Insult and the Making of the Gay Self Read online

  1984. Series ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: The New Press, 2000.

  Recherche

  Marcel Proust. A la recherche du temps perdu. Ed. Jean-Yves Tadié. 4

  volumes. Paris: Gallimard [Pléiade], 1987.

  rtp

  Marcel Proust. Remembrance of Things Past. Trans. C. K. Scott Moncrie√, Terence Kilmartin, and Andreas Mayor. 3 vols. New

  York: Vintage, 1982.

  s t g

  Jean-Paul Sartre. Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr. Trans. Bernard Frechtman. New York: George Braziller, 1963.

  Introduction:

  The Language of the Tribe

  Our point of departure will be the following passage from Proust’s The Captive:

  M. de Charlus did not care to go about with M. de Vaugoubert. For the latter, his monocle stuck in his eye, would keep looking round at every passing youth. What was worse, shedding all restraint when he was

  with M. de Charlus, he adopted a form of speech which the Baron

  detested. He referred to everything male in the feminine, and, being

  intensely stupid, imagined this pleasantry to be extremely witty, and was continually in fits of laughter. As at the same time he attached

  enormous importance to his position in the diplomatic service, these

  deplorable sniggering exhibitions in the street were constantly interrupted by sudden fits of terror at the simultaneous appearance of some society person or, worse still, of some civil servant. ‘‘That little telegraph messenger,’’ he said, nudging the scowling Baron with his

  elbow, ‘‘I used to know her, but she’s turned respectable, the wretch!

  Oh! that messenger from the Galeries Lafayette, what a dream! Good

  God, there’s the head of the Commercial Department. I hope he didn’t

  notice anything. He’s quite capable of mentioning it to the Minister, who would put me on the retired list, all the more so because it appears he’s one himself.’’∞

  How can one not recognize, in this scene written nearly a century ago and so precisely linked to the time of its writing (by, for example, the reference to the ‘‘telegraph messenger’’), something that might just as well be taking place today, a scene that perhaps many gay people will have experienced, or whose equivalent they will have witnessed? How many of them speak in the feminine, about themselves or about boys passed on the street, yet police

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  their gestures and language as soon as they cross the path of a colleague or an acquaintance? It might seem that there is nothing to be done but applaud the genius of the writer who managed to provide this characterization that seems to transcend its time. Yet all of the elements that come together in these lines from Proust to create such a truthful portrait also work precisely to encourage a deeper look at what they have to say about homosexuality.

  Let us begin with this crucial observation: two homosexuals are speaking with each other here, and they are speaking about homosexuality. This presupposes that they are each aware of the other’s tastes≤ and indicates that their complicity is based upon what we can only call a shared a≈liation. We might also note that both of them are insistent about hiding their homosexuality from those who do not belong to their ‘‘race.’’

  What, one might ask, is so extraordinary about that? About the fact that two homosexuals are speaking together about their homosexuality while making sure not to let anything be noticed by any outside observers? There is something in this scene that is less obvious than one might at first think: Is not the question of a≈liation somehow the central point in so many of the discussions of homosexuality of the past one hundred years? Do homosexuals form a particular group, a specific minority, or are they merely individuals like everyone else, except that they have di√erent sexual practices? Are they ‘‘di√erent than the others,’’ as suggested by the title of Richard Oswald’s 1919 film ( Anders als die Anderen)? Or are they the same as anyone else?

  If one accepts the second hypothesis, how do we account for the rapport that has been established between these two characters in Proust? Why would Charlus choose to speak to Vaugoubert about his love life—for that is the reason they go for a walk together—unless it is because he feels the need to speak to someone, and that person must necessarily be another homosexual? What would form the basis of such a bond? Is it not the sheer multitude of bonds of this kind that forms the network Proust described as the ‘‘freemasonry’’ of the ‘‘sodomites,’’ and that we today would call gay subculture?

  Charlus does not much care for Vaugoubert. He finds him too flashy and exuberant. Charlus strives to appear virile and detests e√eminacy. He aims for discretion and worries about the possible e√ects of Vaugoubert’s exuber-ance. Here too we find a characteristic trait of (male) homosexuality: the polarity of masculinity and e√eminacy. The scorn, the hatred, of those who prefer to think of themselves as masculine or virile for those they deem ‘‘e√eminate’’ has been one of the major dividing lines in the self-representations of gay men. And not only in their self-representations, but

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  also in all of the discourses accompanying these images, even in the theories proposed by certain gay advocates—in Germany at the beginning of the

  twentieth century, for example. More generally, one often finds that the kinds of discourses o√ered up by gay men harbor the desire to disassociate themselves, to distinguish themselves, from other gay men. Think of the story Christopher Isherwood tells of visiting Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute in Berlin in the early 1930s. On seeing the photographs on display, he first feels a certain repugnance, and only then takes a moment to reflect and accept that he too belongs to the same ‘‘tribe.’’≥ By what odd conscious or unconscious mechanisms does a gay man come to associate himself with the other members of his ‘‘tribe’’ (Charlus and Vaugoubert) while spending enormous amounts of time denigrating those other members and finding

  detestable, even revolting, those who exemplify other manners of living out one’s homosexuality?

  What Charlus finds annoying in Vaugoubert’s behavior is first and foremost that he speaks of other gay men in the feminine. This linguistic particularity, we also know, extends across time and has lost none of its appeal today. But where does this shared culture—which allows Vaugoubert to express himself in this way and still be understood by the nonetheless exasper-ated Baron de Charlus—come from? Proust speaks of an ‘‘identity . . . of vocabulary’’ (rtp, 2:639–40) that unites individuals coming from di√erent backgrounds and di√erent social conditions. How are these linguistic codes, these specific kinds of slang, learned—the ones that allow gay men, like members of any ‘‘professional organization’’ (Proust’s term), to understand each other without having to spell things out, to grasp jokes, allusions, aspersions, and so on? How are these forms of humor—like ‘‘camp’’ or what in French is referred to as ‘‘ l’humour folle’’—passed on from one generation to the next? And what can be said about codes of dress, or of gesture, ways of speaking, postures and attitudes, and all the other ‘‘cultural’’ reference points of which so many examples—including the ‘‘inversion’’ of language—

  could be provided for today or for yesterday?

  Vaugoubert cuts himself o√ when he sees the director of the Commercial Department passing by, resuming his ordinary social image. Thus gay people, or, as Proust puts it, ‘‘inverts,’’ know how to play with what Erving Go√man has called ‘‘the presentation of self.’’ In di√erent social situations they present di√erent self-images.∂ Of course, this is the case for everyone.

  You are not the same person in your employer’s o≈ce that you are dining with your friends. But it is especially true for gay people. Go√man speaks of

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  their ‘‘double biography.’’∑ Gay lives are often dissociated lives, producing dissocia
ted personalities.

  Notice the final remark of Vaugoubert’s peroration. It emphasizes how this disassociation within gay lives, together with the necessity of self-concealment, leads to shame and self-hatred. It also shows that it leads to a hostile and repressive attitude toward other homosexuals—in order to safe-guard one’s own secret and ward o√ any suspicions on the part of other people. If Vaugoubert is fearful of how the minister would react, it is because

  ‘‘it appears he’s one himself.’’

  One more observation about this passage. It is impossible to read it

  without being struck by the structure of class relations that it reveals: two aristocrats are chatting while taking a stroll. It is noteworthy that they are speaking of telegraph boys and delivery boys as sexual objects. Even more noteworthy is the transgression of these class boundaries: these ‘‘men of society’’ spend their time seeking out liaisons with the youthful members of what are called in Paris ‘‘ les petits métiers. ’’ The literature of the second half of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth attests to the fact that heterosexual men from the monied classes had no hesitation about establishing relationships with milliners, florists, and shopgirls. Still, the social mixing seems more systematic and more clearly marked among homosexuals. It has even been described as one of the characteristics of their way of life, both in order to praise and to condemn it. (This was one of the aspects of Wilde’s life that most scandalized his judges.) The forms of sociability, meeting-places, literary and journalistic representations, private imagin-ings—all the di√erent modes of existence of the ‘‘gay subculture’’—gave a large place to this abolition of class barriers. However artificial it may have been, however detestable it may have sometimes proved in what it implied about social exploitation and domination by money, it nonetheless remains one of the invariants of gay life of at least the past two centuries (and perhaps earlier ones as well).

  So many cultural changes, so many social transformations, so many shifts in sexuality and in homosexuality have taken place since Proust that it is a bit disturbing to come across, in a text already quite old, situations, codes, ways of being, and identities that have scarcely changed. Why might contemporary experiences seem so close to those described by Proust? Is it merely an optical illusion?

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  Joan Scott, in a well-known article, has called into question exactly this, the ‘‘evidence of experience’’ that leads one to recognize oneself in this or that aspect of a past moment whose whole cultural configuration is in fact unknown. The same words, gestures, or characteristics can have di√erent meanings in di√erent contexts, and thus can only be understood if they are reinserted into their proper historical ‘‘sites.’’ ‘‘It is not individuals who have experiences,’’ Scott writes, ‘‘but subjects who are constituted through experience.’’∏

  A ‘‘subject,’’ then, is always produced by the social order that organizes the ‘‘experiences’’ of any individual at a given historical moment. This is why the temptation to see oneself in those past facts and gestures runs the risk of obscuring the reality of the complex systems that governed experience at that time. Today those facts and gestures might stir up in us a sense of the obvious, whereas we should rather inquire into the social, ideological, and sexual mechanisms that gave them their meanings in their own moment and that produced the ‘‘subjects’’ that enacted them. A ‘‘subject’’ is always produced in and through ‘‘subordination’’ to an order, to rules, norms, laws, and so on. This is true for all ‘‘subjects.’’ To be a ‘‘subject’’ and to be subordinated to a system of constraints are one and the same thing.π This is even more the case for those ‘‘subjects’’ assigned to an ‘‘inferiorized’’ place by the social and sexual order, as is the case for gay men and lesbians.∫

  Reading the passage from Proust, we are led to ask: what could this description of homosexuality teach us about its society, about the ways in which that society shaped the categories of gender and sexuality, about the relations between people of the same sex, about the ways those relations were perceived and lived out by people from di√erent social milieux (M. de Vaugoubert and the delivery boy from the Galeries Lafayette). What might we learn about the imbrication of each of these levels with wider social realities? In short, we would do well to ask this essential question: Is not the act of spontaneously recognizing oneself in these categories a way of ratifying their ‘‘self-evidence,’’ when in fact we should be looking at them critically?

  Would that not be to naturalize them at exactly the moment when we should be historicizing them?

  Given that we are here undertaking a reflection on ‘‘subjectivation,’’ by which I mean the production of ‘‘subjects,’’ might we not begin the analysis with a look at this feeling of self-evidence?Ω That feeling would tend to suggest that, whatever transformations have occurred over the course of the last century, the systems of the sexual order have maintained a certain con-

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  tinuity. Pierre Bourdieu asks a similar question about women in Masculine Domination: How have structures of domination managed to reproduce themselves across time despite all the changes that have so altered the relations between the sexes?∞≠ Could we not pose an analogous question about homosexuality? Of course, things have changed since Proust wrote this description, and one should even be wary of imagining that a single situation could be taken to characterize a given historical moment. There have been marvelous studies done of the di√erentiated modes of existence of ‘‘homosexuality’’ at this or that moment in the nineteenth or twentieth centuries, in this or that country, in this or that city. They have shown ways in which each time and place is singular and incomparable. We have learned from all these studies of the past that the notion of ‘‘homosexuality’’ is more recent than one might have thought, and that even for periods not so very far in the past that notion is too massive, too unwieldy, too normative, to take into account all these multiple and heterogeneous experiences. Figures of ‘‘homosexuality’’ are always specific to a given cultural situation. There is no reason to deny any of this, and it is in no way my intention—this should go without saying—to challenge the value and the importance of all this historical work.

  Yet it remains the case that there is a particular type of symbolic violence that is aimed at those who love members of the same sex and that the schemas of perception, the mental structures, that underlie this violence (doubtless largely based on an androcentric worldview) are more or less similar everywhere, at least in the Western world, and have been so for at least the past century and a half.∞∞ This explains the sense that gay men and lesbians might have of their relation to gay or lesbian experiences from another country or another historical moment when they read works that reconstruct those experiences. We need therefore to investigate the perpetuation of this symbolic violence, its e√ects, and the forms of resistance to it.

  This is the double task I have set myself here: first, to study the gay experience of ‘‘subjectivation’’ today, and second, to study how, in many ways and despite many changes, it is not so di√erent from what it was a century ago. I have made use of work in the social sciences (contemporary work as well as work from ten or twenty years ago) as well as of works of contemporary or older literature, especially Proust. My heavy reliance on Proust is in part to avoid endlessly multiplying references, thereby giving the

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  π

  reader easier access to the works I am citing; but it is also and more importantly because his work seemed to me, despite what is often said of it, astonishingly modern in regards to gay issues.

  I begin with the question of insult, so important in gay and lesbian lives, today as previously. I try to reconstruct the ways in which gays are ‘‘subjugated’’ by the sexual order, as well as the ways, di√erent in di√erent moments, in which t
hey resist domination through the production of ways of life, spaces of freedom, a ‘‘gay world.’’ My attention is therefore drawn to those processes of subjectivation or re subjectivation, by which I mean the possibility of recreating a personal identity out of an assigned identity. This implies that the acts through which one reinvents one’s identity are always dependent on the identity that was imposed by the sexual order. Nothing is created out of nothing, certainly not subjectivities. It is always a question of reappropriations, or, to use Judith Butler’s term, ‘‘resignification.’’∞≤ Yet this

  ‘‘resignification’’ is an act of freedom par excellence, in fact the only possible one, for it opens the door to the unheard of, the unforeseeable.

  In the second part of this book, ‘‘Specters of Wilde,’’ I examine how, this time on the historical level, a form of gay ‘‘speech’’ was invented by way of a vast process in which a literary and intellectual discourse emerged with the goal of legitimizing something that had been forbidden. From the

  ‘‘homosexual code’’ in the writings of the Hellenists at Oxford in the mid-nineteenth century through André Gide’s Corydon in 1924, by way of certain writings by Oscar Wilde, a wide range of discourses strove to give same-sex loves access to legitimate public expression. This will-to-speech always took the form of what Foucault called ‘‘reverse discourse’’: it always formulated itself by way of a strategic response to the values, norms, and representations that of course condemned it in advance, but that also more fundamentally shaped it from within. Historically speaking, the repression of homosexuality has nourished the determination toward self-expression. But inversely, that expression has shaped itself to the modes of thought that despised it.

  My attempt here is to study the imbrication of gay speech and homophobic discourse.

  If today’s gay culture is still haunted in many ways by the ghosts of Wilde and of Gide, if its inventions are attached via numerous threads to a subterranean history, if today (as Neil Bartlett has shown so well) gays write their biographies while reading the biographies of those who preceded them, it is surely necessary to sift through this heritage in a critical fashion.∞≥ To in-