Writing the History of Homophobia

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

I'd like to begin with a story that has no homosexual content at all. A few weeks ago I was reading Proust—which is pretty much a chronic condition with me—and I got to a particular volume where the narrative about French turn-of-the-century high society happens to be structured around the Dreyfus case. Now, all I really knew about the Dreyfus case was extremely general: I knew it was a political explosion that made Watergate look like a quilting bee and that for about half a decade, as a result of it, the issue of anti-Semitism was the issue, in some respects the most bitter issue ever in French politics and public life. But I decided that it would be worth learning a little more, so I got up and headed for the bookcase and looked up Dreyfus in my 1945 Encyclopedia Britannica—and sure enough, there he was, with several pages explaining all the details of the case, all the historical background, all the evidence forged and authentic, all the dramatis personae, all the legal technicalities of his various appeals, all the consequences for the rise and fall of governments. There was only one thing that wasn't mentioned in the Britannica article, and that was the small matter that Dreyfus was Jewish and that this probably had some effect on his fate and the importance of his case.

I still don't know what to make of this. It isn't as though the Britannica exactly suppresses the Jewish dimension of the Dreyfus case: when you look up "anti-Semitism," you find pages about the importance of the Dreyfus case in crystallizing nineteenth-century attitudes toward Jews. But you have to know enough to look up "anti-Semitism"; that is to say, you can learn what's most important about Dreyfus from the Britannica, but first you have to know something about Dreyfus that you can't learn by looking up "Dreyfus" in the Britannica. The information's there, in a sense, but it's compartmentalized in such a way that you have to already know it in order to learn it.

Okay, here's a more obviously relevant story. Imagine that you're a kid of fourteen or fifteen, you read around a lot, and you've come across a reference somewhere that convinces you that there was some kind of interesting mystery about someone named Oscar Wilde. So, of course, you head for your trusty old Britannica. And sure enough, you learn there was a scandal about Wilde. The Britannica says, "His success as a dramatist had by [1894] gone some way to disabuse hostile critics of the suspicions as regards his personal character which had been excited by the apparent looseness of morals which since his Oxford days it had always pleased him to affect; but to the consternation of his friends, who had ceased to credit the existence of any real moral obliquity, in 1895 came fatal revelations as the result of his bringing a libel action against the Marquis of Queensberry; and at the Old Bailey, in May, Wilde was sentenced to two years imprisonment with hard labour for offenses under the Criminal Law Amendment Act."

Huh? What did Wilde do, you ask your fourteen-year-old self. "Looseness of morals," "moral obliquity," "fatal revelations," "offenses under the Criminal Law Amendment Act": if you already know that Wilde's crime was to be gay, then you'll know from these phrases that Wilde's crime was to be gay. If you don't already know it, you certainly aren't going to learn it here. What do you need to look under to learn the truth? Well, I haven't figured that out yet. You might, supposing you already know enough to, look under "homosexuality." But there is no entry for homosexuality. "Homophobia," which was the real reason Wilde went to prison? Don't be silly—there's nothing under "homophobia." Shall we try "lesbian"? No entry for "lesbian." Sex? You can look up sex, but all you'll find is "sexual reproduction," which doesn't include nonreproductive sex and which, in any case, seems, rather remarkably, to be practiced only among the lower animals.

On the other hand, we know that the Britannica has not made a systematic policy decision that the word homosexuality will never darken its pages. It so happens that if you look up Proust himself, for instance, you learn that homosexuality is one of his characteristic subjects. And, supposing that the treatment of Dreyfus is at all analogous (which it may or may not be), it is altogether possible that somewhere else in Britannica, if only you could hit on the exactly right word to look it up under, pages and pages of state-of-the-art information (circa 1933) on homosexuality and homophobia are just waiting to reveal themselves to you. But where?

I mention the Britannica problem, first because it's an excellent example of the practical difficulties of learning anything about sexual mores from any historical distance—and here the distance is only forty years! But the second reason I mention it is as an emblem of the extremely elusive and maddeningly plural ways in which cultures and their various institutions efface and alter sexual meaning. The Britannica —which, after all, is only a single institution, although a large and complicated one—does not have a single strategy for dealing with the subject of homosexuality; its tactics range from apparent candor (in the case of Proust's work), to opaque technicalities ("offense under the Criminal Law Amendment Act"), to euphemism ("suspicions as to his personal character"), to overt condemnation ("moral obliquity"), to a general reluctance to raise the issue where not absolutely forced to (see, for instance, on Whitman), to the blanket denial (see the missing article on "homosexuality"—if you can find it). As with the Dreyfus case too, the even more misleading techniques of displacement, compartmentalization, and false categorization are common in discourse about homosexuality.

The consequences of all this are in a certain sense very simple. The Britannica reader who most urgently needs to know about homosexuality—the young precocious reader, say, who is struggling to make sense of her or his emergent desires and identity—cannot get any of the information that encyclopedias are there to provide. The history, the biology, the sociology, the literature, the multiple and rich biography of homosexuality are all, alike, simply unavailable when needed. That is, the effect of the multiple techniques is singly and simply repressive and homophobic. Or if we are using the Britannica as an emblem, we should say that, at least for Western society of the past two millennia, the many complicated paths by which, as I have said, sexual meaning is falsified, denied, and altered all lead homosexuals to much the same thorny and difficult place.

On the other hand, the multiplicity of the different repressive techniques is itself very consequential, even when it does not change the brute fact of repression. In the Britannica, the effect of all thosedifferent paths, different codes, for denying or distorting the fact of homosexuality is to make it extraordinarily difficult to translate back from the encoded form to the actual truth. Even when we know—as the fourteen-year-old we've imagined does not know—that what we are reading is falsified and encoded, breaking the code in one place does not necessarily get us anywhere with the others. Even once we understand the particular kinds of evasion at work in the Wilde article, we cannot count on using the same decoding techniques for the Sappho article or those again for the Whitman article. And none of these tells us what to think about the missing homosexuality article: what unlikely name to look for it under or whether we're crazy to imagine that it might be in there at all.

I know this is an oblique angle from which to approach the history of homophobia. But then, obliquity—if not "moral" obliquity—is the name of the game here, or one of the names of the game. It is so urgent to use all the various means at our command, right now, to reconstitute the effaced history of homophobic meaning, so that we can begin to understand who we are and what we can do about changing it. It isn't by accident that I made the emblematic researcher in my little parable not an adult historian but an adolescent whose sense of her or his own sexual and social meaning is rapidly crystallizing in response to whatever appears or doesn't appear in the authoritative books of the culture. And note that I haven't specified whether the nascent sexuality of the adolescent will be gay or straight. It doesn't matter: whichever it is, in a homophobic culture it will be structured in relation to the effacements and misappropriations of homophobia.

But let's assume that that reader, five years later, is you. The sheet I've passed around will give you a more concrete start: it's a very selective, very idiosyncratic annotated bibliography for those of you who are interested in looking further into this history.

Let me end, also, with a brief list of somewhat more practical applications of the points I've suggested in emblematic form already:

1. You can't study the history of homosexuality without studying the history of homophobia, but the two histories are not the same, and their relation is not consistent. They intertwine as inextricably and as unpredictably as Jewish history with the history of anti-Semitism, or as black history with the history of racism.

2. As I've suggested, you can't study the history of sexuality, either, or of gender, without studying the history of homophobia, but with the same cautions.

3. You can't understand homophobia except through the historical specificity of the institutions through which it is articulated and enforced, but its relation to those institutions is not historically constant. For instance, you cannot trace homophobia without tracing the criminal, civil, or religious law as it concerns homosexuality, but you can never translate directly back from the law to the truth of attitudes or practice, either. The same law, mediated differently through different institutional and ideological systems of enforcement and self-enforcement, for instance, could belong to diametrically different sexual cultures.

4. Because of this, the realities of social stratification and economic and ideological control can never be absent from the historiography of homophobia. The social fractures of class, race, and age, as well as gender, will intersect every issue of sexual preference, and often with a surprisingly definitive force.

5. A corollary: the historiography of homophobia about women and that about men are importantly different projects—though, again, inextricable ones.

The only way I can end is by inviting you into this project—or further into it, for those many of you who have already started to find your way through the tortuous paths of the Britannica, and the culture in general, to a more accurate picture of sexual meaning. And of course, wishing you good luck. Let me know if you find out what name the real information is filed under.

Late Exercises in Minimal Affirmatives

Anne-Lise François

Beside is an interesting preposition ... because there's nothing very dualistic about it; a number of elements may lie alongside one another, though not an infinity of them.

—Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling

Le haïku a cette propriété quelque peu fantasmagorique, que l'on s'imagine toujours pouvoir en faire soi-même facilement. [The haiku has this rather phantasmagorical property: that we always suppose we ourselves can write such things easily.]

—Roland Barthes, L'Empire des signes

There is room for an amateur to say something about Buddha faces.... Anyone who cares about the Lord Buddha can do his face in a few ignorant strokes on sand or blotting paper.

—William Empson, "The Faces of Buddha"

So in his brief 1936 essay "The Faces of Buddha," Empson asserts the adequation of human powers to their otherwise distant object, making or, rather, letting drop the claim with the same complaisance it describes: "anyone," "a few strokes," on whatever happens to be within reach ("paper" or the "sand" at one's feet). The little demanded of the artist, technique, and medium is already Buddha-like in its contented resignation and generous laissez-aller, as if the best (kindest) judge of his representations or interpretations were the Buddha himself, whose "face is at once blind and all-seeing ('he knows no more than a Buddha,' they say of a deceived husband in the Far East), so at once sufficient to itself and of universal charity."

Little more than a willingness to put x at one's disposal, the undemanding generousness or self-sufficient charity that Empson's remark both describes and models has more recent relatives in the turn away from agonistic critique we see in the late work of figures as different as Barthes and Sedgwick. In this essay I take the "aside" of Theory Aside tropologically rather than thematically to designate not the marginalized, minor figures left to the side by theory's more well-known and spectacular controversies but the lateral movement by which in their late work Barthes and Sedgwick set aside the burden of discontented, perfective energies and leave off prying, suspicious efforts to uncover concealed truth. They prefer instead a form of aesthetic engagement that moves laterally, arranging its materials side by side, with something of Empson's offhand casualness.

If this move aside from interpretive struggles in the name of a quieter sense of adequacy seems salutary, I want to use this essay not only to describe these lateral moves but to ask about what it means to read Barthes's and Sedgwick's minimal affirmatives—their vindications of a right to demand little—in the context of today's double discourse of scarce resources and limitless demands. One might well ask whether the lateral move enacted by Barthes and Sedgwick constitutes a true alternative to the forms of critical mastery they decry. By their own admission, the side-stepping they perform does not so much offer a cognitive solution to theoretical impasse as simply change its affective register, according to a movement that closely resembles the suddenly found "rest" (ataraxia, freedom from disturbance) that in classical skepticism follows from the skeptic's suspension of judgment. My aim is not to polemicize or challenge an affective mode that abjures polemic, for how can one argue with a summons to take it or leave it? Rather I'd like to raise the question about the place of this accepting, easy mode in a culture (both in the university and beyond) committed to de-skilling labor anywhere it can and to ensuring, at the cost of enormous energy resources, the ever-readiness of cultural goods.

Empson's assertion of easy "doability" occurs in the context of his attempt to work out his sense of the contradictions held together by what he calls the "after-dinner look of many Buddhas, and the rings of fat on the neck"; these contradictions include the power to help in what seems closed in on itself and oblivious to the world and the surprising capacity for sensual satisfaction permitted by an ethic commonly understood as renouncing sensuous desire: "An idea that you must be somehow satisfied as well as mortified before entering repose goes deep into the system, and perhaps into human life.... The drooping eyelids of the great creatures are heavy with patience and suffering, and the subtle irony which offends us in their raised eyebrows ... is in effect an appeal to us to feel, as they do, that it is odd that we let our desires subject us to so much torment in the world. The first thing to say about the Buddha face ... is that the smile of superiority can mean and be felt to mean simply the power to help."

Quoting from his unpublished manuscript notes ("The normal late Buddha's lips of course are the plump but sharply defined lips of a full and well-organized satisfaction"), Sharon Cameron similarly emphasizes the oddly worldly nature of such achieved repose: "The Buddha visage is enigmatic because, against type, the Buddha has surrendered not desire as such, but rather the pain of its torment. His expression is an antidote to the singular appearances of desire requiring management." As Cameron's paraphrase suggests, the look of mild amusement mixed with regret and surprise at the fuss that Empson finds on the Buddha faces eludes the familiar critique of the pursuit of desire such as that found in Christian asceticism; at stake is not so much desire itself as the aggressiveness of our attempts to secure ourselves from its transience.