Natural/
Against Nature
The day after Michel Foucault’s death in 1984, the French daily
Libération,
usually less homophobic than the majority of newspapers of the time, printed a strongly worded response to statements made by “insolents” who had “sullied [Foucault’s] memory” by suggesting that he had died of AIDS (which was true). If we are to believe the obituaries written in the years that followed, many young men were dying as a result of “violent leukemia” or sudden cancer: it was in fact impossible for people to publicly confront the stigma of AIDS and the suspicion of homosexuality that accompanied it. AIDS not only was construed as the symptom of a depraved life, but also as a verdict, the price to be paid for having strayed from the sexual order as deigned by God or his non-religious aspect, “nature.”
The idea of “divine punishment” was popular among religious groups and puritans of all sorts. We must remember Pat
Buchanan
’s remark, “Those poor homosexuals, they declared war on nature, and now, it is nature that has struck them with a frightening retribution,” or those of designer Paco Rabanne, in an attempt to revive in France the ghost of apocalyptic “divine punishment.” The test was the proof: it was said that the sick were dying as a consequence of their lifestyles. In 1991, Albert German, president of the National Academy of Pharmacology in France, addressed an unflinching assembly: “The AIDS virus had the genius to attack those who turned reproductive physiology into degenerate pleasure.” And in 2002, Hani Ramadan, director of the Geneva Islamic Center, wrote an article in
Le Monde
(the subject of which was to justify the stoning of adulterous women) that the AIDS virus “did not appear out of nowhere” and that “only those with deviant behavior expose themselves to it.”
The Flaw of
Otherness
The obviously archaic idea that AIDS was divine punishment or nature’s revenge upon a disruptive homosexuality required refinement in order to become credible outside of ultra-orthodox circles. In 1991, the Conference of French Bishops released
Catéchisme pour adultes
(Catechism for adults), which included references to AIDS that were greatly inspired by ideas developed by priest-psychoanalyst Tony Anatrella. The
Catechism
demonstrated how the Catholic Church had reinvented its theoretical well-being by cloaking its pronouncements in
psychoanalysis
gone astray. In it, the prevalence of AIDS among the gay male population was directly linked to a definition of homosexuality, presented as a “refusal”—or according to the texts, an “incapacity”—to confront
gender differences
. The result, under these conditions, was an example of “bad faith” exclusive to a “homosexual psychology” that “favors a tendency to cheat in relationships” (Anatrella,
Non à la société dépressive
, 1993). When one is incapable of understanding the other, then one is also incapable of the respect the other is due, and one becomes less scrupulous about possibly contaminating him. These ideas around AIDS were directly related to homophobic thinking: AIDS functions as the new indicator of otherness consistent with homosexuality; conversely, the denial of otherness that characterizes homosexuality is the touchstone of this AIDS theory. In addition, if it is agreed that AIDS is not exclusive to homosexuals, then these thoughts are welcome by the homophobic writers: they permit the transformation of those newly diagnosed with HIV into metaphorical homosexuals. For Anatrella, the homosexual’s denial of otherness is a symptom of a depressed contemporary society.
On the surface there is a great distance between the moralizing homilies of Anatrella and the apocalyptic sociology of Jean Baudrillard, but a close reading reveals a strange resonance between their texts. AIDS is the central theme of Baudrillard’s
La Transparence du mal
(1990) (in English,
The Transparency of Evil
[1993]), just as it is in Anatrella’s
Non à la société dépressive
. Both describe it as the signal for a general denial of otherness by those afflicted, the majority of whom are homosexual. Baudrillard’s reasoning is based on analogy: according to him, the AIDS virus is to the modern body what the AIDS epidemic is to the gay community. After so much time spent preventing diseases and ridding itself of germs with artificial means, the modern body can no longer react to unforeseen adversity: its system of defense has the same flaws as artificial intelligence. The modern body can thus be characterized by a tendency to reject otherness, which Baudrillard also observes in homosexual groups, identifiable by the “compulsion of resemblance” and by their “closed-circuit habits.” Having “expelled their negative elements,” the modern body is “on the verge of complete
positivization
” and could be more vulnerable to HIV: “the absence of otherness creates this other elusive otherness, this absolute otherness that is the virus.” By refusing to be confronted by the other (in this case, gender), homosexuals may make themselves vulnerable to a more radical otherness: death.
Guilty Patients & Innocent Victims
It eventually became apparent that homosexuals and drug users were not—and would not be—the only ones infected, and because shame continued to be associated with the illness, it was necessary to distinguish among the infected, to classify and sort them according to group. On one side were those who “deserved” their fate as a result of their behavior (homosexuals and drug users); on the other were the “innocent” victims who were unjustly infected, such as those contaminated through blood transfusions (like hemophiliacs) or men and women “deceived” by their HIV-positive sexual partners. For the first group, AIDS was a verdict on their behavior, and for the second, it was a great injustice. It appeared that there was a gulf between “kinds” of AIDS, depending on the type of transmission, but from the point of view of an infected person, there is no difference. Still, it was apparent that the major discussions on AIDS did not center on the affliction itself but rather on its origins. Behind the categories, too, were the accusations: if homosexuals were considered responsible for their illness, they were also often considered responsible for others who had it but did not deserve it. At various AIDS conferences, renowned cancer specialist Henri Joyeux calmly spelled out HIV: “In the school of Life and Love, H stands for Homosexuality, I for Innocence, and V for Violence.”That’s all it took to turn AIDS into a fable of innocence destroyed by violence and homosexuality. Albert German, previously cited, named homosexuals as “responsible for the death of hemophiliacs and transfusion patients, and the millions who will die”; and Tony Anatrella underlined the “bad faith” of bisexuals, because they transmitted the virus from the homosexual population to members of society who did not deserve it.
Revisionism
There was heated debate following the release of Frédéric Martel’s
Le Rose et le noir
(1996) (in English,
The Pink and the Black
[1999]), his book on the contemporary history of homosexuals in France, about his insinuation that the French “gay movement” did not do enough during the early years of the AIDS crisis. Even if there is little doubt today that the community’s early response to the epidemic was difficult, some comments surrounding Martel’s work demonstrated unabashed homophobia. Those who had not bothered to worry about the threat of AIDS during a time when it could still be contained or criticize government inaction, now held homosexuals and their representatives as irrefutably responsible for its spread. Such accusations ignored the difficulty in accurately defining the threat designated as the “gay cancer.” Hervé Guibert wrote that Foucault would have laughed the first time he heard about AIDS: “A gay cancer that only affects homosexuals, it would be too good to believe, it’s so funny you could die.” The anecdote is more ironic than precise, but it recalls a time when the media connected AIDS to collective punishment: between the AIDS threat and the Puritan threat, the second was preferable, as it was better known.
Proselytism
In France until the mid-1990s, AIDS organizations were largely founded and directed by homosexuals, from the most explicitly gay community-based (such as ACT UP) to those that were less so, such as SolEnSi (Solidarité Enfants Sida), whose objective was to organize a solidarity network for children with AIDS and their families. The occasion was too perfect: gay activists were held responsible for the most patent failures of the fight against AIDS. This is exactly what Annie Birraux, director of the Department of Research on Adolescence at the Université Paris VII-Denis-Diderot and consultant with the French government’s AIDS agency, until its closure in 1994, did; in a 1992 essay entitled “Perversion or Proselytism,” Birraux explained how AIDS, beginning in its early years, had been a godsend for homosexuals by allowing them to finally attain political power: by assuming the monopoly of prevention, the “gay
lobby
” had usurped the “representations of AIDS” and contained the risks “in a collection of minority behaviors. Even worse (according to Birraux), prevention policies would have only resulted in “homosexual proselytism” aimed at adolescents. Thus, gays “contributed to the extension of the AIDS epidemic” because they made AIDS their “baby.”
This type of reasoning had promise: American sociologist Albert O. Hirschmann noted well how the argument of the perverse effect (
perversity
) constitutes one of the recurring themes of “reactionary rhetoric.” It can be seen—once again—in the ideas of Anatrella, who sees every AIDS prevention campaign, no matter how careful it is to skip over homosexuals in the field of representation, as surreptitiously promoting the “homosexual model.” This is the same logic upon which the views of the Catholic Church are based, from Pope John Paul II to the Conference of French Bishops; they see a further danger in the promotion and distribution of condoms, the risk of the disillusion of “love for sale,” and the pitfall of the “banalization of sexual union,” which they believe contribute “paradoxically” to the extension of the epidemic.
—
Philippe Mangeot
ACT UP-Paris. “Le Sida, combien de divisions.” Paris: Dagorno, 1994.
“Aides,”
Remaide
magazine (n.d.)
Anatrella, Tony.
Non à la société dépressive
. Paris: Flammarion, 1993.
Baudrillard, Jean.
La Transparence du mal, essai sur les phénomènes extrêmes
. Paris: Galilée, “L’Espace critique” collection, 1990. [Published in the US as
The Transparency of Evil
:
Essays on Extreme Phenomena
. New York/London: Verso, 1993.]
Edelmann, Frédéric, ed.
Dix clefs pour comprendre l’épidémie, dix années de lutte contre le Sida
. Paris: Le Monde Editions, 1996.
Fee, Elizabeth, and Daniel M. Fox, eds.
AIDS: The Burden of History
. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1988.
Guibert, Hervé.
A l’ami qui ne m’a pas sauvé la vie
. Paris: Gallimard, 1990.
Gross, Larry.
Contested Closets: The Politics and Ethics of Outing
. Minneapolis/London: Minnesota Univ. Press, 1993.
Kramer, Larry.
Report from the Holocaust: The Making of an Activist
. New York: St Martin’s Press, 1989.
Martel, Frédéric.
Le Rose et le noir, les homosexuels en France depuis 1968
. Paris: Seuil, 1996. [Published in the US as
The Pink and The Black: Homosexuals in France since 1968
. Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 1999.]
Mendès-Leite, Rommel.
Chroniques socioanthropologiques au temps du Sida, trois essais sur les (homo)sexualités masculines
. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2000.
Pinell, Patrice, ed.
Une Epidémie politique, la lutte contre le Sida en France, 1981–1996
. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, “Science, Histoire et Société” collection, 2002.
Pollak, Michael.
Les Homosexuels et le sida. Sociologie d’une épidémie
. Paris: A. M. Métailié, 1988.
———, and Marie-Ange Schiltz.
Les Homo- et bisexuels masculins face au Sida, six années d’enquête
. Paris: GSPM, 1991.
Watney, Simon.
Policing the Desire: Aids, Pornography, and the Media
. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1989.
—Against Nature; Communitarianism; Contagion; Medicine; Otherness; Peril; Proselytism; Rhetoric; Shame.
ANTHROPOLOGY
It may seem difficult for some to imagine that this discipline, for which
otherness
is a constituent part of the social and cultural world that it seeks to understand, could be associated with homophobia. But if anthropology, despite its pretensions, can be criticized because of its link to colonialism, it can also possibly be associated with homophobia. However, it is necessary to begin a critique of the underlying prejudices within anthropology with a historical situating of the knowledge and evaluation of its own theoretical and methodological suppositions in order to take inventory of the elements that interpret a normative—if not heterosexist—vision of the socio-cultural world.
In academia, researchers who study sexuality are often confronted with the prejudices of their colleagues, as sexuality is usually perceived as belonging to the private sphere and thus excluded from the traditional hierarchy of scientific interests. Despite the development over the last twenty years of research on the social relations of sex as well as feminist criticism of androcentrism, the stigma against the study of sexuality persists; some of these themes are considered “minor,” and their anthropology “unhealthy,” “sordid,” “strange,” or “exotic.” Under these conditions, it is no surprise that a British study by Edward Evans-Pritchard (1970), describing institutionalized homosexual relationships among the Azande people of north-central Africa, was published in the United States, rather than
England
, just three years before the author’s death, and thirty years after being written. One of the reasons behind this attitude doubtlessly resides in the fact that since its origin, anthropology has privileged categories that highlight order (social organization, structures, and models) to the detriment of the individual, of subjectivity, and of history.