Sexuality's law.

• Author: Spindelman, Marc
• Position: III. The Ideology of Sexual Freedom: Proofs D. Leo Bersani, Is the Rectum a Grave? through Conclusion, p. 192-227

D. Leo Bersani, Is the Rectum a Grave?

Leo Bersani's essay Is the Rectum a Grave? (453)--published at the same time and in some of the same volumes as Crimp's How to Have Promiscuity in an Epidemic--is one of the most interesting and challenging essays on sexuality and its relation to HIV/AIDS written in the high years of the epidemic. It covers an amazing amount of sexual and political and conceptual ground, rehearsing and engaging and challenging and discarding many of the standard ways in which some gay men and "pro-sex" lesbians had been theorizing sexuality in efforts to make it more acceptable to the heterosexual (and homosexual) mainstream. While others were busy trying to prettify sex, to redeem it, particularly in the age of AIDS, Bersani set out to chart a different course. Traveling deep into sex's dark side, he sought to recover and name the "inestimable value" (454) of the gay sex so many others inside the gay community were busy denying and running from, even as they were sideways uttering the claim, as they looked back in horror, that sex was a value of, and for, the good. Fascinated by what they were all trying to escape, Bersani wanted to stare sex and its relation to death square in the face. When he did, he could not but marvel and celebrate it for its gruesome powers, and in particular, its capacity to humiliate, to injure, to smash, to shatter, and to destroy the self. Complexly written, once its code is cracked, Bersani's analysis comes close--of the texts engaged here, the closest--to a full-bodied embrace of the ideology of sexual freedom's erotics of death. Resoundingly, on both descriptive and normative levels, the rectum is a grave.

Bersani opens with two kinds of aversion to sex, (455) together widespread. The first, reflected in the "big secret" (456) about sex he shares--"most people don't like it" (457)--is summarily treated. A malignant version of aversion to sex--his principal concern-comes in for closer examination. It has, after all, been given a renewed lease on life by the emergence of AIDS, a "spectacle of suffering and death" that "has unleashed and even appeared to legitimize the impulse to murder." (458) This impulse to murder is, as Bersani initially describes it, fully heterosexualized: It is a straight lust to murder gays. Concretely, it can be seen operating in homophobic governmental policies that, among other things, have limited life-saving scientific research and medical services, and also promoted the stigmatization of, and attacks on, homosexuality, (459) all in effect numbering gays' days.

If these policies achieved gay deaths or would have largely by inaction, the murderous, anti-gay impulses of heterosexuals were also visible in threats of more direct gay-killing that hung heavy in the air. All these years later, the story Bersani retells that must continue to give "the greatest morbid delight" (460) is the one that "appeared in the London Sun under the headline 'I'd Shoot My Son if He Had AIDS, Says Vicar!' accompanied by a photograph of a man holding a rifle at a boy at pointblank range. The son, apparently more attuned to his father's penchant for violence than the respectable reverend himself, candidly add[s], 'Sometimes I think he would like to shoot me whether I had AIDS or not.'" (461) Gallows humor aside, Bersani is not venturing any very speculative claim. By his own compass, he is only surveying familiar ground. He thinks it obvious that political "power is in the hands of those [heterosexuals] who give every sign of being able to sympathize more with the murderous 'moral' fury of the good vicar than with the agony of a terminal KS patient." (462)

But, as if to establish the irrefutability of the point, Bersani catalogues other examples, including a U.S. Department of Justice opinion that "employers could fire employees with AIDS if they had so much as the suspicion that the virus could be spread to other workers, regardless of medical evidence," (463) as well as proposals for national quarantine camps, (464) which lead him to suggest that, if then-U.S. Attorney General Edwin Meese himself would not "hold a gun to the head of a man with AIDS, he might not find the murder of a gay man with AIDS (or without AIDS?) intolerable or unbearable." (465) The historical analogue is apparent: Bersani implies that being a gay man in Ronald Reagan's America is like being a Jew in Adolph Hitler's Germany. The rhetorical escalation is fevered, as Bersani is aware. But it does "not exaggerat[e] the hostility to homosexuality 'legitimized' by AIDS." (466) In any event, "being 'sensible,' we may soon find ourselves in situations where exaggeration will be difficult, if not impossible." (467) Homophobia being as intense as it is, gays are "officially regarded, in our entirety, as a disposable constituency." (468) AIDS--far from underscoring homophobia's social dangers or highlighting its moral monstrosity--has "made the oppression of gay men seem like a moral imperative." (469) What gays have for self-defense is "nothing but a moral argument" (470) that is "not even recognized as a moral argument," (471) a bleak picture marred by violence, hatred, and a will to kill gay men that is either actual or imminent, everywhere, its logical endpoint anti-gay genocide. Gays are "in our entirety, ... a disposable constituency," (472) living in a world in which heterosexuals have "a passionate yearning not to share the same planet with [US.]" (473)

Striking as it is on its own, this general survey of the American social scene in the era of HIV/AIDS is not provided as (or for) its own end. Much as anything else, it is presented as the raw social material from which individual desire--including sexual desire--is made. As readily apprehended as how these social forces inscribe themselves in and as heterosexual desire, itself captured and driven by a murderous anti-gay rage inflamed by AIDS, what that, in turn, means for gay men and their sexual desire, is, though equally important, somewhat less clear.

Bersani treads cautiously toward the answer he means to give, starting out with some social comparisons. "[A] gay man doesn't run the risk of loving his oppressor only in the ways in which blacks or Jews might more or less secretly collaborate with their oppressors--that is, as a consequence of the oppression, of that subtle corruption by which a slave can come to idolize power, to agree that he should be enslaved because he is enslaved, that he should be denied power because he doesn't have any." (474) That may be going on with gay men, too, but, Bersani continues, "blacks and Jews don't become blacks and Jews as a result of that internalization of an oppressive mentality, whereas that internalization is in part constitutive of male homosexual desire, which, like all sexual desire, combines and confuses impulses to appropriate and to identify with the object of desire." (475) Stated more affirmatively, homophobia, the "oppressive mentality" Bersani has in mind, "is in part constitutive of male homosexual desire," making it, and so gay sex, and so gay men, be what they are. In saying this, Bersani is not offering the standard observation that homosexuals' desire is marked by self-loathing. Far beyond that, his suggestion is that gay male desire has detectably been captured by a homophobic penchant for anti-gay violence that, undiluted, entails a heterosexualized "impulse to murder" gay men. (476) Lining his vision of gay desire up with the ideology of sexual freedom on a descriptive level at least, homosexuality partakes of an erotics of violence, of injury, and death, an erotics that, as in the ideology of sexual freedom, originates in a homophobic representation of homosexuality's threat--to sex and society itself. (477)

Gay male sexual desire being continuous with a homophobic erotics of death, gay men have a problem on their hands. Not only must gay men fight the forces of homophobia in the social world--fight the government's indifference to our deaths, its secret or not-so-secret delight at our suffering--in order to preserve our lives. We must also fight these forces as they are installed within us (478) as ideological male bodies that make us want, at the level of our own sexual desires, to give and take life--our own and others'--in, and as, sex. In Bersani's words: "An authentic gay male political identity therefore implies a struggle not only against definitions of maleness and of homosexuality as they are reiterated and imposed in a heterosexist social discourse, but also against those very same definitions so seductively and so faithfully reflected by those ... male bodies that we carry within us as permanently renewable sources of excitement." (479)

What form should these political struggles, partly against ourselves, thus take? How are we "to explode [these] ideological bod[ies]" (480) inside us? One tactic is denial: Pretend gay male sexuality is not what it is, in the hope that it might become what we want it to be. (481) Bersani rejects this approach, proposing instead that we follow "an arduous representational discipline" (482) that might enable us to destroy the ideologically-constructed heterosexual male bodies within us and what they make us do by--counterintuitively enough--throwing ourselves fully into our "nearly mad identification with [them]," (483) "never ceas[ing] to feel the appeal of [their] being violated." (484) Male heterosexual identity, with its oppressions of gay men, and, of course, of women, has shown itself "easily" (485) capable of "surviv[ing] social revolutions." (486) But, Bersani suspects, what male heterosexuality, and so its ideological byproducts, may not be able to withstand is its never-ending violation in sex. The problem here is that to embrace this project is to work to eliminate an integral feature of gay desire, hence the gay self. In an important sense, this pro-gay project is anti-gay to begin.

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