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The particular behaviour and fantasies of homosexuals have their counterpart in the blindness and ignorance with which the majority of people respond to the entire sexual question, and the homosexual question in particular. Most of them are still far too unaware of the limitations involved in the opposition between the sexes, even though this may well play a substantial part in their own suffering.
This lack of awareness is the product of the repression they have undergone, and it serves in turn to perpetuate this repression. A severe mental and social censorship conceals what has taken place : their original polymorphous, 'perverse' and undifferentiated erotic disposition was condemned and repressed in the course of infancy, so that the weight of condemnation gradually drags them down into the hell of the adult world, of which the hell of childhood is only the antechamber. Repressed, and thus constricted and deformed, the existence of this tendentially polymorphous disposition has been relegated to the harsh prison of the unconscious, tortured like the bound foot of an old Chinese woman. Restrained by the censorial walls of this prison, each individual has to internalise the sexual values and customs of the heterosexual male model that are imposed by patriarchal society (in our case, capitalist society in particular). In the words of Norman 0. Brown :
The pattern of normal adult sexuality (in Freud's terminology, genital organisation) is a tyranny of one component in infantile sexuality, a tyranny which suppresses some of the other components altogether and subordinates the rest to itself. [3]
The gay movement maintains that the tyranny of genital heterosexuality by no means completely suppresses the polymorphous tendencies of infantile sexuality, it simply subjugates them to the yoke of repression. The struggle for the liberation of Eros can release even the most hidden of desires (for example the coprophagous and necrophilic).
In any case, genital tyranny produces anxiety and suffering in us all. The harsher the repression, the stronger the anxiety induced, in our experience, by persons, events and situations which conjure up the wide scope of the repressed contents and tend to disrupt the repression itself. Thus the homosexual is mistreated by the heterosexual because he 'reawakens' in him the homoerotic desire that has been forced to lie dormant for so long. This 'reawakening' is rarely complete, generally taking the form of a disquietening stirring, the presentiment of an earthquake that would threaten the rigid structure of his ego, based as this is on the repression of homoeroticism. The heterosexual insults, provokes and threatens the homosexual because he feels himself challenged by his presence, which besieges his 'normal' equilibrium by suggesting that he might himself be both object and subject of the gay desire.
According to Groddeck, as I have already pointed out, homosexuality is not completely repressed. Rather than repression, it is a question of a daily self-deception, a 'quasi-repression', a bad faith that leads the heterosexual to present himself as exclusively such, even though he knows in fact that he does have gay desires. [4] It is symptomatic of this that so many men maintain they have never wanted sexual relations with other men; they fear this might please them too much, and that they might become gay themselves.
As a general rule, the heterosexual views the gay man as 'filthy'. This is due, above all, to the fact that the 'normal' individual sees reflected in the gay person the homoerotic component of his own desire, negated and repressed in its anal eroticism, urophilia, coprophilia, etc. 'Normal' people consider 'filthy' any sexual acts bound up with those erotic tendencies which repression has induced them to renounce, giving rise in them — via the induced guilt of their repressed desire — to a particular authoritarian morality, which induces further guilt in its turn. 'Normal' people become maniacs of a certain type of order, of a certain type of cleanliness [pulizia] and of the police [polizia].
Homosexuals who go out cruising — and almost all gay men do so — know perfectly well that their pleasure very often involves them in breaking the law, disrupting order (even in those countries where homosexuality is not as such a criminal offence). We gays have almost invariably made love in the streets, in parks, in public toilets, in cinemas, museums, churches, in the Tuileries. We have been fucked behind barrack walls, we have sucked each other off kneeling in front of religious statues, we have held splendid orgies under railway bridges. 'Normal' people can only see it as 'filthy' that we like to eat sperm and be fucked in the arse. And yet those of us who are revolutionary see it as absurd that we are not allowed to cruise openly, wherever we like, that we can't take off our trousers or petticoats wherever we happen to be.
[3] Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death, London, 1959, p.27.
[4] Georg Groddeck, The Book of the It, London, 1979, pp. 198ff.
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