The sexual experience is still largely outside language — at least as it (language) is constituted at any number of levels.
Ludmilla Jordanova’s book Sexual Visions (University of Wisconsin, 1989) is a stunningly fine and informed study of gender images in science and medicine over the last three hundred years. It was recommended to me by a number of astute readers. I have since recommended it to a number of others perusing like topics of concern.
In its preface, however, Jordanova takes to task Paula Weideger’s book, History’s Mistress (Viking Penguin, 1985), which reprints a selection of extracts from an 1885 book by a gynecologist, Ploss, Woman: a Historical, Gynecological and Anthropological Compendium. Writes Jordanova of Weideger: “Her fictional scenario is supposed to make the point that the thirty-two photographs of breasts in the 1935 English edition are included for prurient reasons. Yet the way she makes the point, her chosen title, and the whole presentation of her book, serve to heighten any sense of titillation in readers and buyers.”
Jordanova then goes on to advise, most wisely, a careful study of such works and their circumstances in order to understand the objects they represent.
Yes, a wise suggestion. But the problem with such a suggestion is that such works — especially in 1935, if not 1885—belonged to a category which tried as carefully and as ruthlessly as possible to exclude the specifically sexual component from all the language around them. Some years ago, I talked to a handful of men, fifteen to thirty years older than I, who recalled using such books as pornography in their youth. What made such works both accessible and pornographic was precisely that the sexual was excluded from any overt mention: it is not absurd to assume that art works, medical works, and legal works occupied such a position all through the nineteenth and the first three- quarters of the twentieth century — especially given that 150 years’ proscription on pornography per se. But the problematics of dealing with sexual research in periods when much of sexual discourse was all but nonverbal is as much a problem for the historian of heterosexuality as it is for the historian of Gay Studies.
Because both today and in earlier times what of the sexual that was allowed into language is notably more than what was allowed in during that period of extraordinary official proscription any of us over forty can still remember, we must not assume that “everything” is ever articulated; we are still dealing with topics that were always circumscribed by a greater or lesser linguistic coding and a greater or lesser social policing. Because Alexander Kojeve and Jerome Carcopino have discussed the double writing of the Emperor Julian and Cicero, and because Robert Martin has traced a like process going on in Melville’s tales of the sea, we must not forget that double codes as well as single codes still exclude, still police. They simply do it at two stages for two audiences — even if one of those audiences is gay. And what is excluded by the code, that code functions specifically by excluding. And because the whole analytical bastion of psychoanalysis lies there to talk about repression both in the areas of the socially articulated and the socially unarticulated, we must not fall into any easy uncritical alignment of the socially excluded with the unconscious and the socially articulated with the conscious. Repressions takes place at a wholly other economic order.
It is often hard for those of us who are historians of texts and documents to realize that there are many things that are directly important for understanding hard-edged events of history, that have simply never made it into texts or documents — not because of unconscious repression but because a great many people did not want them to be known. And this is particularly true about almost all areas of sex.
Though our academic object as textual explicators must begin with what is articulated in a given text, we must always reserve a margin to deal with what is excluded from articulation, no matter the apparent inclusiveness.
That goes just as much for my tales this evening as it does for Musil’s Young Torless or Gide’s The Immoralist. It goes just as much for Hall’s The Well of Loneliness or Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle. It goes just as much for the text collected by a sociologist from a gay informant, female or male, who is being questioned about the realities of gay history.
In 1987 I published an autobiography a good deal of whose motivation was to retrieve various historical articulations in just this context, as I had observed it between the years 1957 and 1965. The advent of AIDS made, I feel, absolutely imperative an inflated level of sexual honesty that dwarfs the therapeutic exhortations for sexual openness that can be seen as the fallout of a certain industrial progress in methods of birth control coupled with Freud’s, if not Reich’s, sexual ethics, and enhanced with the political strategy, dating from Stonewall, of “coming out” (a strategy devised specifically to render the sexual blackmailer without power)… a code, a police action if you will, that controls a good deal of what I say here.
It seems to me that when one begins to consider the range of diversities throughout the sexual landscape, then even the unquestioned “normalcy” of the heterosexual male, whose sexual fantasies are almost wholly circumscribed by photographs of… female movie stars! suddenly looks — well, I will not say, “less normal.” But I will say that it takes on a mode of sexual and social specificity that marks it in the way every other one of these tales is marked, i.e., as perverse.
Similarly, the heterosexual woman whose fantasies entail a man who is wholly faithful to her, and whom, only while he is wholly faithful, does she find sexually attractive, but whom upon showing any sexual interest in another woman — heaven forfend that it be another man — immediately is rendered sexually unacceptable to her; well — like the male above, her sexual condition seems only a particular form of a socially prescribed perversion — one that I could even, for a while, see myself getting behind. Certainly, it would be no more difficult than getting off on someone licking my sneakers. (And it would be, for me, a lot easier than getting off on female movie stars — or most male ones, for that matter.) But both strike me, as do all the other situations I have described tonight, as socially constituted and perverse. And in this case, for all my sympathy, neither perversion happens to be mine.
Similarly, when one surveys the range of fetishes, at a certain point one begins to see that the sexualizing of a hand, a glove, a foot, a shoe, a breast, a brassiere, a buttock, a pair of panties, a jock strap, a sailor’s uniform, a policeman’s uniform, a riding crop, a cigar, a swastika, or the genitals themselves — whether the possessor be a man or a woman — all work essentially by the same mechanism. All are generalizable and proscribable. All, if you will, are fetishes.
But even as we recover ourselves — at this moment of general inclu- siveness — I hope for at least a few moments I have been able to maneuver some of you this evening into thinking: “Is this what Gay Identity is supposed to be? What does all this sneaker licking, drunken undergraduate mischief, and another sob-story of a hapless drug user have to do with my sexuality — my gay identity?” For certainly raising that question was precisely my intention. I said these tales were to trouble. And the troubling answer I would pose is fundamentally as simple as any of the tales themselves: