Homosexuality as a Privilege in a Homophobic Society - Giorgi Maisuradze

'In the same way, the last will be first, and the first will be last, because many are called, but few are chosen.'

Matthew 20:16

'Privilege'

In one of his late personal letters, deemed as his conclusive opinion on homosexuality, Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, defines this form of sexuality as follows: “Homosexuality is assuredly no advantage, but it is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation; it cannot be classified as an illness; we consider it to be a variation of the sexual function, produced by a certain arrest of sexual development. Many highly respectable individuals of ancient and modern times have been homosexuals, several of the greatest men among them (Plato, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, etc.). It is a great injustice to persecute homosexuality as a crime – and a cruelty too.”

Apart from showing his scientific or moral and ethical outlook in this piece, Freud uses a rhetorical tool that points out to yet another subtle implication of his reasoning: a form of negation described by Freud himself. “It’s not what you think” – sums up the form, assuming that the negated thing is revealed or confirmed. In other words, negation means to affirm. Indeed, the word “advantage” appears in the sentence constructed through the form of negation: “Homosexuality is assuredly no advantage, but…” And in the next sentence, he emphasizes that “many highly respectable indi- viduals of ancient and modern times have been homosexuals, several of the greatest men among them.”What can be the implication of the word “advantage” used in the form of negation? Is it a “slip of tongue”, or, in other words, according to Freud, an implied content that is not intended for publicity, revealing its hidden meaning through the negation itself?

Homosexuality as an advantage needs to be addressed in the context of minority-majority opposition where it gains the semantic similar to that of the term “privilege”. Latin wordprivilegium has its roots in Roman law. It represents a separate or distinct law that does not affect only certain people, thereby making them stand beyond the universal law. Thus, their privileged nature, their superiority above everyone else is being emphasized. Usually, privilege is related to power and high social status and is a sign of social inequality. But in Freud’s teachings, the features of exclusive distinctiveness devoid of universal norms belong to the cultural, rather than to the social realms of “privilege”. If culture is based on prohibitions per se from where follows the normativity, then the “separate” or “distinct” (privus) is the one who cannot be placed in the normative order reinforced by these prohibitions or the one who is transgressive with regard to such order, that is, who steps over the boundaries of prohibitions, who is an “outlaw”. Therefore, homosexuality can be a privilege or an advantage only inasmuch as it is beyond the common cultural norms, is separate and is not affected by the number of cultural laws. It can be envisaged as a certain anomie, that is, as something that is, both, beyond and out oflaw, giving its distinctiveness a tint of advantage, and, at the same time, is rejected by society as something threatening. Such dialectic, on the one hand, implies intolerance to and repression of homosexuality, and on the other hand, this societal pressure and constant struggle with it develops special skills in a homosexual individual – the skills that, through the strength of will, can be transformed into great creative energies. And the strength of will means accepting one’s own “anomieousness”, rather than capitulating to the “law” or rejecting one’s own “difference”, assimilating to the majority, and living by the rules and wishes of this “lawful” majority instead of those of one’s own.

Homosexuality as a 'Gift' and 'Blessing'

In his famous interview – conducted by likewise famous German author Hubert Fichte – Jean Genet, the first explicitly homosexual writer, one of the most radical authors and political activists of the 20th century, talks about one specificity of homosexuality that equally determines both, the exclusiveness of homosexuality and homophobia: “Homosexuality puts a man ‘beyond the society’, which is why he is forced to reevaluate all the universally accepted values.” In the same interview, Genet links the ability of reevaluating values with the special sensitivity that is derived from soci- etal rejection, on the one hand, and breaking the stereotypes of gender roles, on the other hand: “Breaking the traditional beliefs about males, man breaks his narrow-mindedness, and sensitivity awakes in him that would have remained hidden otherwise.” Certain “femininity”, accompanying homosexuality, is regarded as a trigger of such sensitivity: “Femininity that is hidden in homosexu- ality enhances a boy’s ability of sensitivity.”

In the picture described by Genet, transgression of homosexuality results from its societal rejection, and it is the marginalization that determines the peculiar sensitivity present among homosexuals and regarded as a gift and blessing by Genet:

“I am aware that homosexuality is considered attractive among artistic bohemia, but in bourgeois environment it is still condemned. I am grateful to my homosexuality in many ways. You might consider it a curse, but to me it has always been a gift, a blessing.” Genet specifies those skills that he developed through his homosexuality: “It has made me an author, it has given me an ability to better understand people […] perhaps it is my homosexuality that made me realize that Algerians are not different from other people.”

The words Genet uses to describe his homosexuality – “gift” and “blessing” – are the words with religious meanings. In religious context, those words imply being a God’s chosen. Whatever God’s mercy is – be it a special talent or a skill – it makes a person blessed and places him outside the society, which means that he falls out of the routine and profane realm for “blessing” involves losing such routine and consumer meanings. Blessed (Latin: sacer) becomes a saint, in other words, he transforms into someone who can not be touched. A person gifted with blessed and divine skills is alienated from the rest of the people per se, and from human realm in general, through his strange and extraordinary characteristics and skills uncommon for human nature. In mythos, prophecy, fortune-telling, knowledge of animals’or plant’s languages are regarded as such skills. The“blessing”is often related to blending of sexual features (for instance, prophet Tiresias changed his sex for several times) or other kinds of“anomalies”. Such person fosters both, reverence and fear-fused hatred among other“normal”people. Being the“God’s chosen”is ill-omened in monotheist religions, too. This is the price that should be paid by a person in exchange for his distinctiveness or special skills. Thus, God’s blessing and gift are also a curse and punishment from the profane, human point of view.

Homosexuality as a gift and blessing can be seen as a certain anomie for Genet, too, a certain “outlaw-ness” that casts homosexual aside from the majority and opposes him to himself and his values, puts him out of the stereotypes of a dominant culture, and, through breaking stereotypes, apart from making him reevaluate his values, helps him develop the skills that would not have been developed under “lawful” or conventional conditions as much as society agrees upon stereotypes, and dropping out from “societal agreement” means sovereign power, on the one hand, and anomie, on the other. Being beyond the commonly accepted norms exposes a wholly different picture that is invisible in the world full of stereotypes and conventions, which is why in the modern secular era, and in a bohemian environment in particular, homosexuality is deemed as“le bon ton”, often carrying the features of exotisation; however, among the burger majority which has a taste for orderly life, homosexuality remains a matter of explicit or implicit aggression and intolerance, and inhibiting homophobic aggression can only be managed through legal and political efforts.

Homophobia

Psychological reasons of intolerance towards homosexuality are trivial and uninteresting: a real homophobic person, that is, the one in whom homosexuality causes fear expressed in hatred, is a latent, unfulfilled homosexual who sees his own un-realized wishes in self-realized homosexual that fosters, both, envy and panic fear towards revealing his own hidden passions. Also, there are imitative homophobic persons: actually, they are not homophobic at all, but as homophobia is a culturally accepted phenomenon, that is, as the majority holds explicitly negative attitudes to homosexuals those who do not have any grounds for homophobia start behaving in a homophobic way only because such behavior is accepted. This is called “conformity” in social psychology: a person can not form or express his own opinion due to the simple fact that the opinion of majority is different from his. As for the majority, it represents a multitude of conformists.
Cultural intolerance to homosexuals or cultural homophobia is far more interesting: it reflects not only traditional stereotypes of hatred towards unknown, but it also largely determines the char- acter of homosexuality, its emotional and psychological background, on the one hand, and the forms of its cultural self-expression, on the other.
What is a cultural homophobia and what is its impact upon a homosexual desire, its cultural articulation? Cultural homophobia assumes the place appointed to homosexual relationships by the culture, in other words by the province of our life that distinguishes human from animal world, that is not naturally innate to humans but represents artificially created forms of social relations, such as customs, religions, political and legal thinking or moral beliefs and ideals of cultural values. This place is marginality and is called either decadence or sin, either crime or subculture, and so forth, depending upon particular epoch and culture. Even in ancient civilizations, such as Egypt, Mesopotamia, Iran and particularly Ancient Greece or Roman Empire that have been known for their tolerant attitudes to the same sex romantic relationships, this form of sexuality had never occupied a central place in the societal life, had never become a “mainstream”, not even then when one of the most powerful Roman emperors, Hadrian, the only one who had not been concealing his homosexuality, made the Roman Senate deify his lover, 17 years old boy Antinous, and built temples and alters in his tribute. None of the following has anything common with the hegemony of homosexuality: neither sometimes tragic love affairs between supreme Olympus Gods (Zeus, Apollo, Dionysus) and beautiful boys, nor the heroic love between Achilles and Patroclus; neither the great Greek female poet Sappho, resident of the island of Lesbos, whose works have become the inspiration for giving the name to the lesbian love, nor the exciting words of Socrates and Plato about the male love or the grief-driven madness of Alexander the Great due to the death of his lover, Hephaestion. This has its cultural reasons, too, that are related to the meanings and purposes of the culture itself.

Normative Sexuality as 'The Natural'

Homosexuality has never been a norm as normativity is related to the principles of societal arrangement and distribution of power. An instinct of reproduction has always been dominant in the culture that is not cultural in essence, but has natural, animalistic origins, that is, it – as an instinct – is present in humans as much as in any other representatives of an organic world. Thus, reproduction is a part of natural determinism, not a cultural achievement. Culture begins there where the regulation of reproduction instinct is introduced, that is, when the social organization is generated in an animal group. To the vast majority of scientific theories, the first step of human’s separation from the nature, that is, from the animal world, and the first sign of the birth of the culture is the regulation of sexual life, namely the prohibition of consanguinity – the incest. That is how the first social organizations are originated: family, lineage, community, which eventually transform into states and nations. As much as all these social organizations are patriarchal, that is, they are based on the dominant position of the male sex and its power, the normalization of sexuality serves to reinforce the patriarchal rule, too.

Additionally, man’s power is symbolically manifested in the sexual act, which according to a quite influential theory (Walter Burkef), is understood as a man’s violence against woman or as “belttling women by men” if we compare this scientific approach to the definition of sexual act by Sulkhan-saba Orbeliani. By sexually seizing women, by symbolically abusing them, each man, tom some extent, repeats  the supreme archetype of the divine power – the act of creation which is manifested in the violence of the creator God against chaos in the violence submission of this chaos. The bloodshed on the first night of marriages is a symbolic imitation of the act of creation.

Along with symbolic meaning, regulation of sexuality has an economic sense, too, which, likewise, is related to the power ultimately. By reducing sexuality to the reproduction, the sexuality of a subordinated woman is limited to the function of reproduction. The desire of her obligatory virginity allows a man to experience himself as Demiurge. Additionally, the area of power is expanded by reproduction and by the demographic growth of family, at first, then of lineage or community, and of nation, finally. The instinct of reproduction, settling the world by one’s own offspring, can be envisaged as a prototype of an imperial expansion: like a man seizes a woman, similarly, one lineage or nation seizes the world and, by its fertilization, they try to master it through their genealogy – their flesh and blood. Expansiveness is patriarchal world’s biologically “determined” strive, self-manifested in the natural instinct of reproduction.

 Normative sexuality, the determinant goal of which is a reproduction, gives rise to the hierarchical political economy of sexuality: subordinated woman is defined as an object of pleasure, while a man enjoys the role of a “subject” whose desires should be fulfilled by a woman. Additionally, the right for pleasure – and woman is not the only instrument here – becomes a privilege: sexual, as well as any other forms of pleasure, is the right of privileged classes and people with power. Being privileged means the deviation from universal norms or their violation. “Thou shalt not commit adultery” – economic rule of monogamy based on reproduction – gives pleasure the meaning of commodity, purchasing which, by violating religious or ethical rules, makes it illegal, and hence, the privileged right. The pleasure that is not limited to reproduction is an excess from economic point of view and because of its excessiveness it should be understood as a luxury and symbol of power. Given the cultural background, homosexuality, being non-reproducible form of sexuality, is a pure type of pleasure and is illegal in sexual economy per se. Its legalization is not the result of establishing universal tolerance; instead, the legalization stems from rendering it an exchange commodity of pleasure by the capitalistic consumer society.

Homosexuality as Sabotage

Homosexuality, which is not a means for reproduction and expansion, does not take part in the kinship process, and instead is a pure form of passion, is understood as sabotage against the whole patriarchal system. From the reproduction logic, a homosexual does not create a product, does not contribute to creating bio-political wealth, instead he benefits from what is created by others, and, moreover, does so in an “illegal” way for in the normative order reinforced by religious or secular ethics, all kinds of pleasures, as an excess, is comprehended only in frames of family institution in a legal way. Traditionally, family had been the sole legal source of pleasure. When the latest in 19 BC, Roman Emperor Augustus Octavian decreed a law on family protection and declared “adul-tery” as a criminal act, the regulation of sexual pleasure had become a state business. In the Christian Middle Ages, the supervision of regulation of pleasure and its restriction to marriage had got the prerogative of pastoral authority – the priests. The same is true for the reproduction policy. The church executes its supervision not only through confessions at individual level, but through controlling dogmatic accuracy of the faith. For instance, in early Christianity, one of the main symbols of enemy was represented by the teachings of Marcion of Sinope, imputed for the Gnostic heresy, who regarded the universal celibate – the most radical form of sabotage against the reproductive instinct – as the only practical means for human redemption.

 The church makes the bodily pleasures legitimate for reproductive purposes and under the condition that relationship between a husband and a wife implies the liability to reproduce. The legiti-mate ground for divorce is woman’s “infertility”, and the sole legal place for non-reproduction is the church itself. Monasticism that is based on separation of sexes and grouping people by the same sex becomes a sublime or practical scene for an illegal pleasure. Indeed, most of the information on homosexual affairs from the Christian Middle Ages comes from the monastic realm (to illustrate the point, one might recall Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe, the fundamental research of American historian John Boswell).

In the new age, built upon the primacy of the mind, according to Michel Foucault, pastoral power had undergone secularization and the state had taken the responsibility to manage peoples’ bodies and private lives. In the first volume of his History of Sexuality, Foucault writes: “it is in the nature of power […] to be repressive, and to be especially careful in repressing useless energies, the intensity of pleasures, and irregular modes of behavior.” The wave of nationalism, which had risen in the 20th century, creating the fiction of a single national body, starts cultivating its population as purebreds: what is useful for a single national organism and what is excessive, or even harmful. Reproduction and its regulation in nationalism becomes the central objective of the power (called “bio-power” by Foucault). Such concerns, explicitly or implicitly, always incorporate the elements of eugenics: the best part of the nation – in terms of warrior and labor skills as well as birth rate – should reproduce, while non-healthy one should vanish. In such selection, homosexuality as a useless pleasure and an open sabotage against procreation of the national body is among the top of the list of those who need to be repressed. Thus, it is not accidental that criminalization of homosexuality took place in the national states, the extreme forms of nationalism (Nazism, Fascism) starting destroying it physically. Imputing homosexuality for something unnatural (which implies refusing the reproductive instinct), sin, perversion, deviation, decadence or a crime from the per-spective of cultural economy is likely to stem from the perception of the sabotage, animosity, attack on the order. Additionally, under regulated sexuality where sexual roles serve as a power balance of a man and a woman, or rather, conquering and subordinating a woman by a man, homosexuality introduces total subversion and chaos and messes up the cultural and social roles defined for sexes. This kind of dubious event can quickly become the target for aggression and hatred as a parasite that does not take part in creating biological wealth and refuses to be a purebred, and thus, its value and price, as of useless object, is low.
 

Homosexuality’s Unnaturalness as a 'Privilege'

At first glance it might seem paradoxical that the cultural value of homosexuality is determined by the same reasons that render homosexuality a homo sacer. Centuries-old persecution and margin-alization have protected homosexuality from becoming a mainstream, and from devaluation consequently, thereby making it a prototype and inexhaustible minefield of all kinds of alternative or counter cultures. At the same time, the forms of self-expression of homosexuality, its distinctiveness and charm or a revolutionary vibe significantly stems from the repressions that had been carried out against it throughout the centuries. Religious bigotry, it can be argued, provided homosexuality with religious, even with a sacral halo: Jesus Christ’s words from Gospel – “In the same way, the last will be first, and the first will be last, because many are called, but few are chosen” (Matthew 20:16) – can be directly referred to the pathos of homosexuality as that of an eternal minority. The pathos of prohibited and persecuted minority creates the subversive, destructive, disturbing forms of cultural self-expression that are characteristic of homosexual culture.

The first main form of cultural self-expression of homosexuality is martyrdom, in which and by which the early Christian martyrology could survive to modern times; thus, it can be argued that homosexual plays the same role in a modern homophobic environment as did the first Christian from the times of catacombs. It is not by accident that Jean-Paul Sartre called the first openly ho-mosexual author, Jean Genet a saint and tried to prove this in his huge monograph, Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr.
Another main feature of self-expression of homosexuality is a carnival-style “festivity”, best manifested at the so-called “gay prides”, causing an outrage of a conservative society. Such festivity trac-es back to antic times, becoming more commonplace in the Middle Ages. The festivity is characterized by a parody, black humor, grotesque, exaggeration, blending sexual roles, “indecency” and épatage. Carnival culture, as its most famous researcher, Mikhail Bakhtin wrote, is a culture of oppressed people, deprived of voice and rights who, through carnival forms, publicly expressed their existence and a desire of liberty, as well as a critique of hierarchies and social oppression.
Indeed, these kinds of “indecent” elements, causing confusion in a normative order, engender cultural explosions. “Cultural explosion” is a term introduced by Yuri Lotman in humanitarian sciences; it is the key mechanism of cultural dynamics, its self-renewal and development, and can be efficient insofar as culture does not accept and assimilate – and, therefore, “dismantle” – it. And dismantling means fitting homosexuality in “societal agreement” and its full partaking that can be achieved by depriving it of its exclusiveness. A homosexual family is an attempt of integrating homosex-uality in the normative order or rather an imitation of it. In return for this peace agreement, homosexuality should decline its subversiveness, denying its position beyond “societal agreement” and, hence, the sovereignty.
Homosexuality is unnatural if the naturalness can be reduced to the reproductive instinct. Indeed, this unnaturalness makes it special, giving it a certain mesmerizing or charming tint that is a pure kind of “art”, albeit not due to its naturalness, but due to the fact that it moves in the opposite direction of nature, for art does not serve to gratify any biological instincts and is totally useless and excessive in terms of consumer economy. Any kind of art that assumes creating unnatural objects or those that are un-created by the nature, is homosexual in a certain sense, and thus, art, as homosexuality, is subversive with regard to the normative order.
Love between the same sex people does not have any other purpose than love itself; its fruit is non-biological. The secret of homosexuality – giving rise to the hatred and appeal, envy and mockery, aggression and empathy, fear and surprise, at the same time, in relation to this form of life – is a certain “disengaged contemplation” when the sexuality is not the means for achieving any goal, but it is goal itself, exposing in it with an un-normative, “authentic” diversity. If by normalizing sexuality, the pleasure aspect is being restricted, then by stepping over the norms, the constrained pleasure increases to a certain amount, gaining an advantage to homosexuality in the lust economy. Indeed, one of the crucial factors in a cultural homophobia is this kind of privilege of homosexuality.

Homosexuality’s Unnaturalness as a 'Privilege'


At first glance it might seem paradoxical that the cultural value of homosexuality is determined by the same reasons that render homosexuality a homo sacer. Centuries-old persecution and margin-alization have protected homosexuality from becoming a mainstream, and from devaluation consequently, thereby making it a prototype and inexhaustible minefield of all kinds of alternative or counter cultures. At the same time, the forms of self-expression of homosexuality, its distinctiveness and charm or a revolutionary vibe significantly stems from the repressions that had been carried out against it throughout the centuries. Religious bigotry, it can be argued, provided homosexuality with religious, even with a sacral halo: Jesus Christ’s words from Gospel – “In the same way, the last will be first, and the first will be last, because many are called, but few are chosen” (Matthew 20:16) – can be directly referred to the pathos of homosexuality as that of an eternal minority. The pathos of prohibited and persecuted minority creates the subversive, destructive, disturbing forms of cultural self-expression that are characteristic of homosexual culture.
The first main form of cultural self-expression of homosexuality is martyrdom, in which and by which the early Christian martyrology could survive to modern times; thus, it can be argued that homosexual plays the same role in a modern homophobic environment as did the first Christian from the times of catacombs. It is not by accident that Jean-Paul Sartre called the first openly ho-mosexual author, Jean Genet a saint and tried to prove this in his huge monograph, Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr.
Another main feature of self-expression of homosexuality is a carnival-style “festivity”, best manifested at the so-called “gay prides”, causing an outrage of a conservative society. Such festivity trac-es back to antic times, becoming more commonplace in the Middle Ages. The festivity is characterized by a parody, black humor, grotesque, exaggeration, blending sexual roles, “indecency” and épatage. Carnival culture, as its most famous researcher, Mikhail Bakhtin wrote, is a culture of oppressed people, deprived of voice and rights who, through carnival forms, publicly expressed their existence and a desire of liberty, as well as a critique of hierarchies and social oppression.
Indeed, these kinds of “indecent” elements, causing confusion in a normative order, engender cultural explosions. “Cultural explosion” is a term introduced by Yuri Lotman in humanitarian sciences; it is the key mechanism of cultural dynamics, its self-renewal and development, and can be efficient insofar as culture does not accept and assimilate – and, therefore, “dismantle” – it. And dismantling means fitting homosexuality in “societal agreement” and its full partaking that can be achieved by depriving it of its exclusiveness. A homosexual family is an attempt of integrating homosexuality in the normative order or rather an imitation of it. In return for this peace agreement, homosexuality should decline its subversiveness, denying its position beyond “societal agreement” and, hence, the sovereignty.
Homosexuality is unnatural if the naturalness can be reduced to the reproductive instinct. Indeed, this unnaturalness makes it special, giving it a certain mesmerizing or charming tint that is a pure kind of “art”, albeit not due to its naturalness, but due to the fact that it moves in the opposite direction of nature, for art does not serve to gratify any biological instincts and is totally useless and excessive in terms of consumer economy. Any kind of art that assumes creating unnatural objects or those that are uncreated by the nature, is homosexual in a certain sense, and thus, art, as homosexuality, is subversive with regard to the normative order.
Love between the same sex people does not have any other purpose than love itself; its fruit is non-biological. The secret of homosexuality – giving rise to the hatred and appeal, envy and mockery, aggression and empathy, fear and surprise, at the same time, in relation to this form of life – is a certain “disengaged contemplation” when the sexuality is not the means for achieving any goal, but it is goal itself, exposing in it with an un-normative, “authentic” diversity. If by normalizing sexuality, the pleasure aspect is being restricted, then by stepping over the norms, the constrained pleasure increases to a certain amount, gaining an advantage to homosexuality in the lust economy. Indeed, one of the crucial factors in a cultural homophobia is this kind of privilege of homosexuality.
The key “privilege” of homosexuality is its lack of cultural acceptance, guarding mainstream and losing the creativity. This feature has been determined by martyr nature of homosexuality. As persecution only strengthened the faith of early Chrisitan martys and gained them followers, likewise, persecution and oppression invigorates homosexuality with even more force to fight and creative energy. Homosexuality loses this advantage and exclusiveness through its universal acknowledgment, making it the part of a normative order. And this overall is the 21st century dilemma of a homosexual culture.