Towards a Gay Communism

Elements of a Homosexual Critique

Mario Mieli

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781786800541
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: LGBT Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

First published in Italian in 1977, Mario Mieli's groundbreaking book is an early landmark of revolutionary queer theory - now available for the first time in a complete and unabridged English translation. Among the most important works ever to address the relationship between homosexuality, homophobia and capitalism, Mieli's essay continues to pose a radical challenge to today's dominant queer theory and politics. With extraordinary prescience, Mieli exposes the efficiency with which capitalism co-opts 'perversions' which are then 'sold both wholesale and retail'. In his view the liberation of homosexual desire requires the emancipation of sexuality from both patriarchal sex roles and capital. Drawing heavily upon Marx and psychoanalysis to arrive at a dazzlingly original vision, Towards a Gay Communism is a hitherto neglected classic that will be essential reading for all who seek to understand the true meaning of sexual liberation under capitalism today.

1

Homosexual Desire is Universal

The Gay Movement Against Oppression

Contemporary gay movements have developed in countries where capital has reached the stage of real domination.¹ However, while still under the formal domination of capital, and for the first time in history, homosexuals had organised themselves into a movement. This happened first of all in Germany, in the second half of the nineteenth century, thanks to the spread of the work of Karl Ulrichs and the subsequent foundation of the Scientific Humanitarian Committee in 1897,² as it did in different ways in England, and then in the first decades of this century in Holland, Austria, the USA, Soviet Russia, and other countries. The homosexual movement did not invariably take the fixed organisational form that distinguished the Scientific Humanitarian Committee and its international offshoot, the World League for Sexual Reform, but in many countries, even without producing specific formal organisations, it still gave rise to a wide debate on homosexuality that involved for the first time a considerable number of cultural and political ‘personalities’ and brought to light problems and arguments which had until then been passed over in silence, in deference to one of the severest of taboos.

The violent persecution of homosexuals by Nazism, Stalinism and fascism obliterated this movement, and with it the very memory of this first major international homosexual self-assertion, thereby re-establishing the absolute ideology of the Norm. Due to this setback, it was only through the research of the new gay movement, re-emerging in 1969 with the Gay Liberation Front in the United States, and subsequently spreading to several other countries, that those of us born in more recent decades became at all aware of the existence of an earlier gay movement, and came to see ourselves as engaged – contrary to what we had believed – in a second wave of the liberation movement and not in the first. Some of the questions that we raise today, for example, involve themes that were already tackled by the first gay movement. One of these, in particular, still concerns homosexuals today as much as those in the past: for what reasons does society marginalise us and repress us so harshly?

To this and other questions, we have tried to reply with a research starting from our own personal experience, whether by talking together at general meetings about our existential and social condition as homosexuals and comparing our experiences, or by committing ourselves more deeply to the analysis of individual experience, undertaking the ‘work’ of self-awareness in smaller consciousness-raising or ‘awareness’ groups. As a result, we have begun to understand better what we are, and why we have been oppressed, in the process of coming together on the basis of our common desire and with the viewpoint of liberation.

The new gay movement has also resumed the historical and anthropological investigations started by the first wave, shedding light on the persecution of homosexuals across the centuries and on the historical origin of anti-gay condemnation, a condemnation that is almost invariably peddled by the ideology of heterosexual primacy as simply natural. And if the old movement had a strong commitment to psychological research, in the new movement groups have formed that concern themselves instead with psychiatry, struggling against the anti-homosexual persecution perpetrated in the guise of psychiatric treatment. The gay movement totally rejects the reactionary (pre)judices against homosexuality displayed by mainstream psychiatry, yet revolutionary homosexuals also oppose the new ‘progressive’ but completely heterosexual view of homosexuality currently widespread in anti-psychiatry circles.³

The work of consciousness-raising has also brought us face to face with elements of psychoanalytic theory that refers to homosexuality. We have discovered in psychoanalysis some important ideas, such as that of the unconscious, for example, and repression – ideas which we can integrate at least temporarily into our own gay science. As a result, we have reached the firm conclusion that the hatred generated towards us within heterosexual society is caused by the repression of the homoerotic component of desire in those individuals who are apparently heterosexual. The general repression of homosexuality, in other words, determines the rejection by society of the manifest expressions of the gay desire. The question now is what it is that provokes this repression; and we believe we shall discover the hidden motives for this by combatting the repression itself, i.e. by spreading the pleasure and desire of homosexuality.⁴ It is in the struggle for liberation that we shall come to understand why we have up till now been slaves – and we are all slaves, both gay and straight alike.

But if repression is a psychoanalytic concept, it was also psychoanalysis, in modern times that first upheld the universality of homosexual desire. In Freud’s words, ‘in all of us, throughout life, the libido normally oscillates between male and female objects’.⁵ Why, then, we might ask, if all people are also homosexual, do so few admit this and enjoy their homosexuality?

Polymorphous ‘Perversity’, Bisexuality and Transsexuality

The hermaphrodite was a distinct sex in form as well as in name, with the characteristics of both male and female, but now the name alone remains, and that solely as a term of abuse. – Plato⁶

Psychoanalysis comes to the conclusion of an infantile ‘perverse’ polymorphism and recognises in every individual an erotic disposition towards others of the same sex. According to Freud, the child is ‘constitutionally disposed’ to this ‘perverse’ polymorphism, and all the so-called ‘perversions’ form part of infantile sexuality (sadism, masochism, coprophilia, exhibitionism, voyeurism, homosexuality, etc.). In fact, ‘a disposition to perversions is an original and universal disposition of the human sexual instinct and . . . normal sexual behaviour is developed out of it as a result of organic changes and psychical inhibitions occurring in the course of maturation.’⁷

Among the forces that inhibit and restrict the direction of the sexual drive are, above all, ‘the structures of morality and authority erected by society.’⁸ Repressive society and dominant morality consider only heterosexuality as ‘normal’ – and only genital heterosexuality at that. Society operates repressively on children, above all through an educastration designed to eradicate those congenital sexual tendencies deemed ‘perverse.’ (Moreover, one could say that today, more or less all infantile sexual impulses are considered ‘perverse,’ including heterosexual ones, the child having no right to erotic enjoyment.) The objective of educastration is the transformation of the infant, in tendency polymorphous and ‘perverse’, into a heterosexual adult, erotically mutilated but conforming to the Norm.

The majority of psychoanalysts recognise sexual expressions even in the very first months of life, and have established steps of sexual development that we can sum up as autoeroticism – homosexuality – heterosexuality. But this is in no way a ‘natural’ evolution; it rather reflects the repressive influence of the child’s social and family environment. There is nothing in life itself that requires the child to ‘grow out’ of autoeroticism and the homosexual ‘stage’ in order to attain this exclusive heterosexuality. The environment in which we live is heterosexual (in the first place the family, the cell of the social tissue), in that it forces the child, through a sense of guilt, to abandon the satisfaction of his auto- and homoerotic desires, obliging him to identify with a mutilated monosexual (heterosexual) model. Obviously, this does not always succeed.

Psychoanalysis defines the first expressions of eroticism as ‘undifferentiated,’ or only a little so. In other words, the selection of an object, for the infant, is due more to circumstances than to biological sex (and to circumstances that can change even in the course of a day). Little girls are all also lesbians, and little boys are all also gay.

To those who still wonder whether they are born homosexual or become so, we must reply that everyone is born endowed with a wide range of erotic propensity, directed first of all towards the self and the mother, then gradually turning outward to ‘everyone’ else, irrespective of their sex, and in fact towards the entire world. They become either heterosexual or homosexual only as a result of educastration (repressing their homoerotic impulses in the first case, and their heterosexual ones in the second).

At this point, however, we might pause to consider whether these tendencies are actually repressed in the strict sense. According to Georg Groddeck, for example, no heterosexual really represses all his homoerotic desires, even if he believes himself to have done so. Rather than repressed, the majority of people most commonly exhibit a latent homosexuality (just as the desire for the opposite sex is latent, as a general rule, in gays). According to Freud, again, ‘we have two kinds of unconscious: the one which is latent but capable of becoming conscious, and the one which is repressed and which is not, in itself and without more ado, capable of becoming conscious’.⁹ To be quite correct, we should therefore speak of both latent homosexual desires and others that are effectively repressed. But since it is not always easy to distinguish the two, I shall speak sometimes of latent homosexual desire and in other contexts of the repression of homosexuality, without establishing too fine a distinction and thus using the concept in a somewhat elastic sense. In any case, faced with skilled seduction by a gay person, it is not repression that wins out; sooner or later, all heterosexuals give in. All are latent queens.

In actual fact, latent homosexuality exists in everyone who is not a manifest homosexual, as a residue of infantile sexuality, polymorphous and ‘perverse’, and hence also gay. A residue, because homoeroticism has been repressed by society, condemned to latency and sublimated in the form of feelings of friendship, comradeship, etc., as well as being converted, or rather distorted, into pathological syndromes.¹⁰

I shall use the term transsexuality throughout this book to refer to the infantile polymorphous and ‘undifferentiated’ erotic disposition, which society suppresses and which, in adult life, every human being carries within him either in a latent state, or else confined in the depths of the unconscious under the yoke of repression. ‘Transsexuality’ seems to me the best word for expressing, at one and the same time, both the plurality of the erotic tendencies and the original and deep hermaphrodism of every individual. But what exactly is this hermaphrodism?

In psychoanalytic theory, the claim of ‘perverse’ infantile polymorphism goes hand in hand with the theory of original bisexuality. (And this theory will also make clearer what I mean by transsexuality and the transsexual nature of our underlying being.) The theory of original bisexuality was first put forward – among other reasons – to explain the causes of so-called ‘sexual inversion’ (i.e. homosexuality).¹¹ Its roots lay in the discovery of the coexistence in the individual of somatic factors common to both sexes. This was well summed up by Daniel Paul Schreber (even though he was not a medical man but a crazy old queen): ‘In the first months of pregnancy the rudiments of both sexes are laid down and the characteristics of the sex which is not developed remain as rudimentary organs at a lower stage of development, like the nipples of the male.’¹² The same applies to the female clitoris. Similar observations of this kind were taken to mean that sex is never unitary, and that monosexuality rather conceals a certain bisexuality (a hermaphrodism). According to psychoanalysis, we are all bisexual beings.

This question has been comprehensively studied by genetic theory and endocrinology. In the words of Gilbert Dreyfus:

Although genetic sex is determined by the composition of the fertilising spermatozoon, so that the father alone is responsible for the genetic sex of his offspring, the embryo undergoes in its early development a phase of apparently undifferentiated sexuality. It is only in the second month of foetal life that the rudimentary genitals begin to differentiate, so as to end up – after a long process and according to whether th...