The Fake and Gay Self

There is no framework for subjectivity

Our faith comes in moments; our vice is habitual.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Over-Soul.

I’ve now caught up with

David Sessions

’s informative series on Michel Foucault’s L’histoire de la Sexualité, but it has not much altered my judgement of the most influential “humanist” of the latter part of the twentieth century. Perhaps it is because my own response to the question of what it means to be gay is quite different from the one David hints at in a recent post describing his interest in Foucault’s later writings:

I wanted to read Foucault more closely because I’ve had a slowly dawning sense, reading other gay intellectuals, of finding a style of thought that I had been looking for, beginning to hazily elaborate to myself. The starting point for that was perhaps the awareness that I found the available frameworks for gay subjectivity thin and ill-fitting, particularly the “born this way” story. (I’ve often said that even if we accept a determinist etiology of homosexuality, to which I have no objection in principle, the “choice” part is still by far more important.) In other words, I was looking for a framework with more ethical agency: if one chooses to be gay, why? What exactly are we choosing? Why would we?

The phrase “chooses to be gay” reminds me of the answer Jean Genet gave when Playboy magazine asked him why he decided to be a thief, a traitor and a homosexual:

I didn’t decide, I didn’t make any decision. But there are certain facts. If I started stealing, it’s because I was hungry… As for homosexuality, I have no idea… Homosexuality was imposed on me like the color of my eyes, the number of my feet… It’s only after becoming aware of this attraction that I “decided,” that I freely “chose” my homosexuality, in the Sartrian sense.

The man Sartre called “Saint Genet”

This Sartrian freedom to choose what has already been decided strikes me as a rather empty and frankly Eurocentric notion of freedom. Buddhism tells us that there is no self. (Hume agreed.) Can nothing be gay? Can nothing be not gay? But accepting for the sake of argument that there is such a thing as a self and that this self can in some sense be chosen, I have personally come to consider being gay to be an almost trivial part of the package. To channel Whitman through Ginsberg through Gorman, I am so much more than my sex and my sexuality, so much more than my body and my mind and my country and my planet: I am the full moon reflected on the ocean, I am the sparkle in the eye of the Queen of Sheba, I am motherfathering everything.¹ This is the American religion that I have been taught by Ralph Waldo Emerson and William James and John Pistelli, not the mediocre ambition of a gay (or queer or trad) subjectivity. I didn’t choose to be gay; as Hedwig said of her angry inch: “it’s what I have to work with”. Gay love has brought me immense joy² and even moments of transcendence. But if transcendence is the point, it is no use idolising the means of getting there.

In response to David’s post My Year in Gay Novels, I declared that my personal gay novel of 2024 was Iris Murdoch’s 1970’s A Fairly Honourable Defeat, whose zany cast of characters includes the same-sex couple Axel and Simon, who are as good as married despite the stark differences in their gay subjectivities:

Axel hated the least suggestion of 'camp'. He banned homosexual jokes and indeed risqué jokes of any kind, nor would he tolerate upon Simon's lips the cant language of the homosexual world; although he was now prepared with misgivings to accept the word 'queer', which Simon represented to him as being by this time a general usage and not a term of art. 'Nothing,' declared Axel, 'is more boring than homosexuals who can talk about nothing but homosexuality.’ Simon, who almost always gave way to Axel, relinquishes these trivia with a certain regret. It was a myth of their relationship that Simon's life before he met Axel had been depressing and even sordid, but this was only half true. It was indeed Simon's nature to seek to give his heart, and to want to give it entirely, and unresponsive and unfaithful partners, of whom he had had many, had caused him much unhappiness. Yet he had enjoyed some of his adventures and liked the jokey parochial atmosphere of the gay bars which he had been used to frequent in the old days before Athens and Axel. His philosophy had been: one offers oneself in various quarters and one hopes for love. The love he had hoped for was real love. But the search had had its lighter side.

What interests Murdoch, of course, is intersubjectivity. How can we love a whole other person? What gets in the way? In The Sovereignty of Good Over Other Concepts (first delivered as a lecture in 1967), Murdoch insists on attending to the unflattering picture that “modern psychology” paints of us, something Foucault, with his rejection of Freud, seems intent on ignoring:

The psyche is a historically determined individual relentlessly looking after itself. In some ways it resembles a machine; in order to operate it needs sources of energy, and it is predisposed to certain patterns of activity. The area of its vaunted freedom of choice is not usually very great. One of its main pastimes is day-dreaming. It is reluctant to face unpleasant realities. Its consciousness is not normally a transparent glass through which it views the world, but a cloud of more or less fantastic reverie designed to protect the psyche from pain. It constantly seeks consolation, either through imagined inflation of self or through fictions of a theological nature. Even its loving is more often than not an assertion of self. I think we can probably recognise ourselves in this rather depressing description.

In this sense Freud was, as Philip Rieff recognised, a moralist. While we can easily set aside Freud’s more idiosyncratic theories about the precise psychosexual origin of our unconscious desires, it seems perilous to me to deny the importance of these unchosen desires in formulating any kind of sexual ethics.³ In Part II of his series, David writes:

Foucault notes that while Christian moral thinking will (eventually) be full of precise descriptions of which sexual acts are acceptable, Greek moralists said almost nothing about specific positions or sex acts.

Eventually! In contrasting Christian and Greek moral attitudes toward sex, I don’t think we can ignore the legacy that the former inherited from Mosaic law. And I would argue that the anatomically specific denunciation of sexual sin that later Christian Pharisees indulged in has little to do with “Christian moral thinking”, properly considered.

I have no personal experience with heterosexuality, but I would like to believe that, contra Babygirl, to love a woman is not to treat her like a dog.⁴ Conversely, to love a dog is not to treat her like a woman. To arrive at this conclusion, we don’t need doctrines of Jus Naturale or Ordo Amoris, we simply (although it is far from simple) need to pay close attention to the individual in front of us.

L’affaire Gaiman has predictably prompted a small chorus of Christian insistence that “consent is not enough!” I don’t disagree, but am I doubtful that the Christian Church has much authority left to lecture the rest of society on matters of sexual morality. Ben Crosby has aptly summarised the dilemma:

In the progressive mainline, a conviction (which I largely share) that the church has gotten some things wrong in how it has taught people about gender and sexuality leads to an unwillingness to talk about sexuality in any moral terms other than the secular-progressive language of consent. More broadly this loss of nerve in the church’s moral teaching sometimes leads to the idea that the church cannot tell people (especially members of historically oppressed groups) what to do at all but must simply lovingly accompany them in their decisions.

That’s why I’m unconvinced by what

Gnocchic Apocryphon

, in response to my previous post arguing for the primacy of religious practice above belief, referred to as “the Catholic and orthodox argument that [US evangelicals who are all in for Trump] *do* believe in the wrong way, that in the absence of tradition of ancient vintage they’ve accrued various harmful bits of extrascriptural teaching, latched onto the wrong elements of modernity as it were.”

My inner Protestant howls at accusations of “extrascriptual teaching” coming from the Church that brought us the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption of Mary! But more fundamentally, I would like to better understand how orthodox-but-progressive Christians feel comfortable rejecting much of traditional Christian teachings on sexuality, while at the same time accusing their right-wing brothers and sisters of reading the Bible in a selective, self-serving manner.

In my own view, if the Gospels still have something to teach us about how to treat each other properly—erotically and otherwise—it is not because of their ancient vintage, but because the teachings of Jesus dare us to live in a way that represents a radical departure from both nature and tradition.⁵

While admitting that “higher-level, more serious left-wing thought” shows a remarkable lack of interest in formulating an “ethics of life”, David claims that “even the non-reactionary philosophy of setting your boundaries, ‘loving yourself’ or knowing your worth, etc, is its own ethic of self-improvement.” But what if both conservatives and liberals are looking for improvement in the wrong place? For Murdoch, the core message of Christianity, like that of Buddhism and many other spiritual traditions, is the need to practise “unselfing”, beautifully described by Simone Weil in her analysis of “the perfect request” contained in the first line of the Our Father:⁶

We cannot prevent ourselves from desiring; we are desire. But that desire which nails us to the imaginary, the temporal, to egoism—if we make it pass totally into this request we can turn it into a lever that snatches us from the imaginary into the real, from the temporal into eternity and outside the prison of 'me' (the self).

To riff off an old gay hymn:

I am not what I am. I am my own special decreation.

1. You know how when you’re on shrooms, the most mundane observation can strike you as a profound truth about the universe? On one particular trip, I misremembered the name of the band Everything Everything as “Everything is Everything” and I thought: “Eureka! Everything is everything. Nothing but everything is everything. Nothing is reducible to anything else, not without loss. The map is not the territory. Life is not a matter of theory, but of practice.”

2. SIC ETIAM NOBIS BREVIS ET PERITVRA VOLVPTAS
QUAM PETIMVS TRISTI MIXTA DOLORE NOCET

3. For those with a particular aversion to Freud, I’ve discussed how Mary Midgley drew similar insights from the work of Darwin.

4. What is next? A boot stamping on a human face forever, but in a sexy way?

5. I hope Mark Oppenheimer will not accuse me of misusing Jewish sources by quoting the last paragraph of the great Hebrew scholar Joseph Klausner’s Jesus of Nazareth:

In his ethical code there is a sublimity, distinctiveness and originality in form unparalleled in any other Hebrew ethical code; neither is there any parallel to the remarkable art of his parables.

6. From the Bradley Jersak translation of Awaiting God.