Richard Goldstein interview with James Baldwin in the late 80s for Village Voice, about race and LGBT struggles. Goldstein asks why “white gay men like me flamed with rage at the straight world”?. Baldwin responds:
Well, I think that’s because you are penalized, as it were, unjustly; you’re placed outside a certain safety to which you think you were born. A black gay person is already menaced and marked because he or she is black. The sexual question comes after the question of color. It’s simply one more aspect of the danger in which all black people live. I think white gay people feel cheated because they were born into a society where they were supposed to be safe. The anomaly of their sexuality puts them in danger unexpectedly. Their reaction seems to me in direct proportion to the sense of feeling cheated of the advantages that accrue to white people in white society.
The second is from Guy Hocquenghem’s blistering book “The Screwball Asses”, I think originally written as part of Guattari’sRecherches journal
I could tell a third story. But its protagonists have taken it upon themselves to recount it in a text published here entitled “Arabs and Us.” Very rarely have the twists of homosexual desire been exposed with such stupefying honesty by those who experience them, and anyone who has read the text has been plagued by intense, almost nauseating, doubt. A majority of readers will probably escape such feelings by filing the text away as pathological. The text, however, does not incriminate its own admissions, but those that remain untold, by which we mean the well-heeled forms of homosexual (or simply sexual) activity of those who experience, upon reading it, the slightest hint of nausea.
Such perversions are not mine, as I am certainly more bourgeois, yet they push me to question why I disdain the practices they describe and the spirit of such practices. I can’t get out of this by saying it points to pure sexual misery where joy and true sharing are absent. I know only too well that joy is rare and that it is almost always the result of period privilege (certain primitives), privilege of age (certain children) or class (certain marginal bourgeois).
I have been privileged to encounter many dicks, not only Arab ones, many Arabs, and not only their dicks, but this does not give me the right to criticize or to reject a sexual structure that avowedly attains its highest pleasure only with Arabs and only with their dicks. The boys speaking in “Arabs and Us” do not declare their obsessions to be gospel; on the contrary, they insidiously imply that whoever condemns them can only do so in the name of some gospel or another.
What does the text say? The scene is Paris, but the background is the paradise of the Moroccan countryside, uncontaminated as yet by urban capitalist relations and where a subsistence economy subsists. The myth of the primitive operates in full force, ejaculation returns to precocious and brutal ingenuity, and one could easily become an Arab there oneself. But return to Paris is inevitable, and there, Arabs are no longer admirable Arcadian shepherds but industrial sub-proletarians. And that is where things get complicated. It is out of the question to open a whorehouse for Arabs in which we would be the whores, as it was in Marrakech. There is no escaping economics. Everything reverts to spectacle and exploitation. In this gigantic spectacle, the bourgeoisie directs the spectacle of the proletariat, but it is the proletariat who produces the bourgeoisie and its particularisms.
What the young gay man says to the Arab is still an avowal of guilt: “The bourgeoisie exploits you, my father exploits you, so fuck me!” And he might add: “Doing this in my country, under the Clichy Bridge, is sordid; but in your country, in the bushes of Essaouira, it’s so wonderful!” Class struggle, class masochism, what hides beneath this artificial appropriation of the primitive?
In “Arabs and Us,” some homosexual boys explain to us that their desire is looking for the primitive and the oppressed. But what they are looking for, instead, is someone that is the least capable of exerting power over them, and yet this social victim is the most male chauvinist of all. We might even say that bodies with a phallus but no penis are drawn towards bodies which have a penis without a phallus. What an extraordinary desire, not only does it satisfy itself, it commits a political act as an alibi: I get fucked in the ass by the people my father and grandfather have fucked in the colonial wars, before doing so in their factories. But such an equation is absolutely false: I lend my ass for fifteen minutes to someone that the bourgeoisie has mythically sodomized its entire life, to the point of perfecting in him the male pride that was already instilled by Islam.
Such an attitude might perhaps stand a chance of disrupting the mechanism of established roles if the European shouted at the Arab: “Your virility is insolent! I love it!” and if the Arab responded: “So, you recognize I am a beautiful male! You can sodomize me now!” That particular Arab would then escape his archetypical socio-sexual category. But it is already a rare occurrence to encounter an Arab who accepts to play the sodomized on the condition of being the active sodomite in the end. What is nonexistent, in “Arabs and Us,” is the Arab who agrees to sodomize only if he is then sodomized in turn. There is reason for this: the latter would be Westernized, he would produce meaning instead of producing such animality as coded by Mohammed or Coca-Cola, and would no longer interest those queers who run after Arabs and who proclaim it in their confession.
If we read this confession a couple of times, without hostile a prioris, we discover that it contains a certain number of postulates. First, as we have seen, desire is cut off from the slightest revolutionary project: if an Arab has begun his sexual revolution, he is excluded from sex. Roles are not broken but granted. And let us add, so that there can be no misunderstanding on our part, racism must be enacted sexually: the sexuality of the queers speaking to us in this text demands racism as a particular form of exogamy; although, we cannot imagine how this racism might finally be wiped out.
Secondly, pleasure is radically separated from the confrontation of people, from all the Vaselines of psychology, in short, from all communication other than organic penetration. The homosexuals who concern us here segregate pleasure and communication. One of them proclaims the following sentence before a microphone, which is then communicated to us in writing: “Communication is a fucking bore!” The only remaining power relation is the muscular relation. So here we have the erection alone in its cage, a machine that does not believe it is human, nothing but pure machine. Love with a big “F” has assassinated love with a big “L,” thank God.
In the end, what have Arabs become in this story where a thrust of the dick will never abolish chance? They are a collection of dildos, and we must not forget that a collector is always somehow a bourgeois. Turning his back to this pack of utensils and opening his ass to them, the Arab chaser queer dreams of being killed by a dick that obliterates his own, by an ivory dick, as he says, a primitive gadget that will transform him, in phantasm, into a hole without a dick, a dramatized woman, and that will deliver divine death to him.
If I now admit that such extreme behavior bewilders me and that perhaps I dream of it, my analysis will have been too critical to be believed. But the tape player that tells the story of “Arabs and Us” keeps turning in my head, and I hear a sentence repeat like a broken record. One of the boys keeps saying: “There must be no dupes! I don’t want there to be dupes! There are no dupes! There are no dupes! There are no dupes!” And yet, he and his comrades propose a form of intellectuality that consumes primitive virility and cultivates phallocracy, all the while imposing its cultural law. And everyone is duped.
But this confession is exemplary nonetheless. Not all homosexuals experience such adventures, which they believe to be dangerous, and even these confessions make them cringe. Those who live them and dare tell about it at least do so fully. The bourgeoisie did not leave us many pathways to homosexuality; there is just one, all others lead to flight or masquerade. The text “Arabs and Us” gives an excellent picture of that path. Those who speak there are dupes but certainly not liars. Rather, the other queers are the liars or actors, who play either the comedy of the bourgeoisie or the comedy of the revolution.
