Rather we talked about the burgeonings of our sexual awareness, in the family, in school, in the street, and in the times we moved from one to the other, now in our early summer camp experiences, now on our visits to cousins in the country, or with playmates away, at last, from overseeing adults. We talked mostly of happenings that occurred before ages thirteen and fourteen, and of experiences that certainly seemed, for both of us then, directly constitutive of who, sexually, we had become. Both of us, again and again, were astonished at how many experiences we shared, how many of the separate lessons that we’d learned were clearly congruent, and how much of the stuff of the initial awareness of the sexual — from the body out — seemed all but identical for the two of us. But, given the time we had our conversation, no one had yet told us that we were supposed to be all that different. Hank remarked on the similarities. So did I.
For better or for worse, the solidarity I feel with many lesbians is still based on such experiences. What my understanding of that vastly differing context explains for me is why those conversations are rarer for me with women than with men. An understanding of that vastly differing context allows me to translate from women’s experiences to mine — when such translation is possible. An understanding of that vastly differing context explains for me why so frequently no translation takes place at all. But what that context does not do in any way is validate the notion for me of some transcendental, irreducible sexual difference between men and women, either in terms of sex or gender, straight or gay, a difference that becomes the ground for any and every social difference one might want to elaborate from it. Indeed, it is precisely my understanding of the specific complexity of the context that makes an acceptance of that irreducible and transcendental difference impossible for me.
Certainly the identification I speak of is always partial, problematic, full of mistakes and misreadings… But that is my experience with any identification I feel with any other, male, female, gay, straight…
Thus even the similarities are finally, to the extent they are living ones, a play of differences — only specific ones, socially constituted. Not transcendental ones.
Thinking about discussing this with you tonight, I was wondering at the same time about the inside/outside metaphor that common sense so frequently asks us to use — but which has come under an intensive critique in recent years.
For, in terms of the progression of my didactic narrative argument, we are about to take up the phrases “inside language” and “outside language.”
I did not tell Hank all my stories.
Doubtless, she did not tell me all hers.
I told her, for example, none of the stories I’ve so far told here. And the stories I did tell — it occurred to me when I was reviewing the incident for inclusion in this account tonight — were, none of them, included in the autobiography I wrote twenty years later… though I still remember them very well! Which is to say, they still remain largely outside language.
Diana Fuss has written, introducing the fine volume she edited, Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories (New York: Routledge, 1991): “The figure of ‘inside/outside’ cannot easily or ever finally be dispensed with; it can only be worked on and worked over — itself turned inside out to expose its critical operations and internal machinery” (p. 1).
Fuss begins the argument I have quoted from the “philosophical opposition between ‘heterosexual’ and ‘homosexual,’” heterosexuals representing the inside and homosexuals the outside. But I think there’s a finer economy of inside and outside where her point is just as valid: that is the notion of sexuality itself as always occurring partly inside language and partly outside it.
I am not speaking of a hypostatized language as an unarticulated totality, beside which some sex acts occur in an ideal silence apart from the word, while others are swaddled in a constant, approved, and privileged discourse. I speak rather of language as an articulated and variegated set of discursive fields, many of them interpenetrating, but many of whose distinct levels bear a host of economic relations one to another. Some of those levels are privileged, some are not; some are notably more ephemeral than others. These levels fall into hierarchies of reproducibility, accessibility, and permanence. And some never leave that most ephemeral state — that internal speech of the individual we call unarticulated thought. In that sense, of course, all human activity is inside language. But by the very same set of distinctions, all human activity takes place inside certain orders of language and outside certain others — and that is the force of the metaphor behind what I’ve said about activities inside language and outside language till now, as it will be behind what I have to say in the discussion to come.
As comfortable as I am calling the tales I tell here “true,” these tales are nevertheless quite coded — coded as to their selection, as to their narrative form, as to their referents, their texture, and their structures; and the conventions that code them were more or less sedimented well before the incidents that prompted the accounts took place. Despite their sedimentation, however, these codes have also shifted with history: such tales certainly could not have been told, say, thirty-five years ago at a formal, public, university gathering — inside this particular order of language.
No less coded — and no less true — is this last of my tales. Its coding today may even be the most self-evident, the most obvious.
One bright, November afternoon, as I was passing just across the street from the theater I was telling you about before, a young man in his early twenties, slight and half-a-head shorter than I, came up to me. Pretty clearly Irish American, he was wearing a jean jacket and a broad smile. His hands were in his pockets, and, in the sunny chill, he breathed out white wisps. “Hey, you want to get together with me? I seen you comin’ around here a lot. Somebody told me you write science fiction. I like that stuff. I read it all the time. Makin’ it with somebody who writes about spaceships, and time machines, and flying saucers and stuff, that’d be pretty cool.”
I laughed. “Sorry,” I told him. “Not today.” And went on about my business.
A few days later I passed him again, and again he approached me: “Hey — when are you an’ me going to get together?”
Smiling, I shook my head and walked on.
Days later — the third time I passed him — he called me over to a doorway he was standing in and, when I came, bombarded me in an intense whisper with a detailed and salacious account of what he could do for me. He finished up: “And I ain’t expensive either. Man, I’m a street person. I can’t afford to charge high prices — isn’t that a bitch? I just want to make enough to get high.”
“Look,” I said. “First of all what’s your name?”
Let’s say he said it was Billy.
“Billy,” I said, shaking his offered hand, “I was about to get something to eat. I’ll buy you a sandwich. But that’s all.”
“Sure,” he said. “It’s a start. Maybe something’ll develop.”
“Nothing’s going to develop,” I told him, “except a sandwich. But come on.”
At a hot-plate bar two blocks south on Eighth Avenue, I had a pastrami on rye, while Billy had a roast beef on whole wheat, which he ate with two or three fingers of both hands pushing and working inside his mouth, for seconds at a time, to tear the food apart. No beer; he just wanted a soda. While he drank it, he listed the titles and summarized the plots of the last dozen science fiction novels he’d read. I allowed as to how he had good taste. Wiping at his mouth with his napkin, he apologized: “You know, I used to be a pretty neat eater, would you believe it? But I guess living out here, I’m turning into kind of a pig. It’s my teeth. They give me a lot of trouble, and a lot of things I can’t really chew. How come you won’t give me a tumble?”