On Sexuality and Power

After decades of collaboration and occasional sexual experimentation together, Esther Newton and Shirley Walton realized that the reason they had never really got off was that, despite appearances, they both were tops. What is needed, they argue, is “a more precise vocabulary to take us out of Victorian romanticism in sexual matters and toward a new understanding of women’s sexual diversity and possibility.”¹ The categories Newton and Walton discover are:

sexual preference (from which gender you usually select your partners)

erotic identity (how you image yourself)

erotic role (who you want to be in bed)

and erotic acts (what you like to do in bed)

What you prefer to do in bed cannot be inferred from whether you appear to be cultivating a masculine or a feminine image, or whether you are the older or the younger partner. My investigation of taxonomies entailed an admittedly schematic tendency; this chapter will involve a corrective assessment of the disorderly operations of fantasy, which challenge, solidify, and divert established identities and orthodox desires.

Your fantasies may run quite counter to your self-presentation; they may be indelible, or fairly flexible; they may be conventional or, at least to others, radically inventive. There is, writes Vicky Lebeau, “no limit to the reach of fantasy, its role in our attempts to contain the trauma, as well as the banality, of our lives.”² Fantasies are not, as I use the term, typically unconscious, though they may be. Leo Bersani declares their practical importance: “What positions, what activities, what identifications excite us? What imagined object best helps the masturbatory process along? What do we prefer the other to be doing—to us, for us, alone, with someone else?”³

By fantasy I mean the scenarios that we cultivate in our imaginings, typically of empowerment and humiliation (I seek to justify this emphasis on power in the next chapter). Fantasies are not necessarily sexual in form or origins; as I have indicated, a scenario of class or racial identification or domination is not necessarily to be reduced to the sexual. Their most intense expression may be sexual, however; that is where they enter the most vivid sites of pleasure and control. Fantasies are not necessarily solitary, secret, manipulated, or frustrated; the term includes attempted and successful realization in action, perhaps in collaboration with another. Getting someone to share your scenario is not only fun, it may help to make it plausible to you. Perhaps, as Aristophanes suggests in Plato’s Symposium, the desire to find one’s lost other half is fundamental not just to love and desire, but to humanity. Fortunately, a consensual partner may be found for most practices. Conversely, Jean-Paul Sartre’s vision of hell, in his play Huis Clos (No Exit; 1944), is three people trapped together and prevented by their incompatible psychic needs from confirming each other.

Regrettably, that is not all. You can be at ease with yourself and with your partners, but if the social and political system is stigmatizing and criminalizing you, then you still have a problem. Consider the men in the British “Operation Spanner” case, who were found guilty of consensual S/M practices about which they felt personally very happy.⁴

Sophisticated analysis of these topics often begins at the intersection of psychoanalysis and film studies, with “the gaze.” A comparison may be broached between the way the subject locates him- or herself in the reading of a film (or other) narrative, and in a fantasy scenario. Laura Mulvey inaugurated much of this work by arguing that in Hollywood cinema male viewers are invited to identify with a male protagonist in looking at and desiring women as objects, while women are to identify with the female figures passively looked at.⁵ Such an analysis answers well to an intuitive sense of Hollywood as a monstrous dream machine for the industrialization of culture, dedicated to the preservation of conventional male and female roles. However, it seems to make women passive, not to say stupid, in their reading of film. Also, it makes the system appear more monolithic than is plausible.

Subsequent work—including by Mulvey herself—has consisted of theorizing a way past the implications of the gaze, involving three main points.⁶ First, Hollywood does seem to offer more diverse possibilities. An instance that has delighted many gay men is the chorus, “June Is Bustin’ Out All Over,” in Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein’s Carousel (Henry King, 1956). In the film’s choreography, the girls dance with the fishermen and the sailors, but then the boys dance with each other, in pairs, and for each other as complementary groups; the girls watch the boys, the boys watch each other. Diverse spectatorial positions are available here for women and gay men. Unfortunately, Carousel strives ultimately to contain such gender exuberance: the plot is resolutely heterosexual, and even comradely relations between men are shown as dishonest, violent, criminal, and fatal. Such a contradiction is not unusual in the Hollywood musical. But audiences do not have to respect closures; they may dwell imaginatively on the episodes that excite them. June may bust out.

Second, as Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis observe in a key formulation, fantasy “is not the object of desire, but its setting.” This means that the subject may locate him- or herself at more than one point in a scenario. A seduction fantasy, for instance, “is a scenario with multiple entries, in which nothing shows whether the subject will be immediately located as daughter; it can as well be fixed as father, or even in the term seduces.”⁷ Desire-for alternates, overlaps, and tangles with desire-to-be. Freud is often credited with noticing this potential mobility of identification and desire in his essay “‘A Child Is Being Beaten.’”⁸ There is a nice instance of it in James Robert Baker’s novel, Boy Wonder, where a leading theme is obsessional fantasy investments. “As the film [Rebel Without a Cause] reached its climax, and Sal Mineo died on the observatory steps, Shark wept. ‘I felt as I were Sal Mineo,’ he said, ‘but also Dean. In the end more Dean, the survivor, than Mineo, the martyr. But a part of me died on those observatory steps.’”⁹

Chris Straayer considers how a Mulveyan viewing regime may be adapted to accommodate a lesbian spectator and her partner. In films such as Entre Nous (Diane Kurys, 1983) and Voyage en Douce (Michel Deville, 1979), the male in a triangular relationship with two women may be regarded as an “intermediary” for the feeling between the two women. Through hints such as the exchange of significant glances, a space for “female bonding” may be discovered.¹⁰ Again: Dorothy Allison notes that the clippings pinned above her desk include a young woman in a black lace dress and feathered hat, and a samurai woman sweeping her long sword. “Some days I want to become one or the other of them. Some days I want to write the story of how they become lovers. Other days I can’t stand to look at them at all.”¹¹

Third, any assumption that people want to identify with the nearest equivalent to their ostensible selves is unsatisfactory. On the contrary, fantasy is likely to be the place where we try out alternative identities and desires. Constance Penley has observed how women contributors to Star Trek fanzines invest their libidinal energies in heroic, romantic, and sometimes sexy stories about Captain Kirk and Dr. Spock, rather than in women characters. Penley takes this as evidence “that one can, no matter what one’s gender, identify with either the man or the woman, or the entire scene itself, or the fictional place of the one who looks on to the scene.”¹² The motives of these women seem to be mixed. They are witty and self-parodic; fooling about, experimenting, conducting their own enterprising voyage into the unknown; they are also in earnest. They are claiming male freedoms in their imaginations, while refusing to announce themselves as feminists and rejecting the female body; they are happy to see men as erotically involved but reluctant to contemplate gayness. The main point, however, is perhaps that very many people are far more inventive and adaptable than has often been supposed.

Cross-gender identification is an obvious instance of unruly fantasy. In some aspects at least, it seems to be more disturbing to heteronormativity than dissident object-choice. The notorious version is the traditional gay male devotion to female stars such as Judy Garland and Maria Callas. The death of Garland is usually reckoned to be one of the direct stimuli for the 1969 Stonewall Riots. According to Richard Dyer, Garland “could be seen as in some sense androgynous, as a gender in-between.” Further, “she sings of desire for men and of relationships with men going wrong. Male singers could not (still largely do not) sing of these things.”¹³ Stephen Maddison posits two explanations. The gay man adopts the position of the woman—perhaps, we might confess, elbowing her aside—so as to commandeer her desire for the man. Also, a broadly “feminine” emotional stance is desired and the entire scenario is embraced.¹⁴ Lately many gay men have admired women such as Barbra Streisand and Madonna, who appear to have more control over their destinies.

At this point it seems appropriate to recall my argument in the previous chapter, that individuals who cultivate an element of gender dissidence, stopping short of a transsexual adjustment, do not want to be a different gender; they should be apprehended as aspiring, quite informally, to an amalgamation of gender attributes. Gay men who gain pleasure and strength from a vivid engagement with Streisand don’t believe that they are her. They are pirating aspects of the image for their own purposes. For gender is a negotiation, not a possession; there are innumerable reasons for trying to feel definite about it, but any such attainment is provisional. Fantasy should be understood, not as an absolute demand, nor as a unified core, but as a sequential, piecemeal, strategic adaptation. David Wojnarowicz remarks: “Fantasized images are actually made up of millions of disjointed observations collected and collated into the forms and textures of thought.”¹⁵

If a mood of feminine emotional indulgence and sexual attraction has appeal for some men, the freedoms associated with masculinity have an obvious appeal for women. Lynne Segal describes how her path to a heterosexual and feminist identification passed through gay fiction: “The lustfully desirous fantasies of my own youth were—as they remain—most easily aroused and fed by the words and images of male homosexual authors.” Segal was drawn particularly to the black, and hence doubly forbidden, author James Baldwin. His gay characters afforded a more attractive route to desire for the male than many of the available images of women.¹⁶ Cora Kaplan describes a comparable youthful investment in Baldwin’s writing. She appreciated

the lowered threshold he provided for fantasies that were not about the fixing of gender or sexual orientation but about their mobility and fluidity. Women could take up shifting and multiple fantasy positions within his fictional narratives: that possibility, itself wonderfully if terrifyingly liberating, allowed an identification not just with specific characters but with the scenarios of desire themselves.¹⁷

Images of gay men offered a way to gain a more flexible foothold among the extant sex and gender scenarios, evading a premature consolidation of fantasmatic desires and identifications within the limits of Cold War gender ideology.

Some lesbians report a youthful, transitional reliance on male gay scenarios. They signaled, in the context of a relative sparsity of lesbian images, at least that not everyone is straight. For Cheryl Clarke, an African American, Baldwin figured the prospect of queer, black authorship. Another Country, despite having nothing positive to say about lesbianism, “made me imagine freedom from traditional monogamous heterosexuality and set me to thinking about the possibility of a ‘variant’ life.”¹⁸ As a prominent dissident intellectual—one who preferred not to live in the land of the free—Baldwin represented broader prospects of alternative thought. Bia Lowe describes a double displacement, whereby she invested in actors who were admired for their virility while implicitly embodying an element of gayness. Lowe got from her mother the idea that actors such as Laurence Olivier and Rock Hudson

were men with enormous sex appeal and, now I realize, not without that certain je ne sais quoi [sic]. Was I unknowingly drawn to gay men because of the model of my mother? Or because, as a budding Miss H, I was protected by them from the failure of heterosexual contact? Because gay men reminded me more of brothers than of fathers? Until I came out, I might as well have been a gay man, for male was the only gender I would spot in the “pathology” of same-sex love. I read Giovanni’s Room, saw The Boys in the Band. I eyed my mother’s string of interior decorators. I listened for clues to my own stirrings in the swells and swirl of Tchaikovsky’s music.¹⁹

As well as race, class identifications may tangle with sexuality and gender. Sue-Ellen Case says she became queer through an adolescent identification with Arthur Rimbaud.²⁰ Valerie Walkerdine remarks how, watching Rocky II, she found that her identification was taking an unexpected path. She had not expected to enjoy its “macho sexism,” but she found herself identifying with the class feeling that informs it. “The film brought me up against such memories of pain and struggle and class that it made me cry…. I too wanted Rocky to win. Indeed, I was Rocky—struggling, fighting, crying to get out.”²¹ Class feeling overwhelmed gender principles—or, rather, enabled a more complex experience of them.

There may be downsides to these irregular identifications. As always with appropriations, one gets more than one had bargained for. For Kaplan, to read Baldwin in the context of the limited ideology of femininity that prevailed in the late 1950s meant engaging “not only in an empathetic, even desiring, identification with the figures of masculinity in his texts, but also (if only subliminally) in a repudiation of the feminine, if not exactly of women.”²² Segal pursued her interest in gay men to the extent of becoming pregnant by and marrying one; it didn’t work out.²³

Anthropologists have held that some societies organize same-sex passion around age, others around gender. In chapter 2, correspondingly, a complementarity model and a relative-gender model emerged. But these models are not always discrete. In Pai Hsien-yung’s Taiwanese novel Crystal Boys, the prostitutes are all boys and the punters are older men; the informing imagery, in this militaristic society, is of fathers and sons. This seems to be a same-sex community structured primarily around age. Nonetheless, the boys are called “fairies,” even the ones who might seem masculine: one who is “husky as an ox” is called “Little Fairy,” and one with “a wonderful physique”—“broad shoulders, and a muscular chest”—is called “the Butch Queen.”²⁴

What seems to be happening here is a conflation or substitution of roles: since both boys and women figure subordination, they may be blurred together, or the one may stand for the other. It is beyond the scope of this book to track the range and intricacy of fantasy. In this section I mean to unravel some exemplary instances of fantasmatic maneuvering and explicit role-play, discovering a nexus of complications that seem especially prominent as ways of elaborating gay psychic experience. I distinguish substitutions, conflations, reversals, and loops.

Sometimes roles are substituted for (allegedly) tactical reasons. In single-sex institutions one male may fuck another without losing status, so long as he takes the “active” part and the other is regarded as a stand-in woman. In 1922, Alec Waugh invoked the substitutability of boys and women as an explanation for homosexuality in boarding schools:

In this environment there is nothing unnatural about the attraction exercised by a small boy over an elder one. A small boy is the nearest approach possible to the feminine ideal. Indeed a small boy at a Public School has many of the characteristics that a man would hope and expect to find in a woman. He is small, weak, and stands in need of protection.²⁵

That is a heteronormative way of putting it, of course; we might say that the attraction of women resides in their “boyish” characteristics. Boy-love as a substitute for girl-love is widely displayed in prison dramas, including Little Ol’ Boy by Albert Bein, “Now Barabbas …” [sic] by William Douglas Home, Deathwatch by Jean Genet, and Fortune and Men’s Eyes by John Herbert.²⁶

Freud’s comment on same-sex passion among the Greeks finds that love of boys is really about love of women. “What excited a man’s love was not the masculine character of a boy, but his physical resemblance to a woman as well as his feminine mental qualities—his shyness, his modesty and his need for instruction and assistance.”²⁷ So gender hierarchy is maintained after all—so long as you go along with the Victorian notion of what “a woman” is like. Foucault believes the opposite of the Greeks:

it was the juvenile body with its peculiar charm that was regularly suggested as the “right object” of pleasure. And it would be a mistake to think that its traits were valued because of what they shared with feminine beauty. They were appreciated in themselves or in their juxtaposition with the signs and guarantees of a developing virility.²⁸

Commenting on an earlier version of some of the ideas in the current study, David Halperin insists that not all systems conflate all subordinations, or in the same way.²⁹ This is indeed my point; the conflations I observe are particular strategic adjustments, not instances of an essential process.

It is noticeable that substitution and conflation of roles are more commonly posited of subordinate figures. The masculine, together with the adult, the established, and the white, appears simply as itself, and claims the authority to reposition its others. Pai Hsien-yung’s crystal boys, having run away from home, are lower class as well as young and feminine. Arthur, in Alan Hollinghurst’s Swimming-Pool Library, is black, and also younger and considerably poorer. Such conflations illustrate the malleability of fantasy, but also the ruthlessness of its appropriations, and its disregard for the stability of the subordinated person. If relative femininity and youth are regarded as metonymic, or perhaps even the same, then the conflation of roles may enable a more elaborate fantasmatic discourse; alternatively, it may lead to a confused identity.

Edmund White reports: everyone on the New York scene was doing it: “We were all obsessed with fantasies back then, which we kept exploring until they became absurd. One boy even said to me: ‘I do father-son, sailor-slut, older brother–younger brother, black rapist–white secretary, trucker-hitchhiker, and a virgin couple on their wedding night.’”³⁰ You can slot into one or the other; it’s all the same kind of thing; hierarchy is the point, as much as the particular terms in which it is framed. Perhaps it is a mistake to suppose an original menu of discrete dominations and subordinations, wherein everything was simply itself. In fact, an attraction of same-sex relations may reside in their potential to invoke, simultaneously, several social hierarchies in complicated combinations.

The fantasy identifications discussed so far seem to involve fairly simple substitutions; a person is able to cultivate feelings, typically of empowerment or submission, that would be hard to access through his or her regular identity. Of course, fantasy is not always so conveniently labeled or so comfortably experienced. Often in psychic life there is a tendency for roles to be reversed—such that one fantasizes oneself as the other. As Jacqueline Rose puts it, with case histories of Jewish Holocaust survivors in view, “being a victim does not stop you from identifying with the aggressor; being an aggressor does not stop you from identifying with the victim.”³¹ Role reversal was common in the cross-class liaison of the mid-twentieth century, where the bit of rough trade might be called upon to fuck his social superior.

I remarked at the start of this book how Reginald Shepherd’s desire for men is entangled with his experience of racial hierarchy. Shepherd both desires white men and has himself always wanted to be white. He asks, “How much of wanting another man is the desire to be that man?” The connection works quite literally: by being seen with a white lover, Shepherd becomes “an honorary white man.” He believes that sex is about dominance and submission: “For a gay man both roles are simultaneously available.”³² Gary Fisher, with similar issues in mind, ponders Billy Budd: Melville might have been “a bit more generous; he might have asked us to feel instead of to just watch, feel what it is to be victim and victimizer; white victim and then black victim; white victimizer and black victimizer; asked us to feel, to study and enjoy all the permutations, all the variations on a theme in this text.”³³

Such reversals may be facilitated in gay relations. In the previous chapter I followed John Fletcher’s argument about the breaking of the fragile barrier between identification and desire, to show that such confounding of the distinction between desire-to-be and desire-for is endemic in same-sex passion. Earl Jackson Jr. frames this factor in a revision of Mulveyan, cinematic terms: whereas the viewing pleasures of the heterosexual male may most easily entail identification with the man and objectification of the woman, the gay viewer “regularly identifies with the figure he sexually objectifies. In other words, he experiences a coalescence of drives that are radically dichotomized in his heterosexual male counterpart.” This is specially true in pornography.³⁴ In my view Jackson may underestimate the perversity (to use the normative term) in much heterosexual passion; in horror films men may identify with the female victim.³⁵ But we should take Jackson’s point, that gay people may more readily cross the heavily policed line between identity and desire, making it relatively convenient to cultivate complex scenarios. In Robert Chesney’s play Jerker, or the Helping Hand, J. R. declares his engagement with both the prince and the princess: “I was always more interested in him than in the fairy tale princesses—Snow White, Cinderella, whatever. I identified with the Sleeping Beauty: I wanted that kiss.”³⁶ J. R. is committed to both characters: he wants to be both the prince who kisses and the princess who gets kissed—and awakened into sexual response, such that the prince gets kissed in return.

Finally, we may observe instances in which passion takes a loop through one kind of identification or desire, in order to gain a role in relation to another. This was a resource for the young Edmund White, as he struggled with adolescent passion. In A Boy’s Own Story he falls for the gym teacher, Mr. Pouchet, and imagines himself to be Pouchet’s girlfriend. White was prepared to be “Julie or Helen or whoever else, just so long as I was in his mind somehow.”³⁷ His desire loops through the desire of the teacher and the person of the girlfriend.

Jonathan Dollimore describes a threesome in which a bisexual male (I call him “the protagonist”) watches a man fucking with a woman:

His identifications here are multiple: he identifies with the man (he wants to be in his position, having sex with the woman) but he also wants to be her. And I mean be her: he doesn’t just want to be in her position and have the man fuck him as himself (though he wants that too); no, he wants to be fucked by the man with himself in the position of, which is to say, as, the woman.³⁸

The protagonist has desire-to-be the man, but this is for a purpose: “he wants to be in [the man’s] position, having sex with the woman.” He wants to fuck the woman, and imagines doing it through the agency of the man. His masculine activity is routed through another. Elsewhere, we have found desire-for and desire-to-be to be autonomous, in the sense that nothing about the one can reliably be inferred from the other (drag artistes may be straight). In this case, one facilitates the other:

Both these desires seem to secure the masculinity of the man. This, however, is not the protagonist’s goal, Dollimore insists: “he also wants to be her. And I mean be her.”

Bisexuality is usually glossed, quite simply, as a static split: desire-for both genders. This is not an adequate account of the positionings of Dollimore’s protagonist: he is performing an elaborate psychic loop through the possible permutations. He knows the pleasure of being fucked by a man, he adds, but in this scenario “he also wants to be the woman; he wants to be fucked by the man in a way he imagines—fantasizes—only a woman can be.” This way of putting it implies another variant:

Is this the goal, then? For the bisexual protagonist, Dollimore admits, “the sexual attractiveness of the male is heightened by the fact that the latter is apparently desired by the woman; he excites the more because he is desired by her” (529). Should we declare the protagonist in bad faith, then? His desire-for and desire-to-be take him in a loop through the woman, but his true goal is to share the identity and desire of the man (Dollimore is aware that the woman might be the most objectified figure in the scenario as he presents it; indeed, she might be in effect extinguished). However, I believe that would be a false inference. The care with which the sequence is elaborated indicates that the pleasure is in the entire process, not in any singular end product. Indeed, having reached the point of desiring the man, the protagonist may well go back to the beginning and, from the position of the man, desire the woman.

Guy Willard’s novel Mirrors of Narcissus offers a complex sequence of the desires and identities that one young man might experience. We first see Guy looking at his reflection after working out, and enjoying the thought that women in the dorm opposite can see him through the window. His desire-to-be appears suitably masculine, and adequately depends on heterosexual validation. However, desire-to-be crosses into desire-for when he masturbates over a picture of a bodybuilder. He likes the thought of other men fancying his girlfriend, Christine. “It was as if she were my doll and I was dressing her up to please the guys. And my pleasure in it was ignited by a process of reflection: the other boys’ excitement excited me.” So far so good, though the other boys seem rather prominent in the fantasy. Then identification turns to desire: “I imagined that all the male attention she drew to her stuck to the surface of her skin, so that when I caressed her, I was caressing those male glances…. This was the only way I could get close to a boy.”³⁹ Guy contrives the positions of Christine and himself in lovemaking so that she appears like a boy: “I lay on my back and she sat atop me straddling my thighs, the better to stroke my erection. From the way she was sitting it looked as if my upthrusting penis were hers, completing the illusion that she was a boy” (26). The consequent orgasm may be credited to all three of them. Christine sees that Guy is turned on; she is open-minded, but he conceals the extent of his gay interest.

Guy manages to lever the woman out of the loop when he is invited to model as Narcissus by a gay artist, Peter. Guy is excited by the thought that Peter desires him. When the painting is finished, Guy finds himself aroused by the image of himself (mirroring again the Narcissus in the painting, of course).

Guy falls for his straight roommate, Scott, who, in the manner we have seen elsewhere, is slightly feminine—though not, of course, effeminate: “The eyes were what held my attention. They were large and soulful, and hinted of artistic sensibilities. As if to confirm this, his skin was very fair, a shade too delicate for a boy, though it didn’t make him effeminate in any way” (63). Guy seeks to approach Scott by suggesting to Christine that they help him to lose his virginity. She refuses to do this; instead, she and Scott sleep together and discover their love for one another. For Guy, though only in imagination, this completes a loop: “Through the channel of Christine’s body, Scott and I were now one, linked by the most basic bonds vouchsafed to unrelated strangers. My skin, in nakedness, had touched Christine’s, and her skin, in nakedness had touched his” (169).

The implication in the novel is that Guy was really gay all along, and using loop strategies, exploitatively, to sort himself out. Thus any playful or adventurous potential in his fantasies is set aside. Christine’s refusal to collaborate is wise, according to the narrative; Scott, despite his responsiveness to Guy’s advances on one occasion, is “Perfectly normal” (187). The simplest models are adequate after all. Mirrors of Narcissus finally offers a traditional view of dissident fantasy.

As film theory has repudiated the deterministic notion of spectatorship found initially in Mulvey, it has sometimes imagined a free play of identities. Penley declares: “An important emphasis has been placed on the subject’s ability to assume, successively, all the available positions in the fantasmatic scenario.”⁴⁰ The mobility and intricacies of fantasy tend to undermine expectations of stability, thereby facilitating an elaborate range of libidinal investments. This account is too voluntaristic for Teresa de Lauretis. She objects to

the optimistically silly notion of an unbounded mobility of identities for the spectator-subject; that is to say, any spectator would be able to assume and shift between a variety of identificatory positions, would be able to pick and choose any or all of the subject-positions inscribed in the film regardless of gender or sexual difference, to say nothing of other kinds of difference.⁴¹

Even in these postmodern times, identity has to have some kind of structure, however provisional. I have shown readers investing in diverse aspects of scenarios, but that does not mean there are no constraints; indeed, movement within a scenario may help to keep it in place. This issue is the theme of this section.

The potential for mobility in psychic identifications has been a persistent motif in queer and poststructuralist thought (queer theory is best understood as a kind of poststructuralism). Judith Butler concludes Gender Trouble with the prospect that we might evade the oppressions of difference by elaborating a multiplicity of fantasies and practices: “Cultural configurations of sex and gender might then proliferate or, rather, their present proliferation might then become articulable within the discourses that establish intelligible cultural life, confounding the very binarism of sex, and exposing its fundamental unnaturalness.”⁴² If we recognized innumerable sexualities, norms and stigma would collapse. Henning Bech reaches a compatible conclusion in his book When Men Meet. He argues that the admiration of gay men for masculinity has now become a harmless style choice:

the more the surfaces are detached and become autonomous, the more the roles are severed from nature, the more accessible they become for staging and pleasure, the more they can be treated as surfaces, as roles, as images…. We can finally reach the point at which the dangerous in masculinity is maintained all the while it’s suspended, the violence, the domination, the power display; it can stop when it isn’t fun any more.⁴³

The more we experiment with masculinity, in other words, the less significance it has. Bech foresees the demise of the masculine/feminine hierarchy.

I am struck more by the repetition and fixity of fantasy, in the experience of very many people. I conceded in chapter 2 that my juggling of “M” and “F” might impress the reader as too standardized. It goes against the general postmodern/poststructuralist truism that any identity is, and should be, provisional, unstable. I do believe that psychic life is manufactured out of the typical building blocks of gender, age, class, race, and sexual orientation. These are the structures in which we live, and ongoing psychic life is an attempt to cope with the attendant triumphs and humiliations. I envisage our selfhoods as constructed through a kind of bricolage—the term proposed by Claude Lévi-Strauss to describe the development of cultures in anthropology. In John Clarke’s account this means a piecemeal, appropriative process: “the re-ordering and re-contextualisation of objects to communicate fresh meanings, within a total system of significances, which already includes prior and sedimented meanings attached to the objects used.”⁴⁴ As I have said, it is because the permutations are so numerous and so intricate that the outcome is experienced by many as implying the uniqueness of the individual, and, often, his or her ultimate freedom from the constraints of history and ideology.

What is difficult to articulate, in the models I have been using, is the fourth dimension: time. In the formation of an individual subject, there will be moments of crystallization, in which a specific set of identifications and object-choices will become established, while others are repudiated. Fantasies attempt to manage those traumatic moments, often in tangled form; the individual subject, at any point of time, is the product of a sequence of pioneering and entrenched selves. Through these successive engagements, the subject is constituted.

The postmodern notion that one might manage better without some kind of working identity is intensely romantic. R. D. Laing, the 1960s theorist of damaged identity, remarks: “It is difficult to imagine many who would choose unlimited freedom within a nexus of personal relations, if anything they did had no significance for anyone else. Would anyone choose freedom if nothing he did mattered to anyone?”⁴⁵ Would a boundless indeterminacy be sexy? Dollimore invokes the German film Taxi zum Klo (Taxi to the Toilet: Frank Ripploh, 1981), where Frank passes a note through to the next cubicle asking, “What are you into?” The reply is, “Everything. Anything.” Frank walks out in disgust.⁴⁶ No opposition, no substance, no turn-on. It is one of Foucault’s key insights: power always entails—is experienced only through—resistance.

Identity, according to Laing, is neither essential, nor something you adopt and proclaim, like a political slogan. More fundamentally, it is “that whereby one feels one is the same, in this place, this time as at that time and at that place, past or future; it is that whereby one is identified. I have the impression that most people tend to come to feel that they are the same continuous beings through womb, to tomb. And that this ‘identity,’ the more it is phantasy, is the more intensely defended” (86; Laing’s emphasis). Because gay people may be out of touch with their birth families and closeted at work, they may appear to be unconstrained. A potential for anomie in gay culture is the theme of Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance. “We are free to do anything, live anywhere, it doesn’t matter. We’re completely free and that’s the horror,” Malone opines. “‘Perhaps you would like a Valium,” Sutherland responds.⁴⁷

The extent to which one might be bound to an identity, and the consequences of abandoning it, are explored in Kevin Smith’s film Chasing Amy (1997). Placing his friendship and artistic collaboration with Banky in jeopardy, Holden falls in love with Alyssa, although he knows she is a lesbian. His feelings become unbearably intense, so he tells her of them. Alyssa’s response is to climb out of the car and start hitchhiking. Has she no comment? Yes: “Fuck you!” It is unfair of Holden to unburden his soul to her, because by ignoring her declared lesbianism he is refusing to take her seriously: “Do you remember for one fucking second who I am?” “People change,” Holden replies. “Oh, it’s that simple. You fall in love with me and want a romantic relationship. Nothing changes for you…. I can’t just get into a relationship with you without throwing my whole fucking world into upheaval” (my elision). There’s bound to be a period of adjustment, Holden replies. “There’s no period of adjustment, Holden, I am fucking gay. That’s who I am, and you assume that I can just turn all that around because you’ve got a fucking crush!” She follows him back to the car, however; they embrace heavily; next thing it’s morning and they’re sleeping on the couch together.

Alyssa does seem able to abandon her declared identity after all. The outcome is notably uneven, however, as Holden falls into complacent assumptions. He is devastated to learn that Alyssa’s adaptable identity includes a history of experimentation with boys at school. Also, he presumes that he can reengineer his relations with Banky, who is evidently jealous, by inviting him to explore his (alleged) latent homosexuality. In some circumstances some people may be able to change some parts of their identities in some directions, but they will still be carrying all kinds of debris, and indeed esteem, from their former selves, and the outcome may be uncomfortable.

Generally, erotic imagery proves amazingly stubborn, as people who have tried to change through psychotherapy and religious devotion know. In a memorable formulation, Lynne Segal presents intrepid fantasmatic adventuring as characteristic of psychic life: “We insert ourselves, whatever our sex, at one and the same moment as both active and passive, powerful and powerless, giving and receiving: desire flows through binaries in all directions at once, all of the time.”⁴⁸ Yet I can also envisage a case for the opposite extreme: the fixation. The obsessional fetishist may be living more intensely than people who gain an easy, moderate pleasure, either from unconsidered custom, or from almost anything.

Jeanette Winterson’s protagonist in The PowerBook supposes that the idiom of the computer adds a new impetus to the idea of freedom to be who you will, if only for one night. This prospect is emblematic of our ability to rewrite the stories in which we figure: “there is always a new beginning, a different end. I can change the story. I am the story.”⁴⁹ We assume that the screen we have open at the moment represents our lives, but there is another, less familiar window behind that, and yet another beyond that. “We think of ourselves as close and finite, when we are multiple and infinite” (103). However, The PowerBook does not actually exemplify such freedom. Ali (as the narrator is most often called) engages in a sultry affair with a married woman, who is reluctant to leave her husband. This passion governs Ali’s electronic explorations: “That’s why I trawl my screen like a beachcomber—looking for you, looking for me, trying to see through the disguise. I guess I’ve been looking for us both all my life” (64). This is hardly freedom, and hardly the sign of a new electronic age. It is a quest as purposeful and traditional as those pursued by the heroic knights of epic and romance—whose stories are intercut with Ali’s affair. The challenge to forsake everything, follow your heart, and live for the magical twosome is hardly a new narrative motif.

The invocation of freedom sits oddly with the air of obsession in The PowerBook. Indeed, links with other novels by Winterson suggest that she herself (like very many authors) is working out some compulsive stories of her own. The angry invocation of narrow childhood circumstances is reminiscent of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, and her lover’s flaming red hair and autocratic husband recall Louise in Written on the Body. Indeed, the latter novel and The PowerBook suggest a dynamic, whereby the narrator is a masculinized figure (in Written on the Body it is unclear whether s/he is a woman or a man) who feels impelled to compete with the husband. The narrator in The PowerBook identifies herself with male heroes, permitting little sense of herself as a woman; she doesn’t allow that any particular pressures might attend a lesbian affair. In The Passion, Henri venerates Napoleon, while Villanelle makes love to another woman in the guise of a man, and has to endure the sight through a window of the domestic affection of her lover and her husband. The patterns in Winterson’s writing mark the extent to which we do not control our own stories.

It may be observed also that The PowerBook affords an instance of the thesis I develop in the next chapter, concerning the effacement and ineluctability of power in our relationships. Ali insists that there is no legitimate overlap between power and love. However, the main narrative shows her seeking to control her lover by imposing her idea of how they should proceed. She complains specifically when she feels herself unable to exclude her lover’s husband. “The only power I have is the negative power of withdrawal…. A relationship where one person has no power or negative power, isn’t a relationship, it’s the bond between master and slave” (187; my elision). Of course, this would explain Ali’s male identification: men have power. While fantasy may prove transformative, it may also trap the subject in fruitless and perhaps dangerous compulsions.

The psychic investments discussed thus far in the present chapter are in fact less about freedom than the discovery of a flexible, but apparently suitable, identity. In other contexts, the scope of the fantasy scenario is a problem: it harbors rapists, stalkers, habitual familial abusers, serial killers. Not all roles can be legitimated, even within the superpermissive regime of Queer. There is a persisting problem with individuals who want to force their practices upon others. This should not surprise us. While the hierarchies of gender, age, class, and race often appear benign, and may afford opportunities for rewarding sexual adventures, it is evident that the social and political system, which sponsors such fantasies, can operate in intimidating and brutal ways when a serious threat is perceived. As these hierarchies are internalized by individuals and groups, often as competing psychic and social demands, they are bound to produce strenuous techniques of psychic management and vehement attempts to gain control of self and others. Violent mental disturbance, in other words, is what you would expect in societies like ours.

Mark Ravenhill’s play Shopping and Fucking represents the ménage à trois of Robbie, Lulu, and Mark as unexceptional but foundering because of Mark’s substance abuse. He decides, as part of his cure, to avoid dependency of any kind, but young Gary’s story of abuse by his stepfather draws Mark in after all. Gary, however, doesn’t want to be loved and protected, he wants to be owned and hurt. So why not gratify him? “When someone’s paying, someone wants something and they’re paying, then you do it. Nothing right. Nothing wrong. It’s a deal,” Gary says.⁵⁰ Is this right? For Robbie in particular, more or less anything goes. Like him, many of us are learning to acknowledge and accommodate a range of “perverse” practices that previously would have been thought embarrassing, if not disgusting. But does that mean we can have any experience that we can afford to pay for? When they operate a telephone chat line, Lulu is eventually sickened when a scenario comes too close to life. The question, then, is this: How far is fantasy liberating, how far constraining?

The protagonist in Frisk by Dennis Cooper is drawn “uncontrollably” to a particular “physical type.”⁵¹ Ever since the age of thirteen, when he saw photos of an apparently murdered model, the desires of the narrator, Dennis, have been fixed on such a boy and such a scene (“It looked as if someone had set off a bomb in his rectum”; 27). The photos, he says, “went on to completely direct or destroy my life” (30). Five years later Dennis meets Henry, who claims to have been the model: the photos were fakes. But that doesn’t dispel the fantasy.

The novel takes place at this interface between actuality and fantasy. Samson is Dennis’s ideal type, so he maintains his fantasy scenario in his imagination during conventional lovemaking: “In reality I was caressing him. In my head I’d be grabbing objects off the night table, crashing his skull, then mutilating his body, especially his ass, while he tried to dissuade me from murdering him in a brain-damaged voice” (34). One night Dennis loses it with Samson and punches him repeatedly. Samson isn’t upset: “‘I was so out of it. And you were so weird’” (35; Cooper’s emphases). However, Dennis is afraid, and for a few years avoids

serious, ongoing relationships as a precaution. It wasn’t that I didn’t fantasize murdering hustlers. It’s just that I tend to be too scared or shy the first few times I sleep with someone to do what I actually want. The worst that could, and did, happen was I’d get a little too rough. But the hustler would stop me, or I’d stop myself, before things became more than conventionally kinky, as far as he knew. (36)

What is inhibiting Dennis from acting out his fantasies? He seems to have no trouble getting boys to go with him, especially when they are on drugs; he has money (his parents send it to him). He writes a story, in which Joe’s wish to be hurt has placed him in the power of Gary, who fantasizes about murdering people. “‘But something usually stops me. I think it’s beauty. But whatever it is, it’s not there with you. I really want to kill you,’” Gary says (63). He is not impressed by the conventional S/M notion that the bottom is in charge. “‘Well, um, you shouldn’t do it, because I don’t want you to, and I’m half of this,’” Joe protests. “‘If I don’t do it,’ Gary said, ‘that’ll be why. But it’s the only reason, which is strange, because there should be others, right?’” (64).

We live in a world, Frisk is showing, in which it is not easy to supply better reasons. This is not a new dilemma (“‘I mean, I know there’s no God’”—Dennis; 69). Compare Dorian Gray’s exclamation when Lord Henry is executing his initial seduction: “‘Stop!’ faltered Dorian Gray, ‘Stop! you bewilder me. I don’t know what to say. There is some answer to you, but I cannot find it.’”⁵² Dennis’s old friend Julian says he understands the appeal of murder, but is shocked by the idea of doing it. “‘I’m not being moralistic. I’m talking fairness, which is not a particularly bad rule to live by, as rules go’” (112). This seems right, but it scarcely measures up to the intensity of Dennis’s compulsion.

Ultimately he is inhibited, more simply, by the very extremity of the gap between ordinary life and his fantasy. Henry wants details of the photos in which he appeared, but they seem preposterous in real-life conversation: “Spoken aloud, the descriptions seemed much more pretentious, ridiculous, amoral … something, than they’d ever been in the secret, uncritical world of my fantasies” (30; Cooper’s pause). This gap between what you can imagine and what you can actually, plausibly, say or do is neatly illustrated when Dennis fantasizes about sacrificing a boy called Finn on the top of an Aztec pyramid. “Part of me wanted to kill and dismember him, which I probably could have done without getting arrested,” Dennis reports; “but most of me gave him a towel, then humored him until he left” (38).

Dennis writes letters to his old friend Julian, describing how he has been killing boys in Amsterdam. The murders become more violent and disgusting (at least to me). Julian and his younger brother Kevin, who’s always had a thing for Dennis, come to rescue him. Kevin lights on the idea of restaging the photos, and hence Dennis’s original trauma. “I’d wind up cured or exorcised or something” (121). It appears to work; Julian goes home to his partner, while Kevin and Dennis stay together. But is Dennis cured? It all depends, as Claudia Card says of S/M generally, on whether the cathartic or the addiction model is correct. The former means that occasional controlled indulgence may enable painful psychic material to be disposed of safely; the latter that enactment may produce a need for more intensity or more frequency.⁵³ The closure of Frisk depends on the cathartic model (Dennis’s need to act out his desires diminishes), but elsewhere in the novel Dennis’s obsessions feed on themselves and the addiction model appears to reign; certainly it seems to claim intense imaginative energy. Nor is mere indulgence in fantasy without eventual consequence. Dennis explains why he was unfazed by the first (pretended) murder: “I guess I’d fantasized killing a boy for so long that all the truth did was fill in details. The feeling was already planned and decided for ten years at least” (92). Frisk does not flinch from the thought that fantasmatic desires may prove overwhelmingly addictive, no matter how repulsive they are.

In fact, although he has not actually murdered anyone, Dennis’s motives in writing the letters were not therapeutic: “I realized at some point that I couldn’t and wouldn’t kill anyone, no matter how persuasive the fantasy is.” He was trying to attract an accomplice—someone to “come here, and give me the courage or amorality or whatever to actually kill somebody in league with them” (123). Notice also the ambivalence in Dennis’s key statement, that the snuff photos “went on to completely direct or destroy my life” (30). “Destroy” speaks Dennis’s revulsion, but “direct” is more complacent.

Dennis’s unrepentant streak nourishes and is nourished by a disturbing cross-current in the novel: the idea that the boys he approaches are neither uninterested nor unwilling. Henry is still eager to please, eager to be appreciated; Joe at the last moment appears to consent to his own murder; Pierre’s partner predicts that a boy who has escaped from a “kiddie porn ring” will be terrified, but he blows a kiss to media reporters (86). One might argue, anyway, that consent is often no more than internalized ideology. For instance, when in the marriage service the partners say “I will,” this is perhaps because they are taking it for granted that matrimony is their natural destiny. It would be open to the sexual dissident to interrupt with an impediment, namely that marriage colludes with the wish of the state to control reproduction by fixing gendered and sexual roles. The bride and groom believe they are choosing freely, but they have been systematically conditioned. Where we consent, therefore, we may be most deluded. Not much can be done about this, but it undermines any straightforward reliance upon consent as an ethical and political principle.

Nonetheless, many readers may reflect that the ascription of readiness to the boys is all too convenient for Dennis. A novel is a kind of fantasy scenario, in which the characters may be arranged to suit an imaginative contrivance. The novel says, “this is how people are,” but readers may declare the outcome implausible or immoral—merely (we may say) a fantasy. Frisk actually draws attention to the contrivance of fiction. The narrative slips repeatedly between invention and (pretended) reportage, first and third person. Dennis presents himself continually as if he were in a film. “I should include some reaction shots here,” he says, meaning some indication of how he reacted to his own manic assault on Samson. “But I doubt I had many. I felt numb, blank, so my face probably followed suit” (34). He watches slasher movies avidly; his most substantial conversation is with Pierre, a porn star and hustler whom he has hired. He admits that writing down his fantasies “‘was and still is exciting in a pornographic way’” (123). Such an explicit preference for fantasy over reality does not encourage the reader to trust Dennis’s perceptions of other people. It is, however, a logical outcome to the indulgence in fantasy that some theorists are encouraging; Frisk is about how you police fantasy when experimentation is offered as a good in itself.

In his next novel, Try, Cooper presents similarly violent scenarios, but largely from the viewpoint of the teenager. Ziggy is used sexually by his adoptive fathers, Brice and Roger:

Ziggy’s happy. It’s drug-induced, no doubt. Still, for whatever reason, he suddenly knows, like, for sure, that a huge part of … sexual abuse, at least for him, is how he loves being a target for such intense feelings, especially from someone who knows him and isn’t just stupidly thinking he’s cute or whatever. That’s why he hasn’t killed Brice, or hired a hit man like other abused-type teens do.⁵⁴

We may grant that Ziggy’s contentment is an interesting and important phenomenon, but it doesn’t justify the exploitation. Indeed, the passage quoted acknowledges the extreme distress which “abused-type teens” may experience. Apart from the power (age and wealth) difference, the use of drugs negates any prospect of informed consent. Ziggy is talked into a threesome he doesn’t really want; he is suddenly depressed and bursts into tears, but Roger is oblivious: “‘If you loved me …’—Ziggy slugs—‘… you wouldn’t rim me while I’m crying.’ This time he hits Roger’s head so violently it’s knocked loose. ‘That’s the truth, you … scum!’” (149; Cooper’s pauses and emphases).

The quest for accomplices in Cooper’s books discloses a frightening world of desperate, undernourished youngsters, lacking any evident parental or school guidance, oblivious to the risk of AIDS, taking without hesitation any drug they are offered, absurdly possessed by heavy metal bands, and making themselves available to far more powerful men in return for the most meager emotional consolations. Henry, for instance, has commodified himself to the point where he asks everyone he has sex with, “‘If you could change one thing about the way I was acting a minute ago, what would that be?’” “‘You talk too much,’ the guy said” (Frisk, 8–9).

Frisk constitutes a limit case for any progressive, poststructuralist, or queer wish, that all fantasies might be exhilarating and all sexualities viable. If my contention (which I pursue in the next chapter) about the social and political constitution of desire is right, then it means, on the one hand, that we have to accept as inevitable and only realistic the lineaments of power relations in our sexualities. On the other hand, it means also that gross psychic deformations will appear, even as capitalism and patriarchy produce horrific exploitations. While in the first perspective it is vain to expect that the overwhelming run of our desire can be redirected, in the second perspective there will be perilous consequences to some fantasy scenarios, and it will be necessary to intervene. These consequences will not always be at the gruesome level displayed in Cooper’s writings; there are other, meaner, and narrower kinds of fixation, which produce barely tolerable bullying, bigotry, and disconfirmation. Frisk and Try are valuable books because they take some readers at least into the world of abuse without abandoning them there, but also without harboring impractical prospects for reconciliation of aberrant desire.

A later novel, Guide, displays Dennis in a more realistic setting. Alongside murderous fantasies, the narrator exhibits a rather subdued, lovelorn stance. Contrary to the earlier novels, he doesn’t get the boys he desires. Luke moves in to his apartment, to the alarm of Andy who has seen the novels: “‘Have you read them? They’re all about serial murderers. And all the victims are boys. And all the boys look like you.’”⁵⁵ Luke doesn’t feel threatened: “‘I think Dennis is more sort of someone who lives in his head,’” he opines (170). Let’s hope so.