Perhaps this is only a simulation of a passage.
By reading, do we halt it?
By reading, do we move it along? Do we move along it?
But, now, we’d best let Helva have back her screw and get on with her work.
Pace, and good luck, Ms. Haraway, with yours.
Aversion/Perversion/Diversion
After an introduction by George Cunningham, this talk was delivered at Scott Hall, Rutgers University, 8:00 p.m., Friday night, on November 1, 1991, at the Fifth Annual Lesbian and Gay Conference on Gay Studies.
Aversion, perversion, diversion — the topics of my talk — present us at the outset with their intensely overlapping euphony, their entwined etymologies — sharing much with the Latin “proversus,” source of “prose,” “verse,” “verb,” and “proverb.” Certainly they start with the suggestion of three very inter-confused topics. Nor is that confusion allayed by my further explaining that my talk tonight will be about neither “inversion” nor “reversion”—that is, it will not be about “homosexuality,” female or male, considered as some notion either of the masculine or of the feminine inverted, negated, turned inside out or upside down to produce the “lesbian” or the “gay male,” a production presumably re- coupable by the simplest uncritical reversion to its former state — no matter how violent the effort needed, a violence too often justified by the very simplicity of the move.
But whatever confusions I bring you this evening, I shall assume that basically you have asked me here as a storyteller. So let me say that, true to my triplet topics — aversion, perversion, and diversion — the tales I shall tell are tales that trouble me. Something about them makes me want either to turn away from them, or to turn their telling away from the pattern the tale made when it was presented to me.
There is, of course, a tale I would very much like to tell. The protagonist of that story is without sex. He or she is wholly constituted by gender — female, male, gay male, lesbian. What’s more, our protagonist is unaware of any contradictions in the constitutive process, so that his or her blissfully smooth, seamless self may be called “natural,” “unalienated,” “happy”—or what-you-will.
Our hero — for certainly she must be a hero — never does anything that is ego-distonic, that does not please her. All her actions — purposeful, habitual, gratuitous — are ego-tonic. They feel good.
The only unpleasant things that befall her inevitably originate outside the self. Whether she is defeated by them or triumphant over them, their external origin is a knowledge she is secure in. I hope we can all recognize in the basic situation here the story of that most glorious political comedy that we have yet been able to erect in the name of liberation.
I adore it as much as anyone.
But it worries me; for while it can make me thrill, rejoice, and wildly applaud, it never makes me weep — other than in joy… and from what I know of the world, that is something to worry about. That is why I’m worried.
There was a movie theater in New York once, called the Cameo, whose screen provender was heterosexual commercial porn, whose clientele was overwhelmingly male, and whose management encouraged a high level of homosexual activities in its corridors, stairwells, side seats, and — to a lesser extent — its bathrooms; and, in its upper balcony, a somewhat lower level of drug commerce and use.
Of the many hundreds of men with whom I had sex there over more than a decade, from a dozen or so regulars with whom I had a settled and comfortable routine to a cavalcade of one-, two-, or three-time-en-counters, a number stand out. One such was a young man, white, with dark hair, of about twenty-five, who usually wore a suit jacket — in a population largely black and Hispanic and usually in jeans and sport shirts. Sitting on the right-hand side of the theater, a seat apart, we had exchanged some five or ten minutes of furtive eye contact, when he motioned me to sit beside him.
As we began to touch each other, he leaned toward me to whisper, in a light, working-class accent associated with the outlying boroughs of the city, “You know, I’ve never done anything like this before. All the other sex I’ve ever had has been with women. But somebody told me about this place. So I just thought…” He shrugged. And we continued, easily enough considering his virgin status, to some satisfaction for us both.
Three months later, visiting the theater once more, after a stroll down one aisle and up the other, I noticed the same young man, again sitting off on the side. Recalling our last encounter, I slid in immediately to sit a seat away from him, smiled, and said softly, “Hi!” This time, he motioned me to the next seat right away, grinning and saying hello. As we began to touch each other, again he bent forward to explain: “You know, I’ve never done this before — with a man, I mean. I’ve had sex with women, sure. But this is my first time doing it with a guy…”
I thought better of contradicting him. We went on as before — with the same results.
Some months later, when I met him there again, he actually began talking to me by saying, “Hello! Good to see you. How’ve you been?” quite ready to acknowledge that we knew each other. But when, in a moment, we started to touch, again he whispered: “You know, this is the first time I’ve ever done this — with a man, I mean…”
What troubles me in the memory of these encounters is, of course, how much of myself I can see in this fellow. His litany, like some glorious stutter, recalls Freud’s dictum: repetition is desire.
But I have no way, at this date, to ascertain whether he experienced that desire as sexual predilection or as social fear. Was his endlessly renewed homosexual virginity (with its corresponding claim of heterosexual experience) part of the person he felt he must be to be sexually attractive? Or was that portable closet, that he was perpetually just stepping out of, merely some silly and encumbering excuse that could have been dispensed with by the proper enlightenment — the simple revelation that, other than himself, no one at the Cameo he was likely to run into really cared.
The fact that the latter represents, however, a certain level of common sense is what suggests that the fantasy itself might be part of the sexual order of his desire. But the social marginality of the situation, and the extreme behavioral range in that margin — for the breadth of human experience generally remaining outside one sub-language or another is far greater than what, from time to time, over-spills into the centers of articulation — militates for a social interpretation.
What was he averring socially?
What was he averring sexually?
And certainly it does not take much to see the two as diverging dramatically.
But it was precisely my lack of concern with these questions, plus a general sympathy for the eccentric (and he was good looking), that let me move with him through the labyrinths of mutual desire without questioning such contradictions.
The first time I taught for a full term at an American university, I had my thirty-second birthday while there as a Visiting Professor. As sometimes happens when a writer comes to a new school, a handful of the brighter students attached themselves to me, and soon I felt that some of those students had even become my friends. Among them was a brilliant young Hispanic woman, who, for the sake of the telling, I’ll call Carla, and who, while I knew her, had her nineteenth birthday.
Full-figured, with black hair and astonishing gray-green eyes, Carla turned a questioning energy on everything about her. She was an attractive personality for anyone who enjoyed the pleasures of thinking for its own sake.