I sometimes regret the invention of the category “gay.”
In the late 1970s I became friends with Michel Foucault, and he and I disagreed about gay identity as well. I never quite understood his position, which struck me as ambiguous. He’d given an early interview to the French gay magazine Gai Pied (which Foucault had named) without letting his name be cited in the article. He was fascinated by gay life, especially sadomasochistic scenes in San Francisco, and never was there a more self-conscious and highly organized subculture than that one. Yet Foucault was very much against identity politics and “the culture of avowal,” by which he meant a culture that thought every individual had a secret, that that secret was sexual, and that by confessing it one had come to terms with one’s essence. He traced the need to avow to the early Christian church, which had been obsessed by evil thoughts even more than evil deeds (the pagan world had worried only about the deeds).* I could understand his objections to the Oprah-like emotionality and the revival-meeting “change of heart” so appealing to Americans, but it did seem to me undeniable that “coming out” was still a liberating moment, especially since most gays could “pass” as straight and still did, to their own harm. Yes, it might be wrong to consider one’s sexuality to be the key to one’s identity—and in the ultimate scheme of things perhaps gay identity politics have led to an easy packaging and commodification of our experience, a trivialization of the bacchic rites (“Yeah, I’m a power bottom into domination but not pain, highly verbal, into role-playing of the coach-athlete sort but no scat or blood, please, though water sports are fine”). Nevertheless, what we desire is crucial to who we are. I agree with Nietzsche, who said, “For what does one at present believe in more firmly than one’s body?” To be fair, Foucault was combating all general ideas, all categories, and what he clung to as a good positivist were particular facts, tiny clusters of verifiable events. I wouldn’t dare to defend gay identity against such a convincing argument, but I would still say that people who are oppressed by an entire society can free themselves only by taking on that entire society and redefining the terms that were imposed on them, switching all the minuses to pluses.
EDMUND WHITE, from his new memoirs City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and ’70s New York : Bloomsbury, 2009, p. 185-86.
Photo: Mine Shaft Dress Code, Leather Archives and Museum, Chicago. Originally uploaded by Adventurestan on flickr.
*Foucault – “The quest for some form of morality universally acceptable (…) seems a catastrophe to me.”
