On Sexuality and Power

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

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 occur: it is at that moment in the Oedipal process at which the individual is caught in the “wrong” gender identity. In a note added to the Three Essays in 1910, Freud declares:

In all the cases we have examined we have established the fact that the future [male] inverts, in the earliest years of their childhood, pass through a phase of very intense but short-lived fixation to a woman (usually their mother), and that, after leaving this behind, they identify themselves with a woman and take themselves as their sexual object. That is to say, proceeding from a basis of narcissism, they look for a young man who resembles themselves and whom they may love as their mother loved them. (56)

In other words, the homosexual behaves as his mother did (or as he wanted her to). Carole-Anne Tyler glosses: “if a man desires another man, he must do so as a woman.”²¹

For women the Oedipal sequence is more complicated, but the outcome is similar. In his essay on “Female Sexuality” (1931), Freud sketches three lines of development for the girl as she “acknowledges the fact of her castration…. Only if her development follows the third, very circuitous, path does she reach the final normal female attitude.” Otherwise she may arrive at “a general revulsion from sexuality,” or she may “cling with defiant self-assertiveness to her threatened masculinity,” perhaps resulting in “a manifest homosexual choice of object.” In a footnote Freud grants cheerfully that “men analysts with feminist views, as well as our women analysts, will disagree.”²²

A third problematic tendency, for many lesbians and gay men, is located around the term narcissism. The mythical Narcissus is a beautiful youth who refuses to be wooed, embracing only himself; gazing at his own reflection, he starves to death. Not the kind of guy you want as a role model.

In his essay “On Narcissism: An Introduction” (1914), Freud distinguishes anaclitic (other directed) and narcissistic love. According to the anaclitic type a man may love the woman who feeds him, and the man who protects him. According to the narcissistic type a man may love versions of himself—what he is, what he was, what he would like to be, someone who was once part of himself. Freud straightaway mentions, but does not develop, “the significance of narcissistic object-choice for homosexuality in men.”²³

On Freud’s own account, narcissistic love is far less limited than the name suggests. Like anaclitic love, it requires two people, and only in one variant are they supposed to be the same; otherwise there is a significant difference. In practice, a relationship with an individual who represents the person you have been, or might become, is likely to involve ceaseless negotiation. You are faced continually with both the distinctiveness of the other person (the extent to which s/he does not embody your ideal self) and the contradictions and failures in your own yearning (your ideal self is not as likable, coherent, or attainable as you might wish to suppose). In fact “anaclitic” doesn’t mean independent, but attached; specifically, “leaning-on,” Freud’s editor explains, “by analogy with the grammatical term ‘enclitic,’ used of particles which cannot be the first word in a sentence, but must be appended to, or must lean up against, a more important one.” Narcissism, then, may operate in an anaclitic way. Freud does not offer them as opposed types: “We have, however, not concluded that human beings are divided into two sharply differentiated groups.” Nor, according to Freud, is narcissistic love distinctively gay. It characterizes many women, who, “especially if they grow up with good looks, develop a certain self-contentment which compensates them for the social restrictions that are imposed on them in their choice of object…. Such women have the greatest fascination for men.”²⁴ Freud instances also the narcissism of parents and children.

Notwithstanding, followers of Freud have tended to conclude that homosexual love is narcissistic and therefore at best immature, at worst pathological. It seems likely to involve age and status difference (a man loves what he was, what he would like to be), and hence to violate the modern egalitarian ethos. The common inference, as Kenneth Lewes puts it, is that homosexuality is “not truly object-related, that it involves impoverished object relations and consequently operates through a primitive and defective superego, and that its mental organization is basically preoedipal.”²⁵ It is not surprising that lesbians and gay men have been uneasy at being labeled “narcissistic.” The only relation of difference that is validated is gender, and then only when a male and a female are involved.

Even so, in my view Freud’s four variants of narcissistic love do offer an intuitively relevant model for some kinds of lesbian and gay passion. Elements of hero worship and idealization, in or of a younger partner, abound in the histories we have created for ourselves, from Socrates and Sappho to Shakespeare, and on to Wilde and Forster. This is not just a male thing. Sarah Ponsonby was thirteen and Eleanor Butler nearly thirty when they made the commitment that was to become the Ladies of Llangollen. Stephen is thirty-one and Mary twenty-one when they fall in love in The Well of Loneliness. Audre Lorde in Zami tells how she passed for thirty-five when she was actually twenty so as to take the protective role in her relationship with Muriel.²⁶

In pursuit of a more effective and more materialist taxonomy, I mean to resort to another Freudian construct—one which is, I hope, less ideologically loaded than those I have discussed so far. In the essay Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1921), Freud draws a distinction between desire-for and desire-to-be. Typically, he says, the boy develops an anaclitic attachment to (desire-for) the mother. At the same time, also, he experiences an identification toward (desire-to-be) his father. These are “two psychologically distinct ties: a straightforward sexual object-cathexis toward his mother and an identification with his father which takes him as his model.” Propelled by “the irresistible advance toward a unification of mental life, they come together at last; and the normal Oedipus complex originates from their confluence.”²⁷

For Freud it is crucial, if your Oedipus complex is to work out properly, to get desire-to-be and desire-for the right way round:

A little boy will exhibit a special interest in his father; he would like to grow like him and be like him, and take his place everywhere. We may say simply that he takes his father as his ideal. This behaviour has nothing to do with a passive or feminine attitude towards his father (and towards males in general); it is on the contrary typically masculine. It fits in very well with the Oedipus complex, for which it helps to prepare the way.²⁸

However, it may not work out so conveniently. The father may be taken as the object of a feminine attitude, or the boy may develop an identification with his mother. The process, Freud admits, is precarious and hard to understand:

It is easy to state in a formula the distinction between an identification with the father and the choice of the father as an object. In the first case one’s father is what one would like to be, and in the second he is what one would like to have. The distinction, that is, depends upon whether the tie attaches to the subject or to the object of the ego. The former kind of tie is therefore already possible before any sexual object-choice has been made. It is much more difficult to give a clear metapsychological representation of the distinction. (135)

What does seem clear is: (1) desire-to-be must be kept apart from desire-for, (2) this quarantine is unreliable, and (3) the consequence is sexual and gender dissidence. This insistence upon a precarious separation is Eve Sedgwick’s theme in Epistomology of the Closet where, she says, the idea was “to demonstrate that modern, homophobic constructions of male heterosexuality have a conceptual dependence on a distinction between men’s identification (with men) and their desire (for women), a distinction whose factitiousness is latent where not patent.”²⁹ Judith Butler also addresses the topic: “The heterosexual logic that requires that identification and desire be mutually exclusive is one of the most reductive of heterosexism’s psychological instruments: if one identifies as a given gender, one must desire a different gender.”³⁰

So how does passion cross the barrier between desire-to-be and desire-for? The answer: very easily! Wayne Koestenbaum observes: “I spent much of my childhood trying to distinguish identification from desire, asking myself, ‘Am I in love with Julie Andrews, or do I think I am Julie Andrews?’ I knew that to love Julie Andrews placed me, however vaguely, in heterosexuality’s domain; but to identify with Julie Andrews, to want to be the star of Star!, placed me under suspicion.”³¹ John Fletcher declares: “There can be no clear cut distinction between identification and desire, being and having, in the early stages” of infant development; it is only a presumed Oedipal polarity that requires it.³² Noncompliance with this heteronormative demand is presented by Fletcher as a positive opportunity for gay relations:

What is refused [in male homosexuality] is not masculinity or the phallic in itself, but the polarity at the heart of the Oedipal injunction: “You cannot be what you desire, you cannot desire what you wish to be.” The “narcissism” that characterizes certain gay male erotic scenarios, turning on images and terms of traditional masculinity and phallic positioning, often can be seen to have a reparative function, restoring an alliance between being and having, identification and desire. (114; Fletcher’s emphasis)

Like de Lauretis in her argument for gender identity as fetish, Fletcher cleverly reorients the Oedipal calamity so that it becomes a gay advantage.

Now, it is not necessary to tangle with psychoanalytic intricacies and purported explanations of gender and sexuality in order to find illumination in the distinction between desire-to-be and desire-for. The pattern has a formal aptness; it will admit, at least in the abstract, all the models I have discussed so far. It reorganizes, in relatively neutral terms, the gendered and narcissistic models of homosexuality which have troubled lesbians and gay men in psychoanalysis. It may be mapped onto, though not contained by, the schema posed so precisely by Sedgwick in Epistemology of the Closet, of inversion (women’s souls in men’s bodies and vice versa) and gender separatism (same-sex bonding).³³ It offers to connect up Halperin’s four prehomosexual traditions. For instance, the effeminate man may be seen as cultivating desire-to-be of the feminine gender, while experiencing desire-for either women or men. Or, again, an “active” sodomite cultivates a desire-to-be male while experiencing desire-for a boy or man.

For the conventional model of heterosexuality you need a man who has desire-to-be male and desire-for a female, and a woman who has desire-to-be female and desire-for a male:

The structure appears complementary at every point—as it should do, for the terms are designed to ratify heteronormativity. You desire-to-be yourself (i.e., your own gender), which seems only right. You have desire-for-another, who is indeed other (another gender). Changing any of the positions disrupts the model. Such disruptions may be experienced, variously, as shameful weakness, moral dilemma, nervous strain, exhilarating kinkiness; some of them will produce gender identifications and object-choices which our cultures call homosexual.

It may be that the dichotomies I am invoking will strike you as a blunt instrument; so they do me. Their usefulness, it will emerge, resides largely in what we can learn from their inadequacies. My goal is not to fit the range of our relations into them, but to use them to disclose salient features of that range. For a start, the terms “M” and “F” must be problematized. They are to be understood as the prevailing normative concepts of male and female, together with the norms of masculinity and femininity that commonly accompany them. It is not my assumption that they are the positions that we have to occupy, but they are the positions we have to negotiate. In the initial, simple version of the model, it is supposed that gender identity will correspond to anatomical sex; however, this may not be so. In practice, little is uncontested in these matters. Some people referred to Margaret Thatcher as “that bloody woman,” others said she wasn’t really a woman at all; interestingly, I don’t remember anyone calling her a lesbian. Again: is it manly or cowardly for a man to assault his wife? Our cultures are not agreed on that.

Two main dissident models initially appear. For the sake of simplicity, and because I feel more confident there, I am writing them as they apply to men. However, I believe they may admit lesbian experience as well; I indicate this from time to time, drawing upon instances and scholarship from lesbian traditions. In an attempt to evade preconceived historical and geographical notions, I call the two initial dissident models (c) and (g).

The former, model (c), is often associated with the ancient Greeks and endorsed by many gay men today. It shows males, without relinquishing their masculine gender identities, desiring other males:

This model flies in the face of a (Freudian) inclination to impose a cross-sex pattern upon same-sex relations by distributing a same-sex couple as one pseudo-male and one pseudo-female. However, it may be authenticated (for Freudians) by Freud’s recognition of desire-for the same gender in his account of narcissism. If the two men are more or less equal, they fit the modern egalitarian ethos. I return in a while to some of the complications in model (c).

This is the classic inversion model of the “passive” male homosexual: he wants to be female, and his desire, like that conventionally expected in a woman, is for a man. He may be said to have a woman’s soul in a man’s body, or a negative Oedipus complex. In the popular imagination, still, effeminacy is the badge of gayness. For instance, in Ned Cresswell’s romance of small town to stardom via sexual intrigue, A Hollywood Conscience, neither Brik nor Ryder has shown any sign of effeminacy. However, once Brik’s gayness is recognized, camp becomes the inevitable marker of this knowledge. If Ryder is getting married he will want a matron of honor, Brik suggests. “‘Guess you’ll have to wax your legs,’” Ryder responds. The topic is not pursued by the boys; it is too risky, they pull back to their customary protocol.³⁴ I trace some of the history of dissident gendering in chapter 5. Model (g) is about sexual dissidence organized around gender; we may call it the gender model.

Many gay men and lesbians, I have suggested, are uncomfortable with this model; it often appears in context with some element of disavowal or, at least, unease. In James Robert Baker’s novel Tim and Pete, Pete is a garage mechanic, performs heavy metal, and passes for straight. Tim is a film archivist. He likes Pete because he is not simply gendered—not “just a mechanic or a rock musician or a cute, butch guy…. It could be a long time before I met someone else with Pete’s sensibility and humor.”³⁵ Meanwhile Tim risks being too effeminate, Pete accuses: “‘The day we went to Monte Carlo you looked like a fruit.’” “‘Only in your mind. I was wearing a totally masculine, faded green tennis shirt and a sloppy straight guy’s khaki shorts,’” Tim retorts. “‘With your collar turned up like a queen,’” Pete insists; two German guys made antigay remarks (73). However, neither of them is as feminine as Victor, who is British, lives with his mother, and likes Barry Manilow and Liza Minnelli.

Further, model (g) proves significantly inexact, in ways that indicate just how tangled and resistant to categorization gender is in our sex/gender system. Consider: the obvious partner for the man in model (g), who desires that he himself should be feminine and that his partner should be masculine, is:

Of course, this image is familiar: it represents the “normal” heterosexual man! Actually, that is not so strange. In the mid-twentieth century, men such as Quentin Crisp believed that effeminate homosexuals sought “to win the love of a ‘real’ man.” So the ultimate ideal partner was indeed a straight-identified man who desired the feminine. Unfortunately, desiring the feminine in the masculine form called the straightness of this man into question: “A man who ‘goes with’ other men is not what they would call a real man.”³⁶ So the maneuver is bound to fail. In Latin cultures, however, this seems less of a problem: a masculine-identified man may manifest desire-for both women and effeminate men.³⁷

If, in one aspect, model (g) discloses a congruency with heterosexual desire, in another it fails to distinguish between the “effeminate” male homosexual and the transsexual anatomical male who feels that he really is female. Each manifests desire-to-be F, and may well experience desire-for M. This confusion is paradoxical, because one advantage of separating desire-to-be from desire-for is that it becomes easier to see the specificity of transgender.³⁸ The ultimate distinction is that whereas the male homosexual priority is to get a man (desire-for), the transgender priority is to establish a dissident identity (desire-to-be). In Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues, Jess has a dream which “wasn’t about being gay. It was about being a man or a woman.”³⁹ Judith Halberstam reports the case of Danny, a pre-operative female-to-male transsexual: Danny finds sexual satisfaction with men, but only so long as it is understood to be “gay” sex—so long as s/he is “recognized” as a man.⁴⁰ Don Kulick has observed a comparable attitude among male-to-female travestis in Brazil. They choose their macho boyfriends not for sexual fulfillment but because having such a man in the house reassures the travesti that s/he is female.⁴¹ In fact, transsexuals are not necessarily homosexual, and their model has to be written:

The transsexual also problematizes the initial term in the diagram, “a man” (or “a woman”), for s/he may regard hirself as a male, a female, a mixture of the two, or neither. Notice that when we speak of the transsexual as a man who has desire-to-be a woman, that this is a loaded way of putting it—a way that prioritizes anatomical gender. We might instead term this person a woman who has been born into the wrong body, prioritizing psychological gender.

As Jay Prosser observes, some transsexuals are refusing absolute gender categories. Kate Bornstein remarks: “I identify as neither male nor female, and now that my lover is going through his gender change, it turns out I’m neither straight nor gay.”⁴² This is not new. Theresa, Jess’s lover in Stone Butch Blues, calls herself a lesbian and urges Jess to join the women’s movement—“‘You’re a woman!’” she exclaims. But Jess denies this: “‘No I’m not,’ I yelled back at her. ‘I’m a he-she. That’s different.’”⁴³ The transsexual is complicated also as a partner: is desire-for about hir masculinity, hir femininity, or both? Such relationships may be straight or gay, depending how you look at it.

Application of the categories “M” and “F” has been thrown into further disarray by recent academic and political attention to “intersexuality”—approximately, what has been called hermaphroditism—bearing anatomical indications of both genders. The Intersex Society of North America is objecting to the practice of surgeons who, coming upon infants whose sex appears mixed or indeterminate, intervene to construct what they regard as more satisfactory gender characteristics. The society urges that medically unnecessary surgery be deferred until the child can make an informed decision from within a supportive environment.⁴⁴ Intersex people may feel themselves to be “F,” “M,” neither, or both. Clifford Geertz presents attitudes toward intersexuality in different cultures as an instance of the constructedness of common sense.⁴⁵ The fact that transgender resists my diagrams is not surprising; it is an index of the difficulty our societies have in conceptualizing it.

One consequence of constructing a model that prompts a serious recognition of transgender is that the situation of the more typical lesbian or gay man comes more clearly into focus by comparison. Many such people experience a degree of dissident gender identification. However, they do not behave or regard themselves as thereby not-male (for men), or not-female (for women). Rather, they see themselves as embodying an element of the alternate gender. So camp men generally have more in common with other men than they do with women (women know this). Correspondingly, contributors to Sally Munt’s collection Butch/Femme insist that while butches allude to masculinity, and even masquerade as men, their purpose is to pursue their particular ways of being women.⁴⁶ Judith Butler writes:

Within lesbian contexts, the “identification” with masculinity that appears as butch identity is not a simple assimilation of lesbianism back into the terms of heterosexuality. As one lesbian femme explained, she likes her boys to be girls, meaning that “being a girl” contextualizes and resignifies “masculinity” in a butch identity. As a result, that masculinity, if that it can be called, is always brought into relief against a culturally intelligible “female body.”⁴⁷

Halberstam cites Butler’s argument, but reasserts that there are other positions: “While some girls are content with boys who retain genetically female bodies, others desire the transgendered or cosmetically altered body.”⁴⁸

I am minded to conclude, from these complexities, that the difference between lesbian or gay and transgender variants of model (g) is one of degree. They all point toward a dissident gender identity, but they range, in a person of predominantly male anatomy, from sensitivity, through the screaming queen, to the person who seeks gender reassignment surgery. In the diagram

therefore, the terms comprise variable intensities in a continuum. If this argument feels wrong—threatening to situate you close to something that you feel is not-you—bear in mind that it is the proximate that demands most assiduous policing. Stephen Maddison, in Fags, Hags, and Queer Sisters, suggests that we regard (some kinds of) homosexuality and transgender as “alternative responses to similar conditions,” adding: “The two movements share a heritage.”⁴⁹ That is right: the diaries of Anne Lister and The Well of Loneliness figure in both lesbian and transgender discourses (I develop this argument in chapter 5).

What has made it difficult to unravel the diversity of the gender model is Freudian absolutism, which is committed to a distribution of psychic life between two poles: father/mother, male/female. For instance, in “A Case of Homosexuality in a Woman” (1920), Freud’s analysand had “entirely repudiated her wish for a child, her love of men, and the feminine role in general.” The outcome was “extreme”: “She changed into a man and took her mother in place of her father as the object of her love.”⁵⁰ But the extremism is Freud’s: not wanting a child, a male partner, or a feminine role does not turn a woman into a man! Again: finding at the end of puberty that the time has come for “exchanging his mother for some other sexual object,” a young man “identifies himself with her; he transforms himself into her, and now looks about for objects which can replace his ego for him, and on which he can bestow such love and care as he has experienced from his mother.”⁵¹ Such language (“he transforms himself into her”) encourages the inference that the homosexual who develops a dissident gender identity really has, at some level, changed gender.

In fact most gender-dissident individuals in the gender model, transsexuals apart, should be apprehended as aspiring, quite informally, to some kind of mixing of gender identities, whereby a person may appropriate “other” gender attributes, without seeking to abandon his or her initially ascribed gender. I had thought to call this “androgyny,” meaning not a semimystical transcendence of gender and the body, but simply a strategic appropriation. However, Halberstam critiques Martha Vicinus’ usage on this: “The androgyne represents some version of gender mixing, but this rarely adds up to total ambiguity; when a woman is mistaken consistently for a man, I think it is safe to say that what marks her gender presentation is not androgyny but masculinity.”⁵² So androgyny and female masculinity are distinct.

The wider point here is that a range of degrees and types of commitment may occur within the gender model, and only the most extreme should be understood as amounting to gender transformation. Desire-to-be is a relative matter, then, not an absolute difference. Perhaps the idea, as Maddison suggests, is not to be a woman but to disaffiliate from dominant heterosexual modes of manhood.⁵³ For many or most gay men, desire-to-be in the gender model should be represented not by “F” but by “RF,” relatively feminine:

While “RF” does embrace the carefully fashioned appropriation of the drag queen or king and the punk gender-bender, for the most part it entails the ordinary, day-to-day effects of an uneven gender identification. Indeed, it may have little to do with object-choice, and be compatible with a heterosexual desire-for. Desire-to-be “RF” is available for diverse disaffections of males from heavily masculine commitments: leisure-class men affecting a dandified style; schoolboys wanting to be aesthetes rather than athletes; artists, priests, and dons choosing to signal unworldliness; the present-day “New Man.” Halberstam points out that rural women may be considered masculine by urban standards, but merely practical in their own community.⁵⁴

In most cases I have written the dissident models as they locate individuals, but identities are interactive and the partner (long or short-term, actual or fantasized) is important because s/he is the person who, above all, is expected to confirm one’s own identity. In conventional heterosexual couples this may work contrastively: the man may feel more masculine in contrast with the woman, and vice versa. Plainly a lot of normative masculinity depends on that process; indeed, while it is conventionally supposed that a man has to be masculine in order to impress a woman, it may be the other way around—the woman is called upon to ratify his masculinity. This is a point made by feminists. Today in metropolitan contexts the obvious partner for a man who has desire-to-be “RF” is a man who has desire-for “RF.” In fact both partners may experience desire-to-be “RF” and desire-for “RF.” This does not mean that such couples will be symmetrical. The “RF” element may be distributed unevenly, producing complementarity at some points, conflict at others. Further, “M,” “F,” and “RF” are likely to be relative between the partners. In a butch/femme couple, for instance, the partners may be gender-marked mainly as measured against each other, not in absolute terms of masculinity and femininity.

The relative nature of many gender-dissident identities points toward the diversity of innumerable actual lesbian and gay relationships. I think its occurrence is sufficiently pronounced to justify terming it the relative-gender model, or model (rg). Insofar as it posits a weaker element of gender dissidence than has often been supposed, it begins to converge on model (c)—to which I now return.

In the most obvious version of (c), each man is attracted to someone who is very like himself. They may admire and inspire one another’s masculinity, perhaps emulously, as between Shakespeare’s Coriolanus and Aufidius, or in the gym. (When Aufidius calls Coriolanus “boy,” at the climax of the play, he ejects him from manly equivalence.) Somewhere around this point, many accounts of (c) and (g) seek to justify one and condemn the other. Adherents of (c) are accused of doubling phallic maleness, colluding with heteronormativity, and despising women; adherents of (g) are accused of being effeminate, colluding with heteronormativity, and (secretly) despising women. A taxonomist is not obliged to evaluate—though in fact the terms I have been using are replete, inevitably, with premature evaluations; there is no neutral language.

As with model (g), for some men the positions in (c) might better be apprehended as “RF” or “RM” (relatively feminine or masculine). However, this does not affect the viability of the model. The main structural inadequacy in (c) is that diverse relations are incorporated together. If this model may be labeled narcissistic, that does not mean that a monochromatic sameness prevails. For very many gay men, it is crucial that the desired object in model (c) should be male and different—different, above all, in class, and/or age, and/or race. Let’s take examples.

At the start of the film about David Hockney and his friends and lovers, A Bigger Splash (Jack Hazan, 1974), we see a good-looking young man, hands behind his head, face composed. The camera swings between him and Hockney; they look pleased with themselves. Hockney speaks partly toward Joe, partly to camera:

How could I describe Joe? He’s, erm, erm, he’s tall; he’s about my size [Hockney smirks and Joe giggles], erm, he’s handsome. He’s got a complexion similar to mine. He’s [they laugh] witty, erm, he’s, erm, sexy. And—what else? He’s artistic: I’ve decided you’re artistic, Joe.

“When did you decide that?” Joe asks—“When I said I liked your work?” Joe suggests.

Hockney emphasizes the physical similarity of the two men; their complicit laughter allows the viewer to suppose that they are talking partly about genital equipment. However, everything else in the exchange speaks status difference. We don’t need to have Hockney described because we know who he is and, anyway, the entire film is about him. He has the authority to decide who is to be called artistic; they have been to Paris with some of his pictures. Joe, we may gather, is stirred by Hockney’s fame. At the end of the film we are in the same scene; Joe is talking about Hockney’s paintings: “They were so beautiful. And I said, ‘My God, I know the painter that did that.’ And I knew the person thought I was lying.” Joe’s admiration is flattering for Hockney who, though I deem nice-looking, is not a pinup boy; age is not mentioned, but Joe is clearly younger. The difference in status, I think for both men, is part of the attraction.

Class difference was very common in mid-twentieth-century queer relationships, where it was often associated with (middle-class) effeminacy and (working-class) masculinity; I have written about this in various places.⁵⁵ Some women cultivated it as well. Stephen in The Well of Loneliness begins by falling in love with Collins, the maid. Ominously, in respect of her later sacrifice of Mary, Stephen prays to be allowed to take Collins’s housemaid’s knee, Christlike, upon herself; when praying doesn’t work she tries kneeling for long periods. Disillusionment sets in when she comes upon Collins necking with the footman; she handles it by transferring her affections to her new pony, which she names “Collins.” As Prosser points out, Stephen is of a higher class than her lovers, Angela and Mary.⁵⁶ Consider also Virginia Woolf’s romance with aristocracy, as well as with Vita Sackville-West, for instance as displayed in Orlando. I am taking “class” approximately, as comprising hierarchies of wealth, status, and cultural sophistication, and their markers in attire, decor, and general lifestyle; it is in my view quite wrong to suppose that we have grown out of all that.

Class hierarchy is disavowed and then acknowledged in Tim and Pete. Both men are into movies, but whereas Tim is an archival researcher and, as I have remarked, at risk of appearing effeminate because of his college-educated manner, Pete is an automobile mechanic, fronts an aggressively political band, and is passing as straight in his rough (lower-class) apartment building. Pete has misled Tim about his “‘middle-class background’”: “the neighborhood was more lower-middle class or blue collar.” Pete implied that he studied at Yale, when actually he’d only lived in New Haven with a history professor (class and age hierarchy there). Tim realizes that Pete had “exaggerated so that we’d seem more equal.”⁵⁷ But does Tim really want Pete to be more equal? “Once I’d sucked Pete’s cock while he was only wearing his Yale T-shirt. Afterward he’d said, ‘So do you like me better as a brilliant student or a dumb mechanic?’” Tim had replied: “‘I like you’”—the correct response for the modern, egalitarian gay man. But now he wonders whether it was true (37). When they saw the film of Maurice they went home and acted joke variations on the roles (“‘Oh, Scudder. You’re stretching me. My word’”). Their parody effected a “homoerotic catharsis … a genuine guilty pleasure” (39; my elision). The endurance of class mobility as a theme is evident in The Talented Mr. Ripley (Anthony Minghella, 1999) and AKA (Duncan Roy, 2002), films in which desire-for and desire-to-be cross over to intriguing effect.

If model (c) sexualities may be regarded as narcissistic, and hence as involving what one was, would like to have been, or would like to be, then age difference is a likely component (it is a factor in A Bigger Splash and Tim and Pete). In Felice Picano’s novel Like People in History, a young ACT UP activist is surprised to find Wally and the older narrator together: “‘I could never figure out why a great-looking guy like Wally would get involved in a transgen thing.’” “Read trans-generational,” the narrator says to himself. “Read I’m old enough to be his father but neither look it nor act like it. Read eternal Peter Pan.”⁵⁸ The age model flourishes notwithstanding. It figures in many of the most influential texts of our time—The Immoralist (André Gide), Death in Venice (Thomas Mann), Maurice (E. M. Forster), Funeral Rites (Jean Genet), Hemlock and After (Angus Wilson), Variation on a Theme (Terence Rattigan), Sweet Bird of Youth (Tennessee Williams), Entertaining Mr. Sloane (Joe Orton), A Single Man (Christopher Isherwood), The Swimming-Pool Library (Alan Hollinghurst), Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall (Neil Bartlett), Frisk (Dennis Cooper), The Night Listener (Armistead Maupin). Its ordinariness is manifest in innumerable contact ads. In The Beautiful Room Is Empty by Edmund White, the narrator has a substantial relationship with Lou, but it doesn’t work out: Edmund is “too big and educated to be the boy, and too much younger to be the man.”⁵⁹

De Lauretis’ founding of lesbianism in the loss of the mother seems likely to produce relationships characterized by age difference. She reports how the Milan Women’s Bookshop Collective found disparities (social, educational, economic) among their reading group: some women “were seen as authoritarian ‘mothers’ prevaricating over the preferences and interpretations of the others, who thus felt cast in the role of daughters.”⁶⁰ The collective decided not to outlaw this element of hierarchy, but to validate relations of entrustment,

in which one woman gives her trust or entrusts herself symbolically to another woman, who thus becomes her guide, mentor, or point of reference…. Both women engage in the relationship—and here is the novelty, and the most controversial aspect of this feminist theory of practice—not in spite, but rather because of and in full recognition of the disparity that may exist between them in class or social position, age, level of education, professional status, income, etc. (21–22; my elision)

And this, de Lauretis observes, is “contrary to the egalitarian feminist belief that women’s mutual trust is incompatible with unequal power” (24). Working with disparities enables a proper recognition of the diversity of women.

An interesting corollary of the age version of model (c) is that it offers a way for lesbians and gay men to reproduce their kind: some girls and boys may pass through, serially, to the woman’s or man’s position, and so on from generation to generation. This is anticipated by Freud in his comments on the Greeks: “As soon as the boy became a man he ceased to be a sexual object for men and himself, perhaps, became a lover of boys.”⁶¹ Jean Genet is a notable individual who was involved in such a sequence. People hostile to homosexuality become especially distressed at the prospect that we might have our own, same-sex way of breeding.

In my discussion of the gender model (g), it was possible to recognize a range of desires by horizontal substitution—complicating rather than changing the received terms of the model (“M” and “F”), and then adding “RF” and (rg). In model (c) vertical substitution is required. For instance:

The asymmetry between the two models occurs because (g) is about gender, whereas in (c) gender tends to obscure other factors. I propose calling model (c) the complementarity model, taking this to include both the sense of lack in narcissism and the potential affinity in difference; it may be particularized as race complementary, class complementary, and age complementary.

As with the gender model, the mapping of such elaborations discloses further complications. With the complementarity model there is no convenient starting assumption as to who does what. A boy in the age version, for instance, might be rough and “active” or docile (tractable, agreeable) and “passive”; indeed, he might be rough and “passive” or docile and “active.” Nor are these matters stable: a relationship may start in one vein and modulate into another. Delving further into the intimate potential of both fantasy and practice would produce more elaborate systems.

A blatant disturber of neatly gendered models is bisexuality. Traditionally, lesbians and gay men have been suspicious of bisexuality, regarding it as a way of evading the stigma of gayness. This may have been partly true. It is plain, however, that very many people entertain, simultaneously or successively, divergent desires, both for and to-be. In Gay and After I argue that in the 1970s and 1980s, to declare yourself gay or lesbian was such a strenuous project that to blur the effect by adding that sometimes you were a bit straight after all seemed just too complicated, and scarcely plausible. The notion that there are two distinct populations suited straights because it helped them to avoid contamination, and gays because it facilitated political and economic organization. However, since the mid-1990s, some young people are less daunted by such pressures. Meanwhile some noted lesbian and gay activists, who can hardly be accused of running scared, have been venturing beyond customary identities.⁶²

Taxonomical thinking discloses an interesting symmetry: compare the position of the bisexual with that of the transsexual. Both are in-between—irregular combinations of “M” and “F.” However, one is structured in desire-for, the other in desire-to-be.

The scope for entertaining, more or less together, formally incompatible desires is represented positively in Aiden Shaw’s self-consciously contemporary novel, Wasted. At the beginning David and Joe are together, though David was with Flora before. David also loves his nephew, Ryan (age sixteen). Ryan is with Leila, but experiments in going to bed with David. Flora takes up with Don, who is straight but nonetheless drawn to Joe. David dies, and Joe connects with Flora as an artistic collaborator. Flora falls for Josie. Joe finds an immediate sexual rapport with Dylan, a student friend of Ryan. “‘Yeah. Meet the family,’ said Flora.”⁶³ These are families of choice. Scarcely an eyelid is batted at these diverse developments. David is worried that his feelings for his young nephew are sexual (50); however, for Ryan it’s cool: “‘You sound like an old queer from the Fifties.’ He held out his arms to hug David. ‘Why should it bother me?’” (52). Flora doesn’t hesitate with Josie: “It felt so right in Josie’s arms. Complete. Already it felt like the next phase in life” (200); “‘What! Flora a dyke?’” Ryan exclaims. “‘Fuck! That one’s full of surprises’” (218). Joe and Dylan feel obliged to defend the age difference between them (fifteen years), but it’s no big deal. Among the younger generation more or less anything goes. Indeed, Ryan finds that in fantasy he can fill in the blank of David’s former lover with diverse interchangeable images, including himself, like morphing in a pop video. In Ryan’s drugged dream the characters of the book merge into each other: “Leila was David. David was Leila, now both just one person. Sexual. Passionate. Loving. Breasts turned into arse cheeks, their dicks into syringes. Dylan also became a part of them. He merged with David and Leila. Ryan loved them, physically and mentally” (257).

However, free-ranging is not the only game in town. As a counterpart to the equable families of choice, Wasted displays a preoccupation with involuntary sexual experience. David tells Ryan how he has been obsessed with him—“‘hundreds of times I have jerked off about you … nine years of jerking off, and the different images I’ve had of you in my head during that time’” (142; my elision). There is one rape in the novel, probably two. Also, as well as the usual array of clubbing drugs, the characters experiment with a sleeping tablet through which one person subjects himself to an oblivion in which anything can be done to him. “‘But he could have done anything.’ ‘Exactly. Sexy, huh?’” (9). It is a mechanism of trust, but also of exploitation. More ominously, the closing episode of the book indicates that not everyone in the city is cool. The amiable, freewheeling milieu has no resources to match obsessional sexual violence.

The outcome is merely frustrating in a rueful instance offered by Sarah Schulman in her novel Empathy. Anna, a woman, and a man have been drinking and decide to play a game: “each one would say their fantasy and the other two would fulfill it.” The man goes first, and wants the two women to suck his dick, so they do. The woman wants Anna to be fucked by the man, so she is. However, when Anna wants the man to leave the room so she can make love to the woman, the woman says no.⁶⁴

My goal in this chapter has been to generate models of gender and sexual experience quite abstractly, so as to afford a possible frame within which the more local, empirical categories of Halperin, Smith, Rousseau, and anthropological scholars may be comprehended. I have derived desire-for and desire-to-be from Freudian writings, while trying to avoid the Freudian tendency to essentialize and absolutize gender. The dominant categories that emerge in my analysis are gender difference and gender complementarity. Gender difference comprises heterosexuality, together with a range of intricate same-sex relations of identity and desire, in which a person with at least some biological male characteristics is apprehended, either by himself or his male partner, as feminine (and the other way about for women); gender difference turns out, often, to be relative. Gender complementarity delineates relations where two men or two women have both desire-for the same gender and desire-to-be the same gender; while it may be addressed as a kind of narcissism, it emerges as preoccupied with hierarchies of class, age, and race, within ostensible sameness.

Arguably, I have myself colluded with heteronormativity by retaining versions of “F” and “M” as starting points in my models. Perhaps we should be taking more seriously a desire-to-be wealthy, taller, a doctor, or Barbra Streisand. Or this:

Identity might not be about gender, sexuality might not be genital. Many erotic practices are relatively diffuse—involving pleasures of touch and smell. Some sadomasochists, fetishists, and pedophiles may be able to find satisfaction with either male or female partners. Concepts such as beauty, intelligence, sense of humor, and even virtue may be stimulating; they are not altogether in thrall to ideology. The point of my taxonomy, I have said, is not to limit identity or desire but, rather, to offer a base from which the specificity and multiplicity of the potential combinations and interactions may coherently emerge.

Even with these provisos, I suspect that for many readers my brisk modeling feels too regulated, too standardized. It goes against the general postmodern-poststructuralist truism, that any identity is, and should be, provisional, unstable, fuzzy around the edges, occupied only through processes of anxious iteration. Taxonomy refuses the ideology which asserts that we are all individuals, and that our sex lives belong to a private, personal, individual realm into which it is better not to inquire. At least (it may be averred) Freud produces an air of mystery. I have to say that I have never found individualism a very appealing or reassuring idea. As David Evans observes, capitalism invites us to see ourselves as “unique individuals with needs, identities and lifestyles which we express through our purchase of appropriate commodities.”⁶⁵ In fact, advertisers and other cultural producers know how to corral us into niche markets where we can be conveniently targeted; individual choice is disturbingly congruent with the idea that the right designer label will enable us to complete our happiness. At the same time, it is only by combining that ordinary people gain any potential for political action—for understanding, even. Insistence upon individuality amounts to a naive reluctance to acknowledge that oneself is actually quite like a lot of other people.

The presumption behind my models is that our behavior falls into patterns, and that they are not unconnected with those disclosed by surveys and focus groups. Sexuality is social. However, I do believe that those patterns are immensely complex. In Stone Butch Blues Theresa protests when Jess decides to begin taking male hormones in order to pass as a man. “‘I’m a woman, Jess. I love you because you’re a woman, too,’” Theresa avers. “‘I just don’t want to be some man’s wife, even if that man’s a woman.’”⁶⁶ This is not just a matter of object-choice. Theresa experiences her identity as interdependent with that of her partner: “‘I’m a femme, Jess. I want to be with a butch.’” Otherwise her lesbian character is at stake: “‘If I’m not with a butch everyone just assumes I’m straight. It’s like I’m passing too, against my will. I’ve worked hard to be discriminated against as a lesbian’” (151).

A man has:	desire-to-be M	desire-for F
A woman has:	desire-to-be F	desire-for M

(c) A man has:	desire-to-be M	desire-for M
	who is old	who is old
	young	young
	old	young
	young	old