemic, many of us adopted part of the fundamentalist argument that AIDS was the not entirely un-deserved consequence of the unbridled poppered promiscuity of the 1970s, of our perverse preference for five or ten partners in the bathhouse over the one-and-only in the drug-free privacy of a suburban home. Monogamy continues to have its appeal (the demand for legalized gay marriages testifies to that), but promiscuity has also made its insidious way back. Sex clubs are thriving (and, perhaps related to this, the incidence of HIV has risen among young queers, many of whom apparently think AIDS is a generational disease).

In addition to this renewed sexual energy, there were the joyous turnouts all over the country, just a few days before my writing these words, for Lesbian and Gay Pride Day, 1993 (and just before this book goes to press, the celebrations and media coverage of the twenty-fifth anniversary of Stonewall). It is as if AIDS, the devastating depletor of the body’s energies, had energized the survivors. Look at us: We’re still alive. We won’t be made to feel guilty, we’re having sex—lots of it—again. Look at us: We demand the rights and privileges that you enjoy. We demand a future without discrimination even as AIDS makes us wonder how much of a future we have. Rather than make us shameful about who we are and how we desire, AIDS has helped more of us to come out than ever before—as if to help you, straight America, fight the terrifying fantasies “legitimated” by AIDS with the knowledge that we are already your neighbors and that our sins can be as ordinary, as unworthy of fantasy-fabulation, as yours. Look at us: We’re not only here, everywhere at your side, but also everywhere in history, in neglected works and figures but also in the subtexts of the masterpieces of western civilization.

In fact, no one can stop looking. But we might wonder if AIDS, in addition to transforming gay men into infinitely fascinating taboos, has also made it less dangerous to look. For, our projects and our energies notwithstanding, others may think of themselves as watching us disappear. The heightened visibility conferred on gay men by AIDS is the visibility of imminent death, of a promised invisibility. Straight America can rest its gaze on us, let us do our thing over and over in the media, because what our attentive fellow citizens see is the pathos and impotence of a doomed species.

Two recent reports—which once again made gays highly visible in the media—support my sense of the intimate connection between our remarkable presence in America today and the absence with which the nation may be rewarded for allowing the presence. In February 1993 the National Research Council made public a study asserting that the AIDS epidemic will have little impact on the life of most Americans. Since AIDS is concentrated among homosexuals, drug users, the poor, and the undereducated—what the council calls “socially marginalized groups” with “little economic, political, and social power”—the epidemic will have minimal effect on “the structures and directions of [American] social institutions.”⁵ The New York Times article summarizing the report was, on the one hand, a caricature. By highlighting the conclusions just summarized, it suggested a heartless and vicious document. In fact, this 300-page study is in many ways a model of humane objectivity. Though the general sociological discourse of which it is a part prevents it from being explicitly prescriptive, it speaks with concern of the “psychological burdens” borne by those who are stigmatized as a result of HIV infection,⁶ and it warns of the potential infringement, by government, of the civil rights of HIV-positive people in economically deprived and politically powerless communities. On the other hand, the Times article accurately summarizes what might be called the report’s unconscious, where irrationality and even ferocity are in direct proportion to the report’s neutrality and its consistently maintained distance from the explosive medical, sexual, and political questions it raises.

That unconscious operates throughout the report to transform HIV disease into a geographically and socially defined and confined epidemic. It thrives in communities that are already “islands of illness,” where there is already a “synergism of plagues.” The council’s study of New York City in particular reveals a “chilling epidemological fact: HIV/AIDS is but one in an overlapping cluster of epidemics.” The conflation of AIDS with other diseases endemic to “areas in which economically impoverished members of ethnic minorities live” is effected by a significant slippage in the report’s definition of the HIV-infected population, a slippage that might seem authorized by the actual progression of the disease. “At its outset,” the report notes in its general findings, “HIV disease settled among socially disvalued groups, and as the epidemic has progressed, AIDS has increasingly been an affliction of people who have little economic, political, and social power.” Here the council could be thought of as allying itself with those AIDS activists who protest against what they see as a disproportionate amount of AIDS care and money going to middle-class white gay men—to the detriment of the growing numbers of HIV cases among inner-city minorities. But the council, with its nonprescriptive bias, makes no such protest, and its emphasis on the movement of HIV from “socially devalued groups” (presumably gay men) to people without power works to fac...