Guérin, Daniel.
Autobiographie de jeunesse
. Paris: Belfond, 1972.
Halperin, David. “Comment faire l’histoire de l’homosexualité masculine,”
Revue européenne d’histoire sociale
, no. 3 (2002).
Katz, Jonathan Ned.
L’Invention de l’hétérosexualité
[1995]. Paris: EPEL, 2001. [Published in the US as
The Invention of Heterosexuality
. New York: Dutton, 1995.]
Kennedy, Elizabeth, and Madeline Davis.
Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community
. New York: Routledge, 1993.
Marcus, Sharon. “Quelques Problèmes de l’histoire lesbienne.” In
Les Etudes gay et lesbiennes
. Edited by Didier Eribon. Paris: Ed. du Centre Georges-Pompidou, 1998.
Marrou, Henri-Irénée.
Histoire de l’éducation dans l’Antiquité
. Paris: Le Seuil, 1948. [Published in the US as
A History of Education in Antiquity
. Madison, WI: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1956.]
Rupp, Leila J. “History.” In
Lesbian Histories and Cultures
. Edited by Bonnie Zimmerman. London/New York: Garland, 2000.
Sartre, Maurice. “Les Amours grecques: le rite et le plaisir.” In
L’Histoire, enquête sur un tabou: les homosexuels en Occident
. Paris, 1998.
Tamagne, Florence.
Histoire de l’homosexualité en Europe, Berlin, Londres, Paris, 1919–
1939. Paris: Le Seuil, 2000. [Published in the US as
A History of Homosexuality in Europe: Berlin, London, Paris, 1919–1939
. New York: Algora, 2004.]
———. “Homosexualités, le difficile passage de l’analyse des discours à l’étude des pratiques,”
Revue européenne d’histoire sociale
, no. 3 (2002).
Tin, Louis-Georges, ed.
Homosexualités: expression/répression
. Paris: Stock, 2000.
—Anthropology; Censorship; Essentialism/Constructionism; Greece, Ancient; Literature; Philosophy; School; Sociology.
HOOVER, J. Edgar
J. Edgar Hoover (1895–1972) is one of the most enigmatic figures in the history of homosexuality and homophobia. As Director of the FBI for forty-eight years, he initiated the monitoring of gay organizations across the country in a relentless attempt to control their activities. Hoover and his Associate Director, Clyde Tolson, were proponents of
McCarthyist
tactics, and instrumental in helping to construct the concept of homosexuals as “an internal enemy” of the American machine. All the while, Hoover and Tolson were lovers for over forty years. If the evidence brought forward in Anthony Summers’ 1993 book
Official and Confidential:The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover
leaves no doubt as to Hoover’s sexual orientation, and despite reservations one might have with certain testimony, it remains nevertheless difficult to understand his paradoxical, hypocritical attitude. Even more, the exposure of Hoover’s homosexuality by the American left was itself not exempt from accusations of homophobia, demonstrating the limits of its “sympathy” toward gay and lesbian issues.
There are a number of hypotheses that help to explain the paradox of Hoover’s life; the most popular one establishes Hoover as a symbol of internalized homophobia,
self-hatred
that was manifested in his FBI directives against the first gay movements of the 1950s. Nevertheless, the exclusive and apparently harmonious relationship that he seems to have enjoyed with Tolson for four decades makes this hypothesis highly unlikely. One must then consider Hoover as a man of his generation, a senior member of the public service held to the important duty of social respectability. Moreover, his actions against homosexuals and particularly against the very first gay organizations must be viewed in light of other issues. Hoover’s authorized harassment was equally directed against members of the American Communist Party and Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party, as well as anti-segregationist militants. Hoover is most accurately a symbol of the construction of a federal totalitarian intelligence strategy, whereby the central administration attempts to extend its assigned limits by increasing its power and authority at the local level. That Hoover had gay associations targeted is a relatively well-documented fact; but to him, all collective dissident organizations were threats to the very legitimacy of the FBI’s existence.
Thus, it is possible to hypothesize that Hoover’s homosexual life was a purely private and individual issue, essentially based on the values of masculine friendship and fidelity; a personal homosexual experience that was clearly at odds with the approach taken by the early activists (such as Henry Hay, founder of the first Mattachine Society and former member of the Communist Party) to fight for acknowledgment of the collective gay experience (and who were generally regarded as leftist militants, the complete opposite of Hoover). The Hoover paradox then boils down to a generational issue that is relatively common in gay and lesbian history and marked by a process of discontinuity. Hoover could have very well considered that his stable and “noble” relationship with Tolson had nothing to do with middle or working-class homosexuals, who were not necessarily in relationships nor seeking them, who engaged in interracial sexual relations, and who rubbed shoulders with or admired left-wing Beat Generation artists and addicts. During the 1950s, there was a growing apprehension of homosexuals as a coherent social group. That we, in retrospect, qualify his love life as homosexual is quite possible; however, to assume that this aspect should have influenced Hoover’s social status and political convictions is purely anachronistic.
—
Pierre-Olivier de Busscher
Powers, Richard.
Secrecy and Power: The Life of J. Edgar Hoover
. New York: The Free Press, 1987.
Reeves, Thomas.
The Life and Times of Joe McCarthy
. New York: Stein & Day, 1982.
Summers, Anthony.
Official and Confidential:The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover
. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1993.
—McCarthy, Joseph; North America; Police; Treason; Violence.
HUMOR
There is a story of two young seminarians who are cycling around in the seminary’s courtyard while shrieking and laughing. Exasperated, the Father Superior opens the window and yells, “Stop shouting like that, or I’ll have to put the seats back on your bicycles.”
In France, the word
humour
is an Anglicism that first appeared in the eighteenth century, including in Diderot and D’Alembert’s
Encyclopédie
. Up until the nineteenth century, the use of the term was generally associated with
England
; Victor Hugo once evoked “this English thing that is called humor.” Nevertheless, the French adopted the word and used it to describe “a certain lively French wit,” as stated in a dictionary of the times (the wit of Rabelais, for example), and even “witty Italian eloquence.” Moreover, there exists the German term
witz
, which can be translated as “joke” or “witticism,” and which gave way to Freud’s interpretation of wit as “anger turned sideways.”
The issue of whether humor itself can be “homophobic,” as it can be anti-Semitic, is a difficult question. In the reverse of reality in which it operates, the expression of humor or witticism is at times ambiguous, and it is not always easy to definitively say that it is directed against this or that thing. Its nature is polyphonic; in reality, we hear several voices within it, and it would be simplistic to reduce it to a single voice. It is further complicated by the use of humor to taunt or razz someone, particularly when the object of derision is a peer, or even oneself. This is why homophobic humor has its place when it is told by homosexuals, in the same way that Jewish humorists make anti-Semitic jokes. When a particular group develops a specific type of humor about itself, it integrates—in a privileged way—the rejection felt by this group. There is a danger to this, however: in the telling of a “gay joke,” whether by a gay person or not, representations may appear confused and warped, well beyond the intention of the one telling it. These representations have in common a psychological change which includes feelings the person himself refuses to admit. That is when homophobia—in the same way as anti-semitism—can play a role: it allows an environment in which one can conceal personal opinion.
One of the main characteristics of humor about homosexuals is that it can function with a simple
mention
. For many, the sole evocation of a gay person, without saying anything about him, is presumed to be hilarious. In many comedy sketches, or even in
songs
from the 1930s to the 1950s, a basic humor tactic consists of implying, during a lull in the dialogue, that one of the characters is gay, as in “Isn’t he a little…?” followed by comical expressions and, hopefully, laughter from the audience. The stereotype of the male homosexual, preferably an effeminate
caricature
, has long been a familiar construction within heterosexual society, to the point that the development of sophisticated humor beyond it is not necessary.
According to psychologist George Weinberg (who introduced the first scholarly concept of homophobia in his 1972 book
Society and the Healthy Homosexual
), homophobia is mainly anchored in the fear felt by a heterosexual forced into the same proximity as a gay person. In a way, part of the inventiveness and creativity that is found in homophobic humor could be interpreted as the result of a will to
not think of
a situation that could potentially expose one to this risk.
One day the amorino said to his mother:
Why am I not dressed?
If Baptiste sees me naked, my ass is done for.
In this small satirical quatrain about musician Jean-Baptiste Lully written in the seventeenth century, it is easy to see that the small amorino (a cherub) represents the innocent heterosexual threatened with rape by the crazed homosexual.
In an essay entitled “Homophobia Among Men” that appeared in the 1992 anthology
Men’s Lives,
Gregory Lehne suggested that homophobia was primarily a masculine essence felt more by men than women. While debatable, this opinion seems to be confirmed when one observes humor whose subject is homosexuality. Such humor is often driven by fear, whether subtly or overtly; this fear may be defined further as the fear of passive penetration. In this way, a man who mocks homosexuals is in fact expressing his fear of losing his active sexual role, which is equated with a negation of his virility, a negation of himself. It is not so much the man who is having sexual relations with another man that is mocked in homophobic humor; it is he who assumes the passive role. For homophobes, what is most unthinkable about this
toevah
(abomination) that is described in the
Bible
is that this passive role could be a voluntary choice. Just as with the ritual sodomy of the enemy during Antiquity, the essential function of homophobic humor is to place an individual who is thought of as radically “other” in a position of being sodomized. Two situations can then result: either the individual is sodomized against his will under circumstances that can be more or less ludicrous (as is the case in the joke about Lully), or he presents signs of a comical will to be sodomized (as in the joke of the slow driver who, after the man in the car behind him yells, “Hey, move it or you’ll get it in the rear,” responds, “Promises, always promises”).
In any case, being penetrated represents the most inconceivable situation for a heterosexual man, and one that can take on the most radical social or political significance. After all, one is always buggered by the unmentionable, the inhuman. For example, during the 2002 presidential campaign in France, an anti-National Front slogan read: “Now is not the time to move backward; the National Front is erect.”
The image of the man with an “open ass” (which is the name of the Riprocte character in a comedy by Aristophanes) is common in Greek and Latin antiquity. Jokes in which this “open ass” is subject to all kinds of trials and tribulations are peppered throughout the works of Catullus and Martial as well as in Petronius’s
Satyricon
. This humor, linked to male feminization and passivity, is an example of its scatological potential, which remains common to this day; when the premise is centered on male penetration, references to excrement are also prevalent. This leads to all kinds of suggestive situations and wordplays. A high percentage of jokes about gays are filthy in tone, producing ignominious images of sexuality, particularly anal, oral, or masturbatory. An example: the story of “the gay who worked at the sperm bank; he was let go because he was drinking on the job.” Gay male jokes are, therefore, premised on a large inventory of potential situations, including mocked sexuality. This is equally valid, although less common, in humor that implicates lesbians. When the joke is not centered on the comical masculinization of the woman, or on related wordplays, it is centered on the premise of a strange, awkward sexuality that by nature is inferior to “real” coitus: “What do you call a lesbian with very thick fingers? Well-endowed.”
Another obsessive fear rears its ugly head in gay jokes: that of
sterility
and the futile (i.e. non-procreative) spending of sexual energy, which homophobes see as typical of gay sexuality. In the traditional, heteronormative model of sexuality, homosexuals are viewed as outsiders, and as a result, are often caricatured and ridiculed as unrestrained, greedy, and non-reproductive. The “penalty” that is represented by the impossibility of homosexuals to have natural children thus offers this least funny form of humor: the tradition of mocking the “defectiveness” of others—for example, the short person, the humpback, the cross-eyed man—which is related to what Freud called the
Schadenfreude,
or “the pleasure derived from someone else’s misfortune.” An example: “What is the height of optimism? Two gays buying a baby carriage.” This joke is without a doubt authentically homophobic in that the “humor” consists of pinpointing a defect in others which at the same time reveals the joker’s apparent superiority. However, the reassurance provided by the inability of homosexuals to produce children is nonetheless insufficient to dissipate the fear of their propagation; as French writer Tristan Bernard said, “Even if they do not reproduce, we see more and more of them every year.”