GRATING SPACE

What follows is the fourth of a four-part series comprised of an essay I found interesting and two responses to it by my friends. This is the second and final response, by Scott Ries, as he sent it to me in an email.

(View Part I: The Introduction)
(View Part II: The Essay)
(View Part III: The First Response)

Why were you in Cairo? There long?

I got your postcard. I think that’s the best traveled piece of mail I’ve ever received, definitely from a friend.

Oh, here are my thoughts on Hocquenghem, formless and speculative:

Why, when I’m sitting at a very late breakfast with my lover, a friend, and a new acquaintance, would I hear the acquaintance laugh at the conjunction “homosexual/criminal”? Because he’s homosexual and feels offended? I doubt some combination thereof. Because the conversation has taken a turn for the pretentious? Probably. But I’d like to think:

Look at Fassbinder, who made 40 films (not including the TV and theater works) in 15 years. Homosexual. No, gay. He killed himself with cocaine and sleeping pills shortly after he turned 37. Radical. Where have the “progress”-fucking eddies of “sexual liberation” lead us? “Fassbinder’s summary of the plot [of Katzelmacher] reminds us of the way property relationships extend to sexuality in bourgeois society.” (Fassbinder, Filmmaker) Illegitimacy, promiscuity, disease, poverty: that which was necessarily rejected by the bourgeoisie is being begged to be forgiven, forgotten, excluded. Somehow we hear of love now as a heart-rending persuasion, a “unisexual” likeness. “Same sex marriage” is homosexuality’s suburb: I fear the suburb, not sexuality.

Why are all of our hip friends bisexual? Why is identifying as bisexual just easier for me, a refuge I often take? There’s a vodka billboard on my way home with a woman with an O-face: where has all the ugly gone? Advertising! That’s the secret problem with sexuality: “the market” meets desire at any cost, at no cost. Everything can shift right: ecology did. Happy Earth Month! Even straight people can’t keep their God-given (i.e. Throttled) desire for the same sex at bay. Not everyone is bisexual, but everyone will be, can, must become. The elimination of difference: a sufficient definition of ideology. Internalized multiculturalism. Sexual liberation did not open the bars of a prison; it opened the lock on the gated community. Centripetal, not centrifugal. A microfascism, like the one that killed Pasolini, is the pleasure of doubting ones sexuality while hating that one might be one or the other.

Since Hocquenghem’s death, too, the perpetrator of Pasolini’s murder is again an official mystery. Who killed Pasolini, Cornelius Cardew, and Walter Benjamin? How will Genet, Burroughs, Bacon, and Fassbinder read? Like Hocquenghem, maybe, I prefer dissimulation to revelation; let history itself dissimulate. How are we to compare the terrible images of Salo and that of Pasolini’s body itself, dead, face down in the dirt?

I’m resisting the temptation to revise it more along with the thought in my head that grad school teaches that all writing is paperwork.

I’m done with classes, sitting around, drinking alone at my girlfriend’s, watching some David Lynch. Not too bad….

Cheers, mate,
sr