GRATING SPACE

What follows is the second of a four-part series comprised of an essay I found interesting and two responses to it by my friends. This is the essay.*

(View Part I: The Introduction)
(View Part III: The First Response)
(View Part IV: The Second Response)

“We All Can’t Die in Bed”
by Guy Hocquenghem

Pasolini was killed by a swindler

We all can’t die in bed, like Franco. The Italian extreme left is indignant. M.A. Macciocchi, in Le Monde, speaks of a fascist plot. More perceptively, Gavi and Maggiori show how the incident was a microfascist coup: the assassin, Pelosi, wasn’t used by fascism, he was the voluntary instrument of racism and the refusal of difference, the day-to-day nonpoliticized kind of fascism.

Probably, probably. Something all through this explanation does not convince me: the external and political nature of this viewpoint on the murder of a homosexual. Certainly you can’t help but agree with the analysis of the Pelosi case, you can’t help but to refuse to consider him, too, as a victim. Turning the other cheek is out of the question.

At the same time, Pasolini’s death seems to me neither abominable, nor even, perhaps, regrettable. As far as I’m concerned, I find it rather satisfying. So much less stupid than a highway accident. In a way, I would want it for myself and for all of my friends.

Sadian estheticism? I hope not: it is only that a fundamental aspect of this story of the murder of a homosexual, of homosexual murder, necessarily eludes the political analysts and those who mean to protect homosexuals from their potential murderers.

It is the intimate, ancient, and very strong bond between the homosexual and his murderer, a bond as traditional as their delinquent prescription in the big cities of the nineteenth century. We too often forget that dissimulation, the homosexual secret or lies, were never chosen for themselves, through a taste for oppression: they were necessary for projecting a desiring impulse towards the underworld, for a libido attracted by objects outside the laws of common desire. Vautrin, in Balzac, represents this underside of the civilized world born of the corruption of big cities where homosexuality and delinquency go hand in hand, very well. As an urban perversion, illicit homosexuality has always been linked with underworld crime. There is a specific “dangerousness” which surrounds homosexuality, homosexual blackmail, homosexual murder.

Gavi and Maggiori quite rightly point out that in the Pelosi trial, the victim is just as guilty as the murderer. Which is certainly scandalous, but it constitutes a distinctive feature of the homosexual condition. In the eyes of the courts and the police, there is, in these cases, no difference between victims and murderers. There is but one suspicious “milieu,” united by mysterious bonds, a free-masonry of crime where the homo and the murderer intersect. Homosexuality is first of all, and perhaps for a short while will continue to be, a category of criminality. Personally I prefer this state of affairs to its probable transformation into a psychiatric category of deviance. The libidinal link between the criminal and the homosexual ignores the rational concepts of law, the division of individual responsibility and the distribution of roles between victims and murderers. A homosexual murder is a whole, complete unto itself. A captain of the Belgian gendarmerie writes in an article devoted to the situation of homosexuals: “An attentive surveillance of this particular milieu makes it possible to compile a very useful dossier for the discovery of future swindlers, murderers, and possibly spies.”

“Decriminalizing Homosexuality?”

Some will tell me that this is precisely what we’re fighting against. So? Are we going to demand the rational progress of justice in distinguishing victims and the perpetrators? Are we going to require, as do the respectable homosexual associations, that the police and the courts accept complaints from homosexuals who are mistreated or blackmailed? Will we see gays, exactly like women, demand the condemnation of rapists by the courts and request protection under the law?

I think on the contrary that even in a struggle for liberation, homosexuality’s hope still lies in the fact that it is perceived as delinquent. Let us not confuse self-defense with “respectabilization.” The homosexual has frequent contact with the murderer: not only through masochism, suppressed guiltiness or a taste for transgression, but also because an encounter with such a character is a real possibility. Of course, one can always avoid it. All one needs do is avoid cruising in the criminal world. To stop cruising the streets. Not to cruise at all, or only to pick up serious young men from the same social sphere. Pasolini wouldn’t be dead if he had only slept with his actors.

This is what eludes all those who sincerely want to “decriminalize” homosexuality, to defend it against itself by severing its bonds with a hard, violent and marginal world.

These combatants are unaware that they are thus joining the vast movement, in France and America for example, of respectabilization and neutralization of homosexuality. That movement does not progress by increased repression, but relies, on the contrary, on an intimate transformation of the homosexual type, freed from his fears and his marginality and finally integrated into the law.

The traditional queen, likable or wicked, the lover of young thugs, the specialist of street urinals, all these exotic types inherited from the nineteenth century, give way to the reassuring modern young homosexual (age 25 to 40) with mustache and briefcase, without complexes or affectations, cold and polite, in an advertising job or sales position at a large department store, opposed to outlandishness, respectful of power, and a lover of enlightened liberalism and culture. Gone are the sordid and the grandiose, the amusing and the evil. Sado-masochism itself is no longer anything more than a vestiary fashion for the proper queen.

A “White” Homosexuality

A stereotype of the legal homosexual, integrated into society, molded by the Establishment, close to it in his tastes, and reassured, moreover, by the powerful presence of an undersecretary who himself is a homosexual without any false shame — homosexuality is no longer a secret shared only by a few initiates — progressively replaces the baroque diversity of traditional homosexual styles. Finally the time will come when the homosexual will be nothing more than a tourist of sex, a gracious member of Club Med who has gone a little farther than the others, with a horizon of pleasure slightly broader than that of his average contemporary.

We cannot suspect any of this unless we frequent the homosexual circle, a rather closed whole which forges, even for the most isolated homosexual, the social image of his condition. Normalizing pressures move quickly, even if Paris and the bars of the rue Sainte-Anne are not all of France. While there are still queens seeking Arabs in the suburbs or Pigalle, a movement has undeniably been launched for a truly white homosexuality in every sense of the term. And it is rather curious to note, looking at ads and films or at the exits of the gay bars, the emergence of a unisex model — common to homosexuals and heterosexuals — offered up to the desires and identification of all. Homosexuals become indistinguishable, not because they hide their secret better, but because they are uniform in body and soul, rid of the saga of their ghetto, reintroduced fully and completely not into their difference but into their similarity.

And everyone will fuck in his own social class, the dynamic junior executives will breathe with rapture the smell of their partners’ aftershave, and even the Pope will no longer be able to defect anything wrong with it. A very natural thing, as a recent film said. The new official gay will not go looking for useless and dangerous adventures in the short-circuits between social classes. He will surely go on being a sexual pervert, he’ll experiment with fist-fucking or flagellation, but with the cool good sense of sexological magazines, not in social violence, but in sex techniques. Pasolini was old-fashioned, the prodigious remains of an epoch that is now being left behind.

Translated by George Richard Gardner, Jr.

*This essay was retyped from its printed version as it appeared in Hatred of Capitalism: A Semiotext(e) Reader, (edited by Chris Kraus and Sylvére Lotringer, MIT Press, 2001)