GRATING SPACE

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What follows is the third of a four-part series comprised of an essay I found interesting and two responses to it by my friends. This is the first response, by Lee Wharf, as he sent it to me in an email.

(View Part I: The Introduction)
(View Part II: The Essay)
(View Part IV: The Second Response)

Nate,

I’m grateful for the opportunity to reflect on and respond to this unusual treatise on crime, class and homosexuality — God knows where you unearthed it. I’m a little dubious that you sought me out for my ability to “answer thoughtfully”; I suspect it’s more my special expertise you’re after, as a card-carrying criminal and certified homosexual. The question of a fag’s place in the socio-criminal sphere is actually one which I’ve pondered at alarming length, so I appreciate the chance to hold forth on the subject.

I know little about Pasolini. The thoroughly modern thing to do would be to Wikipedia the poor bastard; I’d rather stick to my own scant impressions of the man. I saw one of his movies: avant-garde claptrap that I was too stoned to fathom, if you want my honest appraisal. I also attempted to read “A Violent Life,” his semi-autobiographical portrayal of hardscrabble Italian hustlers. The book, I recall, read like a movie, an effect I soon grew tired of. It had a sort of early-60’s graininess to it, and evoked an obsolete era to which I had difficulty relating — “Pasolini was old-fashioned,” as Hocquenghem surmises. I seem to remember that Pasolini was killed not so much by a “swindler” as a hustler; the linguistic difference is subtle but significant.

He reminds me strongly of Jean Genet, another venerated avant-queer who always seemed too remote to fully fire my imagination. Both men ruminated compulsively over the intersection of crime and homosexuality. Both seem unrelentingly literary.

What strikes me about Hocquenghem’s eerie polemic is that it seems to straddle eras, his lens panning away from Pasolini’s quaint world of public-urinal-trolling seediness — wasn’t Senator Craig’s true transgression not that he sought out gay sex but that he had the Old-World effrontery of seeking it out in an airport men’s room? — as the modern, “integrated” fag comes into blurry focus. The question he raises is whether this generational shift has done anything to change the “delinquent” nature of homosexuality; and if so, what has been lost along the way?

The philosophical divide that Hocquenghem navigates is one I’m familiar with. In my late-night bouts of time-travel, I sometimes journey back across the schism of Gay Liberation and explore Pasolini’s turf. It’s a landscape that I’m drawn to, if one I don’t quite comprehend. In this noir-ish realm, homosexuality requires quite a bit of detective work, its rites secret and complex — baroque, as Hocquengem has it. Something turns me on about this insistence on secrecy and predilection for the darkened doorway — it appeals to the unliberated fag in me, who doesn’t feel comfortable holding hands with a man in public or fighting for gay marriage. A good part of me, in short, comes down on the side of homosexuality’s inherent delinquency, if only for the sex appeal of it — my “libido attracted by objects outside the law of common desire.”

Another part of me tends toward the Burroughs school of literary escapism, where homosexuality is not so much delinquent as it is the only game in town — an alternate realm where boy soldiers suck each other off as a matter of routine. Even further down this rabbit-hole lies Pierre Guyotat’s Tomb for 10,000 Soldiers, a psychedelic re-imagining of the French-Algerian War that is so incessantly mud-splattered, blood-soaked and semen-drenched as to be virtually unreadable. God knows I’ve tried, several times, but it’s like staring at the sun, and after only a few pages my vision is fried. Here, delinquency doesn’t even hint at the depths of sexual violence; the book makes Pasolini’s hustlers look like choirboys.

But what do these flights of fancy have to say about our position today? Certainly, from a liberal-establishment perspective, the opportunities for a young faggot are brighter than ever. I might not reasonably hope to become, say, the President of the United States — despite what they always told me! Democracy has its limits — but I’m more or less free to be queer and pursue my life’s interests unimpeded by sexual orientation. I can, at least, seek out sex without undue fear of being murdered. Which is all well and good. But, as Hocquenghem remarks, “let’s not confuse self-defense with respectabilitization.” Or, respectabilitization at what cost? The author’s briefcase-toting, mustachioed, ad-exec fag seems outdated; let’s take this Hocquenghem on a stroll down modern-day Halsted Street, that he might witness establishment homosexuality in its full flower. Well-heeled fairies parade in $100 jeans; cultural activity on the strip is largely underwritten by multi-national beer companies, and if the season is right he might catch the alderman stumping for votes at the Pride Parade. The author might hang around the corner or Roscoe and Halsted for months on end without hearing anyone mention the “struggle for liberation”; he could haunt every fag bar in town and not find anything sordid or grandiose.

And yet, has delinquency really vanished entirely, or has it merely found new avenues for expression — moved, as have so many other human activities, online? Craigslist, for example, maintains a bustling bulletin board for anonymous sex, a sort of vast, virtual public urinal more sordid and grandiose than anything in Pasolini’s day, a pervert’s buffet of gangbangs and gloryholes. Is it a “freemasonry of crime where the homo and the murderer interact”? Maybe nothing as hysterical as all that, though I do offer the following news item: New York-based radio journalist George Weber was found dead in his Brooklyn apartment, in late March of this year, bound with duct tape and stabbed upwards of 50 times; the confessed killer was a troubled 16 year-old hustler (the New York Daily News described him as a “Satan-loving sadomasochist with a knife fetish” — sordid enough?), who Weber picked up on Craigslist. Much as in Pasolini’s day, many commentators saw the victim as being every bit as guilty as his murderer; even on gay sites like advocate.com there was a great deal of finger-wagging — “They were both wrong,” one poster advised. “The victim shouldn’t have been having sex with a 16 year-old to begin with, much less supplying him booze and drugs…” How much, then, has really changed? Hocquenghem perhaps underestimates the indomitability of homosexual delinquency. Plenty of dark recesses, I think, remain in the homosexual sphere.