OSCAR WILDE characterized gay love as that “great affection … such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy. … It is that deep, spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect. It dictates and pervades great works of art like those of Shakespeare and Michelangelo. … It is in this century misunderstood, so much misunderstood that it may be described as ‘Love that dare not speak its name.’” The particular meaning that Wilde credited to gay love in this famous speech may have been expedient—he was on the witness stand, accused of sordid acts of debauchery—but (call me sentimental) I can never read this speech without feeling that this was not a cynical ruse by a brilliant rhetorician but a spontaneous surge of eloquence de profundis. His trial was about the meaning of homosexuality, and whose meaning would prevail.
What is the meaning of homosexuality?
The last issue of the GLR [Nov.-Dec. 2014], which raised the question of “the first gay novel,” showed us multiple approaches to the nettlesome question of homosexual meaning-making by highlighting early gay novelists. These homosexual authors were groping for a way to name something new in the human experience of personhood. Homosexual acts had been featured in world literature from the beginning, but as Will Roscoe said in an essay that I will discuss below, “the leap from adjective to noun had not been made.” It was not until the late 19th century that suddenly there burst upon the scene a plethora of artists and thinkers who felt compelled to personify gay love—to make it an identity. Many struggled to find the right name—invert, Uranian, intermediate sex, urning, homosexual—while others, like Gore Vidal in The City and the Pillar, steadfastly refused to play the name game, anticipating the queer theorists of later decades.
In spite of the differences in the meanings they made (including Vidal’s meaningful negation of the endeavor), one thing they all had in common was the fact that they made the theme of same-sex love a pillar of their story. Acknowledging that bugbear of postmodernism—the transhistoric metanarrative, the idea that there could be universal meanings to human experience that transcend cultural and historic horizons—I would venture to propose a mini-narrative of intra-historic proportions that depends upon a provincial Western perspective and yet could be deeply meaningful to many of us today. My proposal rests upon the idea that sexuality constitutes a primal organizing principle by which we make our lives meaningful and proposes that homosexuality has a symbolic value standing for the potential of human beings to achieve individualized personalities. These individualized personalities can be experienced as a personalized sense of agency and creative interiority. By “personalized” I mean to indicate a feeling of personhood that belongs uniquely to one’s self.
I first began musing about this idea after reading Will Roscoe’s provocative essay “The Radicalism of Harry Hay” in the November-December 2013 issue of the GLR. Roscoe’s essay about Hay, the oft-acknowledged mid-century father of the gay liberation movement and founder of the Mattachine Society, demonstrates how essentialist devices can serve minority peoples’ struggles to define their identity in the face of oppressive forces determined to impose hostile meanings on their subjects. Hay’s theory that homosexuals comprised an oppressed cultural minority was a radical intellectual innovation that sustained several decades of successful gay activism, but it succumbed finally to what Roscoe called “anti-identitarian queer theory” in the 1990’s. Since then, while many of us still feel homosexual passion, it has become harder to feel passionate about being a homosexual, a fact that has shaped the course of what was known as the gay liberation movement.
Roscoe’s essay illuminated the rich meaningfulness of Hay’s homosexual radicalism. Hay was radical because he proposed, for the first time, that homosexuals were “a people.” He was also radical because he was a Marxist and a member of the Communist Party. But he was most radical because he linked homosexuality and Marxism. As Roscoe showed, Hay argued for a “transcendental” version of gay identity that was grounded in Marxist theory. Gay identity was not just a fluke of recent Western culture but transcended historical eras and cultures due to the roles that homosexuals played in the social relations of production.
To be radical means to have a transformative vision for the future that’s rooted in history (the word “radical” derives from the Latin for “root”). Hay forged a radical vision by uncovering a meaning to the homosexual past, grounded in Marxist theory. Sadly, the gay liberation movement later lost its radical vision for the future along with a meaningful myth of the past. Today, with the fiercest battles for marriage equality behind us, the future seems to hold a post-gay era of further assimilation and accommodation to the status quo—the slipping away of a deeply imagined and individuated gay world view and the loss of an opportunity for a revolutionary confrontation with the non-gay institutions (such as marriage) responsible for the tragedy of this overburdened planet.
The abandonment of Hay’s gay radicalism was less a consequence of the waning of Marxism than of the waxing of social constructionism. If the first half of the 20th century was marked by competing meanings of homosexuality, the second half was marked by the deconstruction of meaning itself. Until the advent of deconstructionism, all meanings were up for grabs—Wilde’s platonic love, the Marquis of Queensberry’s sin of sodomy, Hay’s androgynous minority—but after the publication of Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality, all bets were off. One of the premises of this work was that sexual orientation is not a disclosure of an essential human sexual condition, as is popularly assumed, but rather a construct built by localized socio-historic forces—what Foucault called “discourse.”
This “discursive” theory of sexual identity posed a direct challenge to Hay’s theory because it implied that homosexual identity was brought into being by cultural “discourse” and not by homosexuals themselves acting through their own agency. In his essay, Roscoe mounted a lively illustration of this controversy by staging a fictional debate between Harry Hay and Michel Foucault. Roscoe defended Hay’s position with a complex but persuasive argument that I will not summarize here. But I will offer further support for Hay by disputing Foucault’s assertion that it was the policing authority of juridico-medico discourse that constructed homosexual identity.
A close study of the origins of the word “homosexual” demonstrates that it was coined by an early gay rights activist and only later adopted by medical practitioners and sexologists. This complicates Foucault’s misleading assertion that that the psychiatrist Carl Westphal invented the modern homosexual. Lombardi-Nash’s book, Sodomites and Urnings: Homosexual Representations in Classic German Journals (2006), documents the history of the word “homosexual.” The word was first used in a letter from Hungarian journalist Karoly Maria Kertbeny to Karl Ulrichs in 1868. Ulrichs was the pre-eminent campaigner for Uranian rights in Germany in the latter half of the 19th century. Kertbeny wrote to Ulrichs, disagreeing about the best strategy for changing the Prussian penal code concerning the crime of sodomy. Ulrichs, who used the words “Uranian” and “Urning” to describe men who loved men, was interested in finding scientific arguments to show that the Uranian condition was inborn, and perhaps hereditary. Kertbeny thought that this was a mistaken strategy and that the best course of argument was to cite legal precedent to show that homosexual behavior was not a threat to society. In his letter to Ulrichs he says:
The theory of heredity—as much as it is correct anthropologically … also has the great disadvantage that it does not destroy prejudice against Urnings, but rather increases it even more, makes them into special natures, into sinister, abnormal, unfortunate people, changeable creatures, into hermaphrodites, who are not organized as fully as other people, with a lame and biased bent, and therefore cannot be approached by Dionings [heterosexuals]without a certain sympathetic horror.
This passage is striking for how closely its tone is echoed by Foucault more than one hundred years later in this infamous passage in The History of Sexuality: “Homosexuality appeared as one of the forms of sexuality when it was transposed from the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphrodism of the soul. The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species.” The similarity in tone makes me wonder if Foucault knew of this letter dated 1868, which is the first recorded publication of the word homosexual. And yet, in an earlier section of the paragraph quoted above, Foucault says that “homosexuality was constituted from the moment it was characterized—Westphal’s famous article of 1870 on ‘contrary sexual sensations’ can stand as its date of birth.” Why is Foucault post-dating homosexuality’s birthday by two years, unless because it was inconvenient to his argument for the baby to be delivered by a pro-homosexual activist rather than an anti-homosexual psychiatrist?
These facts cast doubt on the common understanding that homosexual identity originated in the context of medical pathology. As an example of this common misconception, take this quote from Jeffrey Weeks’ Coming Out: Homosexual Politics in Britain from the Nineteenth Century to the Present (1990): “For Foucault … the homosexual was an invention of nineteenth-century attempts to control sexual perversity.” On the contrary, as this passage from Kertbeny shows, the word was coined by a social justice activist who was fighting against a biological characterization of the homosexual person (Ulrich’s argument) and for the dignified humanity of homosexuals who deserved legal protection. Only after this auspicious birth of the word homosexuality was it appropriated by physicians like Carl Westphal and sexologists like Krafft-Ebing, whose writings mark the popularization of the word, and unfortunately, its bastardization.
Kertbeny was not a doctor or a sexologist. He prided himself on being an advocate for reformist causes, including revision of the laws against usury and the laws that imprisoned debtors. Kertbeny claimed to be thoroughly studied in history, literature, anthropology, and science. According to Ulrichs, Kertbeny was jealously competing with him (Ulrichs) to be the foremost authority on the matter of homosexual rights. In his 1868 letter to Ulrichs he insisted that he was much more learned than Ulrichs on the question of male-male sexuality and that he had written a manuscript “developed into four main parts: monosexual, homosexual, heterosexual, and heterogenit.” He coined the word homosexual using the Greek homos (same), linking the word to the golden age of same-sex love in Classical Greece and to early homosexual writers such as the unschooled but visionary Swiss milliner Hössli, writing in the 1830’s, who used the phrase “Greek love” as a way to positively identify the natural goodness of sexual love between men.
According to this reading, homosexual identity was constructed in the context of social justice activism with the intent of de-stigmatizing what had been thought of as a perverse sexual behavior by recognizing it as much more—a way of loving—and affirmatively bringing into view, through a name, an unrecognized population group and a kind of person. Before this identity was tarnished by pathologists, it was constituted in favorable ways by activists like Heinrich Hössli, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, and Karl-Maria Kertbeny. This gay-centered revisionist history buttresses Hay’s argument that homosexuals authored their own identity in an effort to claim the worthy meaning of their deviation from collective sexual norms. I believe that this alternative perspective, based upon a gay-centered history of (homo)sexuality, can serve as a model for an urgently needed human project wherein we dare to name our unique subjectivities and transform our lives into individualized beings.
This analysis remains within a social-constructionist paradigm: homosexuality is understood not as a natural object but as a linguistic device for naming a psychological experience. This understanding does not, however, obliterate that which is given to human beings before they meet with the cultural or socio-historic. It assumes that we come into this world pre-loaded to experience reality in ways that are universal but also highly individual. These capabilities are destined to be channeled according to the social roles and constraints that a given community has constructed, but this does not mean that an individual’s connection to a variety of universal experiences ceases to exist.
Philip Lance, PhD, is a psychotherapist and the executive director of a nonprofit community development corporation in Los Angeles.
