The Dictionary of Homophobia (155 page)

Alain de Lille.
De Planctu naturae
(1176). Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1980. [Published in English as
The Complaint of Nature
.]

Boswell, John.
Christianisme, tolérance sociale et homosexualité
. Paris: Gallimard, 1985. [Published in the US as
Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century
. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1980.]

Clifford, Allen, and Charles Berg.
Les Problèmes de l’homo-sexualité
. (Followed by
Ce que pense la population française de l’homosexualité
.) Paris: Les Yeux ouverts, 1962.

Foot, Philippa.
Virtues and Vices
. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1978.

Kant, Immanuel.
Métaphysique des moeurs
(1796–97). In
OEuvres philosophiques, III. Les Derniers écrits
. Paris: Gallimard, 1986. [Published in English as
Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals
.]

Thierry, Patrick.
La Tolérance: société démocratique, opinions, vices et vertus
. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1997.

Servez, Pierre.
Le Mal du siècle
. Givors, France: André Martel, 1955.

Thomas of Aquinas.
Summa theologiae
(1266–72). Paris: Le Cerf, 1984.

—Against Nature; Bible, the; Damien, Peter; Debauchery; Heresy; Medicine; Paul (of Tarsus); Perversions; Philosophy; Theology.

VILLON, François

François Villon (1431–63) was a great French poet at the end of the Middle Ages and also a criminal who served time in prison for robbery. The image that remains of him today is blurred. Villon presented himself as an
escolier,
a student who became
maistre es arts
. But this diploma, which should have paved the way for a beneficial administrative career, did not give him any advantage. He was the author of ballads and long poems, including “Le Lais” (The legacy) and “Le Testament,” which were autobiographical and narrative, with philosophical and meditative qualities: they evoked the poet’s highly pessimistic attitude towards life, death, illness, torture, and
prison
. Villon depicted himself as an erratic man who was chased from wherever he went, like an amorous martyr fleeing from the love of women (young girls, prostitutes, and proper ladies).

What we really know of Villon is only what he consented to write about himself in his poems, which is difficult to penetrate given his predilection for masks, alternative voices, and even aliases. It is difficult trying to reconstruct the details of his life, his years spent in exile and prison, and even the exact date of his death: he disappeared at the beginning of 1463, without his death ever being confirmed. The image that he proposed of his sexuality is no clearer. In his poems, he took liberties with the portrayals and first names of feminine characters. However, there are numerous hints that lead us to believe that the poet loved boys. In his
Ballades en jargon
, he seemed to employ a Parisian street slang which was derived partially from the gay jargon of the thirteenth century,
jobelin
(well represented in theater); but the sole use of this slang makes the ballads difficult to comprehend at first try. One must also mention his frequent contact with impoverished students and unemployed scholars, some of whom would also be condemned for theft and other crimes. Villon’s own condemnation is still a source of confusion. It is almost certain that he was sent to prison, tortured, condemned to death, granted pardon, and finally exiled (the judiciary archives are among the only documents related to Villon that are left), but the different reasons for these condemnations, which included theft and murder, remain vague, and without doubt the poet’s homosexuality must have played in his disfavor. In fact, as indicated by Thierry Martin, while “homosexuality in the fifteenth century enjoyed a relative
tolerance
,” death sentences could be pronounced in aggravating circumstances; and Villon had been implicated several times, alongside his other criminal charges.

All of these uncertain facts suggest an interference behind which lurks the shadow of homophobia: born of a hidden and disturbing truth and expressed in several ways. The truth is based on certain indisputable facts: Villon enjoyed the complicity of certain well-known homosexuals who had been arrested and condemned on numerous occasions; he wrote poems with clearly homosexual themes, in a language that also belonged to this milieu. It is beyond these findings, that no one questions anymore, that homophobia begins.

If one follows an inverse diachrony, one must note, even to this day, the refusal of a large part of the biographies and research on Villon to face the facts of his sexuality. Most of them do not take them into account or, worse, deliberately hide them. Homophobia thus is present, expressed in the negation of a truth almost established: the uneasiness of researchers is evident. This appears to have contributed to the interference in the image of the poet, and in particular, led to misinterpretations of his poetry, as evidenced in the work of Thierry Martin and Christine Martineau-Génieys. One can still read exhaustive critiques of Villon which make no mention of his homosexual penchants or even allusions to it. Certain (braver) researchers have, however, proposed translations of his homosexual ballads, such as Pierre Guiraud, as early as 1968, or more global interpretations of his work, such as Gert Pinkernell since 1975. Nonetheless, it is clear that Villon remains a victim of homophobia long after his death.

One must also take into account the homophobia that occurred in Villon’s time, specifically that of the church, tribunals, and medieval society in general. This problem largely exceeds the poet or his work and thus is not further developed here, other than in its consequences for Villon’s own personality. Villon’s work, and the manner in which he expressed himself, prove that he frequented places where male homosexuality was practiced, and we can hardly believe that he himself had remained a stranger to those practices. However, the poet expressed himself in veiled terms. The
Ballades en jargon
are in particular ambiguous: the use of jargon make them difficult to access. Their interpretation in gay terms is not apparent at first glance and it seems as if the poet were trying to hide a part of their true meaning. In fact, on this same model, the entire work of Villon hides a reflexive homophobia: the author is often the mouthpiece of Nature and life; his poetic work seems to be opposed to the general perversion of society, as well as its
vice
and
sterility
. This is evidenced, for example, in Villon’s violent criticisms against Bishop Thibault d’Aussigny, who had Villon arrested, and whom the poet accused of sodomy and practices
against nature
. After all, in poetry that was clearly more accessible than his
Ballades
, Villon integrated and assumed the homophobia of his era.
—Thierry Revol

Guiraud, Pierre.
Le Jargon de Villon ou le gai savoir de la coquille.
Paris: Gallimard, 1968.

Martin, Thierry.
Villon: Ballades en argot homosexuel
. Paris: Mille et une nuits, 1998.

Martineau-Génieys, Christine. “L’Homosexualité dans
Le Lais
et
Le Testament
de François Villon,”
Conformité et déviances au Moyen Age, Les Cahiers du CRISIMA
, no. 2 (1995).

Villon, François.
Poésies complètes
. Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 1991.

Villon hier et aujourd’hui, actes du colloque pour le 35e anniversaire de l’impression du Testament de Villon
. Bibliothèque de la Ville de Paris (December 15–17, 1989). Paris, 1993.

—Against Nature; Censorship; Damien, Peter; Literature; Theology.

VIOLENCE

The notion of “gratuitous” violence is a fallacy. There is a reason for every human action, and homophobic violence does not break this rule. But a serious reflection on homophobia (as on all forms of racism) cannot be confined to vague and impoverished notions of prejudice, representation, or even ideology. In refusing to reduce violence to simple irrational impulses, these notions try to wrest them from arbitrary madness and succeed in part to make them less absurd and less unintelligible. But if we try to identify the causes of physical or verbal aggression in a psychological coherence, we will fail to see their social and practical ground, and, more widely, their sociological “necessity.”

To avoid repeating the errors and proceedings of idealists and the politically correct—which believed they could change reality and make social violence disappear by simply changing the words through which it is expressed—homophobic violence (both verbal and physical) must be understood within a general economy of heterosexist domination. Certainly, this system of oppression translates into language and ideas, but it also materializes in the functioning of institutions (e.g.,
school, army, marriage
, family, the state, and the legal system); it objectivizes itself in the structures of physical space (particularly urban), and is inscribed even in bodies, crystallized in most everyday practices which put into play social dispositions that are durably interiorized by individuals and groups. The understandable interest for linguistic subtleties and the violence of micro-interactions must then be inserted in a global and historical understanding of the phenomena. One can understand, particularly, how social order and its agents abuse homosexuals and regularly collide with their “nature,” their identity, only if one understands at the same time that this identity (gay, lesbian, etc.) is constructed by oppression and in response to heterosexist domination. Homophobic violence is not absurd: it is the violence that a society reserves for its other, that part of itself which negatively defines it. To be gay or lesbian today is to be a child of that violence.

From Plural to Singular
Violence is defined as any number of abusive acts: physical, verbal, or symbolic; those that we feel, that we hear, and that we experience, ranging from the verbal
insults
of daily life to the mortal brutality of a baseball bat, through harassment, blackmail, and public demonstrations. As French sociologist Daniel Welzer-Lang contends, these homophobic acts of violence are perhaps more aptly described as
transphobic
: they are aimed less at same-sex love
per se
than “masculine” traits in women and “feminine” traits in men (i.e. therefore aim at persons who possess these traits without being homosexual). Often instigated by men, homophobic violence is usually motivated by sexuality and the reduction to the sexual, as is the case in the extreme example of the punitive rape of gays or lesbians. When the target is a lesbian, or perceived as such, the assault can be a punishment for the sexual unavailability of the victim toward not only the particular aggressors (there is often more than one), but also men in general, with whom the aggressors feel solidarity. When the rape victim is a gay man, it is, conversely (but not solely), his refusal or incapacity to “hold his rank” that is targeted.

Revealingly, while rapists do not always perceive the imposed and punitive sexual relation with a male homosexual as posing an explicit threat to their own heterosexuality (particularly because they do not think of the act itself as sexual relation, but as an action), they often take certain virile precautions intended to prevent the act from becoming
contagion
. These small yet significant rites are seen as necessary reparations for breaching the socio-sexual order.

However, the social efficacy of this physical violence—which, even in its most brutal forms, is never solely physical—and this verbal violence—which, even in its most euphemized forms, is always more than simply words—is not completely in the gesture or words which actualize it. Verbal and physical abuse hurts, but it hurts that much more if it means “This is what you are, a second-class citizen, an abnormal and inferior being.” By this interpolation, the attacker has the power to name without being named himself, to classify without being classified himself; to push his victim back into his social place by reminding him with each blow the superiority of “objective” norms and hierarchies. If these assaults can act inextricably on minds and bodies, it is because they are based on a
symbolic order
that they recite and reinforce. Such being the case, this order does not identify with a simple intellectual or political context that would be purely exterior to social actors, and would be exercised on them only in the mode of influence. Much more radically, the symbolic order penetrates to the most intimate of subjectivities, which it tends to produce in its image by creating individuals who spontaneously function according to its laws. Through “open” violence (which sometimes presents itself as only a threat), it literally summons the homosexual (or virtually homosexual) subject. Sometimes, it even paralyzes and renders him mute—as very often one does not have the words to describe oppression.

Thus, the violence of verbal or physical assaults draws its vexatious efficacy from a continuous social conditioning that precedes it, in part, and which results in thinking habits, practical reflexes, and schemes of perception. The assault acts somewhat like a trigger which, activating our acquired psychological mechanisms and our conditioned reactions, liberates and mobilizes in an instant all social violence and energy accumulated by the history of an individual and his collective oppression. In other words, if physical and verbal aggressions sometimes have apparently disproportionate consequences in relation to their tangible and material reality (a “simple” word, a “slight” look, a “minor” hazing), it is because they are only recalling what is under everyone’s nose, what is known and felt to the deepest of socialized consciences and bodies: they are that much more cruel and effective because what they say goes without saying.

The consequence of this systemic violence, reproduced in ordinary interactions, is often that it causes the repeated “enchanted submission” of victims, and this brought certain homosexuals to think of themselves in the language that is “
against nature
.” It is this “symbolic violence”—to recall sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s concept—which is exercised, whenever oppression is felt as legitimate or “normal,” and each time that a position dominated in the social relationships of gender or sexual identity come to be lived in the mode of “natural” evidence.