The Dictionary of Homophobia (114 page)

We could even say, perhaps unfairly, that Rousseau contaminates Kant himself, whose formal morality—founded on the respect of the human person determined
a priori
, thus independently of any empirical specificity (sexual or otherwise)—is in essence foreign to all homophobia in the same way as to all racism in general. Kant later does not restrain himself from writing—following his beautiful definition of a “sexual community” that almost justifies same-sex marriage through the “reciprocal use that a man can make of the sexual organ and faculties of another person”—that this usage is either “natural” or “contrary to nature,” that is to say “with a person of the same sex or an animal of another species”; he comments, “These transgressions of the laws, these vices contrary to nature, that they say are unnamable, are insults to the humanity within our persons that no restriction or exception could save from complete reprobation.” It is thus necessary to be unfair: this is not truly Kant, it is once again Rousseau.

Modern Philosophy: Bio-Anthropological Homophobia
Let’s go a little further. Rousseau does not content himself to synthesize the foundations of two great philosophical arguments of the past to become homophobic; he establishes the basis for specifically modern homophobia, which will surreptitiously run from Hegel to Levinas in the form of the primordial bio-anthropological affirmation of gender differences. It is in fact once again Rousseau who invents, in part, the figure of the love of the Other based on the biological difference between the sexes; that is to say, it is not the legitimization of heterosexuality (this legitimization has barely any history), but the idea that the anthropological basis of our relations with others is situated in the unquestionable biological difference between the sexes. “Neither nature nor reason can make a woman love in man what resembles her, nor is it by taking his mannerisms that she must seek to be loved”; and vice versa.

Similarly, there is around this time a profound rupture of the archaic model of “against nature.” It is no longer a question of condemning the love of persons of the same sex as a deviance or a difference from nature, but rather to see in such a love the incapacity to conceive of another same-sex person as a veritable figure of Otherness. Homosexuality no longer contravenes the homogeny of nature, nor does it any longer “pervert” (in the sense of diverting) “natural” desire; further, its condemnation is no longer based on its veritable defense of homophilia (love of the same). Homosexuality’s essential fault is, on the contrary, to lack the primordial heterogeneity of nature, its primary otherness, that can only be given in the form of the male-female relation, before any love of the same. It is thus no longer “nature” as such that is corrupt, it is its opposite: the foundation of a good socialization with those who are similar; the foundation of good rapport with all others (the sin of the Jesuit and of the convents, sin of all institutions that are too masculine or too feminine). For Rousseau, the calamitous Sophie must not only be the
first
other of Emile but also she must
primordially
be the foundation for his later relations with other men.

It is in this breach that, to a greater or lesser degree, the two great modern philosophies of the Other (that of Hegel and Levinas) will commit themselves. Hegel states it explicitly in the
Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences
: the differences between the sexes is what allows the “awakening” of the human soul, its exit from the “sleep” of simple, fixed singularity, and its first step towards substantial universality. In other words, only the sexual act between biologically different sexes, by permitting to find oneself in the other, offers the soul the real possibility to go from its being-in-self to being-for-self. This moment in the differences between the sexes is only an initial one, but it is crucial, and seems to appear in the
Encyclopedia
, through the central role played by the Master and the Slave dialectic, and in
The Phenomenology of Spirit
, which only reasoned at the level of consciousnesses. If we allow ourselves to extrapolate the Hegelian text, we would willingly say (as he does not speak of it explicitly): homosexuality is the simple and non-dialectal fixity of the first years of life; the homosexual, forever locked away in his being- in-self, will never have access to the other, i.e. human being. That is to say not to the All Other, abstract and empty, but to the real other, rich in determinations that make up individuals.

From a completely different perspective, it is by following the same device excluding all primordially homosexual otherness that Levinas constitutes, over a century later, his phenomenology of the transcendence of the Other. He states it explicitly when he tries to once again find the—if not primordial, at least “intimate”—core of our relationship to the Other as essentially inappropriable: “And the Other, whose presence is discreetly an absence, and through which is accomplished the hospitable welcome
par excellence
that maps out the space of intimacy, is Woman. Woman is the condition of reverence, the interiority of hearth and home.” In other words, at the intimate level, of sexual love and faithful love—the love “at home”—it is only Woman (for Man) who can constitute a viable and human relationship to the Other, a gentle immanence in the hard and imperative transcendence of the Other. What Levinas barely explains later in his criticism of Buber: “The I-you where Buber perceives the category of the interhuman relationship is not the relationship with the interlocutor, but with female otherness.” It could not be any clearer: love and sex cannot be human unless they graft themselves onto the biological difference between the sexes.

However, here again, we cannot too quickly qualify all of Hegelian or Levinasian philosophy of otherness as homophobic. It is not at the level of Reason fulfilled, but in his unique analysis of the “ages of life” that Hegel takes the issue of gender differences into consideration; and from this point of view, we could rightly say that it is not at the level of his philosophical system (in which the specifically biological has no place), but at the level of its foundations, its material phenomenology (specific to the
Encyclopedia
) that traces of homophobia clearly intervene. Similarly, for Levinas, it is not in his primordial constitution of ethical otherness that we can speak of homophobia; at this level, the absolute transcendence of others, which forces me to close our eyes, absolutely forbids us from simply distinguishing between man and woman, or even more, the child (even though Levinas says the Son, but this time no doubt religiously and not philosophically, with regard to Abraham’s sacrifice). At the level of a phenomenology of the “home” (which for him has none of the fundamental nature given to it by Heidegger in the last phase), to speak of Levinasian homophobia—to say that the homosexual denies the Other—is to have no understanding of what Levinas means by this.

To have a little fun, we could even find in Hegel some serious arguments to make an apology (at the opposite spectrum from the Greeks) if not for a homosexuality, at least for a homophilia, that is specifically adult, once rid of the heterosexual arousals of youth. And in Levinas as well, we could find arguments to support the happy homosexuality of certain married men (no more despicable than anything else); they alone possibly know how to surrender to the absolute experience of otherness, it being purged of the “discretion” of the domestic sphere.

These last lines are not written in order to wash Hegel and Levinas (and through them, philosophy itself) of their homophobic “excesses”; once again, it would not seem to be a question of such. Simply, let us recall for a last time our thesis: philosophy is rarely homophobic, but when it is, it is only in the margins; however, since there is evidence that philosophy has indeed been homophobic, it is necessary to recognize that it is possibly for specifically philosophical reasons, and not as a mask for some common sense or a given religion, no more than as an ideology of a secretly repressed urge, idiosyncratic and thus pre-philosophical. Hegel does not seem to be homophobic because he was a German Protestant bourgeois at the beginning of the nineteenth century; nor does Levinas because he was a Jewish bourgeois from before the sexual revolution. They were philosophically homophobic because they were philosophers. And in this sense, they appear to be even more homophobic than Kant, for example, who uses much harsher words. It is not at the level of discourse, but at the very level of the concept that philosophy should question itself on its potential homophobia. This is an acknowledgment which may perhaps remind philosophers in general to show some modesty on this “despicably” strategic question of homophobia, given the philosophically uncontestable grandeur of these two “cases”; and what is more, to exhort them to correct their incorrigible temptation to absolve themselves beforehand of what is real in the name of their assumption of understanding it. Hegel himself foresaw it: philosophy must guard itself from becoming edifying; one does not give lessons and expect to get away with it.
—Pierre Zaoui

Aristotle.
Ethique à Nicomaque
(VII, 5). Paris: Vrin, 1986. [Published in English as
Nicomachean Ethics
.]

Augustine, Saint.
Confessions
(notably III, 8, 15). Paris: Le Seuil, 1982. [Published in English as
Confessions
.]

Bentham, Jeremy.
Essai sur la pédérasti
e. Lyon: Presses universitaires de Lyon, 1982. [Published in English as “Paederasty.”]

Brown, Peter.
Saint Augustin
. Paris: Le Seuil, 1986. [Published in the US as
Augustine of Hippo
. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2000.]

Brunschwig, Jacques, and Geoffroy Lloyd.
Le Savoir grec
. Paris: Flammarion, 1996. [Published in the US as
Greek Thought
. Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2000.]

Diderot, Denis.
Le Rêve de d’Alembert
. Paris: Bordas, 1990. [Published in English as
D’Alembert’s Dream
.]

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich.
Encyclopédie des sciences philosophiques
(notably book III “Philosophie de l’esprit,” § 398 and 412). Paris:Vrin, 1988. [Published in English as
Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences
.]

Hume, David.
Traité de la nature humaine
(notably I, II, III). Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1995. [Published in English as
Treatise of Human Nature
.]

Kant, Immanuel.
Doctrine du droit
(III, 1, § 24). Paris:Vrin, 1985. [Published in English as “The Science of Right.”]

Levinas, Emmanuel.
Totalité et infinité
. Paris: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971 (notably and
s
). [Published in English as
Totality and Infinity
.]

Plato.
Phèdre
;
Banquet
;
Lois
. Paris: Gallimard, “Pléiade,” 1988 (notably 838
c
and
s
). [Published in English as
Phaedrus
;
Symposium
; and
Laws
.]

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques.
Confessions
(II);
Emile ou de l’éducation
(III–V);
Lettre à d’Alembert
. Paris: Gallimard, “Pléiade,” 1964. [Published in English as
Confessions
;
Emile
; and
Letter to D’Alembert
.]

Sade, Donatien Alphonse François (Marquis) de.
Français, encore un effort si vous voulez être républicains
. Paris: Presses de la Renaissance, 1972.

Thomas Aquinas.
Somme théologique
(notably I.II, q. 94, II.II, q. 142, and q. 154). Paris: Le Cerf, 1999. [Published in English as
Summa Theologica
.]

—Against Nature; Biology; Essentialism/Constructionism; Heterosexism; Medicine; Otherness; Psychiatry; Psychoanalysis; Symbolic Order; Theology; Universalism/ Differentialism; Utilitarianism; Vice.

POLICE

In Western countries, the police have long played a central role in the harassment of gays and lesbians and in the construction of the negative image of homosexuals. This role deserves close study, because it sheds light not only on the gay condition at its darkest but also the internal functions of the police and the liberties they often took with the law.

Police repression of homosexuality is an old reality which goes back at least to the seventeenth century. In
France
, it began with the creation of the Paris police in 1667 under Lieutenant General (i.e. chief) Gabriel Nicolas de la Reynie. Henceforth, Parisian sodomites risked being arrested and possibly imprisoned. Inside the police force, a vice squad was created in 1725 by Nicolas Jean-Baptiste Ravot d’Ombreval; two members, Simonnet and Haymier, were specifically assigned to follow and subsequently arrest homosexuals (they collected bonuses according to their results, but very early on began blackmailing those they were arresting, in keeping with a long tradition of police corruption). They maintained a network of several dozen informants or “
mouches
” (flies), recruited from among the lackeys and male prostitutes who previously had dealings with them, being both informers and corrupt abetting agents, enticing the “
infâmes
” (the “vile ones”), whom they delivered into the hands of the police. Thanks to these collaborators—which also included some virtuous types who agreed with the police’s actions, such as Abbot Théru, who helped to spy on their behalf at the College of the Four Nations—the police uncovered several covert homosexual networks; as a result, the capture of pederasts became a daily event. There were also routine police raids of known homosexual meeting places, such as the Jardin des Tuileries (the main cruising area for the Ancien Régime of Paris, which was socially very mixed), the banks of the Seine (where lackeys worked the streets), the Jardin du Luxembourg, and the former St Antoine’s Gate, as well as numerous nightclubs which were equipped with small private rooms. Police interrogations were relatively thorough: they tried to establish the origin of the “corruption” or the “initiation to
vice
”; they inquired as to the precise nature of the acts committed; they maintained a rigorous record of instances of “sexual intercourse,” “hand jobs,” and ejaculations. Those arrested (who were often shaking with
shame
) were made to swear that they would “mend their ways” and to sign a letter confirming their guilt. Punishments varied from reprimand to imprisonment (between eight days to two months on average, but this could be prolonged at the request of families on the condition that they paid the additional cost for keeping them there). Court proceedings were rare, and death sentences were rarer still (the last two men so condemned, and subsequently burned alive for acts of sodomy not aggravated by violence and murder, were Jean Diot and Bruno Lenoir, a shoemaker and a laborer, arrested after being caught having sex on Rue Montorgueil in January 1750). The degree of severity by police, not surprisingly, depended on the social standing of those arrested: noblemen caught in the act were, at most, lightly reprimanded; clerics were referred to their superiors, who generally let the incident slide; heads of families and teenagers were lectured for long periods, but released rather quickly; and as for commoners, they ended up in the notorious Bicêtre prison. This enormous amount of activity allowed police to report to the Minister of Paris (the secretary of state for the king) an estimate of the number of Parisian “sodomites” (20,000 were reported in 1725 and 40,000 in 1783) and also provided lists of homosexuals in the upper class, as revealed by their servants.