Quite possibly not much.
The point to the notion of Gay Identity is that, in terms of a transcendent reality concerned with sexuality per se (a universal similarity, a shared necessary condition, a defining aspect, a generalizable and inescapable essence common to all men and women called “gay”), I believe Gay Identity has no more existence than a single, essential, transcendental sexual difference. Which is to say, I think the notion of Gay Identity represents the happily only partial congruence of two strategies, which have to do with a patriarchal society in which the dominant sexual ideology is heterosexist.
In terms of heterosexist oppression of gays, Gay Identity represents a strategy for tarring a whole lot of very different people with the same brush: Billy, Mike, my perpetual virgin — at least, that is, if the people with the tar believe in a transcendent difference between male and female. (For those are precisely the people who historically have contrived to keep male homosexuality not talked of and lesbianism trivial.) And if, on the other hand, they simply believe deviance is deviance, then it includes as well, you, me, Carla, and Hank. The tar is there in order to police a whole range of behaviors — not only in terms of the action that is language but also in terms of the language that human actions themselves must generate, including the language of these tales tonight.
In terms of gay rights, Gay Identity represents one strategy by which some of the people oppressed by heterosexism may come together, talk, and join forces to fight for the equality that certain egalitarian philosophies claim is due us all. In those terms, what we need these stories for is so that we don’t get too surprised when we look at — or start to listen to — the person sitting next to us. That person, after all, might be me, or Hank, or Mike — or anyone else I’ve spoken of this evening. In those terms, Gay Identity is a strategy I approve of wholly, even if, at a theoretical level, I question the existence of that identity as having anything beyond a provisional or strategic reality. Nor do I seek what Jane Gallup has written of so forcefully as some sort of liberation from identity itself that would lead only to another form of paralysis — “the oceanic passivity of undifferentiation” (The Daughter’s Seduction, Ithaca: Cornell, 1982, p.xii). For me, Gay Identity — like the joys of Gay Pride Day, weekends on Fire Island, and the delight of tickets to the opera — is an object of the context, not of the self — which means, like the rest of the context, it requires analysis, understanding, interrogation, even sympathy, but never an easy and uncritical acceptance.
That is to say, its place is precisely in the politically positivist comedy of liberation we began with — but probably nowhere else. But the reason why that partial congruence between the two strategies is finally happy, is because it alone allows one group to speak, however inexactly, with the other. It allows those who have joined together in solidarity to speak to those who have been excluded; and, to me even more important, it allows the excluded to speak back. That very partial congruence is the linguistic element of the conduit through which any change, as it manifests a response by a vigorous and meaningful activism, will transpire.
Again: in a field of heterosexist dominance and homophobic oppression, however much the policing of what is allowed into language has broadened since the late sixties, the bulk of the extraordinarily rich, frightening, and complex sexual landscape has been — and remains — outside of language. Most of it will remain there for quite some time. It is precisely because I have talked of it as much as I have that I am so hugely aware of how little of it I have actually spoken. But because that sexual landscape is not articulated in certain orders of language — written language, say, of a certain formality — does not mean it doesn’t exist. Nor does it mean that its effects as a pervasive context do not inform other articulations, that either do not reflect it directly or that reflect only a highly coded, heavily policed portion of it.
From time to time I have been accused — I have always taken it as praise — of trying to put the sex back in homosexuality. Here, not as a matter of nostalgia, but to facilitate an analytical and theoretical precision, I am trying to trouble the notion both of what we aver and what we are averse to, in its perversity and its diversity — or, if you will, through occasional appeals to the averse, I am trying to put a bit of the perversity back into perversion.
I hope many of you so inclined will welcome it. And to all of you tonight: Love, luxury, justice, and joy.
Thank you.
Shadow and Ash
1. Rhetoric is the ash of discourse.
2. Probably in the winter of 1797–98, in what has become known as The Gutch Memorandum Notebook, Samuel Taylor Coleridge jotted down the sweepingly sonorous verses:
the prophetic soul
of the wide world dreaming on things to come —
In those 95 sheets that served him over some three years as commonplace book, journal, and project notebook, after a few more entries, including some odd lines from Shakespeare’s sonnets and a tercet that grew into the third verse paragraph of “Christobel,” Coleridge copied out a glorious description of alligators from a travel book by one William Bartram with the sesquipedalian title Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida, the Cherokee Country, the Extensive Territories of the Muscogulges, or Creek Confederacy, and the Country of the Chactaws; containing an Account of the Soil and Natural Production of these Regions, together with Observations on the Manners of the Indians. After about a page, the transcription is interrupted by a paragraph-long entry on an accident with Coleridge’s infant son:
— Hartley fell down & hurt himself — I caught him up crying & screaming — & ran out of doors with him. — The Moon caught his eye — he ceased crying immediately — & his eyes & the tears in them, how they glittered in the Moonlight!
Then, after the mention of a “wilderness plot, green & fountainous & unviolated by man” (an image that perhaps helped to hold the winter at bay), Coleridge goes back to transcribing Bartram on alligators; followed by Bartram on the flowering Gordonia Lasianthus; followed by Bartram on the snake-bird…
In his magisterial study The Road to Xanadu (1927), John Livingston Lowes suggests that these New World alligators are the Ur-versions of the archaic sea monsters that would wriggle and slither over the waters of “The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere, in Seven Parts,” as it would be titled when, just after the famous “Preface,” it opens Lyrical Ballads (printed by Biggs and Cottle for T. N. Longman, Paternoster-Row, London) in 1798. Certainly Bartram’s and Coleridge’s water beasts share, as Lowes points out, both aspects and adjectives.
At the end of his cadenza (“Chaos”) on the riches of the Gutch (the notebook eventually passed into the hands of Coleridge’s schoolmate, John Matthew Gutch, from whom it was purchased by the British Museum in 1868: hence the name), Lowes mentions half a dozen Coleridge poems with germs lying among the fragments he has exegeted: “Christobel,” “The Wanderings of Cain,” “The Nightingale,” “Kubla Khan,” “Lewti,” “Love,” “Fears in Solitude,” “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (the revised title that would eventually head the poem, along with the addition of the marginal rubrics), and even Wordsworth’s “Ruth.”