On Sexuality and Power

1

INTRODUCTION

Reginald Shepherd is, he says, the person no one wants to know about: a black (African American) gay man with an unappeasable attraction to white men. I am in love with the image and idea of white manhood, which is everything I am not and want to be. Why is this such a fearful condition? Because of the historic oppression of blacks by whites. Shepherd is under no illusion about the role of power in his attraction: I think many gay men worship the power that oppresses them; I think too that all sexual relations in our society are about power over another or the submission to the power of another.¹

Shepherd’s sexual desire is hinged on to racial difference, the most fraught political, economic, social, and cultural issue in the United States and Britain, and in many other countries. At this juncture, unavoidably, the psychic meets the social, fantasy meets history, desire meets politics. No wonder our societies find the subject hot to handle. We experience a marked unease about all hierarchical liaisons—not only of race but also of age, gender, and class. In metropolitan contexts today, it is often said, gay people favor egalitarian relations. Shepherd himself seeks commonality in everything but racial difference: his dream lover is some beautiful cultured blond named Troy with whom I’d have everything in common, everything but that (56).

Yet power differentials are remarkably persistent, in gay fantasies and in the stories about gayness that circulate. I discern three reasons for this. One is that, while we may like to think of fantasy as free-ranging, in fact it often shows astonishing fixity. Shepherd’s desire is by no means comfortable, but it appears ineluctable. So I hate him and desire him, fearing him and myself, too often despising both. So I continue to want him (56). Second, our desires are not ours alone; they are embedded in the power structures that organize our social being. Shepherd would like to step out of his personal history, but that would be to step out of the history of the nation. It would be to say: This is not America. The entire social system is tending to maintain his fantasy. And, anyway, who would he then be? The catch is that ‘myself’ is a product of that history both general and very particular…. What and who would I be without the burden of the past? (57; my elision).

A third reason for the persistence of hierarchy in relationships, I will argue, is that it is sexy. Racial difference is not just a major influence on or component in Shepherd’s sexuality, it is intricately implicated with what turns him on. I am in love with the image and idea of white manhood, which is everything I am not and want to be, and if I cannot be that at least I can have that, if only for the night, if only for the week or the month (54–55). For Shepherd, whiteness is sexy, despite or because of its bond with oppression.

It would be absurdly presumptuous to suppose that a (white) commentator might begin to unravel Shepherd’s intimate experience. However, he has placed it, boldly, in the public domain, and I can record that it is there. A project of this book is to reexamine the implication of sexuality and power. I propose a framework for this in chapter 4, and continue with chapters that explore binary relations founded in gender, age, class, and race. These formations, as Jonathan Dollimore says, quoting Jacques Derrida, are violent hierarchies: one of the two terms forcefully governs the other.² They structure our societies; they constitute our psyches also.

The late and still-lamented Allon White, a keen Freudian, and I were talking about the unconscious. I was attempting to substantiate a materialist position which I associated with Jean-Paul Sartre, namely that human behavior may be explained without resort to the idea of a reservoir of unconscious repressed experience which could only be reached through the ministrations of the analyst. In order that traumatic experiences may be repressed into the unconscious, they have first to reach the threshold of the conscious, which is where they are censored as unacceptable. The images which Freud dredged up in his hysterical patients were not unavailable: rather, the patients did not want to admit to them. So there is no reason to posit an unconscious as such.³ That’s right, cried Allon, puckishly. Some people have no unconscious. And you’re one of them. I felt that at some not very subtle level I had lost the debate. Even a materialist needs a theory of psychic life. Chapters 2 and 3 of this book make a start on sketching what the terms for that might be.

My approach is broadly cultural materialist. It seeks to raise questions about cultural production, addressing typically the relations between dominant and subordinate cultures; the scope for dissidence; how far male dominance might be able to accommodate feminism and dissident sexualities; how culture is negotiated through institutions, including those which govern the definition and circulation of art and literature; how subcultural groups constitute themselves in and through culture. Cultural materialism is a kind of Marxism, and does not pretend to political neutrality. It looks for the transformation of an exploitative social order.⁴

Cultural materialists believe that historic forces and the power structures that they sustain determine the direction, not just of our societies, but ultimately of our selfhood. Yet there is little agreement on how to describe the links between the psyche and the social order. Raymond Williams, who announced the main themes of cultural materialism in the 1970s and 1980s, placed his understanding of personal attachments in his novels, rather than his theory. Louis Althusser seeks to explain how the human subject is persuaded to recognize him- or herself as hailed (interpellated) by the norms of society, while experiencing him- or herself as a free individual.⁵ This sounds like the beginnings of a theory of subjectivity and psychic life. However, Althusser is ready to cede the individual psyche to Freud and his followers. He accepts that the unconscious and its effects are the specific object of psychoanalysis. History, ‘sociology’ or anthropology have no business here. Nevertheless, questions remain, for Althusser, about how historical origins and socioeconomic conditions affect psychoanalytical theory and technique.⁶

The most ambitious theory has sought to combine Freudian and Marxian principles. Herbert Marcuse in Eros and Civilization (1955) sought to reverse what was usually taken as a central Freudian principle—that repression of natural instincts is a necessary condition for the development of civilization.⁷ Marcuse argued that while some repression is inevitable, modern societies experience surplus repression, that is, repression in the service of domination. Further, what is specially repressed is sexuality, and especially insofar as it is restricted to genital organs and reproductive purposes. Marcuse wants us to retrieve the polymorphous perversity that we experienced as infants: this, he holds, will threaten the overthrow of the order of procreation and the institutions that guarantee it. This was a theory for the exuberant and optimistic 1960s. Writing a little later, in 1976, Michel Foucault is more aware of the polymorphous techniques of power. A Marcusean great Refusal of the system supposes power to be unitary and solely oppressive. Rather, the opposite has come about: there is a plurality of resistances.⁸

Anyway, rather than repressing sex, Foucault points out, we have talked of almost nothing else, since Victorian times. This veritable discursive explosion (96) has been the cause and effect of diverse taxonomies of sexual and gender dissidence, especially in the traditions of anthropology and psychoanalysis; I mean to draw upon both. Anthropologists have observed structural correlations in diverse societies: same-sex passions, they find, are organized through age difference (commonly, an older partner initiating a younger partner) and gender difference (one partner takes the role of a man, the other of a woman). I have added race and class to age and gender.

For feminists, and lesbian and gay activists, psychoanalytic texts are fraught with problems. My emphasis on age, class, and race, as well as gender, has to resist a Freudian propensity to suppose that proper analysis of any sexual relation is likely to disclose a version of the ultimate drama through which the castrating father (allegedly) installs gender hierarchy. Consider Joan Riviere’s much-cited essay, Womanliness as a Masquerade. An analysand who grew up in the American South reports a dream in which she is threatened by a black man, and resists him with the secret intention of attracting him. Riviere comments: The meaning was that she had killed father and mother and obtained everything for herself (alone in the house), [and] became terrified of their retribution.⁹ Although she mentions the American South, Riviere’s interpretation involves no thought of the horrific violence that was enacted against black men accused of violating white women. One allegedly hostile man is pretty much like another, and it all comes back to your father.

Other commentators have made a similar point. Michael Warner demands: Why is gender assumed to be our only access to alterity? It is not even the only line of sameness and difference that structures erotic images. Race, age, and class are capable of doing that as well.¹⁰ Lynne Segal traces a difficulty in articulating class to Lacanian psychoanalysis and points out that some feminists have addressed the significance of differences other than those of gender, noting that class, race, ethnicity and sexual orientation, for example, have no place in psychoanalytic formulations of subjectivity.¹¹

My aim is not to attack or defend psychoanalysis; there is little point, at this date, in doing either.¹² A hundred years after the principles were enunciated, it is still difficult to imagine what a rival theory would look like. Getting beyond this point is going to require a paradigm shift, a wholesale reconception from a new stance. In the meantime, the omnipresence of Freud’s ideas makes him the inevitable reference point. My approach here is pragmatic, perhaps appropriative. While setting aside theories which seem to me unfounded and unhelpful, I mean to make positive use of some Freudian concepts, including the distinction between desire-for and desire-to-be, the demarcation between gender identity and sexual object-choice, and the role of narcissism in structuring gay desire.

In this book elucidations and qualifications of theorists will be balanced and tested by more nuanced, complex, and perhaps vulnerable insights, quarried from works of fiction (novels, stories, and films) and autobiography. (I say little about theater because I have written about it elsewhere, albeit from other points of view.)¹³ Some of my references to fiction are quite brief, designed to support claims that such-and-such an attitude is commonly held. They are synoptic and symptomatic, borrowing purposefully from disparate sources in order to indicate that it is not just Hollywood writers, or just writers concerned with AIDS, or just male writers, who hold this-or-that position. Other discussions are larger, and are designed to show the complexity and subtlety of engagement that occur in certain writings, and, by inference, in human lives.

I am not trying to write literary history, which seems to me impoverished in its defining assumption—that literature is sufficiently self-contained to constitute, ultimately, a self-sustaining system. Nor am I interested in establishing literary value. I am captivated by some contemporary and recent fiction not because it tells us transcendent truths, but because it offers sophisticated narratives for exploration, reflection, and action. The literary is often seen as opposed to action, but I remain loyal to the cultural materialist idea that any writing of ambition might be more important than that. As Bertolt Brecht wrote of theater, it sets out society’s experiences, past and present alike, in such a manner that the audience can ‘appreciate’ the feelings, insights and impulses which are distilled by the wisest, most active and most passionate among us from the events of the day or the century.¹⁴

Reports of gay experience indicate repeatedly that fiction enlarges our sense of our potential. American novelist Jim Grimsley is typical:

The very first book I read in which gay men appeared was Mary Renault’s Fire from Heaven, in which Alexander and Hephaistion become lovers in the second half of the book. I was still in high school, probably 1970 or 1971. The fact that I could find some kind of affirmation that there were—or had been—other men like me was enthralling and I read the book over and over again. One of the ironies of that era was that the best books about gay men were all by women. Soon after that I would find John Rechy’s City of Night, which was extraordinary and powerful and which shook me deeply with its portrait of a gay man’s narcissistic sexuality and indifference to commitment.¹⁵

I have argued elsewhere that the narratives which we revisit compulsively (in literary writing and many other forms) are those which in our cultures are unresolved: I call them faultline stories.¹⁶ When a part of our worldview threatens disruption by manifestly failing to cohere with the rest, then we reorganize and retell its story, trying to get it into shape—back into the old shape if we are conservative-minded, or into a new shape if we are more adventurous. Faultline stories address the awkward, unresolved issues; they find their way, willy-nilly, into texts. There is nothing mysterious about this. Authors and readers want writing to be interesting, and these unresolved issues are the most promising for that. This is true in the culture at large, and in subcultural formations also. I deploy some of the techniques of poststructuralist literary criticism, but my aim is to explore how gay experiences have fed into books, films, plays, and cultural commentary, and how we, in turn, have read and pondered them, and reframed ourselves through them. In recognizing the plausibility of a story (Yes, I would act like that in those circumstances; or No, if he takes that line he’s asking for trouble), we recognize ourselves, both individually and, implicitly at least, as part of a subcultural formation. We don’t have to agree; the point is to have the conversation.

To be sure, I am exploiting different kinds of texts—different genres, different media. A romance is likely to mobilize different impressions of gayness from a thriller. Yet each exerts a claim for plausibility within its own criteria, and readers learn to read accordingly. My main interest is in writing of the last thirty years, but contemporary writing is not necessarily the most influential. I discuss Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde, Thomas Mann, Radclyffe Hall, E. M. Forster, and Jean Genet because they still bulk large in our collective imaginations. The aim is not to deduce facts from fiction, but to explore ideas and images; the kinds of representations that have been circulating. These texts display what people (gay and otherwise) have been saying about lesbians and gay men; or rather—for writing must be seen as an intervention in a contested space—what they have wanted readers to believe. In my concluding chapter I ponder whether there may be some use in the idea of a lesbian and gay canon.

It will be sensible to clarify a few other aspects of my approach. Much of what I have to say may easily be applied to heterosexuality. I have framed my thoughts and study in terms of gay subcultures because I know them better and am personally engaged there; because they offer a substantial and up-to-date body of work to build upon; and because there are plenty of books about sex from a straight point of view. It may be that a queer stance will be of wider relevance. Centers, after all, are defined by margins; dissident sexuality, being not the default position, is by definition always already problematized.

I cannot envisage an effective study of gay men that will not be aware of what lies at the most immediate boundaries, those with lesbians and transgender people. I have drawn upon these neighboring discourses when it has seemed instructive to do so. I refer to both gay and queer, tending to use the former in modern and subcultural contexts, the latter in cases with more of a casual, provocative, and inclusive slant. Sexual dissidence is at once vaguer, more purposeful, and more inclusive.¹⁷ Same-sex aspires to neutrality. Female and male are always to be understood as the prevailing normative concepts, as are the notions of masculinity and femininity that conventionally accompany them.

I have tried elsewhere to write about the interface between metropolitan and nonmetropolitan constructions of same-sex passion. The idea was not to find a universal model, still less to legislate for other peoples, but to gain a critical perspective on metropolitan assumptions, revealing them as a local and temporal creation—one that tends to disavow, repudiate, or repress large areas of actual sexual opportunity.¹⁸ In this book my concern is mainly with gay subcultures that have arisen in the cities of North America and northwestern Europe, and to some extent with local versions of them as they have been distributed through other parts of the world by global interaction.

In practice, as it transpires, although this book was largely conceived and written in Britain, many of my texts are from the United States. As I have observed elsewhere, most of the metropolitan imagery of gayness is American; blue-jeans and T-shirts, short hair and mustaches, have been adopted into British gay subculture; so have candlelit vigils, quilting, buddying, and photo-obituaries.¹⁹ Because it is located in a more violent and fractured society, and because the AIDS emergency struck more precisely in more clearly demarcated communities, writing from the United States often seems to present the dilemmas of gayness with a special intensity. When I refer to our cultures I mean those of the United States and northwestern Europe.

2

TAXONOMIES

POSSIBLE AND PLAUSIBLE

In a recent essay designed to kick-start gay history, David Halperin proposes a new categorization of same-sex relations. He distinguishes the modern concept of homosexuality, and four prehomosexual traditions. These latter are found in specific European contexts—from ancient Greece through early-modern Italy and France, and the molly houses of the eighteenth century, on into the emergence of the concept of sexual inversion in the writings of late-nineteenth-century sexologists. They are: (1) effeminacy, (2) pederasty or active sodomy, (3) friendship or male love, (4) passivity or inversion.¹ The key factor linking these prehomosexual traditions, Halperin says, is the privileging of gender over sexual identity (defined by object-choice).

In modern homosexuality, which develops in the mid-twentieth century, it is the other way around. Both partners in a same-sex scenario are regarded as gay and neither need be positioned as feminine. Today, Halperin says, Homosexual relations cease to be compulsorily structured by a polarization of identities and roles (active/passive, insertive/receptive, masculine/feminine, or man/boy). Exclusive, lifelong, companionate, romantic, and mutual homosexual love becomes possible for both partners.² However, traces of earlier patterns linger, and hence the confusions in some current ideas of gayness. Conversely, we may read modern egalitarian expectations back into earlier periods. Astutely, Halperin observes an inconsistency in Jamie O’Neill’s acclaimed novel, At Swim, Two Boys: while the Irish situation is presented with careful historical responsibility, the relationships between the gay boys are presented in the modern manner.³

Halperin’s model is relatively local—it charts particular social and historican contexts within Western European and classical tradition. He concedes that his categories are heuristic, tentative, and ad hoc, that his patterns do not reduce to a single coherent scheme.⁴ Bruce Smith’s analysis of early-modern England and George Rousseau’s account of Enlightenment Europe are in similar vein: they chart same-sex liaisons more or less in the terms in which they were regarded contemporaneously.⁵ In fact, their models may be regarded as local elaborations of the more general model advanced by anthropologists such as David Greenberg, Stephen Murray, and Gilbert Herdt. From a wide survey, they discover two main patterns of male same-sex relations: gender difference (one party is masculine, the other feminine) and age difference. Like Halperin, they find that a new type—egalitarian partnerships founded in similarity—has been developing lately in metropolitan settings.⁶ More elaborate homosexual taxonomies, Jeffrey Weeks notes, have been generated by psychologists, such as Clifford Allen’s twelve types (including the compulsive, the neurotic, and the alcoholic) and Richard Harvey’s forty-six types (including the religious, the bodybuilder, and the ship’s queen).⁷

Anthropological approaches have afforded a valuable way of reminding post-Stonewall gays that their way of doing things is not universal. I mean to take another route, trying to assemble a more abstract model—one that will seek to map the range of possible sex and gender positions, aspiring to coherence and even completeness. The plausible positions, at any time and place, will be a particular selection and development from the possible positions. For instance, Halperin believes that while it was plausible in earlier centuries to have a close male friend, and to cross-dress, to combine the two in one person was almost inconceivable. However, it is always possible, and nowadays a drag queen may have close friends of all kinds.

It should not be supposed that the plausible modes delimit the totality of current behaviors. At present, for instance, there is no extant moral or legal ratification for the serial killer. Even psychologically, it is quite hard to envisage what gratification he or she might be obtaining. Nonetheless such people exist. Plausibility locates what can be said and done within normal parameters but, necessarily, it supposes the coexistence of varying degrees of implausibility, threatening always to infiltrate or shatter the normative. A more abstract taxonomy may remind us that the immediate evidence will not anticipate all possibilities.

I do not intend this as an antihistorical, nor an ahistorical work. My aim is to explore frameworks within which historical differences may be better comprehended (especially, in the present study, the relations between the present and the recent past). The detecting of taxonomies is not a trivial matter. Eve Sedgwick suggests that it may contribute to "the making and unmaking and remaking and redissolution of hundreds of old and new categorical imaginings concerning all the kinds it may take to make up a world."⁸

THREE PROBLEMS WITH FREUD

The other established taxonomies are in the Freudian tradition. Kenneth Lewes derives four explanations of male homosexuality from Freud’s work; C. A. Tripp eight; Kaja Silverman three (one of them in two variants).⁹ As Silverman remarks, the various theories Freud proposes to account for the etiology of homosexuality are far from consistent, and it is often difficult to determine whether one is supposed to extend, supplement, or supersede those that came before (362). My intention is not to rehearse these theories, nor to attack or defend Freud, but to reconsider problems and opportunities for a materialist elucidation of dissident sexualities.

Freud makes a number of gay-friendly utterances: most famously, that all human beings are capable of making a homosexual object-choice and have in fact made one in their unconscious.¹⁰ However, some of his ideas about homosexuality occur in the course of surprisingly flimsy essays (such as the one on Leonardo da Vinci).¹¹ Lesbians and gay men have found three tendencies in Freudian theory particularly hard to deal with. One is the implication that gay men are in some fundamental way feminine, and lesbians correspondingly masculine. For many sexual dissidents, it should be said at once, this implication is not at all unsatisfactory. They are happy to think of themselves as embodying a significant element of the other sex. However, many are not. Gay men in particular have often appealed to David and Jonathan, the Theban Band, and Walt Whitman in order to establish that, so far from being effeminate, same-sex love may be quintessentially manly. Maurice, in E. M. Forster’s novel, believed he had brought out the man in Alec, and now it was Alec’s turn to bring out the hero in him.¹² Notwithstanding, Silverman, expounding the Freudian corpus, warns that the gay man may have to accept that an identification with ‘woman’ constitutes the very basis of his identity, and/or the position from which he desires.¹³

As one might expect, many lesbians object to the idea that they might be really male. Sheila Jeffreys opposes bitterly the ascription of masculine roles to women.¹⁴ Teresa de Lauretis makes an elaborate case, broadly from within psychoanalysis, for freeing lesbians from the imputation that they are castrated and yearning for phallic maleness. The infant, she says, experiences a castrating loss (such as Freud posits), but it is the loss of the female—of the mother—not of the phallus. De Lauretis instances The Well of Loneliness (1928), where Stephen’s mother finds her daughter’s body repulsive. This maternal withholding, which Stephen cannot address directly, is displaced onto a fetish: manliness. Her masculine bearing, therefore, signifies not phallic pretension but Stephen’s desire for the (lost) female body.¹⁵ The difference from traditional Freudian versions is that Stephen’s cultivation of male identity is linked only incidentally to the phallus. It is the adjustment that the sex/gender system makes available: "The popularity of visible masculine signifiers as lesbian fetish in Western cultures is directly proportionate to the latter’s enduringly hegemonic representation of lesbianism as phallic pretension of male identification" (308).

Probably Elizabeth Grosz is right to say that this attempt to render psychoanalysis lesbian-friendly still carries too much Freudian baggage.¹⁶ Nonetheless, de Lauretis’ separation of gender from heterosexuality sets off reverberations that may be heard through the present study. My aim at this point is not to evaluate such theories but to note the firmness with which some lesbians repudiate Freudian arguments that would position them as second-class men. Molly in Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle, encountering a butch/femme bar, exclaims: "That’s the craziest dumbass thing I ever heard tell of. What’s the point of being a lesbian if a woman is going to look and act like an imitation man? Hell, if I want a man, I’ll get the real thing, not one of these chippies."¹⁷ This is perhaps the kind of incident Judith Butler has in mind when she insists that homosexuality is not a copy of heterosexuality. As a young person, she confesses, I suffered for a long time, and I suspect many people have, from being told, explicitly or implicitly, that what I ‘am’ is a copy, an imitation, a derivative example, a shadow of the real.¹⁸

A second problematic tendency in Freudian theory concerns arrested development. As Freud elaborates his idea of an Oedipus complex and adapts to it his experiences of homosexuality, the congenital claims of Havelock Ellis and the inversionists are largely replaced by a developmental model. In his famous letter to a mother about her son’s homosexuality, Freud assured her that it was nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation. Nonetheless, he felt bound to say, it was produced by a certain arrest of sexual development.¹⁹ How does it come to be taken as self-evident that homo-erotics is really an arrested form of interest in oneself? Michael Warner demands.²⁰

What is so revealing is the point at which the arrest is supposed to