DESIRE AS PRAXIS
Towards a Queer Surrealism
by Peter Dubé
Rebel Satori Press. 234 pages, $24.95
ALTHOUGH PETER DUBÉ is best known as poet, his new book, Desire as Praxis, contains nonfiction prose. I thought at first it might be a historical survey of queer-identified surrealists and their work, but Dubé does something stranger and more interesting. He explores various ways in which the ideologies and practices of surrealism overlap and intersect with those of the early gay liberation movement.
The original surrealists, who came to prominence in Europe after World War I, wanted to transform art and society by merging the conscious and unconscious. Led by the author André Breton, their goal was to combine the unreality of dreams with the reality of the objective world. Their desired result was something that would surpass the real: the surreal.
According to Dubé, the gay liberationists of the late 1960s and early ’70s had a very similar goal. They, too, wanted to change art and society by bringing what had long been repressed into the open, although in their case the repressed force was homosexual desire. Members of the gay liberation movement wanted to create new ways of seeing and experiencing the world by bringing previously hidden queer desires into America’s cultural consciousness. As Boston activist Charles Shively wrote in a 1974 manifesto: “Our desires are not false, nor an expression of hunger, appetite, want: our desires … are creative, they are the road to creating, to modification of reality.” Referring to gay manifestoes like Shively’s, Dubé notes: “In these affirmations we hear a call for social and psychic transformation not dissimilar to that of surrealism: a demand to transform the mind and the world, and for non-conformism.”
Dubé acknowledges that some of the original surrealists would have been unhappy with his comparison of their movement with gay liberation. Breton in particular expressed disgust at homosexuality multiple times, but Dubé is interested in the ideas and practices of the movements, not the personalities of their individual members. Perhaps the greatest similarity is that the driving force behind both movements is the complicated mix of love and desire called “eros.” Breton claimed that only by paying attention to eros could one accurately navigate the “forest of symbols” that mediate between the mind and the physical world. He also claimed that unleashed eros could be channeled to create political change. The parallels between surrealism and gay liberation, which taught queer people to listen to their inner desires and use them to change society, are obvious here. Dubé provides examples of how the two movements expressed their ideas about eros through literature and film, comparing Georges Bataille’s erotic novella Story of the Eye and two of Luis Buñuel’s films with two John Rechy novels and David Kittredge’s 2009 film Pornography: A Thriller.
Since this is a book about surrealism, art is of course discussed prominently. In a chapter titled “Aesthesis,” Dubé looks at perception and its connection to the intellect in the creation of art. He discusses work by a variety of artists, including surrealist Charles Henri Ford (co-author of 1933’s The Young and Evil, an early American gay novel), 1970s celebrity model and filmmaker Peter Berlin, and William S. Burroughs, who learned his famous literary cut-up technique from Brion Gysin, himself briefly a member of the surrealist group in Paris.
It’s a heady topic, and Dubé has insightful things to say, particularly about the role collecting and collections play in surrealism, gay liberation, and art. Whether or not the stereotype is true, since the days of Oscar Wilde gay men have had a reputation for possessing good taste when collecting antiques and art. Objects are the focus of collections, and in their quest to merge the conscious with the unconscious, the surrealists also sought to merge subject and object. The impulse to collect, Dubé suggests, may be an unconscious expression of their idea that “persons and objects, the self and the social, however discrete, are felt or perceived to be connected, and thus, epistemologically, are connected.”
When objects are added to a collection, they are removed from their original context and assume new meaning and energy for their owner. Breton’s home was filled with art and objects from around the world, which he routinely touched while writing to find inspiration. Dubé compares Breton’s collection with the one compiled by Samuel Steward, the tattoo artist and pornographer who worked with Alfred Kinsey. Breton collected art from Africa, Oceania, and Europe; Steward collected graffiti from bathroom stalls, homoerotic photos and prints, and the pubic hair of men he slept with. In both cases, Dubé claims, the collections were filled with erotic, creativity-inspiring energy for their owners.
Concepts like “energy” and “creating a reality beyond reality” sound almost magical, so perhaps it’s not surprising that many surrealists were inspired by occult practices, such as ceremonial magic and spiritualism, and created art using automatic writing and trance. “Magic was a stimulus to thinking,” the surrealist painter Kurt Seligmann wrote, “it freed man from fears, endowed him with a feeling of his power to control the world, sharpened his capacity to imagine.” Dubé presents several instances showing the overlap between surrealism and the occult. For example, a group of surrealists created a Tarot deck while holed up in a Marseille mansion waiting to escape the Nazis, and the painter Ithell Colquhoun’s novel Goose of Hermogenes was based on alchemical processes. Georges Bataille’s novella Madame Edwarda features an elderly prostitute who might be God.
Dubé also notes a similar occult impulse among some early gay liberationists. Interested in finding new ways of thinking about homosexuality, they looked beyond Christianity to marginalized but welcoming occult philosophies in which sexuality (and sex magic) were viewed in a positive light. Leo Martello, a founding figure of the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) and the Gay Activists Alliance (GAA), was a practicing witch and the author of titles like 1969’s Weird Ways of Witchcraft, but even more emblematic of gay liberation’s occult impulse was Arthur Evans.
Evans was also a member of the GLF and GAA, but his fame primarily rests on writing Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture (1978), in which he claims that gay men, witchcraft, and paganism are inextricably linked. He believed gay men should return to their ancient roles as shamans, healers, and sorcerers, but his book is also deeply political. Evans wrote that if gay men “are to overthrow the industrial patriarchy, I believe we must tap into deeper energies. … These are the energies of magic.” There is also overlap between Evans’ work and that of Harry Hay, one of the founding figures of the Radical Faeries movement, whose belief that gay men should relate to each other with “subject-subject” consciousness is an attempt to dissolve the boundary between subject and object, which echoes a goal of surrealism.
Desire as Praxis was based on Dubé’s doctoral dissertation at Montréal’s Concordia University. The book includes significant amounts of academic language but also lots of interesting information and ideas that a general reader can appreciate. Although I left graduate school thirty years ago, I still found a lot to think about in this slim book.
Peter Muise is the author of Legends and Lore of the North Shore (2014) and Witches and Warlocks of Massachusetts (2021).
