Discussion on the subject in France changed in 1998 and 1999 with the debates on PaCS (the Pacte civil de solidarité; Civil solidarity pact), which deigned to legally recognize domestic partnerships. Though it originated from minority demands, PaCS was designed for all types of couples, regardless of sexuality. Yet at the same time, the gay and lesbian demand for the right to marry and adopt children is based on the universalist principle of republican equality. Under such conditions, the validity of an anti-communitarianist notion—whose very touchstone is the denunciation of a political system dominated by lobbyists representing special interest groups—begins to fall apart. In fact, the specter of American communitarianism began to fade, only to be replaced by a new rhetoric which henceforth would be used to oppose gay and lesbian demands—that of a
symbolic order
guaranteed by a single difference, itself different from all the others: that of
gender
.
Nevertheless, anti-communitarianist sentiment in France enjoyed a resurgence, buoyed this time by the fledgling Fondation du 2 mars (March 2nd Foundation), a French think-tank. One of the foundation’s members,
Le Figaro
editorialist Joseph Macé-Scaron, produced the most complete reformulation of this new wave of anti-communitarianism in a book succinctly entitled
La Tentation communautaire
(The communitarian temptation), its title modeled on a book by Jean-François Revel,
The Totalitarian Temptation
. Here again, communitarianism is cast as the main enemy, its gay and lesbian component being but one of its avatars. As before, the
universalist
and republican argument is invoked; however, it is developed around several themes, following a bombastic rhetoric whose polemical efficiency is such that it defies all attempts to find concrete answers to the questions it asks, at the risk of confusing the universal with the majority.
On
Ghettos
A priori
, the mere existence of a gay community, and its gathering places, will not bring society to ruin. Nonetheless, the development of such places and their concentration in certain neighborhoods tends to be the focus of criticism by anti-communitarianists: they consider such neighborhoods to signal the fragmentation of public spaces, usurped by special interest groups; the term “ghetto” when describing the gay community seems to be proof enough, a term used even by gays and lesbians themselves. The term is apt, though, provided one perceives the irony: it is a reminder that not all neighborhoods are safe for homosexuals who would prefer that a simple kiss on the month not become an unwitting act of heroism. Anti-.communitarians should have been comforted by the development of gay neighborhoods. After having long been banished to meeting places hidden from plain sight, the establishment of gay neighborhoods meant that homosexuals could finally be out in the open and interacting in public space. Those who claim to be offended by these neighborhoods are in fact merely frustrated at not being the sole owners of public places which, until then, seemed to be exclusively their own.
On Gay & Lesbian Studies
The same hostility manifested itself around the development of gay and lesbian studies. One is reminded of the sarcasms of Alain Finkielkraut and Frédéric Martel, when in June 1997, a conference on gay and lesbian culture was held at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, organized by Didier Eribon. As many American intellectuals participated, the specter of “minority studies” loomed over the French research. However, one has only to compare the amplitude of the American bibliography to the dearth of French works to get an inkling that something is not quite right. To work on gay and lesbian culture requires a methodology of specific questions based on (among others) historiographic study of subordinate classes or
privacy
issues, though it cannot be simplified to only these two subjects. It is arguable that Frédéric Martel’s book
Le Rose et le noir
(
The Pink and the Black
), on the history of homosexuals in France since 1968, could have been more rigorous had the author availed himself of some of the methodological instruments used in America, found in books such as those by Lillian Faderman, John D’Emilio, Esther Newton, and George Chauncey. Anti-communitarianists prefer to shift the debate in a different direction, proposing that gay and lesbian studies are designed only for gays and lesbians, and that they present a risk that homosexuals will want to rewrite history filtered only through the lens of homosexuality. One hesitates even to respond to such absurd objections. Anti-communitarianists pretend to be surprised that gay and lesbian matters, for the most part, are brought up by gays and lesbians, as though the issues could be separated from the lifestyle. This shows a disquieting intellectual intolerance; gay and lesbian studies, like all minority studies, tackle norms and the notion of what is universal from their fringes. This should come as no surprise to those who believe that knowledge never comes without a shift in viewpoint; by those who believe that truth comes from the diverse objects of study; and by those who think that, above all, the purpose of science is not so much to reassure us of what we already know, but rather to shake up our complacent certainties.
On the Public & the Private
As has been noted elsewhere, anti-communitarianist discourse came to prominence in France during the height of the
AIDS
crisis. Logically, the recognition of the epidemic should have weakened certain principles on which anti-communitarianist rhetoric depended: the separation of the private from the public and the distinction between what is social and what is political. It is the nature of all matters of public health to tie together the experiences of the individual (the body, suffering, and death) with the concerns of the collective (prevention, research, and care). This was all the more clear in the case of AIDS: handling epidemics is the most directly political aspect of public health. Yet HIV is, for the most part, transmitted in the most private of ways: sexual intercourse. Within the context of AIDS, anti-communitarianism appears to be a denial of reality and its associated urgencies. The epidemic demanded that questions concerning sexuality, including homosexuality, be treated as political ones. Yet it was also necessary that communities and their networks serve as channels of communication between the state and individuals, a fact that required their institutionalization within the political realm. It is pointless to reiterate the details of the failures of the struggle against AIDS in France; the responsibility of the struggle fell almost solely on the homosexual community, which was long used to being failed by public authorities. Suffice it to say that for the most part the struggle against an epidemic hinges on cooperation between public institutions and the communities affected by it. It is telling that those parts of the population affected the most by AIDS are those whose community networks are the most fragile.
On the Specific & the Universal
However, there is more: the routes taken by the gay and lesbian community in the struggle against AIDS refute anti-communitarianists who might claim that such communities are structured to obtain special rights. Practically all of the associations formed to fight AIDS originated in the homosexual community. And all these organizations immediately opened their doors to put their knowledge and considerable efforts into the service of all populations affected by the epidemic—in other words, in service of the “common good.” Thus, the struggle against AIDS was a reminder that it is not necessary, in order to be a good citizen, to abandon one’s own needs, and that in fact to fight for oneself is a struggle which is larger than any one individual. It shows how a community can take the understanding of its particular sufferings (such as AIDS, and the experience of being excluded) and elevate it from the level of an individual to the collective. In the end, the teaching of one community’s struggles can help draw different aspects of the larger social realm together, and establish a political position that neither compartmentalizes individual identities, nor forces recognition of a single abstract citizenship. In short, it negates the need for having to choose between private identity and universal citizenship.
Indeed, it could even be said that political minorities are more republican than the republicans. The French republican ideal, in all its grandeur, consists of not recognizing differences in practices, beliefs, gender, skin color, or origin; this leads to
discrimination
. Thus, it is by virtue of this ideal and the most precious of its principles—equality—that a minority policy, careful to avoid discrimination, has been able to flourish: in law, because the Republic of France did not always recognize the equality of genders or sexual orientations; in practice, because the principle of republican universalism, in its abstraction, frequently permits discrimination (against gender, sexual preference, skin color, etc.) to quietly pass unnoticed. “We are the universalists,” one could say, because we do not mistake the normal majority for the universal.
On
Lobbying
Even though both the republican criticism of gay and lesbian lobbying and the fallacy of homosexual lobbying as imagined by the
far right
deal with very ambiguous concepts, it is prudent to distinguish between them. The latter refers to the belief that such lobbying consists of bed-hopping arrangements, favors, and assorted conspiracies. The former sees the issue as a matter of disturbing the workings of democracy, where minority mobilization disrupts the political balance by lobbying, to the detriment of the legitimate majority. Communitarianism then inevitably leads to a perversion of a system held hostage between various zones of influence.
However, such criticism of lobbying reveals an inability to envision political jockeying as anything other than as an unfair means of increasing representation or as a greedy quest for power. Minority movements never claim to try to become the majority, no more than they wish to seize power (which distinguishes them from the traditional idea of revolutionary movements); they are defined by their members whom they represent. It is this fact that Martel had a difficult time understanding when he claimed to have discovered a communitarian aporia in the description of the annual Lesbian and Gay Pride parade in Paris, when its organizers stated that it was their hope that “all gays and lesbians will trust them to collectively negotiate their recognition by the authorities.” But the organizers were not usurping representation; they received their authorization from those who marched with them. And there was no real negotiation, because their goal was essentially to make political parties and those in power aware of issues that were critical to the gay and lesbian community. In this way, the organizers occupied a position unique to minority movements: neither internal, nor integrated into social democracy; nor external, nor utopist. Nor even a perversion of democracy, but rather an augmentation of its power.
On Victims
If its detractors can be believed, communitarianism assumes the political persona of the victim (i.e. weak), to the detriment of the persona of the citizen (i.e. strong), which, taken to its extreme, would lead to the stripping of all rights of citizens except for those who claim to be victims of the system or its driving principles. This type of argument is not always exempt, in its rhetoric or its examples, from sexist or homophobic slips, especially when it uses gender metaphors to explain itself: such as French essayist Philippe Muray, who often portrayed Gay Pride as the fable of an emasculated political system; or psychoanalyst Michel Schneider, in whose book
Big Mother: psychopathologie de la vie politique
, he observed the “maternal drift” of a state that has renounced its “masculine functions” in order to smother with love citizens shorn of their responsibilities.
It is true that minority movements often originate from external violence inflicted upon those individuals who make up the community: the politicization of minorities is the politics of adversity. That alone should be enough for its defense: there is no reason that a community should remain silent when it comes to the misfortune of its members. But it does not stop there. Pride (to use the most visible example) is nothing less than the protest of victims; a community’s street festival is a political moment in spite of itself. Thus, communities are spaces of subjectification where those who cannot find a place for themselves within the normal majority can learn the practical application of democracy. With regard to the assimilationist rhetoric of the republicans, who cannot conceive of minorities as anything other than objects to emancipate, such individuals respond by posing as subjects for their emancipation.
On Identity
According to Macé-Scaron, the last word of the “communitarianist temptation” resides in the normative definition of minority identity: the idea that communities impose acceptable ways of living and existing on their members, and that they exert a paranoid level of control on how they are portrayed. Such analyses are often only partial, and one could just as easily speak of normative definitions of the extreme of heterosexual identities, too. However, with regard to the gay and lesbian community, the contrary should be noted in how it reacts and objects to clichés, stereotypes, and all manner of normalization; a critical task whose main goal is to initiate a debate on the power of the dominant culture and on the specter of available representation. Nonetheless, one would be hard-pressed to find a community that is capable of unanimously describing itself in a way that is both correct and fair. Instead of worrying about the norms that communities, supposedly, try to impose on their members, one should first recognize their diversity, starting with the depiction of gays and lesbians in the media, literature, and entertainment, which is crucial to community empowerment. In Hollywood
films
today, for example, there are no fewer backstabbing fags, foppish antiquarians, venomous lesbians, or good ol’ trucker girls (to name just a few of the cinematic clichés from the last century) than there were in the past. At the same time, however, there has been an increase in other portrayals of homosexuals which, if not necessarily “positive,” have at least gained in complexity.