Men come to the brothel in Jean Genet’s The Balcony to act out scenarios of power. There is the Bishop and the Penitent, the General and his horse, the Maîtresse and the Beggar, and the Judge, the Executioner, and the Thief.
There are two kings of France with coronation ceremonies and different rituals, an admiral at the stern of his sinking destroyer, a dey of Algiers surrendering, a fireman putting out a fire, a goat attached to a stake, a housewife returning from market, a pickpocket, a robbed man who’s bound and beaten up, a Saint Sebastian, a farmer in his barn … a missionary dying on the cross, and Christ in person.1
There is no chief of police, as the actual incumbent ruefully observes. However, after he has put down the rebellion, the traditional authority figures wilt and men queue up to enter his scenario. The meaning of this fable is that, traditionally, the imagery of the chief of police is insufficiently charismatic; he is not recognized as part of the establishment, he is too functional. He has not figured in the fantasies of citizens. Now the fascist state has arrived, and the policeman bulks large in the psyches of citizens. His symbol is a man-sized phallus, his counterpart a slave, and his setting a mausoleum. Genet is showing that our sexual fantasies depend on the power arrangements in our societies. This chapter aims to appraise, in outline, the relations between sexual practice and fantasy, social organization, and hierarchies of gender, class, age, and race.
TWO BOYS TOGETHER CLINGING
As a boy, Paul Monette sees his incipient queerness as a failure of manhood. He conceives an attachment to Elizabeth Taylor, he says in his autobiography Becoming a Man: “I’m not quite sure what I’d identified with, but it seemed to amount to a kind of emotional drag—trying on those steamy, gaudy feelings.” He and two friends discover all this for themselves; “If someone had told me I was exhibiting a sensibility, I probably would’ve frozen in horror, terrified my wrists were going limp.” A teacher sees them camping around, and notes: “‘Paul spends too much time acting silly with his day student play-mates. It’s not healthy. He’s got a lot of growing up to do if he wants to be a man.’”2
Paul is not happy with his relatively feminine stance. He “hated the soft androgyny of [his] body, which somehow managed to be both scrawny and plump at once” (70). When he gets fucked he hates himself “for acceding to the woman’s role, when what I had been so desperate for was to prove I was a man” (144; Monette’s emphasis). Class difference is also at issue. Paul’s hitherto virtuous life is turned into a more exciting path at the age of nine by his attachment to a lower-class boy, Kite. The “turn-on” was “the twist of his dirty mouth, the punk veneer, the boot-camp father, like an urchin in Oliver Twist.” The Lawrence who wrote of Lady Chatterley would have understood, and Forster too: “this first fire in my loins was all about class. Paul is perfect was slumming.” Monette adds: “Maybe Kite was a way of getting out from under the weight of gentility. I’ve always had a thing for men from unpaved places, not too polished, definitely not English” (22–24; Monette’s emphasis). Until his late twenties, Monette’s attempts to do something with his unwanted gay sexuality involve class difference. “The laughing man I was looking for was older than I and working-class, certainly no preppie” (194). So there is age difference too, complicated by teaching in private schools, where he is seduced by the boys’ flattering attentions and his own loneliness: “I had become the thing the heteros secretly believe about everyone gay—a predator, a recruiter, an indoctrinator of boys into acts of darkness. Sullying my mission as teacher and guide” (197).
Being the seduced boy may be satisfying. Paul enjoys going around with Harold, who is older and wealthier:
He put on the carnival of events for my sake, treating me like a prince, and even as I raced about laughing on his arm I was thinking how it would be if this were a permanent thing. To be kept by Harold—no more teaching meat-brain kids, no obligations except to be a poet. Wherever we went, running into Harold’s friends, I’d see the flush of pride in his face as he showed me off. No, that’s not right. I did all the showing off. (268)
Yet age difference takes Paul only so far: “I needed the seventeen years’ difference between us in order to put my trust in his sagacity and worldliness. But I also wanted a man my own age, to discover the world along with me” (269). Paul is uncomfortable with these hierarchies of gender, class, and age. The resolution is his meeting with Roger: they remain together for seventeen years, until Roger’s death.
In the continuation of Monette’s autobiography, Borrowed Time, the emphasis shifts to similarity, even sameness. Roger is a successful lawyer, of compatible professional stature and affluence. They are the same size, and hold shirts, underwear, and socks in common. Neither is relatively feminine; though marriage is invoked, roles are not differentiated. “‘But we’re the same person,’” Roger exclaims shortly before death, “in a sort of bewildered delight. ‘When did that happen?’” The answer, according to a friend, is that Paul had anticipated the idea: “‘But that’s what you always used to say in Boston. Roger and you were just two names for the same person.’”3
In fact there are significant differences (this will be a recurring pattern). Roger is four years older—thirty-two and twenty-eight when they meet. Paul is frenzied while Roger is calm; Paul is more dependent, Roger more stable and self-contained. “I am the weather, Roger is the climate” (65). Further: “Over the years, relations between us had evolved to a place where he was the grown-up and I the child” (194). Now Roger is sick and Paul cares for him “like a mother” (341). Notwithstanding, Paul insists that these differences are transcended. “Between us we covered the night and the morning watch”; “Being as we were the same person, happily it all balanced out”; “How was it even physically possible to separate us now, with the two of us so interchangeably one?” (29, 41, 315). Some people, Paul acknowledges, regard him as “just a love junkie. What I experience as being known to the core, appetite and aspiration fused, some queers think of as confinement. Doomed to resemble a bourgeois marriage, straight-identified to boot.” But Paul learned to love himself, “because someone else finally loved me.”4
The more serious problem for the love junkie is living up to it all. In Borrowed Time this is magnified by Roger’s sickness with AIDS.
I ran around the bed and clutched Roger’s hand. “We’ll fight it, darling, we’ll beat it, I promise. I won’t let you die.” The sentiments merged as they tumbled out. This is the liturgy of bonding. Mostly we clung together, as if time still had the decency to stop when we were entwined. After all, the whole world was right here in this room. (77)
The quality of love must ensure survival. We might notice the echo of John Donne’s poem “The Good-Morrow”: love “makes one little room, an everywhere.” “Whatever dies, was not mix’d equally,” the poem continues: Roger’s life appears to depend on their equivalence and togetherness.5 Walt Whitman is there as well:
We two boys together clinging,
One the other never leaving.6
Poetry and gay tradition may help sustain them.
None of Monette’s experiences is uncommon among gay men, though his awareness may be. They amount to a series of anxious negotiations of disjunctions and convergences, positioned around binary differences of gender, class, and age. Positively and negatively, as Monette presents them, these hierarchies constitute the available options; despite aspirations to transcend them in the name of equality, they structure the terms on which intense human interactions become available. Monette prefers to deny, or move beyond, hierarchy, and toward an idealized, egalitarian relationship; yet differentials are still apparent. My case is that hierarchies of gender, age, and class, and race also, are hard to expel from our personal lives because they constitute the principal hierarchies that structure our societies. Differences of masculine and feminine, old and young, upper and lower class, and white and black are not incidental or neutral alternatives. They flow through the power relations that we encounter daily in the world, and through our psyches also; we experience them, ultimately, as empowerment and abjection. Monette’s negotiation of hierarchy and equality manifests a persistent strain in gay imaginings.
This proposition facilitates a materialist interpretation of gender and sexuality. Because these elements are so complex, their institutional apparatuses so contradictory, and the permutations so many and so intricate, we experience ourselves as unique individuals; probably that is what we are. Nonetheless, the hierarchies in fantasy and practice derive not from the individual psyche, but from the social relations that define our being. They are continuous with the stories that construct our psychic reality: social being determines consciousness. Egalitarian aspirations also are socially encoded; they are as exciting and difficult to sustain in personal relations as they are in the social order (I return to this in a while). But often, I will show, there is more hierarchy in the frame than is immediately admitted. Such an account of fantasy and power is cultural materialist on three counts: (1) it recognizes the priority of economic, social, and political structures in the constitution of consciousness; (2) it emphasizes the role of ideology; (3) it maintains an awareness of domination and exploitation.
As Foucault argues, power is to be envisaged as pervading the entire social order, in positive as well as negative aspects. It “penetrates and controls everyday pleasure—all this entailing effects that may be those of refusal, blockage, and invalidation, but also incitement and intensification: in short, the ‘polymorphous techniques of power.’”7 To say this is not to overlook the specific and massive apparatuses of government, law, business, and education in our societies. Power is, at once, both intimate and institutional. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault seems to repudiate the idea that power relations are “localized in the relations between the state and its citizens or on the frontier between classes.” He denies that power may “merely reproduce, at the level of individuals, bodies, gestures and behaviour, the general form of the law or government.” This seems to position class, gender, race, and age as superficial modes, whereas power relations are more fundamental, reaching “right down into the depths of society.” Yet Foucault does grant “continuity” between the multiple modes of power—not in any predictable analogy or homology, but through “a specificity of mechanism and modality.”8
If, then, social structures may be said to inform what we experience as our individual sex/gender formations, this is not to imagine some simple transmission of the world into the psyche. Teresa de Lauretis portrays the relations of representation, action, and fantasy as “intimate … in the realm of the senses and in that of the law, in sexual practices as well as in the juridical-legislative domain.” However, no easy transference should be supposed. We need to observe “the different relations of production.”9 As I remarked in the previous chapter, the erotic deployment of fantasies of power is inevitably tangled into substitutions, conflations, reversals, and loops.
Fantasies of dominance and subjection should be regarded as unsurprising transmutations of prevailing social relations of domination and subordination. Hierarchy is neither an aberration nor a misfortune in desire, but integral with it. Indeed, it may well be that power difference is the ground of the erotic; that it is sexy. That is the insight of Genet’s Balcony.
THE EGALITARIAN IDEOLOGY
The dominant metropolitan ideology suggests that the most suitable partner, gay or straight, will be of similar age, class, and race to oneself. Gender is the difference that is prized—though only when it figures heterosexually. This ideology of similarity and equality informs the companionate marriage, as it has evolved from the 1920s’ endorsement of reciprocity in sexual pleasure, through the 1950s’ pram-pushing hubby, to the 1980s’ “New Man.” Already in 1971, Geoffrey Gorer, reporting on a survey of attitudes toward sex and marriage, was remarking that twenty years previously the dominant model of marriage had been “complementary,” resting on a clear division of responsibilities. However, among younger people this was being displaced by a “symmetrical” model, which stresses “comradeship, doing things together, and articulateness.” The survey was conducted in England but, Gorer noted, key terms in the new model—“togetherness” and “communication”—were coming from the United States.10
Anthropologists and social historians have tracked this development among lesbians and gay men, looking for the emergence of egalitarian relations as a sign of progress. Romantic friendship, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, seems to promise modernity and maturity, even though the equality may be more notional than actual, and the eroticism uncertain.11 Walt Whitman is celebrated for the dear love of comrades, though his own relationships seem to have been characterized by differences of class and age. The key to David Halperin’s sense of modern homosexuality is the opportunity to transcend hierarchy. “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.”12
A change in expectations along these lines has been confirmed lately among lesbians and gay men by Jeffrey Weeks, Brian Heaphy, and Catherine Donovan. They believe that there was once “a prevalent stereotype about the inegalitarian nature of many homosexual sexual and emotional involvements, defined or fractured by generational, class, racial or domestic inequalities.” But now, they find in interviews, “The dominant ethos among lesbians, gay men, and bisexuals is of egalitarian relationships.”13 Even so, “The reality, inevitably, is more complex: non-heterosexuals strive to achieve equality in terms of intimacy, sexual relations and the division of labour in the household against all the inequalities that continue to structure our societies” (109). Actually, around 60 percent of the respondents did not describe their relationships as “equal” (114). Whether they were finding any positive advantage in power differentials is hard to know, since Weeks, Heaphy, and Donovan evidently share the egalitarian ideology, and their interview questions take it for granted that valuable factors, such as “communication, closeness, and intimacy,” are scarcely to be found outside equal relationships (110).
To be sure, few people suppose that it is possible to have a totally egalitarian relationship. Notwithstanding, the dominant ideology says that power differentials are unfortunate and should be either avoided or overcome. Indeed, so strong is the ideology of equality that some S/Mers are insisting that their routines are not just “safe, sane, and consensual,” but actually egalitarian. Lynda Hart and Joshua Dale note that in some quarters S/M “has become less a polarized expression of a master’s power over a slave than a mutual exchange of power.” Already in the 1970s, some practitioners began to refer to S/M as “sensuality and mutuality”; by the early 1980s the “mutualists,” as Geoff Mains calls them, had become a prime element in the leather community.14
Similarity and mutuality correlate with monogamy, respectability, and assimilation in The Lost Language of Cranes by David Leavitt. The project of this novel is to sort out the good gays from the unfortunate approximations. The older generation finds it hard to benefit from recent developments in gay selfhood. Owen, who is married to Rose, is unable to talk to anyone about his yearning for gay sex; even at a pornographic cinema, which he visits regularly, he is too ashamed and frightened to speak to anyone or to follow up potential contacts. Two less prominent characters, Derek and Geoffrey, are old-style queens reminiscent of Oscar Wilde; they cultivate British accents, speak of men as “girls,” prepare a dinner in which all the food is blue, and include in their circle cultured Europeans who go to Tangiers where it is easy to buy young boys.
All this is regarded with a mixture of distaste and disbelief by the younger generation, represented centrally by Philip, the gay son of Owen and Rose. He had difficulty as an adolescent coming to terms with himself but, the narration suggests, he’s doing it more or less right now. He postpones coming out to his parents until he believes he has achieved a gayness he can be proud of: “I wanted to wait until I could show you that a homosexual life could be a good thing.”15 This involves, above all, having a presentable partner: “he had counted on Eliot’s presence in their living room to justify all he had said to them, to justify his life” (198). The alternative is cruising and porn movies, but Philip finds little satisfaction there; he meets partners socially, among friends at dinner parties. He has a favorite gay bar, but there is no back room. It is “a friendly place, very social, a place where people go who really are comfortable with being gay, and know it’s a lot more than a matter of who you sleep with” (155).
Eliot, Philip’s prized partner, proves unreliable. Probably he has been damaged by an overcasual upbringing, and spoiled by superior wealth and connections. However, the resolution, for Philip, is already to hand. Brad, an old school friend, is white, and of the same age, class, and educational attainment; they enjoy spending time together. In due course they find that sex is a natural part of that. When they first kiss, “long and lovingly,” it is “spontaneous, without thought” (311). So no sticky, sexually explicit, bathhouse, pickup scene is required; they appear to be a natural couple. They are innocent of gendered roles: there is nothing “frilly or feminine” about Brad (249), and nothing in Philip’s appearance “betrayed his homosexuality” (33). Yet when he was at school—although “he hardly fit the stereotype of the sensitive, silent, ‘different’ boy who knows how to sew, is friends with the teacher and subject to colds”—the other boys “routinely called him ‘faggot’ or ‘fairy’” (74). Plainly Philip was giving some kind of queer signal, but Leavitt cannot say what it was without admitting a demeaning hint of effeminacy. It is easy for the queer reader today to dismiss Philip and Brad as in thrall to a bourgeois, heteronormative lifestyle concept, but twenty years ago it was not easy for young people to accomplish such a thing, in the absence of role models, and even discussion.
The disqualification of hierarchy is confirmed in the stories of the other characters. Owen, prompted by Philip’s coming out, does his best to catch up. He makes a suitable choice when he takes up with another married man of similar age and class. Philip’s friend Jerene is African American; her adoptive parents—black, middle-class Republicans—reject her when she tells them she is a lesbian. She remains nonetheless nice, good, and wise. However, her new partner is perceived by Philip and Brad as rather a pain, in the manner of characters in Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie: “If Laura’s looks were Laura Wingfield—fragile and transparent as a tiny glass animal—her temperament was pure Amanda: loud and brash and indiscreet; full of hype and bombast; good-natured, loving, easy to hurt” (251). So Laura is the dominating mother posing as the needful daughter; Jerene is subdued and silenced. These women are still involved in power games; they have not yet arrived at an adequately reciprocal partnership.
Such restagings of difference and similarity as manipulation and maturity are found in many other texts. In the film An Early Frost (John Erman, 1985), Michael and Peter form a compatible couple, with just a touch of gender hierarchy: Michael is a lawyer, whereas Peter is artistic, sells collectibles, cooks, wears looser, noncorporate clothes. There are differences, then, but they appear not to signify. It is as if hierarchy is needed to make the relationship plausible, but nothing can be done with it for fear of compromising the image of the good gay. Hollow Reed (Angela Pope, 1995) is similar. The issue in this film is Martyn’s suspicion that his son is being assaulted by his ex-wife’s partner. Meanwhile Martyn and his partner Tom constitute a “good” couple, sharing problems and being sympathetic and sexy for each other; they are a lot nicer than the heterosexuals in the film. There are differences: Martyn is a doctor, he wears a sport’s jacket and a tie; Tom keeps a music shop, dresses in jeans, T-shirt, and denim jacket, appears younger and slighter; Martyn drives a car, Tom rides a bike. However, these do not affect the story.
The notoriously sanitized view of gay life in the film Philadelphia (Jonathan Demme, 1993) includes a careful negotiation of sameness and difference.16 Andy and Miguel look about the same age and professional status, and have been together for more than nine years. Miguel appears comfortable with Andy’s family; at ease and smart in the courtroom; at home he administers sophisticated medical treatment and is articulate; at a gay fancy dress ball (the opportunity for fantasy to burst forth), they dress the same—as naval officers. The difference is that Miguel looks and sounds Spanish (and is played by the actor Antonio Banderas). However, at no point is this difference registered by anyone.
Jack, a novel by A. M. Homes, rewrites Catcher in the Rye.17 Holden Caulfield was harassed by nauseating perverts; Jack freaks out when he finds that the reason his father left home is that he’s gay and lives with Bob. However, there is no need to worry because Bob is entirely presentable: he is a lawyer, Jack’s dad is an accountant; they were acquainted socially before they got together, and they are sufficiently respectable to host a party to support a woman who is running for Congress. Meanwhile the apparently normal family of Jack’s friend Max turns out to be far from ideal. My account makes it sound worthy, but this is a droll book. For a British instance see Anthony McDonald’s romance, Adam.18 Adam (sixteen) falls intensely in love with a young Frenchman (twenty-two). Sylvain is a bit simple—from inbred peasant stock, a child of the woodlands; he can’t be introduced to middle-class family and friends. His devotion to Adam proves morbid and dangerous. After all, Adam finds that he has a more mature kind of sexual love with his long-standing school-friend—same age, same class and education, same nationality.
Michael Cunningham’s novel Flesh and Blood is one that does not take the superiority of sameness for granted. Will, at thirty-five, is “tired of pretty boys” from out of town. His new relationship is with the older Harry:
he’d be the beauty and Harry the one who paid cool, humorous tribute. Will loved and hated the idea. It surprised him. Here in this expensive but haphazardly furnished apartment, he was the one with the body and no cash. It wasn’t where he’d expected to go…. It occurred to Will that he could be to Harry what he’d always wanted pretty men to be to him.19
The sex is different: “Ordinarily [Will] felt concealed by sex; he disappeared into the beauty of the other man. With Harry he was more visible. Sometimes he liked the sensation. Sometimes he thought he’d get up and leave” (307). They come together initially on a friendly rather than a lustful basis, but they do meet in a gay bar and sex is central.
At the same time, Will and Harry are compatible in every other respect. No racial difference is remarked. Will teaches fifth grade (but went to Harvard); Harry is a doctor (but plays the saxophone). They are both clever; they talk all the time about everything. They both love Anna Karenina and Middlemarch, and have rebelled against oppressive fathers. They go to movies, eat in restaurants, drive to Provincetown. “Will and he made no declarations; it just unfolded” (307). Alongside Will’s turning on to difference, then, Cunningham asserts a natural couple (in the manner of The Lost Language of Cranes and Borrowed Time). Indeed, they become so compatible as to be interchangeable: Will “lived as himself and he lived as the younger man who was loved by Harry and he lived, obscurely, as Harry, too” (310). However, as in the complementarity (narcissistic) model of gay relations, these convergences are predicated on discrepancy; they secure sameness and difference at the same time.
IMAGE OF AN UNLIMITED EMBRACE
The project of constituting gay respectability around the equal, if pressured, couple is, of course, contested. The Lost Language of Cranes, An Early Frost, and Philadelphia are promoting one position in a cardinal, ongoing dispute. The contrary position values multiple and anonymous partners. Currently the dispute is often framed as one about “gay marriage.” I will argue that the two positions actually share a preference for sameness, and a persisting unease about hierarchy.
Positive accounts of multiple and anonymous relations are not so easy to find as one might suppose. Notoriously, such gay classics as Dancer from the Dance by Andrew Holleran and Faggots by Larry Kramer represent gay subculture as promiscuous and hence necessarily frustrating and anguished. To be sure, pornography often promotes the idea of multiple and anonymous partners. However, it does so from a less prestigious sector of the gay cultural apparatus. Pornography is widely spoken of, by radicals as well as conservatives, as if it were an essential concept (often it is suggested that its images are distinctively objectified). Rather, we should ask what is the history and structure of such a categorization, and what interests it is tending to serve. It is not that this or that practice is bad and therefore pornographic, but that labeling a practice pornographic reflects a decision to regard it as bad. Pornography is not the opposite of worthwhile sexuality, but a way of asserting which sexualities are worthwhile and which are not. Because it is where we put illicit sexuality, pornography cannot confer legitimacy on its images. This outlaw status is reproduced in its irregular modes of circulation. Leavitt, on the other hand, can present the ideas that inform The Lost Language of Cranes widely through authoritative media: Alfred A. Knopf, Penguin Books, and the BBC (who filmed the book for television).
In The Farewell Symphony, Edmund White makes the important point that the pursuit of multiple and anonymous partners was not a new factor in the 1970s. Cruising was a gay tradition—there was no break with the past. It was the same in England: bear in mind the extensive routines of men such as Tom Driberg, Michael Davidson, and Joe Orton. Nonetheless, White posits a distinctive post-Stonewall ethos: “We saw gay men as a vanguard that society would inevitably follow. I thought that the couple would disappear and be replaced by new, polyvalent molecules of affection or Whitmanesque adhesiveness.” “Guys just sort of fell in with each other, buddies rubbing shoulders. We wanted sexual friends, loving comrades, multiple husbands in a whole polyandry of desire.”20
Samuel R. Delany in The Motion of Light in Water recalls the bar, tearoom (public toilet), and truck scenes of the 1950s, but a post-Stonewall orgy at the baths was qualitatively different:
what this experience said was that there was a population—not of individual homosexuals, some of whom now and then encountered, or that those encounters could be human and fulfilling in their way—not of hundreds, not of thousands, but rather of millions of gay men, and that history had, actively and already, created for us whole galleries of institutions, good and bad, to accommodate our sex.21
Casual sex might be a vehicle for noble, egalitarian aspirations. David Wojnarowicz finds peace, companionship, and empowerment in a one-off encounter: “In loving him, I saw men encouraging each other to lay down their arms…. In loving him, I saw great houses being erected that would soon slide into the waiting and stirring seas. I saw him freeing me from the silences of the interior life.”22 As Ben Gove observes, Wojnarowicz, like Genet, repositions romance by levering it away from its customary link with monogamy.23
Two factors tend to complicate such visions. One is that hierarchy is not so easily expelled. Dennis Altman declares: “The willingness to have sex immediately, promiscuously, with people about whom one knows nothing and from whom one demands only physical contact, can be seen as a sort of Whitmanesque democracy, a desire to know and trust other men in a type of brotherhood.” However, as Leo Bersani points out, Altman admits that “age and physical beauty set up their own hierarchies and barriers.”24
Holleran insists on democracy in Dancer from the Dance. He sees in the disco “a strange democracy whose only ticket of admission was physical beauty—and not even that sometimes. All else was strictly classless.” On the dance floor, he adds, even beauty might not matter: “all of them mixed together on that square of blond wood and danced, without looking at anyone else, for one another.” “What a carnival of people.”25 The abundance of anonymous contacts overwhelms the particularity of this or that partner. There may be plenty of difference, but it doesn’t make any difference. Interestingly, effeminate boys are not excluded from Holleran’s scene. For White too, “Whitmanesque adhesiveness” does not preclude gendered roles. He writes of polyandry (having more than one husband), and of a partner who referred to himself as a “hubby,” and of how he felt like a girl alongside him.26 These accounts are set in the mid-1970s. The development of the clone image (short hair, moustache, denim or leather) tended to produce a repudiation or an effacement of gendered roles.
What is striking is that, insofar as they tend to erase hierarchies which reinsert themselves, these legitimations of casual sex converge, strangely, on The Lost Language of Cranes. Defenders of casual sex are evoking the very bars and cruising grounds that Philip eschewed, but they share nonetheless a suspicion of hierarchy. What have appeared to be the two poles of gay experience are united in their anxious and inconclusive treatment of power in relationships.
Neil Bartlett presents the late 1970s moment of the clone as euphorically inclusive: “It was a style that explicitly proposed a single culture. It offered to embrace everybody, to erase all differences in a generous, homogeneous, successful style. Commercially promoted on a mass scale, it seemed to absorb all the other, older styles.” Not for nothing, Bartlett adds, was the biggest London discotheque opened under the name of “Heaven.”27 Even Kramer, despite his commitment to personal values in relationships and the generally caustic stance of Faggots, finally concedes and celebrates, for once, the indifference of the scene on Fire Island:
The dancing’s over for this night. Haven’t we shared a night of nights! A night of fellowship. We have danced and partied and drugged and Meat Racked, and we have survived no sleep. Together. Together. Yes, we have braved and passaged all these rites together. Though we may not know each other’s names nor will we necessarily speak when next we meet. The beach is filled with my friends.28
Sharing, fellowship, togetherness, friends—these terms are not far from Leavitt’s, though they are adapted to Kramer’s moment of self-abandonment, rather than a personal relationship.
Of course, the status of casual sex has been transformed by HIV and AIDS. Oscar Moore’s A Matter of Life and Sex is one of many texts which accept a correlation between the delights of multiple and anonymous partners and the fate, as it appears in the novel, of infection and death.29 William M. Hoffman in his play and film As Is makes Saul and Rich agree on the pleasures of “promiscuous sex”; they redefine it as “nondirective, noncommitted, non-authoritarian—/ Free, wild, rampant—.” But now sex even with your lover is too dangerous to attempt.30 The most impressive antimonogamy texts attempt principled reassertions of multiple and anonymous partners in the face of AIDS. Thom Gunn in his poem “The Missing,” in The Man with Night Sweats, reasserts a vision of unfettered sexual congress:
Contact of friend led to another friend,
Supple entwinement through the living mass
Which for all that I knew might have no end,
Image of an unlimited embrace.31
Again, difference evaporates into immeasurable multiplicity.
Bersani is the theorist of anonymous sexual relations (antirelational relations). He is sharply critical of commentators who domesticate sex by reinventing it as redemptive—as “less disturbing, less socially abrasive, less violent, more respectful of ‘personhood’ than it has been in a male-dominated, phallocentric culture.” The broad indictment of male ascendancy, and of pornography in particular, by feminists such as Andrea Dworkin and Catherine A. MacKinnon, has in Bersani’s view “had the immensely desirable effect of publicizing, of lucidly laying out for us, the inestimable value of sex as—at least in certain of its ineradicable aspects—anticommunal, antiegalitarian, antinurturing, antiloving.”32 Their exposé of the untamable nature of sex affords a reason not for banning pornography, but for encouraging it.
Yet, as Bersani pushes these ideas along, a familiar theme emerges. In an essay on Genet (which I discuss elsewhere), “an anti-monumental, antiredemptive aesthetic” is discovered; it is endemic in homosexuality, Bersani believes. Within its orbit “an identity between the penetrator and the penetrated” occurs; “a fundamental sameness.”33 Bersani has driven his repudiation of authentic personhood in sex to the point where it makes everyone the same—identical in their anonymity and unrelatedness. Lately Bersani has theorized further his argument for the irrelevance of difference, through a reinterpretation of Aristophanes’ fable of the divided creatures in Plato’s Symposium. The missing portion, Bersani urges, is not the other, but a part of oneself. This is claimed for heterosexuals equally. What the lover lacks is not the other, as followers of Jacques Lacan in particular have supposed, but “more of what he is.” This lack is based not on difference, therefore, “but rather on the extensibility of sameness.”34
Across a wide spectrum of texts, and in diverse and ingenious ways, sameness is valorized and hierarchy is disallowed. Yet even, or especially, when the repudiation of hierarchy is associated with the highest aspirations, it is not easily banished. In later chapters I will explore the erotics of power in specific lived experience of gender, age, class, and race.
SEDUCTION AND IMPLANTATION
An argument about sexuality and power has to engage eventually with the psychoanalytic tradition. What has often troubled cultural materialists and other social constructionists is Freud’s intermittent reliance on what he presents as universal factors—biological, phylogenetic (in the evolution of a race), primordial. In the wake of Darwin, such concepts tend to incorporate a murky, conservative view of human potential, in which sex is envisaged as designed for reproduction and gender roles are confined accordingly. For example, in Freud’s “Wolfman” analysis we are told of a breakthrough at the point where the boy “discovered the vagina and the biological significance of masculine and feminine. He understood now that active was the same as masculine, while passive was the same as feminine.”35
As I observe below, my argument that power difference informs sexuality consorts easily with sadomasochistic fantasies. But Freud, at least from time to time, prizes reproduction over perversion. He writes in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality: “The normal sexual aim is regarded as being the union of the genitals in the act known as copulation.” Other practices, including fetishism, sadism, and masochism, are “the perversions”—that is, “sexual activities which either (a) extend, in an anatomical sense, beyond the regions of the body that are designed for sexual union, or (b) linger over the intermediate relations to the sexual object which should normally be traversed rapidly on the path towards the final sexual aim.”36 The “biological significance” of an element of male aggressiveness may “lie in the need for overcoming the resistance of the sexual object by means other than the process of wooing”; it becomes sadistic—perverse—when it is “independent and exaggerated” (71). However, this approach will not easily account for male masochism. Perhaps it is an instance of a principle: “Every active perversion is thus accompanied by its passive counterpart” (81). So “masochism is not the manifestation of a primary instinct, but originates from sadism which has been turned round upon the self.”37
In “‘A Child Is Being Beaten,’” Freud holds that male masochists occupy a feminine position: “they invariably transfer themselves into the part of a woman; that is to say, their masochistic attitude coincides with a feminine one.” This statement perhaps gestures toward the binary gendering that is associated with reproduction; Freud insists: “It makes no difference if in a fanciful embellishment of the masochistic scene they keep up the fiction that a mischievous boy, or page, or apprentice is going to be punished.” But then, “confusingly enough,” the chastiser also is a woman; Freud moves to another topic.38 At other points Freud connects masochism to “the death drive,” and “a fixation in childhood.”39 The last suggestion seems most plausible. To be sure, Freud offers other frameworks for thinking about masochism at other points in his writing. I have focused on his subsuming of power into reproduction because it occurs in major texts (the Three Essays were reprinted twenty-one times in ten languages between 1910 and 1938), and because it works against my sense that power differentials are intrinsic to sundry sexual identities and interactions, and not dependent on heteronormative interpretation. The priority of reproduction is still asserted by reputable thinkers. Luce Irigaray, for example, declares: “The human species is divided into two genders which ensure its production and reproduction. To wish to get rid of sexual difference is to call for a genocide more radical than any form of destruction there has ever been in History.” It is a mistake, therefore, “to demand equality as women.”40
Mainly since the publication of Jean Laplanche’s New Foundations for Psychoanalysis, via a battery of conferences, translations, introductions, interpretations, and collections of essays, instigated and undertaken principally by John Fletcher, new theories have effected decisive revisions of Freud, and Lacan also, offering a new route beyond biologism.41 Freud, along with Darwin, Marx, and Nietzsche, has often been credited with a decentering of man. Copernicus demonstrated that “man” is not at the center of the universe; these later thinkers have argued that he is not in charge of his own biology, history, and psychology. Laplanche declares this Freudian-Copernican revolution unfinished, and our dependence upon the other unacknowledged, so long as the infant is said to bring with him into the world fundamental drives:
For if the individual is henceforth governed, in classical psychoanalytic theory, by the unknown drives of the unconscious, this “id”—however strange it is supposed to be—is nonetheless not an alien. It is supposed to dwell at the center of the individual, whom it governs in its own way, even if it has dethroned the ego. One sovereign in place of another, but well and truly installed in the keep of the castle.42
To address this problem, Laplanche reviews the “seduction theory,” which Freud abandoned in 1897; this had understood neurotic symptoms as consequent upon the seduction or abuse which his patients reported from their childhood. Upon this abandonment, Freud posited the phases (oral–anal–phallic) of endogenous (growing from within) infantile sexuality, with its apparently biological sequencing.
Laplanche believes that passivity and seduction do constitute the individual’s originary moment. The mother (or other primary caregiver) does seduce the child into erotic pleasure—not at all, however, in any sinister way, but as part of the routine parental ministrations without which the child would die. The feeding and handling of the infant exposes him or her to the caregiver’s fantasy life, inviting cooperation, through strategies of translation and repression. Fletcher explicates:
We are not talking here of abusive events. In Laplanche’s sense seduction is ordinary. This leads him to talk of an implantation of stimulating, arousing and traumatizing non-verbal signifiers with their unconscious, enigmatic significations: an implantation on the surface of the primitive body image or skin-ego of the infant. These are anchored or inscribed particularly in the erogenous zones as folds and openings in the body surface—mouth, anus, genitals.
Thus is effected “the primary mapping and zoning of the sexual body, indeed the very sexing of the body.”43 Martin Stanton asks: “Is there no input from the infant at all?” Laplanche replies that feeding—the initial demand—is interactive, but the sexual message that accompanies it is “a one-way action.”
From the beginning, one is active and the other is passive. But very quickly, the little human tries to turn this passivity into activity, that is, to make something of this message from the other. Still, there is this dissymmetry. This comes from the fact that the active one has more “knowledge,” more unconscious fantasies than the passive infant.44
This way of explaining the development of individual psychic formations is notably compatible with my arguments about sexuality and power, in two main ways. First, the organization of fantasy in which the infant is involved is that of the mother (or other caregiver), and consequently already steeped in her tangle of scenarios. She, necessarily, has already her own personal take on the prevailing system of representation, fantasy, and unconscious desire, and this intrudes, also necessarily, upon the infant. Second, the infant’s initial experience is of power imbalance. “The primary situation that gives rise to the sexual drive in the human being,” Fletcher writes, “is one of a primary passivity and penetration by the other. It involves a breaking in that is characteristic of pain.”45 For what is undeniable in Laplanche’s “situation of primal seduction” is both
the wealth of its innate mechanisms of reciprocal communication between mother and child, and the profound asymmetry between the adult with an already formed unconscious, the bearer of unconsciously determined enigmatic signifiers or messages, and the new-born infant assigned a gender on the basis of adult perceptions of its anatomy but [as yet] without sexual fantasies.46
If, as I believe, Laplanche has evolved an important theory through which the power arrangements in our societies may be implanted in the infant, becoming the building blocks in the bricolage of our psychic life, this should not be envisaged as an elementary mechanism of social conditioning, producing automata incapable of independent agency. The infant is subjected to extremely powerful inputs, but they are complex—and it is the simplicity of a message that stifles agency, not its strength. The transmissions in Laplanche’s theory are fraught with untranslated, resistant, and troubling remainders. Fletcher takes up Dominique Scarfone’s argument that it is negation, repression, and enigma on the part of the adult and her messages that provoke the infant “to translate, to reprise and rework the enigmatic and exciting messages, to substitute its own signifying sequences, fantasies, ‘infantile sexual theories,’ to interpret the blanks in the parental discourse, to sublimate by symbolising otherwise.”47
Further, the encounter may go wrong, implanting materials that resist adequate symbolization. There is a “violent variant” of implantation, according to Laplanche: intromission. This is a blocking process which “short-circuits the differentiation of the agencies in the process of their formation, and puts into the interior an element resistant to all metabolism,” creating the conditions for both the superego and psychosis.48 Perhaps it is the gaps and enigmas in the parental messages that create the space for the child to interpret, translate, and fantasize, whereas when parental fantasies are imposed, full on, translation is paralyzed—which may be why sexual abuse in childhood is so destructive, impairing, and repetitive, from generation to generation.
Of course, I am not equipped to evaluate theories of infant subjectivity. In any event, Laplanche’s insistence on the primacy of the caregiver issues a reminder of the infant’s experience of initial power disparity, while allowing space in which human beings might develop diverse and novel ways of relating.
ARGUMENTS AND VISIONS
If hierarchies of sex and gender are both embedded in our psyches and a sexual turn-on, attempts to thwart them must be both futile and austerely abstemious. To be sure, power may be distributed irregularly between two people, such that A is powerful in respect of p, whereas B is powerful in respect of q. However, this does not mean that hierarchy evens out and becomes irrelevant. More likely, quite intricate and engrossing negotiations will be required to maintain the diverse claims; there will be more engagement with hierarchy, not less.
This is not to say that oppressions of gender, class, age, and race are either necessary or justified. We may campaign for radical transformations. Nor is it to say that it is acceptable to knock your partner around, or to manipulate him or her psychologically, or to use his or her relative poverty or general neediness to exert control. Nor is it to say that you should stay with a partner who abuses you in those ways. I write, I should say, as a relatively empowered person. I am white, male, salaried, and have published some books; I have some advantages of middle age (stability, security) and some of its disadvantages (likely to fall ill and die before long). It is perhaps easy for me to insist that power difference is sexy; my potential partner, if he is located on the more vulnerable side of those hierarchies, may be more exposed, psychologically, in his engagements.
The terms on which women might collude in hierarchies which derive from male-dominated ideologies have been effectively disputed in lesbian feminism. Sheila Jeffreys sets out from somewhere near the start of the present analysis: “Since the concept of difference or ‘male-female polarity’ is the organising principle of the heteropatriarchy it is not surprising that it should so profoundly have shaped the consciousness even of many lesbians.”49 However, Jeffreys contests any idea that lesbians should collaborate with it. She disagrees with women such as Amber Hollibaugh and Cherríe Moraga, who protest that feminist rejection of male dominance in heterosexuality has led to an ill-considered rejection of hierarchical relations between women. Hollibaugh opines: “what feminism did, in its fear of heterosexual control of fantasy, was to say that there was almost no fantasy safe to have, where you weren’t going to have to give up power or take it. There’s no sexual fantasy I can think of that doesn’t include some aspect of that.”50 This is to say, Jeffreys replies,
that we cannot build a sexuality which is about equality and mutuality…. The refusal to see any kind of sex without dominance and submission as possible, rules out the feminist adventure in the total transformation of sexuality with the object of eliminating sexual violence and the objectification of women, almost before it’s begun.51
Moraga responds with her personal experience. She grew up with “the fantasy of capture, taking a woman”; her “identification was with the man, taking”: that is how her sexuality works.52
In Loving in the War Years, Moraga relates these arguments to class and race:
What the white women’s movement tried to convince me of is that lesbian sexuality was naturally different than heterosexual sexuality. That the desire to penetrate and be penetrated, to fill and be filled, would vanish. That retaining such desires was “reactionary,” not “politically correct,” “male identified.” And somehow reaching sexual ecstasy with a woman lover would never involve any kind of power struggle.53
Judith Halberstam comments: “Chicana lesbians cannot suddenly be expected to cast off these sex roles in favour of a lesbian feminist egalitarianism.”54 Esther Newton and Shirley Walton are similarly skeptical. “Do away with masculinity and femininity and the residuum is egalitarian sexuality: open, honest, caring, and non-oppressive”: that is the theory. However, “Power and sexual desire are deeply, perhaps intrinsically connected in ways we do not fully understand and just can’t abolish,” Newton and Walton contend. “It is true that men have more power than women in the sexual domain. But one cannot proceed directly from this fact to explain how sexuality works, any more than male domination of the art world, for example, explains aesthetic experience.”55
It will be evident where the present study stands in relation to these arguments. Our sexual imaginaries probably are informed by hierarchies that are ultimately oppressive, but we have to negotiate within, through, and beyond that insight. It cannot be realistic to suppose that we might simply, through good intentions, sidestep the hierarchies of capitalism and male dominance. They inform our daily interactions, the language through which we come to consciousness, our psychic formations. Islands of individual serenity are a strategic aspiration for therapy, but finally we must be talking about damage limitation. Socialism in a single psyche must be a chimera.
What, then, of aspirations toward sex and gender liberation, and what prospects for the mutuality and harmony that have often been attached to sexual love in our cultures? Egalitarian impulses are not to be regarded as false, deluded, or partial. They too are produced within the system; where else could they come from? Often they are couched in terms afforded by the dominant, but this does not invalidate them. If the opportunities for containment of liberatory aspirations are large, so is the potential for idealism. For the cultural materialist, as well as critique, there is always the prospect of transformation. All the books discussed in this chapter witness to the vitality of reciprocity as an idea, even where they are marking the impediments that strew its path. Perhaps the most extreme instance of an unequal love relationship is between the commandant of a Nazi work camp and a boy inmate. Ursula Zilinsky makes this plausible in her novel Middle Ground. The commandant declares, even in this context, “I don’t believe love is possible except between equals.”56
Collaborative impulses certainly do figure in our sexual imaginaries. They have been important in heroic and romantic friendship; in some forms of romantic love; in partnerships founded in complementarity; in the element of interchangeability in some S/M relations. They have inspired our love poems. I have quoted Monette quoting Donne and Whitman. Philip Sidney’s Arcadia (1580) features cross-dressing and same-sex passion. The singer of this song is a young man who says he overheard it sung by a young maid, so the effect is of a male addressing a male:
My true love hath my heart, and I have his,
By just exchange, one for the other given.
Yet this sonnet continues in a surprisingly violent manner:
His heart his wound received from my sight:
My heart was wounded, with his wounded heart,
For as from me on him his hurt did light,
So still methought in me his hurt did smart:
Both equal hurt, in this change sought our bliss:
My true love hath my heart, and I have his.57
The poem circles back to its initial declaration, reinstating reciprocity, but there’s a lot of wounding and hurting in between, suggesting not just the convention of Cupid’s arrows but also a social order where violent death might be the consequence of inappropriate loving.
Alfred Tennyson in In Memoriam (1850) sometimes celebrates the equality and reciprocity of the deceased Arthur and himself:
I know that this was Life,—the track
Whereon with equal feet we fared;
And then, as now, the day prepared
The daily burden for the back.
Nor could I weary, heart or limb,
When mighty Love would cleave in twain
The lading of a single pain,
And part it, giving half to him.
However, the poet more often dwells upon Arthur’s superiority and inaccessibility:
I vex my heart with fancies dim:
He still outstript me in the race;
It was but unity of place
That made me dream I ranked with him.58
Now Alfred is left behind again, as the confident, privileged, and accomplished Arthur ascends into a more spacious life among the souls of the departed.
W. H. Auden allows that sexual passion may prompt an ideal vision in “Lay your sleeping head, my love” (1937). To lovers, “Soul and body have no bounds”;
Grave the vision Venus sends
Of supernatural sympathy,
Universal love and hope.
Yet for the boy with him he wishes that the “mortal world” will be enough, with all its mundane unevenness.59 In another poem, “The More Loving One” (1955), Auden remarks that, while the language of love celebrates mutuality, it is unusual for two people’s loves to match precisely:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me. (282)
Evocations of ideal harmony may not be entirely unalloyed, then; they may smack of wishful thinking, tactics, and ideology; they may not sit easily with actual power differentials. Yet they do not have to be unalloyed to be important.
Although we tend to think of lesbians and gay men as subject to distinctively complex psychic, ethical, and political demands, the idea of egalitarian sex is far more problematic for heterosexuals. While same-sex partners may choose to engage with hierarchical imagery, the copresence of a man and a woman has to start from it (though other hierarchies of class, age, and race may undermine or counteract it, and perhaps put the woman in the dominant position). The most sustained quest for a viable feminist heterosexuality, from within current progressive thought, has been mounted by Lynne Segal, particularly in Straight Sex. She draws from Naomi Segal the five elements of pleasure that may be said to characterize women’s sexual desire:
purposeless playfulness;
a recovery of childhood feelings (or whatever consciousness can tolerate of their original polymorphous perversity);
a connection with nurturance;
games with power (especially the pleasure of feeling power over the powerful);
a narcissistic sense of completion through access to the body of another.60
While appreciating the elements of sharing, reassurance, and play in this sequence, we may notice also that it seems designed to accommodate and subdue hierarchy. The play has to be purposeless; only so much perversity must be recovered as consciousness can tolerate; the narcissism must not be merely self-regarding. “The pleasure of feeling power” is allowed only if you are generally the powerless one, and only by way of “games.”
Lynne Segal’s goal is an egalitarian containment which will both license and control the pleasures and dangers of hierarchy. It is a fine balance, though. For once you venture beyond mutual reassurance and a bit of playful slap-and-tickle, you get back into dominance and subordination. And unfortunately, Segal admits, men seem less amenable to routing their sense of male power through play. In fact, when Segal wants to assert the scope and vigor of fantasy against the puritanical antipornography stance of Dworkin and MacKinnon, she appeals not to heterosexual theorists but to the raunchy stance of Hollibaugh’s and Pat Califia’s lesbian feminist S/M genre (251). It is not easy to get companionate marriage and vigorous sexuality into the same frame.
An argument about dominance and subordination must finally confront the particular anxieties that cluster around the formalized role-play which we call “S/M,” particularly when it entails the cultivation of scenarios from fascism and slavery. In my view it is a mistake to infer that power play necessarily involves distinctive gear, dedicated bars, and playrooms, and that in other contexts, conversely, the rest of us are egalitarian. Rather, S/M is continuous with other, less specific, hierarchical formations, such as I have been discussing. Consider John Rechy’s attempt at quarantining S/M in The Sexual Outlaw: “I do cultivate a certain tough appearance because it attracts people sexually, and I do equate sex with power. But I know the difference between that and the most negative aspect within the gay world—S & M…. Pain and humiliation have nothing to do with love.”61 Rechy’s distinction sounds less than secure.
Bersani discusses Foucault’s attempt in an interview to distinguish the master-slave relation in S/M from actual power structures. S/M, Foucault said, is not “a reproduction, within the erotic relationship, of the structure of power. It is an acting out of power structures by a strategic game that is able to give sexual pleasure or bodily pleasure.”62 To be sure, there can be no simple “reproduction”; the S/M representation will indeed be “a strategic game.” It will be oblique, displaced, allusive—even, perhaps, parodic. However, Bersani asks, “what is the game without the power structure that constitutes its strategies?”63 Would erotic pleasure survive the evaporation of its ultimate allusion to a real-world model? Does the attraction of leather, say, stem from its texture and derivation from cattle, or would it not become less interesting if policemen and men with heavy manual jobs stopped wearing it? For a time, its residual associations would persist, but eventually it would become quaint.
Insofar as he regards sexuality as necessarily, in the circumstances in which we currently live, about power, Bersani’s argument is congruent with that offered in the present study. His refusal to accept a consolatory story about the innocence of S/M also seems right. However, he derives this from Freudian principles and actively disputes Jeffrey Weeks’s materialist suggestion that “the erotic acts as a crossover point for a number of tensions whose origins are elsewhere: of class, gender and racial location, of intergenerational conflict, moral acceptability and medical definition.”64
My goal here is not to justify or dismiss S/M, but to observe its continuities with fantasies of dominance and subordination that are inevitable in our kinds of societies, and also with the everyday routines of sexual and interpersonal power, as they present themselves through the prevailing structures. The task, then, is to find ways of making hierarchy, in our sexual and personal relations, productive of pleasure and the other rewards of intimacy, and productive also of insights into the psychic economies through which we handle the triumphs and humiliations that the system bestows—while maintaining also the credibility and integrity of our political engagements. This is the project proposed by Claudia Card, who observes the influence of
roles of dominance and subordinance that characterize not only authoritarian adult-child relationships within the family or authoritarian religious relationships but, more generally, the norms of a patriarchal, misogynist society that is also riddled with homophobia, racism, anti-Semitism, and other forms of oppression. On this understanding, sadomasochistic desires have roots not simply in individual psychologies but in society at large; they are not mysterious givens but social constructions.65
Card’s answer is to approach the issue on different levels. Interpersonally, we have to work with the idea of informed consent, despite its awkwardnesses. Politically, we have to oppose oppressive societal structures.
INSURRECTION
James Robert Baker’s novel, Tim and Pete, explores the overlap between interpersonal hierarchies and those which sustain the state. The eponymous heroes believe in love and monogamy, at least in the time of AIDS. Spontaneous sex can be rewarding, Tim allows, but not the 1970s bathhouses:
“it wasn’t joyful. It seemed to bring out the worst in people. It wasn’t sex as catharsis or redemption, but sex as a drug. A crazed, compulsive abuse of what sex can provide. Cynical and loveless. Sex as ego gratification, as ephemeral validation. Sex as a product, something you need to feel better about yourself for a while. A new shirt, a new car, a new fuck. Capitalism. I didn’t like the music either.”66
“Sleaze” is their term for cruising and occasional partners; however, they accuse each other of it continually, and it transpires that at least one of them has fucked at some time with almost everyone they meet.
Their quest for a renewal of their love takes them across Los Angeles, desolate and threatening after the riots of 1991, looking as if it were a sequence of film sets. “In fact, it was so deserted it almost felt like a set. The battered 1920s storefronts, the deep dusk blue of the sky, even the burned-out ruins, had a weird designed look, like a soundstage street for a Janet Jackson video. Or a ‘gritty’ background for a black-and-white Guess? ad” (92; Baker’s emphasis). They view their situation through a filter of film and fantasy, as they reprise recent gay history. They love to improvise pornographic scenarios out of famous Hollywood films and clean-cut surf movies. However, there is a persistent political edge to their invention. “So we’d imagine, in the most extreme and lurid cinematic terms, the obliteration by gunfire of different right-wing people we disliked…. we could machine-gun George Will, for example, in Washington, and suck each other off in Mexico in the same sentence” (179; my elision). Pete heads up a post-punk rock band, and does a song called “What This Country Needs (Is a Baader-Meinhof Gang).” Tim has reservations: “I’d seen his point, that anything in art was permissible, that to depict something was not the same as to advocate it, let alone do it, and I felt that our fantasies, besides being fun, were a kind of harmless way of blowing off steam” (179). But suppose some people experience such a song as a rallying cry?
Pete’s young friend Joey is involved with Glenn, who is forty-two; they have what Pete considers “‘an extremely fucked-up dynamic,’” a “‘possessive, obsessive dance-of-death thing’”—not formally S/M, but emotionally; deriving from Joey’s childhood abuse. Tim calls it “‘a dad-and-lad scene’” (166). “‘I love Joey. We’re both extremely fucked up and bad for each other, but I love him,’” Glenn says (226). It transpires that Glenn is leading a group plotting to assassinate ex-president Reagan. Initially, Glenn’s interest in political terror was “on a kind of camp, ironic level” (199); this is familiar enough to poststructural critics, who have imagined that a purposeful gender-bending might seriously discomfort the system. Already in their paintings Glenn and Joey have drawn upon Tim and Pete’s inventions, trying to break out of the customary boundaries of art; these paintings “were very much like some of the fantasies we used to spin” (179). Glenn tells Pete: “‘You’ve shaken us out of our catatonic grief with your inflammatory call to violence’” (221). Fantasies, and their expression, cannot be corralled into a safe world of art.
It may gradually dawn on the reader that there is a continuity rather than a contrast between Tim and Pete, as a couple, and Glenn and Joey. As I note in chapter 2, Tim and Pete present their relationship to themselves as free from hierarchies of class, age, and gender, but in practice these power differences afford them a guilty pleasure. A lesbian who gives them a lift advises that they might enjoy experimenting with dominance and submission (however, her vehemence destabilizes her own relationship). When Pete gives in and agrees to get back together with Tim, he signals this by singing “I Wanna Be Your Dog” (135–37). Having captured Tim and Pete, Glenn readily intuits the link between their current situation in a real political drama and the fantasies they have cultivated informally: “‘I’ll bet my entire Colt pornography collection you’ve fantasized being stripped and restrained by a gang of rowdy outlaws’” (217). In fact Tim has admitted to this fantasy: “‘I thought about tying you up once. Like a western thing. But serial killers always tie up their victims. What if I snapped?’” (93). Power is everywhere in the system—in the nice guys as well as in the assassins and the president.
The most developed theory of countercultural art and the dramatic insurrectionary gesture derives from Guy Debord, Raoul Vaneigem, and the Situationist International group in the 1960s. It was influential in the May 1968 événementes in Paris, and the bombings of financial and governmental targets by the Angry Brigade in London in 1969–1971. The initial idea was to create the situation that would disrupt the rhythms of everyday life and the spectacle constructed by the state; it was insurrection at the level of representation. Because the state depends upon the spectacle of the commodified image, the revolutionary event may operate by reorienting those images. These ideas informed the underground press and counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s, and the work of prominent British dramatists such as Howard Brenton and David Edgar. For if power was theatrical, theater might be powerful. Leading artistic and musical figures in the punk movement professed familiarity with situationist thought.67
This is what Tim and Pete have been doing in their ad hoc appropriations of movies, Pete also in his music, and Glenn and Joey in their artwork. (It is interesting that people around the Angry Brigade, some of whom were Gay Liberation Front activists, called themselves “The Wild Bunch” and “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.”)68 ACT UP and Queer Nation are in this line of political thought but, according to Pete, they “don’t go nearly far enough…. They should go into the Vatican, remove the fag art, and dynamite the place. Douse the pope with gasoline, set him on fire” (143; my elision). Glenn and Joey have made their pictures as transgressive as they can. The next step, as for the Situationists, is a counter-theater of momentous violence, intended not (as in traditional revolutions) to seize the apparatus of the state, but to undermine its spectacular facade by the radiant symbolism of the intervention. The most plausible instance of a positive effect from political violence in a modern state is perhaps the Black Panthers, who changed the self-awareness of African American people. “‘I miss the Black Panthers,’” Pete says. “‘At least they knew who the real enemy was.’” “‘Which is why they got wiped out,’” Tim replies (80).
Tim and Pete ends before the culminating act of violence which Glenn and Joey intend. Attention is switched to the fact that Pete’s mother is there and would be killed. Of course, once she is factored in, the case for political violence is hard to sustain: nearly half the world is potentially somebody’s mother. Finally Tim envisions the slaughter at the convention, translating it immediately into cinematic terms (The Godfather), and then imagining that he’s “looking at a painting of Pete and me, as we were right now, the way Joey would have painted it” (256). You can’t quarantine fantasy from political action. The question, still, is whether they can work productively together.
Actually I think Tim and Pete is about something else as well. One senses a less focused, more gestural sense of apocalyptic violence—for instance, in the references to Charles Manson. A strain in U.S. culture—both on the right and the left—has always been ready for apocalypse now; the conjunction of AIDS and the end of the millennium made it unavoidable.69
What is at work is less a political analysis than a community that is anguished and desperate. Tim and Pete is strewn with harrowing stories of official and personal disdain for people with AIDS. However, this is not just about the loss of lovers and friends and the threat of sickness and death: it is about social exclusion. There is one strategy running through Tim and Pete’s numerous, impertinent appropriations of movie scenarios: at every point gay men are being inserted into recognized images of “America.” (Pedro Almodóvar, conversely, is mentioned simply with respect; only American scenarios are appropriated.) Already these gay men have been rejected by their families. Now they are mourning “America.” The president, once elected, is supposed to stand for all citizens. But George Bush the elder is quoted as admitting in 1987 that there was still a “giggle factor” in the government’s approach to AIDS (9). Gay Americans find that their condition has excluded them from the nation. Centrally “American” images can be occupied by them only in a parodic or violent way.
They are, in one of David Wojnarowicz’s titles, in the shadow of the American Dream. A leitmotiv in Wojnarowicz’s Close to the Knives is that if only the president would pay attention to AIDS, we would begin to get somewhere with it. I find here a strange vein of surprise that gay rights have not been acknowledged; Wojnarowicz is shocked to read of a Supreme Court ruling that “only people who are heterosexual or married or who have families can expect these constitutional rights.”70 Lamenting the suicide of a friend, he asks: “Man, why did you do it? Why didn’t you wait for the possibilities to reveal themselves in this shit country, on this planet?” (241). “America,” surely, will come good in the end. I have remarked elsewhere this wish to believe in America, noting its role in the thought of Randy Shilts, Larry Kramer, Bruce Bawer, and Andrew Holleran.71
Andrew Sullivan is so keen to believe in “America” that he claims that it has actually discovered its true humanity by taking gay men to its bosom: “AIDS compelled a form of social integration that might have never taken place without its onslaught. Forced to choose between complete abandonment of the homosexual subculture and an awkward first encounter, America, for the most part, chose the latter.”72 This optimistic opinion can be corroborated only in the most fantastic and playful of texts. Social exclusion threatens the drag queens who stop off at a small town in To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar (Beeban Kidron, 1995). “Look at ’em. Perverts!” exclaims the corrupt and homophobic sheriff. “When the Founding Fathers wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and what have you, bringing in justice for all, they didn’t mean them.” He is proved wrong: the people in the film value the impact of drag queens on their society.
It is the epidemic that has released Glenn, Joey, and their friends. Like the men in the film The Living End (Gregg Araki, 1992), they are free because they believe they will die shortly anyway. “And there was a terrifying but profoundly seductive freedom in that. They could do anything now, anything they wanted to, anything at all” (Tim and Pete, 187). Glenn and Joey are free to engage in a range of sexual activities about which Tim and Pete are reluctant even to fantasize. Also, they are free for kamikaze sacrifices (180). So they enact what for other dissidents can only be fantasy. While gay men have not proved an insurrectionary force in the United States, others have. Mikey’s idea of seizing a plane and crashing it into the building where the president will be is “‘a fantasy,’” Joey pronounces. “‘So what?’ Mikey said. ‘Everything starts as a fantasy!’” (240; Baker’s emphases).
In arguing that hierarchy is sexy, I am not saying that we should be abandoning politics, morality, and responsibility and plunging into reactionary and complacent relations which exploit oppressions of class, age, race, and gender. Thinking even for a moment about the reality of those oppressions should restore our commitment to fight them. Bersani, famously, evokes the anguish that may be triggered by the image of a man with his legs in the air.73 But you would have to be truly perverted to find this more distressing than the image of a starving child.
If lesbians and gay men had in fact succeeded in wiping out power in relationships, all we would have to do is enjoy our egalitarian practice and let everyone else in on the secret. But that is far from the case. The prevailing sex/gender system, we have every reason to know, is geared to the production of hierarchy and, as part of that, to the production of anxious, unhappy, and violent people. It produces us and our psychic lives—straights and gays—and it is not going to leave us alone. Arguably, fantasy becomes specific at the points where it is most at odds, superficially at least, with reality. It is a liberal-bourgeois delusion to suppose that “private” space can be somehow innocent of and protected from the real world. The task is to find ways of engaging fantasy without hurting and disempowering other people.
We have to accept that crucial political commitments may fall out of alignment with our fantasies. As Judith Halberstam puts it, “while people may well invest in values like equality and reciprocity in their political lives, they may not want those same values dominating their sexual lives.”74 Bersani discovers a positive virtue in such misalignments: “Our fantasy investments are often countered by more consciously and more rationally elaborate modes of reaching out to others, such as liking or admiring people we don’t desire. In that tension lies an important moral dimension of our political engagement.”75 A politics asserted over libidinal investments may be more considered, more authoritative.
If we don’t acknowledge power differentials in our fantasies and our relationships, we don’t begin to get a hold on exploitation—including that which we perpetrate ourselves. While the political priority of resisting actual oppressions must be maintained, power imbalances in lesbian and gay personal relations may be refigured as potentially rewarding, though inevitably troubling. We should be exploring ways to assess and recombine power, sexiness, responsibility, and love.