sociology of sexuality

Jeffrey Weeks says: “The legal classification [of homosexuality] and the epithet had […] an uncertain status and was often used loosely to describe various forms of non-reproductive sex. There was therefore a crucial distinction between traditional concepts of buggery and modern concepts of homosexuality.”

What was that distinction?

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He also says “[…]the emergence of a specific male ‘homosexual role’, a specialized, despised and punished role which ‘keeps the bulk of society pure in rather the same way that the similar treatment of some kinds of criminal helps keep the rest of society law abiding”

What were the two effects this role had?

Gayle S. Rubin states: “The success of the anti-gay campaign ignited long simmering passions of the American right, and sparked an extensive movement to compress the boundaries of acceptable sexual behaviour.”

According to Rubin, what else did the right and far right link to “non-familial” or frivolous sexuality?

Rubin talks about a “line” between “good” sex and “bad” sex. Describe what this means and the struggle over where to draw the line.

CHAPTER 9

Tbinking Sex: Notes /or a Radical Tbeory 0/
the Politics 0/ Sexuality

Gayle S. Rubin

The Sex Wars

‘Asked his advice, Dr. J. Guerin affirmed that, after all other treatments had failed, he had
succeeded in curing young girls affected by the vice of onanism by burning the clitoris with
a hot iron … I apply the hot point three times to each of the large labia and another on the
clitoris … After the first operation, from forty to fifty times a day, the number of voluptuous
spasms was reduced to three or four … We believe, then, that in cases similar to those
submitted to your consideration, one should not hesitate to resort to the hot iron, and at an
early hour, in order to combat clitoral and vaginal onanism in the little girls.’

(Zambaco, 1981, pp. 31, 36)

The time has come to think about sex. To some, sexuality may seem to be an unimportant topic,
a frivolous diversion from the more critical problems of poverty, war, disease, racism, famine, or
nuclear annihilation. But it is precisely at times such as these, when we live with the possibility of
unthinkable destruction, that people are likely to become dangerously crazy about sexuality. Con-
temporary contlicts over sexual values and erotic conduct have much in common with the religious
disputes of earlier centuries. They acquire immense symbolic weight. Disputes over sexual behaviour
often become the vehicles for displacing social anxieties, and discharging their attendant emotional
intensity. Consequently, sexuality should be treated with special respect in times of great social
stress.

The realm of sexuality also has its own internal politics, inequities, and modes of oppression. As
with other aspects of human behaviour, the concrete institutional forms of sexuality at any given time
and place are products of human activity. They are imbued with contlicts of interest and political
maneuver, both deliberate and incidental. In that sense, sex is always political. But there are also
historical periods in which sexuality is more sharply contested and more overtly politicized. In such
periods, the domain of erotic life is, in effect, renegotiated.

In England and the United States, the late nineteenth century was one such era. During that time,
powerful social movements focused on ‘vices’ of all sorts. There were educational and political
campaigns to encourage chastity, to eliminate prostitution, and to discourage masturbation, espe-
cially among the young. Morality crusaders attacked obscene literature, nude paintings, music halls,
abortion, birth control information, and public dancing (see Gordon and Dubois, 1983; Marcus, 1974;
Ryan, 1979; Walkowitz, 1980, 1982; Weeks, 1981). The consolidation of Victorian morality, and its

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apparatus of social, medical, and legal enforcement, was the outcome of a long period of struggle
whose results have been bitterly contested ever since.

The consequences of these great nineteenth-century moral paroxysms are still with uso They have
left a deep imprint on attitudes about sex, medical practice, child-rearing, parental anxieties, police
conduct, and sex law.

The idea that masturbation is an unhealthy practice is part of that heritage. During the nineteenth
century, it was commonly thought that ‘premature’ interest in sex, sexual excitement, and, above aIl,
sexual release, would impair the health and maturation of a child. Theorists differed on the actual
consequences of sexual precocity. Some thought it led to insanity, while others merely predicted
stunted growth. To protect the young from premature arousal, parents tied children down at night so
they would not touch themselves; doctors excised the clitorises of onanistic little girls (see Barker-
Benfield, 1976; Marcus, 1974; Weeks, 1981; Zambaco, 1981). Although the more gruesome tech-
niques have been abandoned, the attitudes that produced them persist. The notion that sex per se
is harmful to the young has been chiseIled into extensive social and legal structures designed to
insulate minors from sexual knowledge and experience.

Much of the sex law currently on the books also dates from the nineteenth-century morality
crusades. The first federal anti-obscenity law in the United States was passed in 1873. The Comstock
Act named for Anthony Comstock, an ancestral anti-porn activist and the founder of the New York
Society for the Suppression of Vice – made it a federal crime to make, advertise, seIl, possess, send
through the mails, or import books or pictures deemed obscene. The law also banned contraceptive
or abortifacient drugs and devices and information about them (Beserra, Franklin, and Clevenger,
1977). In the wake of the federal statute, most states passed their own anti-obscenity laws.

The Supreme Court began to whittle down both federal and state Cornstock laws du ring the 1950s.
By 1975, the prohibition of materials used for, and information about, contraception and abortion had
been ruled unconstitutional. However, although the obscenity provisions have been modified, their
fundamental constitutionality has been upheld. Thus it remains a crime to make, seIl, mail, or irnport
material which has no purpose other than sexual arousal (Beserra, Franklin and Clevenger, 1977).

Although sodomy statutes date from older strata of the law, when elements of canon law were
adopted into civil codes, most of the laws used to arrest homosexuals and prostitutes come out of
the Victorian campaigns against ‘white slavery’. These campaigns produced the myriad prohibitions
against solicitation, lewd behaviour, loitering for immoral purposes, age offenses, and brothels and
bawdy houses.

In her discussion of the British ‘white slave’ scare, historian Judith Walkowitz observes that:
‘Recent research delineates the vast discrepancy between lurid journalistic accounts and the reality
of prostitution. Evidence of widespread entrapment of British girls in London and abroad is slirn’
(Walkowitz, 1980, p. 83).1 However, public furor over this ostensible problem

forced the passage of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, a particularly nasty and
pernicious piece of omnibus l~gislation. The 1885 Act raised the age of consent for girls from
13 to 16, but it also gave police far greater summary jurisdiction over poor working-class
women and children … it contained a clause making indecent acts between consenting
male adults a crime, thus forming the basis of legal prosecution of male homosexuals in
Britain until 1967 … the clauses of the new bill were mainly enforced against working-class
women, and regulated adult rather than youthful sexual behaviour. (Walkowitz, 1982, p. 85)

In the United States, the Mann Act, also known as the White Slave Traffic Act, was passed in 1910.
Subsequently, every state in the union passed anti-prostitution legislation (Beserra, Franklin and
Clevenger, 1977).

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GA YLE S. RUBIN

In the 1950s, in the United States, major shifts in the organization of sexuality took place. Instead
of focusing on prostitution or masturbation, the anxieties of the 1950s condensed most specmcally
around the image of the ‘homosexual menace’ and the dubious spectre of the ‘sex offender’ . Just
before and after World War 11, the ‘sex offender’ became an object of public fear and scrutiny. Many
states and cities, including Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York State, New York
City, and Miehigan, launched investigations to gather information about this menace to public safety
(Commonwealth of Massachusetts, 1947; State of New Hampshire, 1949; City of New York, 1939;
State of New York, 1950; Hartwell, 1950; State of Miehigan, 1951). The term ‘sex offender’ sometimes
applied to rapists, sometimes to ‘child molesters’ , and eventually functioned as a code for homo-
sexuals. In its bureaucratie, medieal, and popular versions, the sex offender discourse tended to
blur distinctions between violent sexual assault and illegal but consensual acts such as sodomy.
The criminal justiee system incorporated these concepts when an epidemie of sexual psychopath
laws swept through state legislatures (Freedman, 1983). These laws gave the psychologieal profes-
sions increased police powers over homosexuals and other sexual ‘deviants’.

From the late 1940s until the early 1960s, erotie communities whose activities did not fit the
postwar Ameriean dream drew intense persecution. Homosexuals were, along with communists,
the objects of federal witch hunts and purges. Congressional investigations, executive orders, and
sensational exposes in the media aimed to root out homosexuals employed by the government.
Thousands lost their jobs, and restrictions on federal employment of homosexuals persist to this
day (Berube, 1981a, 1981b; D’Ernilio, 1983; Katz, 1976). The FB! began systematie surveillance and
harassment of homosexuals whieh lasted at least into the 1970s (D’Emilio, 1983; Berube, personal
communieation).

Many states and large cities conducted their own investigations, and the federal witch hunts were
reflected in a variety of local crackdowns. In Boise, Idaho, in 1955, a schoolteacher sat down to
breakfast with his morning paper and read that the viee-president of the Idaho First National Bank
had been arrested on felony sodomy charges; the local prosecutor said that he intended to eliminate
all homosexuality from the community. The teacher never finished his breakfast. ‘He jumped up from
his seat, pulled out his suitcases, packed as fast as he could, got into his car, and drove straight to San
Francisco … The cold eggs, coffee, and toast remained on his table for two days before someone
from his school came by to see what had happened’ (Gerassi, 1968, p. 14).2

In San Francisco, police and media waged war on homosexuals throughout the 1950s. Police
raided bars, patrolled cruising areas, conducted street sweeps, and trumpeted their intention of
driving the queers out of San Francisco (Berube, personal communieation; D’Emilio, 1981, 1983).
Crackdowns against gay individuals, bars, and social areas occurred throughout the country. Al-
though anti-homosexual crusades are the best-documented examples of erotic repression in the
1950s, future research should reveal similar patterns of increased harassment against pornographie
materials, prostitutes, and erotie deviants of all sorts. Research is needed to determine the full scope
of both police persecution and regulatory reform. 3

The current period bears some uncomfortable similarities to the 1880s and the 1950s. The 1977
campaign to repeal the Dade County, Florida, gay rights ordinance inaugurated a new wave of
violence, state persecution, and legal initiatives directed against minority sexual populations and
the commercial sex industry. For the last six years, the United States and Canada have undergone
an extensive sexual repression in the political, not the psychologieal, sense. In the spring of 1977,
a few weeks before the Dade County vote, the news media were suddenly full of reports of raids
on gay cruising areas, arrests for prostitution, and investigations into the manufacture and distribu-
tion of pornographie materials. Since then, police activity against the gay community has increased
exponentially. The gay press has documented hundreds of arrests, from the libraries of Boston to
the streets of Houston and the beaches of San Francisco. Even the large, organized, and relatively

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powerful urban gay communities have been unable to stop these depredations. Gay bars and bath
houses have been busted with alarming frequency, and police have gotten holder. In one especially
dramatie incident, police in Toronto raided all four of the city’s gay baths. They broke into cubicles
with crowbars and hauled almost 300 men out into the winter streets, clad in their bath towels. Even
‘liberated’ San Francisco has not been immune. There have been proceedings against several bars,
coundess arrests in the parks, and, in the fall of 1981, police arrested over 400 people in aseries of
sweeps of Polk Street, one of the thoroughfares of local gay nighdife. Queerbashing has become a
significant recreational activity for young urban males. They come into gay neighbourhoods armed
with baseball bats and looking for trouble, knowing that the adults in their lives either secredy
approve or will look the other way.

The police crackdown has not been limited to homosexuals. Since 1977, enforcement of existing
laws against prostitution and obscenity has been stepped up. Moreover, states and municipalities
have been passing new and tighter regulations on commercial sex. Restrictive ordinances have been
passed, zoning laws altered, licensing and safety codes amended, sentences increased, and evidentiary
requirements relaxed. This subde legal codification of more stringent controls over adult sexual
behaviour has gone largely unnoticed outside of the gay press.

For over a century, no tactie for stirring up erotic hysteria has been as reliable as the appeal to
protect children. The current wave of erotie terror has reached deepest into those areas bordered in
some way, if only symbolically, by the sexuality of the young. The motto of the Dade County repeal
campaign was ‘Save Our Children’ from alleged homosexual recruitment. In February 1977, shordy
before the Dade County vote, a sudden concern with ‘child pornography’ swept the national media.
In May, the Chicago Tribune ran a lurid four-day series with three-inch headlines, whieh claimed to
expose anational viee ring organized to lure young boys into prostitution and pornography.4 News-
papers across the country ran similar stories, most of them worthy of the National Enquirer. By the
end of May, a congressional investigation was underway. Within weeks, the federal government had
enacted a sweeping bill against ‘child pornography’ and many of the states followed with bills of
their own. These laws have reestablished restrietions on sexual materials that had been relaxed by
some of the important Supreme Court decisions. For instance, the Court ruled that neither nudity nor
sexual activity per se were obscene. But the child pornography laws define as obscene any depietion
of minors who are nude or engaged in sexual activity. This means that photographs of naked
children in anthropology textbooks and many of the ethnographie movies shown in college classes
are technically illegal in several states. In fact, the instructors are liable to an additional felony charge
for showing such images to each student under the age of 18. Although the Supreme Court has also
ruied that it is a constitutional right to possess obscene material for private use, some child porno-
graphy laws prohibit even the private possession of any sexual material involving minors.

The Iaws produced by the child porn panie are ill-conceived and misdirected. They represent
far-reaching alterations in the regulation of sexual behaviour and abrogate important sexual civil
liberties. But hardly anyone noticed as they swept through Congress and state legislatures. With the
exception of the North American Man/Boy Love Association and Ameriean Civil Liberties Union, no
one raised a peep of protest. 5

A new and even tougher federal child pornography bill has just reached House-Senate conference.
It removes any requirement that prosecutors must prove that alleged child pornography was distrib-
uted for commercial sale. Once this bill becomes law, a person merely possessing a nude snapshot of
a 17-year-old lover or friend may go to jail for fifteen years, and be fined $100,000. This bill passed
the House 400 to 1. 6

The experiences of art photographer Jacqueline Livingston exemplify the climate created by the
child porn panie. An assistant professor of photography at Cornell University, Livingston was fired in
1978 after exhibiting pietures of male nudes whieh included photographs of her seven-year-old son

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GAYLE S. RUBIN

masturbating. Ms. Magazine, Cbrysalis, and Art News all refused to run ads for Livingston’s posters of
male nudes. At one point, Kodak confiscated some of her film, and for several months, Livingston
lived with the threat of prosecution under the child pomography laws. The Tompkins Country
Department of Social Services investigated her fitness as a parent. Livingston’s posters have been
collected by the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan, and other major museums. But she has
paid a high cost in harassment and anxiety for her efforts to capture on film the uncensored male
body at different ages (Stambolian, 1980, 1983).

It is easy to see someone like Livingston as a victim of the child pom wars. It is harder for most
people to sympathize with actual boy-lovers. Like communists and homose:xuals in the 1950s, boy-
lovers are so stigmatized that it is difficult to find defenders for their civilliberties, let alone for their
erotic orientation. Consequently, the police have feasted on them. Local police, the FBI, and watch-
dog postal inspectors have joined to build a huge apparatus whose sole aim is to wipe out the
community of men who love underaged youth. In twenty years or so, when some of the smoke has
deared, it will be much easier to show that these men have been the victims of a savage and
undeserved witch hunt. A lot of people will be embarrassed by their collaboration with this persecu-
tion, but it will be too late to do much good for those men who have spent their lives in prison.

While the misery of boy-lovers affects very few, the other long-term legacy of the Dade County
repeal affects almost everyone. The success of the anti-gay campaign ignited long-simmering pas-
sions of the American right, and sparked an extensive movement to compress the boundaries of
acceptable sexual behaviour.

Right-wing ideology linking non-familial sex with communism and political weakness is nothing
new. During the McCarthy period, Alfred Kinsey and his Institute for Sex Research were attacked for
weakening the moral fibre of Americans and rendering them more vulnerable to communist influ-
ence. After congressional investigations and bad publicity, Kinsey’s Rockefeller grant was terminated
in 1954 (Gebhard, 1976).

Around 1969, the extreme right discovered the Sex Information and Education Council of the
United States (SIECUS). In books and pamphlets, such as Tbe Sex Education Racket: Pornograpby in
tbe Scbools and SIECUS: Conupter 0/ Youtb, the right attacked SIECUS and sex education as com-
munist plots to destroy the family and sap the national will (Courtney, 1969; Drake, 1969). Another
pamphlet, Pavlov’s Cbildren (Tbey May Be YOU13) (n.a., 1969), claims that the United Nations Educa-
tional, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) is in cahoots with SIECUS to undermine reli-
gious taboos, to promote the acceptance of abnormal sexual relations, to downgrade absolute moral
standards, and to ‘destroy racial cohesion’, by exposing white people (especially white women) to
the alleged ‘lower’ sexual standards of black people.

New Right and neo-conservative ideology has updated these themes, and leans heavily on linking
‘immoral’ sexual behaviour to putative dedines in American power. In 1977, Norman Podhoretz
wrote an essay blaming homosexuals for the alleged inability of the United States to stand up to the
Russians (Podhoretz, 1977). He thus neatly linked ‘the anti-gay fight in the domestic arena and the
anti-Communist battles in foreign policy’ (Wolfe and Sanders, 1979).

Right-wing opposition to sex education, homosexuality, pomography, abortion, and pre-marital
sex moved from the extreme fringes to the political centre stage after 1977, when right-wing strat-
egists and fundamentalist religious crusaders discovered that these issues had mass appeal. Sexual
reaction played a significant role in the right’s electoral success in 1980 (Breslin, 1981; Gordon and
Hunter, 1977-8; Gregory-Lewis, 1977a, 1977b, 1977c; Kopkind, 1977; Petchesky, 1981). Organiza-
tions like the Moral Majority and Citizens for Decency have acquired mass followings, immense
financial resources, and unanticipated dout. The Equal Rights Amendment has been defeated, legis-
lation has been passed that mandates new restrietions on abortion, and funding for programs like
Planned Parenthood and sex education has been slashed. Laws and regulations making it more

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difficult far teenage girls to obtain contraceptives or abortions have been promulgated. Sexual back-
lash was exploited in successful attacks on the Women’s Studies Program at Califomia State Univer-
sity at Long Beach.

The most ambitious right-wing legislative initiative has been the Family Protection Act (FPA) ,
introduced in Congress in 1979. The Family Protection Act is a broad assault on feminism, homosexu-
als, non-traditional families, and teenage sexual privacy (Brown, 1981). The Family Protection Act has
not and probably will not pass, but conservative members of Congress continue to pursue its agenda
in a more piecemeal fashion. Perhaps the most glaring sign of the times is the Adolescent Family
Life Program. Also known as the Teen Chastity Program, it gets some 15 million federal dollars to
encourage teenagers to refrain from sexual intercourse, and to discourage them from using contra-
ceptives if they do have sex, and from having abortions if they get pregnant. In the last few years,
there have been countless local confrontations over gay rights, sex education, abortion rights, adult
bookstares, and public school curricula. It is unlikely that the anti-sex backlash is over, or that it has
even peaked. Unless something changes dramatically, it is likely that the next few years will bring
more of the same.

Periods such as the 1880s in England, and the 1950s in the United States, recodify the relations of
sexuality. The struggles that were fought leave a residue in the form of laws, social practices, and
ideologies which then affect the way in which sexuality is experienced long after the immediate
conflicts have faded. All the signs indicate that the present era is another of those watersheds in the
politics of sex. The settlements that emerge from the 1980s will have an impact far into the future. It
is therefore imperative to understand what is going on and what is at stake in order to make informed
decisions about what policies to support and oppose.

It is difficult to make such decisions in the absence of a coherent and intelligent body of radical
thought about sex. Unfortunately, progressive political analysis of sexuality is relatively underdevel-
oped. Much of what is available from the feminist movement has simply added to the mystification
that shrouds the subject. There is an urgent need to develop radical perspectives on sexuality.

Paradoxically, an explosion of exciting scholarship and political writing about sex has been gener-
ated in these bleak years. In the 1950s, the early gay rights movement began and prospered while
the bars were being raided and anti-gay laws were being passed. In the last six years, new erotic
communities, political alliances, and analyses have been developed in the midst of the repression.
In this essay, I will propose elements of a descriptive and conceptual framework for thinking about
sex and its politics. I hope to contribute to the pressing task of creating an accurate, humane, and
genuinely liberatory body of thought about sexuality.

Sexual Thoughts

‘You see, Tim’, Phillip said suddenly, ‘your argument isn’t reasonable. Suppose I granted
your first point that homosexuality is justifiable in certain instances and under certain con-
trols. Then there is the catch: where does justification end and degeneracy begin? Society
must condemn to protect. Permit even the intellectual homosexual a place of respect and
the first bar is down. Then comes the next and the next until the sadist, the flagellist, the
criminally insane demand their places, and society ceases to exist. So I ask again: where is
the line drawn? Where does degeneracy begin if not at the beginning of individual freedom
in such matters?’

[Fragment from a discussion between two gay men trying to
decide if they may love each other (Barr, 1950, p. 310)]

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A radical theory of sex must identify, describe, explain, and denounce erotic injustice and sexual
oppression. Such a theory needs refined conceptual tools which can grasp the subject and hold it in
view. It must build rich descriptions of sexuality as it exists in society and history. It requires a
convincing critical language that can convey the barbarity of sexual persecution.

Several persistent features of thought about sex inhibit the development of such a theory. These
assumptions are so pervasive in Western culture that they are rarely questioned. Thus, they tend to
reappear in different political contexts, acquiring new rhetorical expressions but reproducing funda-
mental axioms.

One such axiom is sexual essentialism – the idea that sex is a natural force that exists prior to
sociallife and shapes institutions. Sexual essentialism is embedded in the folk wisdoms of Western
societies, which consider sex to be eternally unchanging, asocial, and transhistorical. Dominated for
over a century by medicine, psychiatry, and psychology, the academic study of sex has reproduced
essentialism. These fields dassify sex as a property of individuals. It may reside in their hormones or
their psyches. It may be construed as physiological or psychological. But within these ethnoscientific
categories, sexuality has no history and no significant social determinants.

During the last five years, a sophisticated historical and theoretical scholarship has challenged
sexual essentialism both explicitly and implicitly. Gay history, particularly the work of Jeffrey Weeks,
has led this assault by showing that homosexuality as we know it is a relatively modem institutional
complex. 7 Many historians have come to see the contemporary institutional forms of heterosexuality
as an even more recent development (Hansen, 1979). An important contributor to the new scholar-
ship is Judith Walkowitz, whose research has demonstrated the extent to which prostitution was
transformed around the turn of the century. She provides meticulous descriptions of how the inter-
play of social forces such as ideology, fear, political agitation, legal reform, and medical practice can
change the structure of sexual behaviour and alter its consequences (Walkowitz, 1980, 1982).

Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality (1978) has been the most influential and emblematic
text of the new scholarship on sex. Foucault criticizes the traditional understanding of sexuality as a
natural libido yearning to break free of social constraint. He argues that desires are not pre-existing
biological entities, but rather that they are constituted in the course of historically specific social
practices. He emphasizes the generative aspects of the social organization of sex rather than its
repressive elements by pointing out that new sexualities are constantly produced. And he points to a
major discontinuity between kinship-based systems of sexuality and more modem forms.

The new scholarship on sexual behaviour has given sex a history and created a constructivist
alternative to sexual essentialism. Underlying this body of work is an assumption that sexuality is
constituted in society and history, not biologically ordained.8 This does not mean the biological
capacities are not prerequisites for human sexuality. It does mean that human sexuality is not
comprehensible in purely biological terms. Human organisms with human brains are necessary for
human cultures, but no examination of the body or its parts can explain the nature and variety of
human social systems. The belly’s hunger gives no dues as to the complexities of cuisine. The body,
the brain, the genitalia, and the capacity for language are necessary for human sexuality. But they do
not determine its content, its experiences, or its institutional forms. Moreover, we never encounter
the body unmediated by the meanings that cultures give to it. To paraphrase Levi-Strauss, my posi-
tion on the relationship between biology and sexuality is a ‘Kantianism without a transcendental
libido’.9

It is impossible to think with any darity about the politics of race or gender as long as these are
thought of as biological entities rather than as social constructs. Similarly, sexuality is impervious to
political analysis as long as it is primarily conceived as a biological phenomenon or an aspect of
individual psychology. Sexuality is as much a human product as are diets, methods of transportation,
systems of etiquette, forms of labour, types of entertainment, processes of production, and modes of

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oppression. Once sex is understood in terms of social analysis and historical understanding, a more
realistic politics of sex becomes possible. One may then think of sexual politics in terms of such
phenomena as populations, neighbourhoods, settlement patterns, migration, urban conflict, epidemi-
ology, and police technology. These are more fruitful categories of thought than the more traditional
ones of sin, disease, neurosis, pathology, decadence, pollution, or the dedine and fall of empires.

By detailing the relationships between stigmatized erotic populations and the social forces which
regulate them, work such as that of Allan Berube, John D’ Emilio, Jeffrey Weeks, and Judith Walkowitz
contains implicit categories of political analysis and criticism. Nevertheless, the constructivist per-
spective has displayed some political weaknesses. This has been most evident in misconstructions of
Foucault’s position.

Because of his emphasis on the ways that sexuality is produced, Foucault has been vulnerable to
interpretations that deny or minimize the reality of sexual repression in the more political sense.
Foucault makes it abundantly dear that he is not denying the existence of sexual repression so much
as inscribing it within a large dynamic (Foucault, 1978, p. 11). Sexuality in western societies has been
structured within an extremely punitive social framework, and has been subjected to very real formal
and informal controls. It is necessary to recognize repressive phenomena without resorting to the
essentialist assumptions of the language of libido. It is important to hold repressive sexual practices
in focus, even while situating them within a different totality and a more refined terminology (Weeks,
1981, p. 9).

Most radical thought about sex has been embedded within a model of the instincts and their
restraints. Concepts of sexual oppression have been lodged within that more biological understand-
ing of sexuality. It is often easier to fall back on the notion of a natural libido subjected to inhumane
repression than to reformulate concepts of sexual injustice within a more constructivist framework.
But it is essential that we do so. We need a radical critique of sexual arrangements that has the
conceptual elegance of Foucault and the evocative passion of Reich.

The new scholarship on sex has brought a welcome insistence that sexual terms be restricted to
their proper historical and social contexts, and a cautionary scepticism towards sweeping general-
izations. But it is important to be able to indicate groupings of erotic behaviour and general trends
within erotic discourse. In addition to sexual essentialism, there are at least five other ideological
formations whose grip on sexual thought is so strong that to fail to discuss them is to remain
enmeshed within them. These are sex negativity, the fallacy of misplaced scale, the hierarchical
valuation of sex acts, the domino theory of sexual peril, and the lack of a concept of benign sexual
variation.

Of these five, the most important is sex negativity. Western cultures generally consider sex to be a
dangerous, destructive, negative force (Weeks, 1981, p. 22). Most Christian tradition, following Paul,
holds that sex is inherently sinful. It may be redeemed if performed within marriage for procreative
purposes and if the pleasurable aspects are not enjoyed too much. In turn, this idea rests on the
assumption that the genitalia are an intrinsically inferior part of the body, much lower and less holy
than the mind, the ‘soul’, the ‘heart’ , or even the upper part of the digestive system (the status of the
excretory organs is dose to that of the genitalia).l0 Such notions have by now acquired a life of their
own and no longer depend solelyon religion for their perseverance.

This culture always treats sex with suspicion. It construes and judges almost any sexual practice in
terms of its worst possible expression. Sex is presumed guilty until proven innocent. Virtually all
erotic behaviour is considered bad unless a specific reason to exempt it has been established. The
most acceptable excuses are marriage, reproduction, and love. Sometimes scientific curiosity, aes-
thetic experience, or a long-term intimate relationship may serve. But the exercise of erotic capacity,
intelligence, curiosity, or creativity all require pretexts that are unnecessary for other pleasures, such
as the enjoyment of food, fiction, or astronomy.

150

GAYLE S. RUBIN

What I call the fallacy of misplaced scale is a corollary of sex negativity. Susan Sontag once
cornmented that since Christianity focused ‘on sexual behaviour as the root of virtue, everything
pertaining to sex has been a “special case” in our culture’ (Sontag, 1969, p. 46). Sex law has incorpor-
ated the religious attitude that heretieal sex is an especially heinous sin that deserves the harshest
punishments. Throughout much of European and American history, a single act of consensual anal
penetration was grounds for execution. In some states, sodomy still carries twenty-year prison sen-
tences. Outside the law, sex is also a marked category. Small differences in value ar behaviour are
often experienced as cosmie threats. Although people can be intolerant, silly, or pushy about what
constitutes proper diet, differences in menu rarely provoke the kinds of rage, anxiety, and sheer
terror that routinely accompany differences in erotie taste. Sexual acts are burdened with an excess
of significance.

Modern Western societies appraise sex acts according to a hierarchieal system of sexual value.
Marital, reproductive heterosexuals are alone at the top erotie pyramid. Clamouring below are un-
married monogamous heterosexuals in couples, followed by most other heterosexuals. Solitary sex
floats ambiguously. The powerful nineteenth-century stigma on masturbation lingers in less potent,
modified forms, such as the idea that masturbation is an inferior substitute far partnered encounters.
Stable, long-term lesbian and gay male couples are verging on respectability, but bar dykes and
promiscuous gay men are hovering just above the groups at the very bottom of the pyramid. The
most despised sexual castes currently include transsexuals, transvestites, fetishists, sadomasochists,
sex workers such as prostitutes and porn models, and the lowliest of all, those whose eroticism
transgresses generational boundaries.

Individuals whose behaviour stands high in this hierarchy are rewarded with certified mental
health, respectability, legality, social and physieal mobility, institutional support, and material ben-
efits. As sexual behaviours or occupations falliower on the scale, the individuals who practiee them
are subjected to a presumption of mental illness, disreputability, criminality, restricted social and
physieal mobility, loss of institutional support, and economie sanctions.

Extreme and punitive stigma maintains some sexual behaviours as low status and is an effect-
ive sanction against those who engage in them. The intensity of this stigma is rooted in Western
religious traditions. But most of its contemporary content derives from medieal and psychiatric
opprobrium.

The old religious taboos were primarily based on kinship forms of social arganization. They were
meant to deter inappropriate unions and to provide proper kino Sex laws derived from Biblical
pronouncements were aimed at preventing the acquisition of the wrong kinds of affinal partners:
consanguineous kin (incest), the same gender (homosexuality), or the wrong species (bestiality).
When medieine and psychiatry acquired extensive powers over sexuality, they were less concerned
with unsuitable mates than with unfit forms of desire. If taboos against incest best characterized
kinship systems of sexual organization, then the shift to an emphasis on taboos against masturbation
was more apposite to the newer systems organized around qualities of erotie experience (Foucault,
1978, pp. 106-7).

Medieine and psychiatry multiplied the categories of sexual misconduct. The section on psycho-
sexual disorders in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual oj Mental and Physical Disorders (DSM) of
the Ameriean Psychiatrie Association (AP A) is a fairly reliable map of the current moral hierarchy of
sexual activities. The AP A list is much more elaborate than the traditional condemnations of whoring,
sodomy, and adultery. The most recent edition, DSM-III, removed homosexuality from the roster of
mental disorders after a long politieal struggle. But fetishism, sadism, masochism, transsexuality,
transvestism, exhibitionism, voyeurism, and paedophilia are quite firmly entrenched as psychologieal
malfunctions (Ameriean Psychiatric Association, 1980). Books are still being written about the gen-
esis, etiology, treatment, and cure of these assorted ‘pathologies’.

151

FROM GENDER TO SEXUALITY

Psychiatric condemnation of sexual behaviours invokes concepts of mental and emotional inferi-
ority rather than categories of sexual sin. Low-status sex practiees are vilified as mental diseases or
symptoms of defective personality integration. In addition, psychologieal terms conflate difficulties
of psycho-dynamie functioning with modes of erotie conduct. They equate sexual masochism with
self-destructive personality patterns, sexual sadism with emotional aggression, and homoeroticism
with immaturity. These terminologieal muddles have become powerful stereotypes that are indis-
criminately applied to individuals on the basis of their sexual orientations.

Popular culture is permeated with ideas that erotie variety is dangerous, unhealthy, depraved, and
a menace to everything from small children to national security. Popular sexual ideology is a noxious
stew made up of ideas of sexual sin, concepts of psychologieal inferiority, anti-communism, mob
hysteria, accusations of witchcraft, and xenophobia. The mass media nourish these attitudes with
relentless propaganda. I would call this system of erotic stigma the last socially respectable form of
prejudiee if the old forms did not show such obstinate vitality, and new ones did not continually
become apparent.

All these hierarchies of sexual value – religious, psychiatrie, and popular – function in much the
same ways as do ideologieal systems of racism, ethnocentrism, and religious chauvinism. They
rationalize the well-being of the sexually privileged and the adversity of the sexual rabble.

Figure 9.1 diagrams a general version of the sexual value system. According to this system,
sexuality that is ‘good’, ‘normal’, and ‘natural’ should ideally be heterosexual, marital, monogamous,
reproductive, and non-commercial. It should be coupled, relational, within the same generation, and
occur at horne. It should not involve pornography, fetish objects, sex toys of any sort, or roles other
than male and female. Any sex that violates these rules is ‘bad’, ‘abnormal’, or ‘unnatural’. Bad sex
may be homosexual, unmarried, promiscuous, non-procreative, or commercial. It may be masturb-
atory or take place at orgies, may be casual, may cross generational lines, and may take place in
‘public’, or at least in the bushes or the baths. It may involve the use of pornography, fetish objects,
sex toys, or unusual roles (see Figure 9.1).

Figure 9.2 diagrams another aspect of the sexual hierarchy: the need to draw and maintain an
imaginary line between good and bad sex. Most of the discourses on sex, be they religious, psychi-
atrie, popular, or politieal, delimit a very small portion of human sexual capacity as sanctifiable, safe,
healthy, mature, legal, or politieally correct. The ‘line’ distinguishes these from all other erotie beha-
viours, whieh are understood to be the work of the devil, dangerous, psychopathologieal, infantile,
or politieally reprehensible. Arguments are then conducted over ‘where to draw the line’, and to
determine what other activities, if any, may be permitted to cross over into acceptability.

All these models assurne a domino theory of sexual peril. The line appears to stand between
sexual order and chaos. It expresses the fear that if anything is perrnitted to cross this erotie DMZ, the
barrier against scary sex will crumble and something unspeakable will skitter across.

Most systems of sexual judgment – religious, psychologieal, feminist, or socialist – attempt to
determine on which side of the line a partieular act falls. Only sex acts on the good side of the line
are accorded moral complexity. For instance, heterosexual encounters may be sublime or disgusting,
free or forced, healing or destructive, romantie or mercenary. As long as it does not violate other
rules, heterosexuality is acknowledged to exhibit the full range of human experience. In contrast, all
sex acts on the bad side of the line are considered utterly repulsive and devoid of all emotional
nuance. The further from the line a sex act is, the more it is depieted as a uniforrnly bad experience.

As a result of the sex confliets of the last decade, some behaviour near the border is inching across
it. Unmarried couples living together, masturbation, and some forms of homosexuality are moving in
the direction of respectability (see Figure 9.2). Most homosexuality is still on the bad side of the line.
But if it is coupled and monogamous, the society is beginning to recognize that it includes the full
range of human interaction. Promiscuous homosexuality, sadomasochism, fetishism, transsexuality,

152

GAYLE S. RUBIN

Figure 9.1: The sex hierarchy: the charrned circle vs. the outer limits

The charmed circle:
Good, Normal, Natural.
Blessed Sexuality

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and cross-generational encounters are still viewed as unmodulated horrors incapable of involving
affection, love, free choice, kindness, or transcendence,

This kind of sexual morality has more in common with ideologies of racism than with true ethics.
It grants virtue to the dominant groups, and relegates vice to the underprivileged. A democratic
morality should judge sexual acts by the way partners treat one another, the level of mutual consid-
eration, the presence or absence of coercion, and quantity and quality of the pleasures they provide.
Whether sex acts are gay or straight, coupled or in groups, naked or in underwear, commercial or
free, with or without video, should not be ethical concems.

It is difficult to develop a pluralistic sexual ethics without a concept of benign sexual variation.
Variation is a fundamental property of all life, from the simplest biological organisms to the most
complex human social formations. Yet sexuality is supposed to conform to a single standard. One of

153

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FROM GENDER TO SEXUALITY

Figure 9.2: The sex hierarchy: the struggle over where to draw the line

“Good” sex: “Bad” sex:
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Transsexuals

Fetlshists

the most tenacious ideas about sex is that there is one best way to do it, and that everyone should do
it that way.

Most people find it difficult to grasp that whatever they like to do sexually will be thoroughly
repulsive to someone else, and that whatever repels them sexually will be the most treasured delight
of someone, somewhere. One need not like or perform a particular sex act in order to recognize that
someone else will, and that this difference does not indicate a lack of good taste, mental health, or
intelligence in either party. Most people mistake their sexual preferences for a universal system that
will or should work for everyone.

This notion of a single ideal sexuality characterizes most systems of thought about sex. For
religion, the ideal is procreative marriage. For psychology, it is mature heterosexuality. Although its
content varies, the format of a single sexual standard is continually reconstituted within other rhetor-
ical frameworks, including feminism and socialism. It is just as objectionable to insist that everyone
should be lesbian, non-monogamous, or kinky, as to believe that everyone should be heterosexual,
married, or vanilla – though the latter set of opinions are backed by considerably more coercive
power than the former.

Progressives who would be ashamed to display cultural chauvinism in other areas routinely
exhibit it towards sexual differences. We have learned to cherish different cultures as unique expres-
sions of human inventiveness rather than as the inferior or disgusting habits of savages. We need a
similarly anthropological understanding of different sexual cultures.

Empirical sex research is the one field that does incorporate a positive concept of sexual variation.
Alfred Kinsey approached the study of sex with the same uninhibited curiosity he had previously
applied to examining a species of wasp. His scientific detachment gave his work a refreshing neu-
trality that enraged moralists and caused immense controversy (Kinsey et al., 1948, 1953). Among
Kinsey’s successors, lohn Gagnon and William Simon have pioneered the application of sociological
understandings to erotic variety (Gagnon and Simon, 1967, 1970; Gagnon, 1977). Even some of the
older sexology is useful. Although his work is imbued with unappetizing eugenic beliefs, Havelock
Ellis was an acute and sympathetic observer. His monumental Studies in the Psychology 0/ Sex is
resplendent with detail (Ellis, 1936).

Much political writing on sexuality reveals complete ignorance of both classical sexology and
modern sex research. Perhaps this is because so few colleges and universities bother to teach human
sexuality, and because so much stigma adheres even to scholarly investigation of sex. Neither sexology

154

Heterosexual
Marned
Monogamous
Reproductlve
At horne

Transvestrtes
Transse)Cuals

Fetlshists
Sadomasochists

Formoney
Cross-generatlonal

Worst Worst

GAYLE S. RUBIN

nor sex research has been immune to the prevailing sexual value system. Both contain assumptions
and information which should not be accepted uncritically. But sexology and sex research provide
abundant detail, a welcome posture of calm, and a well-developed ability to treat sexual variety as
something that exists rather than as something to be exterminated. These fields can provide an em-
pirical grounding for a radical theory of sexuality more useful than the combination of psychoanalysis
and feminist first prindples to which so many texts resort.

Sexual Transformation

As defined by the ancient dvil or canonical codes, sodomy was a category of forbidden
acts; their perpetrator was nothing more than the juridical subject of them. The nineteenth-
century homosexual became a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood, in addi-
tion to being a type of life, a life form, and a morphology, with an indiscreet anatomy and
possibly a mysterious physiology … The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the
homosexual was now a species. (Foucault, 1978, p. 43)

In spite of many continuities with ancestral forms, modern sexual arrangements have a distinctive
character which sets them apart from preexisting systems. In Western Europe and the United States,
industrialization and urbanization reshaped the traditional rural and peasant populations into a new
urban industrial and service workforce. It generated new forms of state apparatus, reorganized family
relations, altered gender roles, made possible new forms of identity, produced new varieties of sodal
inequality, and created new formats for political and ideological conflict. It also gave rise to a new
sexual system characterized by distinct types of sexual persons, populations, stratification, and polit-
ical conflict.

The writings of nineteenth-century sexology suggest the appearance of a kind of erotic spedation.
However outlandish their explanations, the early sexologists were witnessing the emergence of new
kinds of erotic individuals and their aggregation into rudimentary communities. The modern sexual
system contains sets of these sexual populations, stratified by the operation of an ideological and
social hierarchy. Differences in sodal value create friction among these groups, who engage in
political contest to alter or maintain their place in the ranking. Contemporary sexual politics should
be reconceptualized in terms of the emergence and on-going development of this system, its social
relations, the ideologies which interpret it, and its characteristic modes of conflict.

Homosexuality is the best example of this process of erotic spedation. Homosexual behaviour
is always present among humans. But in different sodeties and epochs it may be rewarded or
punished, required or forbidden, a temporary experience or a life-Iong vocation. In some New
Guinea societies, for example, homosexual activities are obligatory for all males. Homosexual acts
are considered utterly masculine, roles are based on age, and partners are determined by kinship
status (Herdt, 1981; Kelly, 1976; Rubin, 1974, 1982; Baal, 1966; Williams, 1936). Although these
men engage in extensive homosexual and pedophile behaviour, they are neither homosexuals nor
pederasts.

Nor was the sixteenth-century sodomite a homosexual. In 1631, Mervyn Touchet, Earl of Castlehaven,
was tried and executed for Sodomy. It is clear from the proceedings that the earl was not understood
by himself or anyone else to be a particular kind of sexual individual. ‘While from the twentieth-
century viewpoint Lord Castlehaven obviously suffered from psychosexual problems requiring the
services of an analyst, from the seventeenth-century viewpoint he had deliberately broken the Law
of God and the Laws of England, and required the simpler services of an executioner’ (Bingham,

155

FROM GENDER TO SEXUALITY

1971, p. 465). The earl did not slip into his tightest doublet and waltz down to the nearest gay tavern
to mingle with his fellow sodomists. He stayed in his manor house and buggered his servants. Gay
self-awareness, gay pubs, the sense of group commonality, and even the term homosexual were not
part of the earl’s universe.

The New Guinea bachelor and the sodomite nobleman are only tangentially related to a modern
gay man, who may migrate from rural Colorado to San Francisco in order to live in a gay neigh-
bourhood, work in a gay business, and participate in an elaborate experience that includes a self-
conscious identity, group solidarity, a literature, a press, and a high level of political activity. In
modern, Western, industrial societies, homosexuality has acquired much of the institutional structure
of an ethnic group (Murray, 1979).

The relocation of homoeroticism into these quasi-ethnic, nucleated, sexually constituted commun-
ities is to some extent a consequence of the transfers of population brought by industrialization. As
labourers migrated to work in cities, there were increased opportunities for voluntary communities to
form. Homosexually inclined women and men, who would have been vulnerable and isolated in
most pre-industrial villages, began to congregate in small corners of the big cities. Most large nine-
teenth-century cities in Western Europe and North America had areas where men could cruise for
other men. Lesbian communities seem to have coalesced more slowly and on a smaller scale.
Nevertheless, by the 1890s, there were several cafes in Paris near the Place Pigalle which catered to
a lesbian clientele, and it is likely that there were similar places in the other major capitals of Western
Europe.

Areas like these acquired bad reputations, which alerted other interested individuals of their
existence and location. In the United States, lesbian and gay male territories were well established in
New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Los Angeles in the 1950s. Sexually motivated migration to
places such as Greenwich Village had become a sizable sociological phenomenon. By the late 1970s,
sexual migration was occurring on a scale so significant that it began to have a recognizable impact
on urban politics in the United States, with San Francisco being the most notable and notorious
example. ll

Prostitution has undergone a similar metamorphosis. Prostitution began to change from a tempor-
ary job to a more permanent occupation as a result of nineteenth-century agitation, legal reform, and
police persecution. Prostitutes, who had been part of the general working-class population, became
increasingly isolated as members of an outcast group (Walkowitz, 1980). Prostitutes and other sex
workers differ from homosexuals and other sexual minorities. Sex work is an occupation, while
sexual deviation is an erotic preference. Nevertheless, they share some common features of social
organization. Like homosexuals, prostitutes are a criminal sexual population stigmatized on the basis
of sexual activity. Prostitutes and male homosexuals are the primary prey of vice police everywhere. 12

Like gay men, prostitutes occupy well-demarcated urban territories and battle with police to defend
and maintain those territories. The legal persecution of both populations is justified by an elaborate
ideology which classifies them as dangerous and inferior undesirables who are not entitled to be left
in peace.

Besides organizing homosexuals and prostitutes into localized populations, the ‘modernization
of sex’ has generated a system of continual sexual ethnogenesis. Other populations of erotic dissid-
ents – commonly known as the ‘perversions’ or the ‘paraphilias’ – also began to coalesce. Sexualities
keep marching out of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual and on to the pages of social history.
At present, several other groups are trying to emulate the successes of homosexuals. Bisexuals,
sadomasochists, individuals who prefer cross-generational encounters, transsexuals, and transvest-
ites are all in various states of community formation and identity acquisition. The pervers ions are
not proliferating as much as they are attempting to acquire social space, small businesses, political
resources, and a measure of relief from the penalties for sexual heresy.

156

GAYLE S. RUBIN

Sexual Stratification

An entire sub-race was born, different – despite certain kinship ties – from the libertines of
the past. From the end of the eighteenth century to our own, they circulated through the pores
of society; they were always hounded, but not always by laws; were often locked up, but not
always in prisons; were siek perhaps, but scandalous, dangerous vietims, prey to astrange
evil that also bore the name of viee and sometimes crime. They were children wise beyond
their years, precocious little girls, ambiguous schoolboys, dubious servants and educators,
cruel or maniacal husbands, solitary collectors, ramblers with bizarre impulses; they haunted
the houses of correction, the penal colonies, the tribunals, and the asyl ums; they carried their
infamy to the doctors and their siekness to the judges. This was the numberless family of
perverts who were on friendly terms with delinquents and akin to madmen.

(Foucault, 1978, p. 40)

The industrial transformation of Western Europe and North America brought about new forms of
social stratification. The resultant inequalities of dass are weIl known and have been explored in
detail bya century of scholarship. The construction of modern systems of racism and ethnic injustiee
has been weIl documented and critieally assessed. Feminist thought has analysed the prevailing
organization of gender oppression. But although specific erotie groups, such as militant homosexuals
and sex workers, have agitated against their own mistreatment, there has been no equivalent attempt
to locate partieular varieties of sexual persecution within a more general system of sexual stratifica-
tion. Nevertheless, such a system exists, and in its contemporary form it is a consequence of Western
industrialization.

Sex law is the most adamantine instrument of sexual stratification and erotie persecution. The state
routinely intervenes in sexual behaviour at a level that would not be tolerated in other areas of social
life. Most people are unaware of the extent of sex law, the quantity and qualities of illegal sexual
behaviour, and the punitive character of legal sanctions. Although federal agencies may be involved
in obscenity and prostitution cases, most sex laws are enacted at the state and municipal level, and
enforcement is largely in the hands of local police. Thus, there is a tremendous amount of variation
in the laws applicable to any given locale. Moreover, enforcement of sex laws varies dramatieally
with the local politieal dimate. In spite of this legal thieket, one can make some tentative and
qualified generalizations. My discussion of sex law does not apply to laws against sexual coercion,
sexual assault, or rape. It does pertain to the myriad prohibitions on consensual sex and the ‘status’
offenses such as statutory rape.

Sex law is harsh. The penalties for violating sex statutes are universally out of proportion to any
social or individual harm. A single act of consensual but illicit sex, such as placing one’s lips upon the
genitalia of an enthusiastie partner, is punished in many states with more severity than rape, battery,
or murder. Each such genital kiss, each lewd caress, is aseparate crime. It is therefore painfully easy
to commit multiple felonies in the course of a single evening of illegal passion. ance someone is
convieted of a sex violation, a second performance of the same act is grounds for prosecution as a
repeat offender, in whieh case penalties will be even more severe. In some states, individuals have
become repeat felons for having engaged in homosexual love-making on two separate occasions.
ance an erotic activity has been proscribed by sex law, the full power of the state enforces conform-
ity to the values embodied in those laws. Sex laws are notoriously easy to pass, as legislators are
loath to be soft on viee. ance on the books, they are extremely difficult to dislodge.

Sex law is not a perfect reflection of the prevailing moral evaluations of sexual conduct. Sexual
variation per se is more specifically policed by the mental-health professions, popular ideology,
and extra-legal social practiee. Some of the most detested erotic behaviours, such as fetishism and

157

FROM GENDER TO SEXUALITY

sadomasochism, are not as closely or completely regulated by the criminal justice system as some-
what less stigmatized practices, such as homosexuality. Areas of sexual behaviour come under the
purview of the law when they become objects of social concern and political uproar. Each sex scare
or morality campaign deposits new regulations as a kind of fossil record of its passage. The legal
sediment is thickest – and sex law has its greatest potency – in areas involving obscenity, money,
minors, and homosexuality.

Obscenity laws enforce a powerful taboo against direct representation of erotic activities. Current
emphasis on the ways in which sexuality has become a focus of social attention should not be
misused to undermine a critique of this prohibition. It is one thing to create sexual discourse in the
form of psychoanalysis, or in the course of a morality crusade. It is quite another to depict sex acts or
genitalia graphically. The first is socially permissible in a way the second is not. Sexual speech is
forced into reticence, euphemism, and indirection. Freedom of speech about sex is a glaring excep-
tion to the protections of the First Amendment, which is not even considered applicable to purely
sexual statements.

The anti-obscenity laws also form part of a group of statutes that make almost all sexual commerce
illegal. Sex law incorporates a very strong prohibition against mixing sex and money, except via
marriage. In addition to the obscenity statutes, other laws impinging on sexual commerce include
anti-prostitution laws, alcoholic beverage regulations, and ordinances governing the location and
operation of ‘adult’ businesses. The sex industry and the gay economy have both managed to
circumvent some of this legislation, but that process has not been easy or simple. The underlying
criminality of sex-oriented business keeps it marginal, underdeveloped, and distorted. Sex businesses
can only operate in legal loopholes. This tends to keep investment down and to divert commercial
activity towards the goal of staying out of jail rather than delivery of goods and services. It also
renders sex workers more vulnerable to exploitation and bad working conditions. If sex commerce
were legal, sex workers would be more able to organize and agitate for higher pay, better conditions,
greater control, and less stigma.

Whatever one thinks of the limitations of capitalist commerce, such an extreme exclusion from the
market process would hardly be socially acceptable in other areas of activity. Imagine, for example,
that the exchange of money for medical care, pharmacological advice, or psychological counselling
were illegal. Medical practice would take place in a much less satisfactory fashion if doctors, nurses,
druggists, and therapists could be hauled off to jail at the whim of the local ‘health squad’. But that is
essentially the situation of prostitutes, sex workers, and sex entrepreneurs.

Marx himself considered the capitalist market a revolutionary, if limited, force. He argued that
capitalism was progressive in its dissolution of pre-capitalist superstition, prejudice, and the bonds
of traditional modes of life. ‘Hence the great civilizing influence of capital, its production of astate of
society compared with which all earlier stages appear to be merely local progress and idolatry of
nature’ (Marx, 1971, p. 94). Keeping sex from realizing the positive effects of the market economy
hardly makes it socialist.

The law is especially ferocious in maintaining the boundary between childhood ‘innocence’ and
‘adult’ sexuality. Rather than recognizing the sexuality of the young, and attempting to provide for it
in a caring and responsible manner, our culture denies and punishes erotic interest and activity by
anyone under the local age of consent. The amount of law devoted to protecting young people from
premature exposure to sexuality is breath-taking.

The primary mechanism for insuring the separation of sexual generations is age of consent laws.
These laws make no distinction between the most brutal rape and the most gende romance. A 20-
year-old convicted of sexual contact with a 17-year-old will face a severe sentence in virtually every
state, regardless of the nature of the relationship (Norton, 1981).13 Nor are minors permitted access
to ‘adult’ sexuality in other forms. They are forbidden to see books, movies, or television in which

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sexuality is ‘too’ graphieally portrayed. It is legal for young people to see hideous depietions of
violence, but not to see explicit pietures of genitalia. Sexually active young people are frequently
incarcerated in juvenile hornes, or othetwise punished for their ‘precocity’.

Adults who deviate too much from conventional standards of sexual conduct are often denied
contact with the young, even their own. Custody laws permit the state to steal the children of anyone
whose erotic activities appear questionable to a judge presiding over family court matters. Countless
lesbians, gay men, prostitutes, swingers, sex workers, and ‘promiscuous’ women have been declared
unfit parents under such provisions. Members of the teaching professions are closely monitored for
signs of sexual misconduct. In most states, certification laws require that teachers arrested for sex
offenses lose their jobs and credentials. In some cases, a teacher may be fired merely because an
unconventional lifestyle becomes known to school officials. Moral turpitude is one of the few legal
grounds for revoking academic tenure (Beserra, Franklin, and Clevenger, 1977, pp. 165-7). The more
influence one has over the next generation, the less latitude one is permitted in behaviour and
opinion. The coercive power of the law ensures the transmission of conservative sexual values with
these kinds of controls over parenting and teaching.

The only adult sexual behaviour that is legal in every state is the placement of the penis in the
vagina in wedlock. Consenting adults statutes ameliorate this situation in fewer than half the states.
Most states impose severe criminal penalties on consensual sodomy, homosexual contact short of
sodomy, adultery, seduction, and adult incest. Sodomy laws vary a great deal. In some states, they
apply equally to homosexual and heterosexual partners and regardless of marital status. Some state
courts have ruled that married couples have the right to commit sodomy in private. Only homosexual
sodomy is illegal in some states. Some sodomy statutes prohibit both anal sex and oral-genital
contact. In other states, sodomy applies only to anal penetration, and oral sex is covered under
separate statutes (Beserra et al., 1973, pp. 163-8).14

Laws like these criminalize sexual behaviour that is freely chosen and avidly sought. The ideology
embodied in them reflects the value hierarchies discussed above. That is, some sex acts are consid-
ered to be so intrinsieally vile that no one should be allowed under any circumstance to perform
them. The fact that individuals consent to or even prefer them is taken to be additional evidence of
depravity. This system of sex law is similar to legalized racism. State prohibition of same sex contact,
anal penetration, and oral sex make homosexuals a criminal group denied the privileges of full
citizenship. With such laws, prosecution is persecution. Even when they are not strietly enforced, as
is usually the case, the members of criminalized sexual communities remain vulnerable to the possib-
ility of arbitrary arrest, or to periods in which they become the objects of social panic. When those
occur, the laws are in place and police action is swift. Even sporadic enforcement serves to remind
individuals that they are members of a subject population. The occasional arrest for sodomy, lewd
behaviour, solicitation, or oral sex keeps everyone else afraid, nervous, and circumspect.

The state also upholds the sexual hierarchy through bureaucratic regulation. Immigration policy
still prohibits the admission of homosexuals (and other sexual ‘deviates’) into the United States.
Military regulations bar homosexuals from serving in the armed forces. The fact that gay people
cannot legally marry means that they cannot enjoy the same legal rights as heterosexuals in many
matters, including inheritance, taxation, protection from testimony in court, and the acquisition of
citizenship for foreign partners. These are but a few of the ways that the state reflects and maintains
the social relations of sexuality. The law buttresses structures of power, codes of behaviour, and
forms of prejudice. At their worst, sex law and sex regulation are simply sexual apartheid.

Although the legal apparatus of sex is staggering, most everyday social control is extra-legal. Less
formal, but very effective social sanctions are imposed on members of ‘inferior’ sexual populations.

In her marvellous ethnographie study of gay life in the 1960s, Esther Newton observed that the
homosexual population was divided into what she called the ‘overts’ and ‘coverts’. ‘The overts live

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their entire working lives within the context of the [gay] community; the coverts live their entire
nonworking lives within it’ (Newton, 1972, p. 21, emphasis in the original). At the time of Newton’s
study, the gay community provided far fewer jobs than it does now, and the non-gay work world was
almost completely intolerant of homosexuality. There were some fortunate individuals who could be
openly gay and earn decent salaries. But the vast majority of homosexuals had to choose between
honest poverty and the strain of maintaining a false identity.

Though this situation has changed a great deal, discrimination against gay people is still rampant.
For the bulk of the gay population, being out on the job is still impossible. Generally, the more
important and higher paid the job, the less the society will tolerate overt erotic deviance. If it is
difficult for gay people to find employment where they do not have to pretend, it is doubly and triply
so for more exotically sexed individuals. Sadomasochists leave their fetish clothes at horne, and know
that they must be especially careful to conceal their real identities. An exposed paedophile would
probably be stoned out of the office. Having to maintain such absolute secrecy is a considerable
burden. Even those who are content to be secretive may be exposed by some accidental event.
Individuals who are erotically unconventional risk being unemployable or unable to pursue their
chosen careers.

Public officials and anyone who occupies a position of social consequence are especially vulner-
able. A sex scandal is the surest method for hounding someone out of office or destroying a political
career. The fact that important people are expected to conform to the strictest standards of erotic
conduct discourages sex perverts of all kinds from seeking such positions. Instead, erotic dissidents
are channeled into positions that have less impact on the mainstream of social activity and opinion.

The expansion of the gay economy in the last decade has provided some employment alternatives
and some relief from job discrimination against homosexuals. But most of the jobs provided by the
gay economy are low-status and low-paying. Bartenders, bathhouse attendants, and disc jockeys are
not bank officers or corporate executives. Many of the sexual migrants who flock to places like San
Francisco are downwardly mobile. They face intense competition for choice positions. The influx of
sexual migrants provides a pool of cheap and exploitable labour for many of the city’s businesses,
both gay and straight.

Families playa crucial role in enforcing sexual conformity. Much social pressure is brought to bear
to deny erotic dissidents the comforts and resources that families provide. Popular ideology holds
that families are not supposed to produce or harbor erotic non-conformity. Many families respond
by trying to reform, punish, or exile sexually offending members. Many sexual migrants have been
thrown out by their families, and many others are fleeing from the threat of institutionalization.
Any random collection of homosexuals, sex workers, or miscellaneous perverts can provide heart-
stopping stories of rejection and mistreatment by horrified families. Christmas is the great family
holiday in the United States and consequently it is a time of considerable tension in the gay com-
munity. Half the inhabitants go off to their families of origin; many of those who remain in the gay
ghettos cannot do so, and re live their anger and grief.

In addition to economic penalties and strain on family relations, the stigma of erotic dissidence
creates friction at all other levels of everyday life. The general public helps to penalize erotic non-
conformity when, according to the values they have been taught, landlords refuse housing, neigh-
bours call in the police, and hoodlums commit sanctioned battery. The ideologies of erotic inferiority
and sexual danger decrease the power of sex perverts and sex workers in social encounters of all
kinds. They have less protection from unscrupulous or criminal behaviour, less access to police
protection, and less recourse to the courts. Dealings with institutions and bureaucracies – hospital,
police coroners, banks, public officials – are more difficult.

Sex is a vector of oppression. The system of sexual oppression cuts across other modes of social
inequality, sorting out individuals and groups according to its own intrinsic dynamics. It is not

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reducible to, or understandable in terms of, dass, race, ethnicity, or gender. Wealth, white skin, male
gender, and ethnic privileges can mitigate the effects of sexual stratification. A rich, white male
pervert will generally be less affected than a poor, black, female pervert. But even the most privi-
leged are not immune to sexual oppression. Some of the consequences of the system of sexual
hierarchy are mere nuisances. Others are quite grave. In its most serious manifestations, the sexual
system is a Kafkaesque nightmare in which unlucky victims become herds of human cattle whose
identification, surveillance, apprehension, treatment, incarceration, and punishment produce jobs
and self-satisfaction for thousands of vice police, prison officials, psychiatrists, and social workers. 15

Sexual Conflicts

The moral panic crystallizes widespread fears and anxieties, and often deals with them not
by seeking the real causes of the problems and conditions which they demonstrate but by
displacing them on to ‘Folk Devils’ in an identified social group (often the ‘immoral’ or
‘degenerate’). Sexuality has had a peculiar centrality in such panics, and sexual ‘deviants’
have been omnipresent scapegoats. Oeffrey Weeks, 1981, p. 14)

The sexual system is not a monolithic, omnipotent structure. There are continuous battles over the
definitions, evaluations, arrangements, privileges, and costs of sexual behavioUf. Political struggle
over sex assumes characteristic forms.

Sexual ideology plays a crucial role in sexual experience. Consequently, definitions and evalua-
tions of sexual conduct are objects of bitter contest. The confrontations between early gay liberation
and the psychiatric establishment are the best example of this kind of fight, but there are constant
skirmishes. Recurrent battles take place between the primary producers of sexual ideology – the
churches, the family, the shrinks, and the media – and the groups whose experience they name,
distort, and endanger.

The legal regulation of sexual conduct is another battleground. Lysander Spooner dissected the
system of state-sanctioned moral coercion over a century aga in a text inspired primarily by the
temperance campaigns. In Vices Are Not Crimes: A Vindication 0/ Moral Liberty, Spooner argued that
govemment should protect its citizens against crime, but that it is foolish, unjust, and tyrannical to
legislate against vice. He discusses rationalizations still heard today in defense of legalized moral-
ism – that ‘vices’ (Spooner is referring to drink, but homosexuality, prostitution, or recreational drug
use may be substituted) lead to crimes, and should therefore be prevented; that those who practice
‘vice’ are non compos mentis and should therefore be protected from their self-destruction by
state-accomplished ruin; and that children must be protected from supposedly hannful knowledge
(Spooner, 1977). The discoUfse on victirnless crimes has not changed much. Legal struggle over sex
law will continue until basic freedoms of sexual action and expression are guaranteed. This requires
the repeal of all sex laws except those few that deal with actual, not statutory, coercion; and it entails
the abolition of vice squads, whose job it is to enforce legislated morality.

In addition to the definitional and legal wars, there are less obvious forms of sexual political
conflict which I call the territorial and border wars. The processes by which erotic minorities form
communities and the forces that seek to inhibit them lead to struggles over the nature and boundaries
of sexual zones.

Dissident sexuality is rarer and more dosely monitored in small towns and rural areas. Con-
sequently, metropolitan life continually beckons to young perverts. Sexual migration creates con-
centrated pools of potential partners, friends, and associates. It enables individuals to create adult,
kin-like networks in which to live. But there are many barriers which sexual rnigrants have to overcome.

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According to the mainstream media and popular prejudiee, the marginal sexual worlds are bleak
and dangerous. They are portrayed as impoverished, ugly, and inhabited by psychopaths and cri-
minals. New migrants must be sufficiently motivated to resist the impact of such discouraging
images. Attempts to counter negative propaganda with more realistie information generally meet
with censorship, and there are continuous ideologieal struggles over whieh representations of sexual
communities make it into the popular media.

Information on how to find, occupy, and live in the marginal sexual worlds is also suppressed.
Navigational guides are scarce and inaccurate. In the past, fragments of rumour, distorted gossip, and
bad publicity were the most available clues to the location of underground erotic communities.
During the late 1960s and early 1970s, better information became available. Now groups like the
Moral Majority want to rebuild the ideologieal walls around the sexual undergrounds and make
transit in and out of them as difficult as possible.

Migration is expensive. Transportation costs, moving expenses, and the necessity of finding new
jobs and housing are economie difficulties that sexual migrants must overcome. These are especially
imposing barriers to the young, who are often the most desperate to move. There are, however,
routes into the erotie communities whieh mark trails through the propaganda thieket and provide
some economie shelter along the way. Higher education can be a route for young people from
affluent backgrounds. In spite of serious limitations, the information on sexual behaviour at most
colleges and universities is better than elsewhere, and most colleges and universities shelter small
erotie networks of all sorts.

For poorer kids, the military is often the easiest way to get the hell out of wherever they are. Military
prohibitions against homosexuality make this a perilous route. Although young queers continually
attempt to use the armed forces to get out of intolerable hometown situations and closer to functional
gay communities, they face the hazards of exposure, court martial, and dishonourable discharge.

Once in the cities, erotic populations tend to nucleate and to occupy some regular, visible territ-
ory. Churches and other anti-viee forces constantly put pressure on local authorities to contain such
areas, reduce their visibility, or to drive their inhabitants out of town. There are periodic crackdowns
in which local viee squads are unleashed on the populations they control. Gay men, prostitutes, and
sometimes transvestites are sufficiently territorial and numerous to engage in intense battles with the
cops over particular streets, parks, and alleys. Such border wars are usually inconclusive, but they
result in many casualties.

For most of this century, the sexual underworlds have been marginal and impoverished, their
residents subjected to stress and exploitation. The spectacular success of gay entrepreneurs in creat-
ing a variegated gay economy has altered the quality of life within the gay ghetto. The level of
material comfort and social elaboration achieved by the gay community in the last fifteen years is
unprecedented. But it is important to recall what happened to similar miracles. The growth of the
black population in New York in the early part of the twentieth century led to the Harlem Renais-
sance, but that period of creativity was doused by the Depression. The relative prosperity and
cultural florescence of the ghetto may be equally fragile. Like blacks who fled the South for the
metropolitan North, homosexuals may have merely traded rural problems for urban ones.

Gay pioneers occupied neighbourhoods that were centrally located but run down. Consequently,
they border poor neighbourhoods. Gays, especially low-income gays, end up competing with other
low-income groups for the limited supply of cheap and moderate housing. In San Francisco, com-
petition for low-cost housing has exacerbated both racism and homophobia, and is one source of
the epidemie of street violence against homosexuals. Instead of being isolated and invisible in rural
settings, city gays are now numerous and obvious targets for urban frustrations.

In San Francisco, unbridled construction of downtown skyscrapers and high-cost condominiums
is causing affordable housing to evaporate. Megabuck construction is creating pressure on all city

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residents. Poor gay renters are visible in low-income neighbourhoods; multimillionaire contractors
are not. The spectre of the ‘homosexual invasion’ is a convenient scapegoat whieh deflects attention
from the banks, the planning commission, the politieal establishment, and the big developers. In San
Frandsco, the well-being of the gay community has become embroiled in the high-stakes polities of
urban real estate.

Downtown expansion affects all the territorial erotie underworlds. In both San Frandsco and New
York, high investment construction and urban renewal have intruded on the main areas of prostitu-
tion, pornography, and leather bars. Developers are salivating over Times Square, the Tenderloin,
what is left of North Beach, and South of Market. Anti-sex ideology, obscenity law, prostitution
regulations, and the alcoholic beverage codes are all being used to dislodge seedy adult business, sex
workers, and leathermen. Within ten years, most of these areas will have been bulldozed and made
safe for convention centres, international hotels, corporate headquarters, and housing for the rieh.

The most important and consequential kind of sex confliet is what Jeffrey Weeks has termed the
‘moral panie’. Moral panies are the ‘politieal moment’ of sex, in whieh diffuse attitudes are channeled
into political action and from there into sodal change. 16 The white slavery hysteria of the 1880s, the
anti-homosexual campaigns of the 1950s, and the child pornography panie of the late 1970s were
typieal moral panies.

Because sexuality in Western sodeties is so mystified, the wars over it are often fought at oblique
angles, aimed at phony targets, conducted with misplaced passions, and are highly, intensely sym-
bolic. Sexual activities often function as signifiers for personal and sodal apprehensions to whieh
they have no intrinsie connection. During a moral panie such fears attach to some unfortunate sexual
activity or population. The media become ablaze with indignation, the public behaves like a rabid
mob, the police are activated, and the state enacts new laws and regulations. When the furor has
passed, some innocent erotic group has been decimated, and the state has extended its power into
new areas of erotic behaviour.

The system of sexual stratification provides easy vietims who lack the power to defend them-
selves, and a preexisting apparatus for controlling their movements and curtailing their freedoms.
The stigma against sexual dissidents renders them morally defenceless. Every moral panie has con-
sequences on two levels. The target population suffers most, but everyone is affected by the sodal
and legal changes.

Moral panics rarely alleviate any real problem, because they are aimed at chimeras and signifiers.
They draw on the pre-existing discursive structure whieh invents vietims in order to justify treating
‘viees’ as crimes. The criminalization of innocuous behaviours such as homosexuality, prostitution,
obscenity, or recreational drug use, is rationalized by portraying them as menaces to health and
safety, women and children, national security, the family, or dvilization itself. Even when activity is
acknowledged to be harmless, it may be banned because it is alleged to ‘lead’ to something ostens-
ibly worse Canother manifestation of the domino theory).17 Great and mighty edifices have been built
on the basis of such phantasms. Generally, the outbreak of a moral panie is preceded by an intensi-
fication of such scapegoating.

It is always risky to prophesy. But it does not take much prescience to detect potential moral
panics in two current developments: the attacks on sadomasochists by a segment of the feminist
movement, and the right’s increasing use of AIDS to incite virulent homophobia.

Feminist anti-pornography ideology has always contained an implied, and sometimes overt, indict-
ment of sadomasochism. The pietures of sucking and fucking that comprise the bulk of pornography
may be unnerving to those who are not familiar with them. But it is hard to make a convindng case
that such images are violent. All of the early anti-porn slide shows used a highly selective sampie of
S/M imagery to sell a very flimsy analysis. Taken out of context, such images are often shocking. This
shock value was mercilessly exploited to scare audiences into accepting the anti-porn perspective.

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A great deal of anti-pom propaganda implies sadomasochism is the underlying and essential
‘truth’ towards which all pomography tends. Pom is thought to lead to S/M pom which in turn is
alleged to lead to rape. This is a just-so story that revitalizes the notion that sex perverts commit
sex crimes, not normal people. There is no evidence that the readers of S/M erotica or practising
sadomasochists commit a disproportionate number of sex crimes. Anti-pom literature scapegoats an
unpopular sexual minority and its reading material for sodal problems they do not create.

The use of S/M imagery in anti-pom discourse is inflammatory. It implies that the way to make the
world safe for women is to get rid of sadomasochism. The use of S/M images in the movie Not a Love
Story was on a moral par with the use of depictions of black men raping white women, or of drooling
old Jews pawing young Aryan girls, to incite racist or anti-Semitic frenzy.

Feminist rhetoric has a distressing tendency to reappear in reactionary contexts. For example, in
1980 and 1981, Pope lohn Paul 11 delivered aseries of pronouncements reaffirming his commitrnent
to the most conservative and Pauline understandings of human sexuality. In condemning divorce,
abortion, trial marriage, pomography, prostitution, birth control, unbridled hedonism, and lust, the
pope employed a great deal of feminist rhetoric about sexual objectification. Sounding like lesbian
ferninist polemicist Julia Penelope, His Holiness explained that ‘considering anyone in a lustful way
makes that person a sexual object rather than a human being worthy of dignity’ .18

The right wing opposes pomography and has already adopted elements of feminist anti-pom
rhetoric. The anti-S/M discourse developed in the women’s movement could easily become a vehicle
for a moral witch hunt. It provides a ready-made defenseless target population. It provides a rationale
for the recriminalization of sexual materials which have escaped the reach of current obscenity laws.
It would be especially easy to pass laws against S/M erotica resembling the child pomography laws.
The ostensible purpose of such laws would be to reduce violence by banning so-called violent
pom. A focused campaign against the leather menace might also result in the passage of laws to
criminalize S/M behaviour that is not currently illegal. The ultimate result of such a moral panic
would be the legalized violation of a community of harrnless perverts. It is dubious that such a
sexual witch hunt would make any appreciable contribution towards reducing violence against
women.

An AIDS panic is even more probable. When fears of incurable disease mingle with sexual terror,
the resulting brew is extremely volatile. A century ago, attempts to control syphilis led to the passage
of the Contagious Diseases Acts in England. The Acts were based on erroneous medical theories and
did nothing to halt the spread of the disease. But they did make life miserable for the hundreds of
women who were incarcerated, subjected to forcible vaginal examination, and stigmatized for life as
prostitutes (Walkowitz, 1980; Weeks, 1981).

Whatever happens, AIDS will have far-reaching consequences on sex in general, and on homo-
sexuality in particular. The disease will have a significant impact on the choices gay people make.
Fewer will migrate to the gay meccas out of fear of the disease. Those who already reside in the
ghettos will avoid situations they fear will expose them. The gay economy, and political apparatus it
supports, may prove to be evanescent. Fear of AIDS has already affected sexual ideology. Just when
homosexuals have had some success in throwing off the taint of mental disease, gay people find
themselves metaphorically welded to an image of lethai physical deterioration. The syndrome, its
peculiar qualities, and its transmissibility are being used to reinforce old fears that sexual activity,
homosexuality, and promiscuity led to disease and death.

AIDS is both a personal tragedy for those who contract the syndrome and a calamity for the gay
community. Homophobes have gleefully hastened to turn this tragedy against its victims. One col-
urnnist has suggested that AIDS has always existed, that the Biblical prohibitions on sodomy were
designed to protect people from AIDS, and that AIDS is therefore an appropriate punishment for
violating the Levitical codes. Using fear of infection as a rationale, local right-wingers attempted to

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ban the gay rodeo from Reno, Nevada. Arecent issue of the Moral Majority Report featured a pic-
ture of a ‘typical’ white family of four wearing surgical masks. The headline read: ‘AIDS: HOMOSEXUAL
DISEASES THREATEN AMERICAN FAMILIES’.19 Phyllis Schlafly has recently issued a pamphlet arguing that
passage of the Equal Rights Amendment would make it impossible to ‘legally protect ourselves
against AIDS and other diseases carried by homosexuals’ (cited in Bush, 1983, p. 60). Current right-
wing literature calls for shutting down the gay baths, for a legal ban on homosexual employment in
food-handling occupations, and for state-mandated prohibitions on blood donations by gay people.
Such policies would require the government to identify all homosexuals and impose easily recogniz-
able legal and social markers on them.

It is bad enough that the gay community must deal with the medical misfortune of having been the
population in which a deadly disease first became widespread and visible. It is worse to have to deal
with the social consequences as well. Even befare the AIDS scare, Greece passed a law that enables
police to arrest suspected homosexuals and force them to submit to an examination far venereal
disease. It is likely that until AIDS and its methods of transmission are understood, there will be all
sorts of proposals to control it by punishing the gay community and by attacking its institutions.
When the cause of Legionnaires’ Disease was unknown, there were no calls to quarantine members
of the American Legion or to shut down their meeting halls. The Contagious Diseases Acts in England
did little to control syphilis, but they caused a great deal of suffering far the wornen who came under
their purview. The history of panic that has accornpanied new epidemics, and of the casualties
incurred by their scapegoats, should make everyone pause and consider with extreme scepticism any
attempts to justify anti-gay policy initiatives on the basis of AIDS.

The Limits of Feminism

We know that in an overwhelmingly large nurnber of cases, sex crime is associated with
pornography. We know that sex criminals read it, are clearly influenced by it. I believe
that, if we can eliminate the distribution of such items among impressionable children, we
shall greatly reduce our frightening sex-crime rate.

(J. Edgar Hoover, cited in Hyde, 1965, p. 31)

In the absence of a more articulated radical theory of sex, most progressives have turned to feminism
far guidance. But the relationship between feminism and sex is complex. Because sexuality is a
nexus of relationships between genders, much of the oppression of women is borne by, mediated
through, and constituted within, sexuality. Feminism has always been vitally interested in sex. But
there have been two strains of feminist thought on the subject. One tendency has criticized the
restrictions on women’s sexual behaviour and denounced the high costs imposed on women for
being sexually active. This tradition of feminist sexual thought has called for a sexual liberation that
would work for women as well as for men. The second tendency has considered sexual liberaliza-
tion to be inherently a mere extension of male privilege. This tradition resonates with conservative,
anti-sexual discourse. With the advent of the anti-pornography movement, it achieved temporary
hegemony over feminist analysis.

The anti-pornography movement and its texts have been the most extensive expression of this
discourse. 20 In addition, proponents of this viewpoint have condemned virtually every variant of
sexual expression as anti-feminist. Within this framework, monogamous lesbianism that occurs within
long-term, intimate relationships and which does not involve playing with polarized roles, has re-
placed married, procreative heterosexuality at the top of the value hierarchy. Heterosexuality has
been demoted to somewhere in the middle. Apart from this change, everything else looks more or

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less familiar. The lower depths are occupied by the usual groups and behaviours: prostitution,
transsexuality, sadomasochism, and cross-generational activities CBarry, 1979, 1982; Raymond, 1979;
Linden et al., 1982; Rush, 1980). Most gay male conduct, all casual sex, promiscuity, and lesbian
behaviour that does involve roles or kink or non-monogamy are also censured. 21 Even sexual fantasy
during masturbation is denounced as a phallocentric holdover CPenelope, 1980).

This discourse on sexuality is less a sexology than a demonology. It presents most sexual beha-
viour in the worst possible light. Its descriptions of erotic conduct always use the worst available
example as if it were representative. It presents the most disgusting pornography, the most exploited
forms of prostitution, and the least palatable or most shocking manifestations of sexual variation. This
rhetorical tactic consistently misrepresents human sexuality in all its forms. The picture of human
sexuality that emerges from this literature is unremittingly ugly.

In addition, this anti-porn rhetoric is a massive exercise in scapegoating. It criticizes non-routine
acts of love rather than routine acts of oppression, exploitation, or violence. This demon sexology
directs legitimate anger at women’s lack of personal safety against innocent individuals, practices
and communities. Anti-porn propaganda often implies that sexism originates within the commercial
sex industry and subsequently infects the rest of society. This is sociologically nonsensical. The sex
industry is hardly a feminist utopia. It reflects the sexism that exists in the society as a whole. We
need to analyse and oppose the manifestations of gender inequality specific to the sex industry. But
this is not the same as attempting to wipe out commercial sex.

Similarly, erotic minorities such as sadomasochists and transsexuals are as likely to exhibit sexist
attitudes or behaviour as any other politically random social grouping. But to claim that they are
inherently anti-feminist is sheer fantasy. A good deal of current feminist literature attributes the
oppression of women to graphic representations of sex, prostitution, sex education, sadomasochism,
male homosexuality, and transsexualism. Whatever happened to the family, religion, education,
child-rearing practices, the media, the state, psychiatry, job discrimination, and unequal pay?

Finally, this so-called feminist discourse recreates a very conservative sexual morality. For over a
century, battles have been waged over just how much shame, distress, and punishment should be
incurred by sexual activity. The conservative tradition has promoted opposition to pornography,
prostitution, homosexuality, all erotic variation, sex education, sex research, abortion, and contracep-
tion. The opposing, pro-sex tradition has included individuals like Havelock Ellis, Magnus Hirschfeld,
Alfred Kinsey, and Victoria Woodhull, as well as the sex education movement, organizations of
militant prostitutes and homosexuals, the reproductive rights movement, and organizations such as
the Sexual Reform League of the 1960s. This motley collection of sex reformers, sex educators, and
sexual militants has mixed records on both sexual and feminist issues. But surely they are closer to
the spirit of modern feminism than are moral crusaders, the social purity movement, and anti-vice
organizations. Nevertheless, the current feminist sexual demonology generally elevates the anti-vice
crusaders to positions of ancestral honour, while condemning the more liberatory tradition as anti-
feminist. In an essay that exemplifies some of these trends, Sheila Jeffreys blames Havelock Ellis,
Edward Carpenter, Alexandra Kollantai, ‘believers in the joy of sex of every possible political persua-
sion’, and the 1929 congress of the World League for Sex Reform for making ‘a great contribution to
the defeat of militant feminism’ (Jeffreys, 1981, p. 26).22

The anti-pornography movement and its avatars have claimed to speak for all feminism. For-
tunately, they do not. Sexual liberation has been and continues to be a feminist goal. The women’s
movement may have produced some of the most retrogressive sexual thinking this side of the
Vatican. But it has also produced an exciting, innovative, and articulate defense of sexual pleasure
and erotic justice. This ‘pro-sex’ feminism has been spearheaded by lesbians whose sexuality does
not conform to movement standards of purity Cprimarily lesbian sadomasochists and butch/femme
dykes), by unapologetic heterosexuals, and by women who adhere to classic radical feminism rather

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than to the revisionist celebrations of femininity which have become so common.23 Although the anti-
pom forces have attempted to weed anyone who disagrees with them out of the movement, the fact
remains that feminist thought about sex is profoundly polarized (Orlando, 1982b; Willis, 1982).

Whenever there is polarization, there is an unhappy tendency to think the truth lies somewhere in
between. Ellen Willis has commented sarcastically that ‘the feminist bias is that women are equal to
men and the male chauvinist bias is that women are inferior. The unbiased view is that the truth lies
somewhere in between’ (Willis, 1982, p. 146).24 The most recent development in the feminist sex
wars is the emergence of a ‘middle’ that seeks to evade the dangers of anti-pom fascism, on the one
hand, and a supposed ‘anything goes’ libertarianism, on the other. 25 Although it is hard to criticize a
position that is not yet fully formed, I want to draw attention to some incipient problems.

The emergent middle is based on a false characterization of the poles of debate, construing both
sides as equally extremist. According to B. Ruby Rich, ‘the desire for a language of sexuality has led
feminists into locations (pomography, sadomasochism) too narrow or overdetermined for a fruitful
discussion. Debate has collapsed into a rumble’ (Rich, 1983, p. 76). True, the fights between Women
Against Pomography (WAP) and lesbian sadomasochists have resembled gang warfare. But the
responsibility for this lies primarily with the anti-pom movement, and its refusal to engage in prin-
cipled discussion. S/M lesbians have been forced into a struggle to maintain their membership in the
movement, and to defend themselves against slander. No major spokeswoman for lesbian S/M has
argued for any kind of S/M supremacy, or advocated that everyone should be a sadomasochist. In
addition to self-defense, S/M lesbians have called for appreciation for erotic diversity and more open
discussion of sexuality (Samois, 1979, 1982; Califia, 1980e, 1981a). Trying to find amiddie course
between W AP and Samois is a bit like saying that the truth about homosexuality lies somewhere
between the positions of the Moral Majority and those of the gay movement.

In politicallife, it is all too easy to marginalize radicals, and to attempt to buy acceptance for a
moderate position by portraying others as extremists. Liberals have done this for years to commun-
ists. Sexual radicals have opened up the sex debates. It is shameful to deny their contribution,
misrepresent their positions, and further their stigmatization.

In contrast to cultural feminists, who simply want to purge sexual dissidents, the sexual moderates
are willing to defend the rights of erotic non-conformists to political participation. Yet this defense of
political rights is linked to an implicit system of ideological condescension. The argument has two
major parts. The first is an accusation that sexual dissidents have not paid dose enough attention to
the meaning, sources, or historical construction of their sexuality. This emphasis on meaning appears
to function in much the same way that the question of etiology has functioned in discussions of
homosexuality. That is, homosexuality, sadomasochism, prostitution, or boy-love are taken to be
mysterious and problematic in some way that more respectable sexualities are not. The search for a
cause is a search for something that could change so that these ‘problematic’ eroticisms would simply
not occur. Sexual militants have replied to such exercises that although the question of etiology or
cause is of intellectual interest, it is not high on the political agenda and that, moreover, the privileging
of such questions is itself a regressive political choice.

The second part of the ‘moderate’ position focuses on questions of consent. Sexual radicals of all
varieties have demanded the legal and social legitimation of consenting sexual behaviour. Feminists
have criticized them for ostensibly finessing questions about ‘the limits of consent’ and ‘structural
constraints’ on consent (Orlando, 1983; Wilson, 1983, especially pp. 35-41). Although there are deep
problems with the political discourse of consent, and although there are certainly structural con-
straints on sexual choice, this criticism has been consistently misapplied in the sex debates. It does
not take into account the very specific semantic content that consent has in sex law and sex practice.

As I mentioned earlier, a great deal of sex law does not distinguish between consensual and
coercive behaviour. Only rape law contains such a distinction. Rape law is based on the assumption,

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correct in my view, that heterosexual activity may be freely chosen or forcibly coerced. One has the
legal right to engage in heterosexual behaviour as long as it does not fall under the purview of other
statutes and as long as it is agreeable to both parties.

This is not the case for most other sexual acts. Sodomy laws, as I mentioned above, are based on
the assumption that the forbidden acts are an ‘abominable and detestable crime against nature’.
Criminality is intrinsic to the acts themselves, no matter what the desires of the participants. ‘Unlike
rape, sodomy or an unnatural or perverted sexual act may be committed between two persons both
of whom consent, and, regardless of which is the aggressor, both may be prosecuted.’26 Before the
consenting adults statute was passed in California in 1976, lesbian lovers could have been prosecuted
for committing oral copulation. If both participants were capable of consent, both were equally guilty
(Besera et al., 1973, pp. 163-5).27

Adult incest statutes operate in a similar fashion. Contrary to popular mythology, the incest statutes
have little to do with protecting children from rape by dose relatives. The incest statutes themselves
prohibit marriage or sexual intercourse between adults who are dosely related. Prosecutions are rare,
but two were reported recently. In 1979, a 19-year-old Marine met his 42-year-old mother, from
whom he had been separated at birth. The two fell in love and got married. They were charged and
found guilty of incest, which under Virginia law carries a maximum ten-year sentence. Ouring their
trial, the Marine testified, ‘I love her very much. I feel that two people who love each other should be
able to live together.’28 In another case, a brother and sister who had been raised separately met and
decided to get married. They were arrested and pleaded guilty to felony incest in return for proba-
tion. A condition of probation was that they not live together as husband and wife. Had they not
accepted, they would have faced twenty years in prison (Norton, 1981, p. 18). In a famous S/M case,
a man was convicted of aggravated assault for a whipping administered in an S/M scene. There was
no complaining victim. The session had been filmed and he was prosecuted on the basis of the film.
The man appealed his conviction by arguing that he had been involved in a consensual sexual
encounter and had assaulted no one. In rejecting his appeal, the court ruled that one may not
consent to an assault or battery ‘except in a situation involving ordinary physical contact or blows
incident to sports such as football, boxing, or wrestling’.29 The court went on to note that the ‘consent
of a person without legal capacity to give consent, such as a child or insane person, is ineffective’,
and that ‘It is a matter of common knowledge that a normal person in full possession of his mental
faculties does not freely consent to the use, upon himself, of force likely to produce great bodily
injury.,30 Therefore, anyone who would consent to a whipping would be presumed non compos
mentis and legally incapable of consenting. S/M sex generally involves a much lower level of force
than the average football game, and results in far fewer injuries than most sports. But the court ruled
that football players are sane, whereas masochists are not.

Sodomy laws, adult incest laws, and legal interpretations such as the one above dearly interfere
with consensual behaviour and impose criminal penalties on it. Within the law, consent is a privilege
enjoyed only by those who engage in the highest-status sexual behaviour. Those who enjoy low-
status sexual behaviour do not have the legal right to engage in it. In addition, economic sanctions,
family pressures, erotic stigma, social discrimination, negative ideology, and the paucity of informa-
tion about erotic behaviour, all serve to make it difficult for people to make unconventional sexual
choices. There certainly are structural constraints that impede free sexual choice, but they hardly
operate to coerce anyone into being a pervert. On the contrary, they operate to coerce everyone
towards normality.

The ‘brainwash theory’ explains erotic diversity by assuming that some sexual acts are so disgust-
ing that no one would willingly perform them. Therefore, the reasoning goes, anyone who does so
must have been forced or fooled. Even constructivist sexual theory has been pressed into the service
of explaining away why otherwise rational individuals might engage in variant sexual behaviour.

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Another position that is not yet fully formed uses the ideas of Foucault and Weeks to imply that the
‘pelVersions’ are an especially unsavoury or problematic aspect of the construction of modem sex-
uality (Valverde, 1980; Wilson, 1983, p. 38). This is yet another version of the notion that sexual
dissidents are victims of the subtle machinations of the social system. Weeks and Foucault would not
accept such an interpretation, since they consider all sexuality to be constructed, the conventional no
less than the deviant.

Psychology is the last resort of those who refuse to acknowledge that sexual dissidents are as
conscious and free as any other group of sexual actors. If deviants are not responding to the
manipulations of the social system, then perhaps the source of their incomprehensible choices can
be found in a bad childhood, unsuccessful socialization, or inadequate identity formation. In her
essay on erotic domination, ]essica Benjamin draws upon psychoanalysis and philosophy to explain
why what she calls ‘sadomasochism’ is alienated, distorted, unsatisfactory, numb, purposeless, and
an attempt to ‘relieve an original effort at differentiation that failed’ (Benjamim, 1983, p. 292).31 This
essay substitutes a psycho-philosophical inferiority for the more usual means of devaluing dissident
eroticism. One reviewer has already construed Benjamin’s argument as showing that sadomasochism
is merely an ‘obsessive replay of the infant power struggle’ (Ehrenreich, 1983, p. 247).

The position which defends the political rights of pelVerts but which seeks to understand their
‘alienated’ sexuality is certainly preferable to the WAP-style blood-baths. But for the most part, the
sexual moderates have not confronted their discomfort with erotic choices that differ from their own.
Erotic chauvinism cannot be redeemed by tarting it up in Marxist drag, sophisticated constructivist
theory, or retro-psychobabble.

Whichever feminist position on sexuality – right, left, or centre – eventually attains dominance, the
existence of such a rich discussion is evidence that the feminist movement will always be a source of
interesting thought about sex. Nevertheless, I want to challenge the assumption that feminism is or
should be the privileged site of a theory of sexuality. Feminism is the theory of gender oppression.
To assurne automatically that this makes it the theory of sexual oppression is to fail to distinguish
between gender, on the one hand, and erotic desire, on the other.

In the English language, the word ‘sex’ has two very different meanings. It means gender and
gender identity, as in ‘the female sex’ or ‘the male sex’. But sex also refers to sexual activity, lust,
intercourse, and arousal, as in ‘to have sex’. This semantic merging reflects a cultural assumption that
sexuality is reducible to sexual intercourse and that it is a function of the relations between women
and men. The cultural fusion of gender with sexuality has given rise to the idea that a theory of
sexuality may be derived directly out of a theory of gender.

In an earlier essay, ‘The Traffk in Women’, I used the concept of sex/gender system, defined as
a ‘set of arrangements by which a society transforms biological sexuality into products of human
activity’ (Rubin, 1975, p. 159). I went on to argue that ‘Sex as we know it – gender identity, sexual
desire and fantasy, concepts of childhood – is itself a social product’ (ibid., p. 66). In that essay, I did
not distinguish between lust and gender, treating both as modalities of the same underlying social
process.

‘The Traffic in Women’ was inspired by the literature on kin-based systems of social organization.
It appeared to me at the time that gender and desire were systematically intertwined in such social
formations. This may or may not be an accurate assessment of the relationship between sex and
gender in tribaI organizations. But it is surely not an adequate formulation for sexuality in Western
industrial societies. As Foucault has pointed out, a system of sexuality has emerged out of earlier
kinship forms and has acquired significant autonomy.

Particularly from the eighteenth century onward, Western societies created and deployed a
new apparatus which was superimposed on the previous one, and which, without completely

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supplanting the latter, helped to reduce its importance. I am speaking of the deployment of
sexuality … For the first [kinshipl, what is pertinent is the link between partners and definite
statutes; the second [sexualityl is concerned with the sensations of the body, the quality of
pleasures, and the nature of impressions. (Foucault, 1978, p. 106)

The development of this sexual system has taken place in the context of gen der relations. Part of
the modern ideology of sex is that lust is the province of men, purity that of women. It is no accident
that pornography and perversions have been considered part of the male domain. In the sex indus-
try, women have been exduded from most production and consumption, and allowed to participate
primarily as workers. In order to participate in the ‘perversions’ , women have had to overcome
serious limitations on their social mobility, their economic resources, and their sexual freedoms.
Gender affects the operation of the sexual system, and the sexual system has had gender-specific
manifestations. But although sex and gender are related, they are not the same thing, and they form
the basis of two distinct arenas of social practice.

In contrast to my perspective in ‘The Traffic in Women’, I am now arguing that it is essential to
separate gender and sexuality analytically to reflect more accurately their separate social existence.
This goes against the grain of much contemporary feminist thought, which treats sexuality as a
derivation of gender. For instance, lesbian feminist ideology has mostly analysed the oppression of
lesbians in terms of the oppression of women. However, lesbians are also oppressed as queers and
perverts, by the operation of sexual, not gender, stratification. Although it pains many lesbians to
think about it, the fact is that lesbians have shared many of the sociological features and suffered
from many of the same social penalties as have gay men, sadomasochists, transvestites, and prostitutes.

Catherine MacKinnon has made the most explicit theoretical attempt to subsurne sexuality under
feminist thought. According to MacKinnon, ‘Sexuality is to feminism what work is to marxism … the
moulding, direction, and expression of sexuality organizes society into two sexes, women and men’
(MacKinnon, 1982, pp. 5-16). This analytic strategy in turn rests on adecision to ‘use sex and gender
relatively interchangeably’ (MacKinnon, 1983, p. 635). It is this definitional fusion that I want to
challenge.

There is an instructive analogy in the history of the differentiation of contemporary feminist
thought from Marxism. Marxism is probably the most supple and powerful conceptual system extant
for analysing social inequality. But attempts to make Marxism the sole explanatory system for all
social inequalities have been dismal exercises. Marxism is most successful in the areas of social life
for which it was originally developed – dass relations under capitalism.

In the early days of the contemporary women’s movement, a theoretical conflict took place over
the applicability of Marxism to gender stratification. Since Marxist theory is relatively powerful, it
does in fact detect important and interesting aspects of gender oppression. It works best for those
issues of gender most dosely related to issues of dass and the organization of labour. The issues
more specific to the social structure of gender were not amenable to Marxist analysis.

The relationship between feminism and a radical theory of sexual oppression is similar. Feminist
conceptual tools were developed to detect and analyse gender-based hierarchies. To the extent that
these overlap with erotic stratifications, feminist theory has some explanatory power. But as issues
become less those of gender and more those of sexuality, feminist analysis becomes misleading and
often irrelevant. Feminist thought simply lacks angles of vision which can fully encompass the social
organization of sexuality. The criteria of relevance in feminist thought do not allow it to see or assess
critical power relations in the area of sexuality.

In the long run, feminism’s critique of gender hierarchy must be incorporated into a radical theory
of sex, and the critique of sexual oppression should enrich feminism. But an autonomous theory and
politics specific to sexuality must be developed.

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It is amistake to substitute feminism for Marxism as the last word in social theory. Feminism is no
more capable than Marxism of being the ultimate and complete account of all social inequality. Nor
is feminism the residual theory which can take care of everything to which Marx did not attend.
These critical tools were fashioned to handle very specific areas of sodal activity. Other areas of
sodal life, their forms of power, and their characteristic modes of oppression, need their own
conceptual implements. In this essay, I have argued for theoretical as weIl as sexual pluralism.

Conclusion

… these pleasures which we lightly call physical … (Colette, 1982, p. 72)

Like gender, sexuality is political. It is organized into systems of power, which reward and encourage
some individuals and activities, while punishing and suppressing others. Like the capitalist organiza-
tion of labour and its distribution of rewards and powers, the modem sexual system has been the
object of political struggle since it emerged and as it has evolved. But if the disputes between labour
and capital are mystified, sexual conflicts are completely camouflaged.

The legislative restructuring that took place at the end of the nineteenth century and in the early
decades of the twentieth was a refracted response to the emergence of the modem erotic system.
During that period, new erotic communities formed. It became possible to be a male homosexual or
a lesbian in a way it had not been previously. Mass-produced erotica became available, and the
possibilities for sexual commerce expanded. The first homosexual rights organizations were formed,
and the first analyses of sexual oppression were articulated (Lauritsen and Thorstad, 1974).

The repression of the 1950s was in part a backlash to the expansion of sexual communities and
possibilities which took place during World War II (D’Emilio, 1983; Berube, 1981a, 1981b). During
the 1950s, gay rights organizations were established, the Kinsey reports were published, and lesbian
literature flourished. The 1950s were a formative as weIl as a repressive era.

The current right-wing sexual counter-offensive is in part areaction to the sexualliberalization of
the 1960s and early 1970s. Moreover, it has brought about a unified and self-conscious coalition of
sexual radicals. In one sense, what is now occurring is the emergence of a new sexual movement,
aware of new issues and seeking a new theoretical basis. The sex wars out on the streets have been
partly responsible for provoking a new intellectual focus on sexuality. The sexual system is shifting
once again, and we are seeing many symptoms of its change.

In Western culture, sex is taken all too seriously. A person is not considered immoral, is not sent
to prison, and is not expelled from her or his family, for enjoying spicy cuisine. But an individual may
go through all this and more for enjoying shoe leather. Ultimately, of what possible social signific-
ance is it if a person likes to masturbate over a shoe? It may even be non-consensual, but since we do
not ask permission of our shoes to wear them, it hardly seems necessary to obtain dispensation to
come on them.

If sex is taken too seriously, sexual persecution is not taken seriously enough. There is systematic
mistreatment of individuals and communities on the basis of erotic taste or behaviour. There are
serious penalties for belonging to the various sexual occupational castes. The sexuality of the young
is denied, adult sexuality is often treated like a variety of nudear waste, and the graphic representa-
tion of sex takes place in a mire of legal and social circumlocution. Specific populations bear the
brunt of the current system of erotic power, but their persecution upholds a system that affects
everyone.

The 1980s have already been a time of great sexual suffering. They have also been a time of
ferment and new possibility. It is up to all of us to try to prevent more barbarism and to encourage

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erotic creativity. Those who consider themselves progressive need to examine their preconceptions,
update their sexual educations, and acquaint themselves with the existence and operation of sexual
hierarchy. It is time to recognize the political dimensions of erotic life.

Acknowledgements

It is always a treat to get to the point in a chapter when I can thank those who contributed to its
realization. Many of my ideas about the formation of sexual communities first occurred to me during
a course given by Charles Tilly on ‘The Urbanization of Europe from 1500-1900’. Few courses could
ever provide as much excitement, stimulation, and conceptual richness as did that one. Daniel Tsang
alerted me to the significance of the events of 1977 and taught me to pay attention to sex law. Pat
Califia deepened my appreciation for human sexual variety and taught me to respect the much-
maligned fields of sex research and sex education. Jeff Escoffier shared his powerful grasp of gay
history and sociology, and I have especially benefited from his insights into the gay economy. Allan
Berube’s work in progress on gay history has enabled me to think with more clarity about the dynamics
of sexual oppression. Conversations with Ellen Dubois, Amber Hollibaugh, Mary Ryan, Judy Stacey,
Kay Trimberger, Rayna Rapp, and Martha Vicinus have influenced the direction of my thinking.

I am very gratenIl to Cynthia Astuto for advice and research on legal matters, and to David Sachs,
book dealer extraordinary, for pointing out the right-wing pamphlet literature on sex. I am grateful to
Allan Berube, Ralph Bruno, Estelle Freedman, Kent Gerard, Barbara Kerr, Michael Shively, Carole
Vance, Bill Walker, and Judy Walkowitz for miscellaneous references and factual information. I
cannot begin to express my gratitude to those who read and commented on versions of this paper:
Jeanne Bergman, Sally Binford, Lynn Eden, Laura Engelstein, Jeff Escoffier, Carole Vance, and Ellen
Willis. Mark Leger both edited and performed acts of secretarial heroism in preparing the manuscript.
Marybeth Nelson provided emergency graphics assistance.

I owe special thanks to two friends whose care mitigated the strains of writing. E.S. kept my back
operational and guided me firmly through some monumental bouts of writer’s block. Cynthia Astuto’s
many kindnesses and unwavering support enabled me to keep working at an absurd pace for many
weeks.

None of these individuals should be held responsible for my opinions, but I am grateful to them
all for inspiration, information, and assistance.

A Note on Definitions

Throughout this essay, I use terms such as homosexual, sex worker, and pervert. I use ‘homosexual’
to refer to both women and men. If I want to be more specific, I use terms such as ‘lesbian’ or ‘gay
male’. ‘Sex worker’ is intended to be more inclusive than ‘prostitute’ , in order to encompass the many
jobs of the sex industry. Sex worker includes erotic dancers, strippers, porn models, nude women
who will talk to a customer via telephone hook-up and can be seen but not touched, phone partners,
and the various other employees of sex businesses such as receptionists, janitors and barkers. Obvi-
ously, it also includes prostitutes, hustlers, and ‘male models’. I use the term ‘pervert’ as a shorthand
for all the stigmatized sexual orientations. It is used to cover male and female homosexuality as well
but as these become less disreputable, the term has increasingly referred to the other ‘deviations’.
Terms such as ‘pervert’ and ‘deviant’ have, in general use, a connotation of disapproval, disgust,
and dislike. I am using these terms in a denotative fashion, and do not intend them to convey any
disapproval on my part.

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Notes

1. Walkowitz’s entire discussion of the Maiden Tribute 0/ Modern Baby/on and its aftermath (1982, pp. 83-5)
is illuminating.

2. I am indebted to Allan Berube for caIling my attention to this incident.
3. The foIlowing examples suggest avenues for additional research. A local crackdown at the University of

Michigan is documented in Tsang (1977a, 1977b). At the University of Michigan, the number of faculty
dismissed for aIleged homosexuality appears to riyal the number fired for aIleged communist tendencies. It
would be interesting to have figures comparing the number of professors who lost their positions during
this period due to sexual and political offenses. On regulatory reform, many states passed laws during this
period prohibiting the sale of alcoholic beverages to ‘known sex perverts’ or providing that bars which
catered to ‘sex perverts’ be closed. Such a law was passed in Califomia in 1955, and declared unconstitu-
tional by the state Supreme Court in 1959 (Allan Berube, personal communication). It would be of great
interest to know exactly which states passed such statutes, the dates of their enactment, the discussion that
preceded them, and how many are still on the books. On the persecution of other erotic populations,
evidence indicates that lohn Willie and Irving Klaw, the two premier producers and distributors of bondage
erotica in the United States from the late 1940s through the early 1960s, encountered frequent police harass-
ment and that Klaw, at least, was affected by a congressional investigation conducted by the Kefauver Com-
mittee. I am indebted to personal communication from J.B. Rund for information on the careers of Willie
and Klaw. Published sources are scarce, but see Willie (1974); Rund (1977, 1978, 1979). It would be useful
to have more systematic information on legal shifts and police activity affecting non-gay erotic dissidence.

4. ‘Chicago is center of national child porno ring: the child predators’, ‘Child sex: square in new town teIls
it aIl’, ‘U.S. orders hearings on child pomography: Rodino caIls sex racket an “outrage” ” ‘Hunt six men,
twenty boys in crackdown’, Cbicago Tribune, May 16, 1977; ‘Dentist seized in child sex raid: Carey to open
probe’, ‘How ruses lure victims to child pomographers’, Cbicago Tribune, 1977; ‘Child pomographers thrive
on legal confusion’, ‘U.S. raids hit pom seIlers’, Cbicago Tribune, 1977.

5. For more information on the ‘Kiddie pom panic’ see Califia (1980c, 1980d); Mitzel (1980); Rubin (1981).
On the issue of cross-generational relationships, see also Moody (1980); O’CarroIl (1980); Tsang (1981) and
Wilson (1981).

6. ‘House passes tough bill on child pom’, San Francisco Cbronicle, November 15, 1983, p.14.
7. This insight was first articulated by Mary McIntosh (1968); the idea has been developed in ]effrey Weeks

(1977, 1981); see also D’Emilio (1983) and Rubin (1979).
8. A very useful discussion of these issues can be found in Robert Padgug (1979).
9. Levi-Strauss (1970). In this conversation, Levi-Strauss caIls his position ‘a Kantianism without a transcend-

ental subject’.
10. See, for example, ‘Pope praises couples for self-contro!’, San Francisco Cbronicle, October 13, 1980; ‘Pope

says sexual arousal isn’t a sin if it’s ethical’, San Francisco Cbronicle, November 6, 1980; ‘Pope condemns
“camal lust” as abuse of human freedom’, San Francisco Cbronicle, ]anuary 15, 1981; ‘Pope again hits
abortion, birth contro!’, San Francisco Cbronicle, ]anuary 16, 1981; and ‘Sexuality, not sex in heaven’, San
Francisco Cbronicle, December 3, 1981. See also footnote 18 below.

11. For further elaboration of these processes, see: Berube (1981a); D’Emilio (1981, 1983); Foucault (1978); Katz
(1976); Weeks (1977, 1981).

12. Vice cops also harass aIl sex businesses, be these gay bars, gay baths, adult book stores, the producers and
distribution of commercial erotica, or swing clubs.

13. This article (Norton, 1981) is a superb summary of much current sex law and should be required reading for
anyone interested in sex.

14. This earlier edition of the Sex Code of Califomia preceded the 1976 consenting adults statute and conse-
quently gives a better overview of sodomy laws.

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15. D’Emilio (1983, pp. 40-53) has an excellent discussion of gay oppression in the 1950s whieh covers many
of the areas I have mentioned. The dynamies he describes, however, are operative in modified forms for
other erotic populations, and in other periods. The specific model of gay oppression needs to be general-
ized to apply, with appropriate modifications, to other sexual groups.

16. I have adopted this terminology from the very useful discussion in Weeks, 1981, pp. 14-15.
17. See Spooner, 1977, pp. 25-29. Feminist anti-pom discourse fits right into the tradition of justifying attempts

at moral control by claiming that such action will protect women and children from violence.
18. ‘Pope’s talk on sexual spontaneity’, San Francisco Chronicle, November 13, 1980, p. 8; see also footnote 10

above. Julia Penelope argues that ‘we do not need anything that labels itself purely sexual’ and that ‘fantasy,
as an aspect of sexuality, may be a phallocentric “need” from whieh we are not yet free .. .’ in Penelope,
1980, p. 103.

19. Moral Majority Report, July 1983. I am indebted to Allan Berube for calling my attention to this image.
20. See for example Lederer (1980); Dworkin (1981). The Newspage of San Francisco’s Women Against Vio-

lence in Pomography and Media and the Newsreport of New York Women Against Pomography are
excellent sources.

21. Gearhart (1979); Rich (1979, p. 225), (On the other hand, there is homosexual patriarchal culture, a culture
created by homosexual men, reflecting such male stereotypes as dominance and submission as modes of
relationship, and separation of sex from emotional involvement – a culture tainted by profound hatred for
women. The male ‘gay’ culture has offered lesbians the imitation role-stereotypes of ‘butch’ and ‘fernrne’ ,
‘active’ and ‘passive’, cruising, sadomasochism, and the violent, self-destructive world of ‘gay bars’); Pastemack
(1983); Rich (1983).

22. A further elaboration of this tendency can be found in Pastemack, 1983.
23. Califia (1980a, 1980b, 1980c, 1980d, 1980e, 1981b, 1982a, 1982b, 1983a, 1983b, 1983c); English, Hollibaugh,

and Rubin (1981a, 1981b); Hollibaugh (1983); Holz (1983); O’Dair (1983); Orlando (1982a); Russ (1982);
Samois (1979, 1982); Sundhai (1983); Wechsler (1981a, 1981b); Willis (1981). For an excellent overview of
the history of the ideologieal shifts in feminism whieh have affected the sex debates, see Echols (1983).

24. I am indebted to Jeanne Bergman for calling my attention to this quote.
25. See for example, Benjamin (1983, p. 297) and Rich (1983).
26. Taylor v. State, 214 Md. 156, 165, 133 A. 2d 414, 418. This quote is from a dissenting opinion, but it is a

statement of prevailing law.
27. See note 14 above.
28. ‘Marine and Mom Guilty of Incest’, San Francisco Chronicle, November 16, 1979, p. 16.
29. People v. Samuels, 250 Cal. App. 2d 501, 513, 58 Cal. Rptr. 439, 447 (1967).
30. People v. Samuels, 250 Cal. App. 2d at 513-514, 58 Cal. Rptr. at 447.
31. But see also pp. 286, 291-7.

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178

8 Discourse, desire and sexual
deviance
Some problems in a history of
homosexuality

Jeffrey Weeks [1981]

The publication by the Kinsey Institute of the book Homosexualities underlines what is likely
to become a truism in the next few years: that we can no longer speak of a single homosexual
category as if it embraced the wide range of same sex experiences in our society (Bell and
Weinberg, 1978). But recognition of this, tardy as it has been, calls into question a much
wider project: that of providing a universal theory and consequently a ‘history’ of homosexu-
ality. The distinction originally made by sociologists (and slowly being taken up by histor-
ians) between homosexual behaviours, roles and identities, or between homosexual desire
and ‘homosexuality’ as a social and psychological category (Hocquenghem, 1978), is one
that challenges fundamentally the coherence of the theme and poses major questions for the
historian. This paper addresses some of these problems, first, by examining approaches that
have helped construct our concepts of homosexuality, second, by tracing the actual evolution
of the category of homosexuality, third, by exploring some of the theoretical approaches that
have attempted to explain its emergence and, finally, by charting some of the problems that
confront the modern researcher studying ‘homosexuality’.

Approaches

It has been widely recognized for almost a century that attitudes towards homosexual behav-
iour are culturally specific, and have varied enormously across different cultures and through
various historical periods. Two closely related and virtually reinforcing sources for this
awareness can be pinpointed: first, the pioneering work of sexologists such as Magnus
Hirschfeld, Iwan Bloch, Havelock Ellis and others, whose labelling, categorizing and taxo-
nomic zeal led them, partially at least, outside their own culture, and, second, the work of
anthropologists and ethnographers who attempted to chart the varieties of sexual behaviour
and who supplied the data on which the sexologists relied. The actual interest and zeal in the
pursuit of sex was, of course, a product of their own culture’s preoccupations, and the
resulting findings often displayed an acute ‘ethnocentric bias’ (Trumbach, 1977, p. 1), partic-
ularly with regard to homosexuality; but this early work has had a long resonance. The three
most influential English-language cross-cultural studies – that of the traveller Sir Richard
Burton in the 1880s (1888), the work of Edward Westermarck in the 1900s (1906), and the
Human Area Files of Ford and Beach in the 1950s (1952) – have deeply affected perceptions
of homosexuality in their respective generations. Unfortunately, awareness of different
cultural patterns has been used to reinforce rather than confront our own culture-bound
conceptions.

Three phases in the construction of a history of homosexuality are discernible. The first,
manifested in the works of the early sexologists as well as the propagandists like Edward

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Carpenter (1914), attempted above all to demonstrate the trans-historical existence, and
indeed value, of homosexuality as a distinct sexual experience. All the major works of writers
such as Havelock Ellis (1936) had clear-cut historical sections; some, like Iwan Bloch’s
(1938), were substantive historical works. Writers during this phase were above all anxious to
establish the parameters of homosexuality, what distinguished it from other forms of sexu-
ality, what history suggested for its aetiology and social worth, the changing cultural values
accorded to it, and the great figures – in politics, art, literature – one could associate with the
experience. These efforts, taking the form of naturalistic recordings of what was seen as a
relatively minor but significant social experience, were actually profoundly constructing of
modern concepts of homosexuality. They provided a good deal of the data on which later
writers depended even as they reworked them, and a hagiographical sub-school produced a
multitude of texts on the great homosexuals of the past, ‘great queens of history’; its most
recent manifestation is found in the egregious essay of A.L. Rowse, Homosexuals in History
(1977).

The second phase, most usefully associated with the reformist endeavours of the 1950s and
1960s, took as unproblematic the framework established by the pioneers. Homosexuality was
a distinct social experience; the task was to detail it. The result was a new series of texts, some
of which, such as H. Montgomery Hyde’s various essays, synthesized in The Other Love in
1970, brought together a good deal of empirical material even as they failed to theorize its
contradictions adequately.

As a major aspect of the revival of historical interest was the various campaigns to change
the law and public attitudes, both in Europe and America, the historical studies inevitably
concentrated on issues relevant to these. The assumed distinction, derived from nineteenth-
century sexological literature, between ‘perversion’ (a product of moral weakness) and
‘inversion’ (constitutional and hence unavoidable), which D.S. Bailey adumbrates in Homo-
sexuality and the Western Christian Tradition (1955), was highly significant for debates in
the churches. The influential essay on English legal attitudes by Francois Lafitte, ‘Homosex-
uality and the Law’, was designed to indicate that laws that were so arbitrarily, indeed acci-
dentally, imposed could as easily be removed (Lafitte, 1958–59). Donald Webster Cory’s
various works of the 1950s, such as The Homosexual Outlook (1953), sought to underline the
values of the homosexual experience. Employing the statistical information provided by
Kinsey, the cross-cultural evidence of Ford and Beach, and the ethnographic studies of
people such as Evelyn Hooker, historians were directed towards the commonness of the
homosexual experience in history and began to trace some of the forces that shaped public
attitudes.

A third phase, overlapping with the second but more vocal in tone, can be seen as the direct
product of the emergence of more radical gay movements in the late 1960s and 1970s in
Europe and North America. Here the emphasis was on reasserting the values of a lost experi-
ence, stressing the positive value of homosexuality and locating the sources of its social
oppression. A major early emphasis was on recovering the pre-history of the gay movement
itself, particularly in Germany, the USA and Britain (Ford and Beach, 1952; Katz, 1976;
Lauritsen and Thorstad, 1974; Steakley, 1975). Stretching beyond this was a search for what
one might term ‘ethnicity’, the lineaments and validation of a minority experience that history
had denied. But the actual work of research posed new problems, which threatened to burst
out of the bounds established within the previous half century. This is admirably demon-
strated in Jonathan Katz’s splendid documentary Gay American History (1976). But rather
than exploring its virtues, I want to pick out two points that seem to me to pose fresh prob-
lems. The first concerns the title. It seems to me that to use a modern self-labelling term,

126 Jeffrey Weeks

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‘gay’, itself a product of contemporary political struggles, to define an ever-changing concept
over a period of 400 years suggests a constant homosexual essence which the evidence
presented in the book itself suggests is just not there. Katz in fact recognizes this very clearly.
He makes the vital point that the ‘concept of homosexuality must be historicized’, and hopes
that the book will revolutionize the traditional concept of homosexuality.

The problem of the historical researcher is thus to study and establish the character and
meaning of each manifestation of same sex relations within a specific time and society …
All homosexuality is situational.

(Katz, 1976, pp. 6–7)

This is absolutely correct and is the measure of the break between this type of history and, say,
A.L. Rowse’s extravaganza. But to talk at the same time of our history as if homosexuals were
a distinct, fixed minority suggests a slightly contradictory attitude. It poses a major theoretical
problem on which the gay movement has had little to say until recently.

A second problem arises from this, concerning attitudes to lesbianism. Katz very
commendably has, unlike most of his predecessors, attempted to give equal space to both
male and female homosexuality, and although this is impossible in some sections, overall he
succeeds. But this again suggests a problematic of a constant racial-sexual identity which
Katz explicitly rejects theoretically. Lesbianism and male homosexuality in fact have quite
different, if inevitably interconnected, social histories, related to the social evolution of
distinct gender identities; there is a danger that this fundamental, if difficult, point will be
obscured by discussing them as if they were part of the same experience. These points will be
taken up later.

Certainly there has been a considerable extension of interest in the history of homosexu-
ality over the past decade, and as well as the general works, a number of essays and mono-
graphs have appeared, most of which accept readily the cultural specificity of attitudes and
concepts. Nevertheless considerable contradictions recur. A.D. Harvey in a study of buggery
prosecutions at the beginning of the nineteenth century has noted that:

It is too commonly forgotten how far the incidence of homosexual behaviour varies from age
to age and from culture to culture. … In fact it is only very crudely true that there are homo-
sexuals in every period and in every society. Societies which accept homosexual behaviour
as normal almost certainly have a higher proportion of men who have experimented with
homosexual activity than societies which regard homosexuality as abnormal but tolerate it,
and societies which grudgingly tolerate homosexuality probably have a higher incidence of
homosexual activity than societies where it is viciously persecuted.

(Harvey, 1978, p. 944)

But Harvey, despite making this highly significant point, goes on to speak of ‘homosexuals’
as if they realized a trans-historical nature. He writes of the Home Secretary complaining in
1808 that Hyde Park and St James’ Park were ‘being used as a resort for homosexuals’, appar-
ently oblivious of the absence of such a term until the later part of the century. The actual term
the Home Secretary used is extremely important in assessing his perception of the situation
and the type of people involved, and the evidence suggests a problematic of public nuisance
rather than a modern concept of the homosexual person. 1

Similarly Randolph Trumbach, in what is a very valuable study of London ‘sodomites’ in
the eighteenth century, despite a long and carefully argued discussion of different cross-

Discourse, desire and sexual deviance 127

cultural patterns, writes as if the homosexual sub-culture had a natural existence serving the
eternal social needs (or at least eternal in the West) of a fixed minority of people (Trumbach,
1977, p. 23). But there is plentiful evidence that the sub-culture changed considerably over
time, partly at least dependent on factors such as urbanization, and can one really speak of the
courtly or theatrical sub-cultures of the early seventeenth century as if they were the same as
the modern sub-cultures of New York or San Francisco?

Implicit in Trumbach’s essay is an alternative view that profoundly challenges such
assumptions. He notes ‘only one significant change’ in attitudes during the Christian
millennia: ‘Beginning in the late 19th century it was no longer the act that was stigmatised,
but the state of mind’ (Trumbach, 1977, p. 9). But this, I would argue, is the crucial change,
indicating a massive shift in attitude, giving rise to what is distinctively new in our culture: the
categorization of homosexuality as a separate condition and the correlative emergence of a
homosexual identity.

I would argue that we should employ cross-cultural and historical evidence not only to
chart changing attitudes but to challenge the very concept of a single trans-historical notion of
homosexuality. In different cultures (and at different historical moments or conjunctures
within the same culture) very different meanings are given to same-sex activity both by
society at large and by the individual participants. The physical acts might be similar, but the
social construction of meanings around them are profoundly different. The social integration
of forms of pedagogic homosexual relations in ancient Greece have no continuity with
contemporary notions of a homosexual identity (Dover, 1978). To put it another way, the
various possibilities of what Hocquenghem calls homosexual desire, or what more neutrally
might be termed homosexual behaviours, which seem from historical evidence to be a perma-
nent and ineradicable aspect of human sexual possibilities, are variously constructed in
different cultures as an aspect of wider gender and sexual regulation. If this is the case, it is
pointless discussing questions such as, what are the origins of homosexual oppression, or
what is the nature of the homosexual taboo, as if there was a single, causative factor. The
crucial question must be: what are the conditions for the emergence of this particular form of
regulation of sexual behaviour in this particular society? Transferred to our own history, this
must involve an exploration of what Mary McIntosh (1968) pin-pointed as the significant
problem: the emergence of the notion that homosexuality is a condition peculiar to some
people and not others.

A historical study of homosexuality over the past two centuries or so must therefore have
as its focus three closely related questions: the social conditions for the emergence of the cat-
egory of homosexuality and its construction as the unification of disparate experiences, the
relation of this categorization to other socio-sexual categorizations, and the relationship of
this categorization to those defined, not simply ‘described’ or labelled but ‘invented’ by it, in
particular historical circumstances.

Evolution

The historical evidence points to the latter part of the nineteenth century as the crucial period
in the conceptualization of homosexuality as the distinguishing characteristic of a particular
type of person, the ‘invert’ or ‘homosexual’, and the corresponding development of a new
awareness of self amongst some ‘homosexuals’ (Weeks, 1977). From the mid-nineteenth
century there is a bubbling of debate, notation and classification, associated with names such
as Casper, Tardieu, Ulrichs, Westphal, Krafft-Ebing, Havelock Ellis, Magnus Hirschfeld,
Moll, Freud, all of whom sought to define, and hence psychologically or medically to

128 Jeffrey Weeks

construct, new categorizations. Westphal’s description of the ‘contrary sexual instinct’ in the
1870s may be taken as the crucial formative moment, for out of it grew the notion of ‘sexual
inversion’, the dominant formulation until the 1950s.

The word ‘homosexuality’ itself was not invented until 1869 (by the Hungarian Benkert
von Kertbeny) and did not enter English usage until the 1880s and 1890s, and then largely as a
result of the work of Havelock Ellis. I suggest that the widespread adoption of these neolo-
gisms during this period marks as crucial a turning point in attitudes to homosexuality as the
adoption of ‘gay’ as a self-description of homosexuals in the 1970s. It indicated not just a
changing usage but the emergence of a whole new set of assumptions. And in Britain (as also
in Germany and elsewhere) the reconceptualization and categorization (at first medical and
later social) coincided with the development of new legal and ideological sanctions, particu-
larly against male homosexuality.

Until 1885 the only law dealing directly with homosexual behaviour in England was that
relating to buggery, and legally, at least, little distinction was made between buggery between
man and woman, man and beast and man and man, though the majority of prosecutions were
directed at men for homosexual offences. This had been a capital crime from the 1530s, when
the incorporation of traditional ecclesiastical sanctions into law had been part of the decisive
assumption by the state of many of the powers of the medieval church. Prosecutions under
this law had fluctuated, partly because of changing rules on evidence, partly through other
social pressures. There seems, for instance, to have been a higher incidence of prosecutions
(and executions) in times of war; penalties were particularly harsh in cases affecting the disci-
pline of the armed services, particularly the navy (Radzinowicz, 1968; Gilbert, 1974, 1976,
1977). ‘Sodomite’ (denoting contact between men) became the typical epithet of abuse for
the sexual deviant.

The legal classification and the epithet had, however, an uncertain status and was often
used loosely to describe various forms of non-reproductive sex. There was therefore a crucial
distinction between traditional concepts of buggery and modern concepts of homosexuality.
The former was seen as a potentiality in all sinful nature, unless severely execrated and judi-
cially punished; homosexuality, however, is seen as the characteristic of a particular type of
person, a type whose specific characteristics (inability to whistle, penchant for the colour
green, adoration of mother or father, age of sexual maturation, ‘promiscuity’, etc.) have been
exhaustively and inconclusively detailed in many twentieth-century textbooks. It became a
major task of psychology in the present century to attempt to explain the aetiology of this
homosexual ‘condition’ (McIntosh, 1968). The early articles on homosexuality in the 1880s
and 1890s treated the subject as if they were entering a strange continent. An eminent doctor,
Sir George Savage, described in the Journal of Mental Science the homosexual case histories
of a young man and woman and wondered if ‘this perversion is as rare as it appears’, while
Havelock Ellis was to claim that he was the first to record any homosexual cases unconnected
with prison or asylums. The sodomite, as Michel Foucault has put it (1979), was a temporary
aberration; the homosexual belongs to a species, and social science during this century has
made various – if by and large unsuccessful – efforts to explore this phenomenon.

These changing concepts do not mean, of course, that those who engaged in a predomin-
antly homosexual life style did not regard themselves as somehow different until the late
nineteenth century, and there is evidence for sub-cultural formation around certain monarchs
and in the theatre for centuries. But there is much stronger evidence for the emergence of a
distinctive male homosexual sub-culture in London and one or two other cities from the late
seventeenth century, often characterized by transvestism and gender-role inversion; and by
the early nineteenth century there was a recognition in the courts that homosexuality

Discourse, desire and sexual deviance 129

represented a condition different from the norm (McIntosh, 1968; Trumbach, 1977). By the
mid-nineteenth century, it seems the male homosexual sub-culture at least had characteristics
not dissimilar to the modern, with recognized cruising places and homosexual haunts, ritual-
ized sexual contact and a distinctive argot and ‘style’. But there is also abundant evidence
until late into the nineteenth century of practices which by modern standards would be
regarded as highly sexually compromising. Lawrence Stone (1977) describes how Oxbridge
male students often slept with male students with no sexual connotations until comparatively
late in the eighteenth century, while Smith-Rosenberg (1975) has described the intimate – and
seemingly non-sexualized – relations between women in the nineteenth century.

Nevertheless, even as late as the 1870s there was considerable doubt in the minds of the
police, the medical profession and the judiciary about the nature and extent of homosexual
offences. When the transvestites Boulton and Park were brought to trial in 1871 for
conspiracy to commit buggery, there was considerable police confusion about the nature of
the alleged offences, the medical profession differed over the relevance of the evidence
relating to anal intercourse, the counsel seemed never to have worked on similar cases before,
the ‘scientific’ literature cited from British sources was nugatory, while the court was either
ignorant of the French sources or ready to despise them. The Attorney General suggested that
it was fortunate that there was ‘very little learning or knowledge upon this subject in this
country’, while a defence counsel attacked ‘the new found treasures of French literature upon
the subject which thank God is still foreign to the libraries of British surgeons’.2 Boulton and
Park were eventually acquitted, despite an overwhelming mass of evidence, including corres-
pondence, that today would be regarded as highly compromising.

The latter part of the nineteenth century, however, saw a variety of concerns that helped to
focus awareness: the controversy about ‘immorality’ in public schools, various sexual scan-
dals, a new legal situation, the beginnings of a ‘scientific’ discussion of homosexuality and
the emergence of the ‘medical model’. The subject, as Edward Carpenter put it at the time,
‘has great actuality and is pressing upon us from all sides’ (Carpenter, 1908, p. 9). It appears
likely that it was in this developing context that some of those with homosexual inclinations
began to perceive themselves as ‘inverts’, ‘homosexuals’, ‘Uranians’, a crucial stage in the
prolonged and uneven process whereby homosexuality began to take on a recognizably
modern configuration. And although the evidence cited here has been largely British, this
development was widespread throughout Western Europe and America.

The changing legal and ideological situations were crucial markers in this development.
The 1861 Offences Against the Person Act removed the death penalty for buggery (which had
not been used since the 1830s), replacing it by sentences of between ten years and life. But in
1885 the famous Labouchere Amendment to the Criminal Law Amendment Act made all
male homosexual activities (acts of ‘gross indecency’) illegal, punishable by up to two years’
hard labour. And in 1898 the laws on importuning for ‘immoral purposes’ were tightened up
and effectively applied to male homosexuals (this was clarified by the Criminal Law Amend-
ment Act of 1912 with respect to England and Wales – Scotland has different provisions).
Both were significant extensions of the legal controls on male homosexuality, whatever their
origins or intentions (Smith, 1976; Bristow, 1977; Weeks, 1977, p. 2). Though formally less
severe than capital punishments for sodomy, the new legal situation is likely to have ground
harder on a much wider circle of people, particularly as it was dramatized in a series of sensa-
tional scandals, culminating in the trials of Oscar Wilde, which had the function of drawing a
sharp dividing line between permissible and tabooed forms of behaviour. The Wilde scandal
in particular was a vital moment in the creation of a male homosexual identity (Ellis, 1936, p.
392). It must be noted, however, that the new legal situation did not apply to women, and the

130 Jeffrey Weeks

attempt in 1921 to extend the 1885 provisions to women failed, in part at least on the grounds
that publicity would only serve to make more women aware of homosexuality (Weeks, 1977,
p. 107). But the different legal situation alone does not explain the different social resonances
of male and female homosexuality. Much more likely, this must be related to the complexly
developing social structuring of male and female sexualities.

The emergence of a psychological and medical model of homosexuality was intimately
connected with the legal situation. The most commonly quoted European writers on homo-
sexuality in the mid-nineteenth century were Casper and Tardieu, the leading medico-legal
experts of Germany and France respectively. Both, as Arno Karlen has put it, were ‘chiefly
concerned with whether the disgusting breed of perverts could be physically identified for
courts, and whether they should be held legally responsible for their acts’ (Karlen, 1971, p.
185). The same problem was apparent in Britain. According to Magnus Hirschfeld, most of
the 1000 or so works on homosexuality that appeared between 1898 and 1908 were directed,
in part at least, at the legal profession. Even J.A. Symond’s privately printed pamphlet A
Problem in Modern Ethics (1983 [orig. 1883]) declared itself to be addressed ‘especially to
Medical psychologists and jurists’, while Havelock Ellis’s Sexual Inversion (1936 [orig.
1897]) was attacked for not being published by a medical press and for being too popular in
tone. The medicalization of homosexuality – a transition from notions of sin to concepts of
sickness or mental illness – was a vitally significant move, even though its application was
uneven. Around it the poles of scientific discourse ranged for decades: was homosexuality
congenital or acquired, ineradicable or susceptible to cure, to be quietly if unenthusiastically
accepted as unavoidable (even the liberal Havelock Ellis felt it necessary to warn his invert
reader not to ‘set himself in violent opposition’ to his society) or to be resisted with all the
force of one’s Christian will? In the discussions of the 1950s and 1960s these were crucial
issues: was it right, it was sometimes wondered, to lock an alcoholic up in a brewery; should
those who suffered from an incurable (or at best unfortunate) condition be punished? Old
notions of the immorality or sinfulness of homosexuality did not die in the nineteenth
century; they still survive, unfortunately, in many dark corners. But from the nineteenth
century they were inextricably entangled with ‘scientific’ theories that formed the boundaries
within which homosexuals had to begin to define themselves.

The challenge to essentialism

Clearly the emergence of the homosexual category was not arbitrary or accidental. The
scientific and medical speculation can be seen in one sense as a product of the characteristic
nineteenth-century process whereby the traditionally execrated (and monolithic) crimes
against nature – linking up, for instance, homosexuality with masturbation and mechanical
birth control (Bullough and Voght, 1973) – are differentiated into discrete deviations whose
aetiologies are mapped out in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century works (Ellis,
1936; Hirschfeld, 1938, 1946; Krafft-Ebing, 1965). In another series of relationships the
emergence of the concept of the homosexual can be seen as corresponding to and comp-
lexly linked with the classification and articulation of a variety of social categories: the
redefinitions of childhood and adolescence, the hysterical woman, the congenitally inclined
prostitute (or indeed, in the work of Ellis and others, the congenital criminal as well) and
linked to the contemporaneous debate and ideological definition of the role of housewife
and mother.3 On the other hand, the categorization was never simply an imposition of a new
definition; it was the result of various pressures and forces, in which new concepts merged
into older definitions.

Discourse, desire and sexual deviance 131

It is striking that the social purity campaigners of the 1880s saw both prostitution and male
homosexuality as products of undifferentiated male lust (Weeks, 1977, p. 17), and equally
significant, if generally unremarked, that the major enactments affecting male homosexuality
from the 1880s (the Labouchere Amendment, the 1898 Vagrancy Act) were primarily
concerned with female prostitution. Indeed as late as the 1950s it was still seen as logical to
set up a single government committee – the Wolfenden Committee – to study both prostitu-
tion and male homosexuality. It is clear, however, that the emergence of the homosexual cate-
gory and the changing focus of the definition of homosexual behaviour are intimately related
to wider changes. The problem is to find means of explaining and theorizing these changes
without falling into the twin traps of a naive empiricism or a reductive materialism. The
former would assume that what was happening was simply a discovery of pre-existing
phenomena, a problematic which, as we have suggested, has little historical validity; the latter
poses the danger of seeing the restrictive definitions of homosexual behaviours as a necessary
effect of a pre-existing causative complex (usually ‘capitalism’). Given the absence in
orthodox Marxism of any theorization of sexuality and gender that is able to cope with the
actual historical phenomena, the tendency has been to graft a form of functionalism on to
historical materialism, which, while it suggests useful connections which might be worth
exploring, simultaneously produces historical descriptions that are often difficult to fit with
more empirical substantiation.

Most attempts to explain this more closely have relied on variations of role theory. Male
homosexuality has been seen as a threat to the ensemble of assumptions about male sexuality
and a perceived challenge to the male heterosexual role within capitalism.

In Britain sexual intercourse has been contained within marriage which has been
presented as the ultimate form of sexual maturity … the heterosexual nuclear family
assists a system like capitalism because it produces and socialises the young in certain
values … the maintenance of the nuclear family with its role-specific behaviour creates
an apparent consensus concerning sexual normalcy.

(Brake, 1976, p. 178)

So that:

Any ambiguity such as transvestism, hermaphrodism, transsexuality, or homosexuality
is moulded into ‘normal’ appropriate gender behaviour or is relegated to the categories of
sick, dangerous or pathological. The actor is forced to slot into patterns of behaviour
appropriate to heterosexual gender roles.

(Brake, 1976, p. 176)

The result is the emergence of a specific male ‘homosexual role’, a specialized, despised and
punished role which ‘keeps the bulk of society pure in rather the same way that the similar
treatment of some kinds of criminal helps keep the rest of society law abiding’ (McIntosh,
1968, p. 184). Such a role has two effects: first, it helps to provide a clear-cut threshold
between permissible and impermissible behaviour, and, second, it helps to segregate those
labelled as deviant from others, and thus contains and limits their behaviour patterns. In the
same way, a homosexual sub-culture, which is the correlative of the development of a special-
ized role, provides both access to the socially outlawed need (sex) and contains the deviant.
Male homosexuals can thus be conceptualized as those excluded from the sexual family, and
as potential scapegoats whose oppression can keep the family members in line.

132 Jeffrey Weeks

The notion of a homosexual role in this posing of it has certain difficulties. It is, for
example, a negative role, not one that is socially sustained. It also assumes a unilinear fit
between the socially created role and the identity that it delineates, whereas all the evidence
indicates that this is problematical. It also suggests an intentionality in the creation of the role
that again is historically dubious. But beyond this are other related problems in the function-
alist model. It apparently assumes that the family acts as a unilinear funnel for the channelling
of socially necessary sexual identities and responds automatically to the needs of society (or
in the Marxist functionalist model, capitalism). It assumes, in other words, that the family can
be simply defined as a unitary form (the ‘nuclear family’) that acts in a determined way on
society’s members, and at the same time it takes for granted a sexual essence that can be orga-
nized through this institution.4 Neither is true.

Mark Poster has recently suggested that ‘historians and social scientists in general have
gone astray by viewing the family as a unitary phenomenon which has undergone some type
of linear transformation’ (1978, p. xvii). He argues instead that the history of the family is
discontinuous, evolving several distinct family structures, each with its own emotional
pattern. What this points to is the construction of different family forms in different historical
periods and with different class effects. A functionalist model which sees the family as an
essential and necessary agent of social control and with the role of ensuring efficient repro-
duction ignores both the constant ineffectiveness of the family in doing so and the immense
class variations in family forms.

But even more problematic are the assumptions classically made about the nature of sexu-
ality, assumptions current both in traditionalist and in Left thought (and particularly evident
in the writings of the Freudian Left: Reich, Fromm, Marcuse). They also have the undoubted
strength of the appearance of common sense: in this view sex is conceived of as an overpow-
ering, instinctive force, whose characteristics are built into the biology of the human animal,
which shapes human institutions and whose will must express itself, either in the form of
direct sexual expression or, if blocked, in the form of perversion or neurosis. Krafft-Ebing
expressed an orthodox view in the late nineteenth century when he described sex as a ‘natural
instinct’, which ‘with all conquering force and might demands fulfilment’ (1965, p. 1). The
clear presupposition here is that the sex drive is basically male in character, with the female
conceived of as a passive receptacle. More sophisticated versions of what Gagnon and Simon
have termed the ‘drive reduction’ model (1973) recur in twentieth-century thought. It is
ambiguously there in parts of Freud’s work, though the careful distinction he draws between
‘instinct’ and ‘drive’ has often been lost, both by commentators and translators. But it is
unambiguously present in the writings of his epigones. Thus Rattray Taylor in his neo-
Freudian interpretation of Sex in History:

The history of civilisation is the history of a long warfare between the dangerous and
powerful forces of the id, and the various systems of taboos and inhibitions which man
has erected to control them.

(Taylor, 1964, n.p.n.)

Here we have a clear notion of a ‘basic biological mandate’ that presses on, and so must be
firmly controlled by the cultural and social matrix (Gagnon and Simon, 1973, p. 11). What is
peculiar about this model is that is has been adopted both by Marxists, who in other regards
have firmly rejected the notion of ‘natural man’, and by taxonomists, such as Kinsey, whose
findings have revealed a wide variety of sexual experiences. With regard to homosexuality,
the instinctual model has seen it either as a more or less pathological deviation, a failure of

Discourse, desire and sexual deviance 133

socially necessary repression, as the effect of the morally restrictive organization of sexual
morality, or, more romantically but no less ahistorically, as the ‘great refusal’ (Marcuse,
1969) of sexual normality in the capitalist organization of sexuality.5

Against this, Gagnon and Simon have argued that sexuality is subject to ‘socio-cultural
moulding to a degree surpassed by few other forms of human behaviour’ (1973, p. 26), and in
so arguing they are building both on a century of sex research and on a century of ‘decentring’
natural man. Marx’s formulation of historical materialism and Freud’s discovery of the
unconscious have been the major contributions to what over the past few decades, in
structuralism, anthropology, psychoanalysis and Marxism, has been a major theoretical effort
to challenge the unitary subject in social theory. ‘Sexuality’ has in many ways been most
resistant to this challenge, precisely because its power seems to derive from our natural being,
but there have recently been three sustained challenges to sexual essentialism from three quite
different theoretical approaches: the interactionist (associated with the work of Gagnon and
Simon), the psychoanalytic (associated with the re-interpretation of Freud initiated by
Jacques Lacan) and the discursive, taking as its starting point the work of Michel Foucault.
They have quite different epistemological starting points and different objects of study – the
social sources of human conduct, the unconscious and power – but between them they have
posed formidable challenges to our received notions of sexuality, challenges which have
already been reflected in the presentation of this paper.6

Despite their different approaches and in the end different aims, their work converges on
several important issues. First, they all reject sex as an autonomous realm, a natural force with
specific effects, a rebellious energy that the ‘social’ controls. In the work of Gagnon and
Simon, it seems to be suggested that nothing is intrinsically sexual, or rather that anything can
be sexualized (though what creates the notion of ‘sexuality’ is itself never answered). In
Lacan’s ‘recovery’ of Freud, it is the law of the father, the castration fear and the pained entry
into the symbolic order – the order of language – at the Oedipal moment that instigates desire
(cf. Mitchell, 1974). It is the expression of a fundamental absence, which can never be
fulfilled, the desire to be the other, the father, which is both alienated and insatiable: alienated
because the child can only express its desire by means of language that itself constitutes its
submission to the father, and insatiable because it is desire for a symbolic position that is itself
arbiter of the possibilities for the expression of desire. The law of the father therefore consti-
tutes both desire and the lack on which it is predicated.

In Foucault’s work ‘sexuality’ is seen as a historical apparatus, and ‘sex’ is a ‘complex idea
that was formed within the deployment of sexuality’.

Sexuality must not be thought of as a kind of natural given which power tries to hold in
check, or as an obscure domain which knowledge gradually tries to uncover. It is the
name that can be given to a historical construct: not a furtive reality that is difficult to
grasp, but a great surface network in which the stimulation of bodies, the intensification
of pleasures, the incitement to discourse, the formation of special knowledges, the
strengthening of controls and resistances, are linked to one another, in accordance with a
few major strategies of knowledge and power.

(Foucault, 1979, pp. 105–6)

It is not fully clear what are the elements on which these social constructs of sexuality play.
In the neo-psychoanalytic school there is certainly rejection of the concept of a pool of
natural instincts that are distorted by society, but nevertheless there seems to be an accep-
tance of permanent drives; and the situation is complicated by what must be termed an

134 Jeffrey Weeks

essentialist and trans-historical reading of Oedipus, which seems to be essential for any
culture, or in Juliet Mitchell’s version, ‘patriarchal’ culture.7 Gagnon and Simon and
Plummer (1975) seem to accept the existence of a pool of possibilities on which ‘sexuality’
draws, and in this they do not seem far removed from Foucault’s version that ‘sexuality’
plays upon ‘bodies, organs, somatic localizations, functions, anatamophysiological
systems, sensations, and pleasures’, which have no intrinsic unity or ‘laws’ of their own
(Foucault, 1979, p. 153).

Second, then, what links the anti-essentialist critique is a recognition of the social sources
of sexual definitions. In the feminist appropriation of Lacan this can be seen as a result of
patriarchal structures and the differential entry into the symbolic of the human male and
female. But this poses massive theoretical problems, particularly in the attempt at a materi-
alist position. The problem here is that the trans-historical perception of the Oedipal crisis and
the consequent focusing of sex and gender already presuppose the existence of a unified
notion of sexuality which we are suggesting is historically specific. Both the interactionists
and Foucault make this clear. Gagnon and Simon suggest that:

It is possible that, given the historical nature of human societies we are victim to the
needs of earlier social orders. To earlier societies it may not have been a need to constrain
severely the powerful sexual impulse in order to maintain social stability or limit inher-
ently anti-social force, but rather a matter of having to invent an importance for sexu-
ality. This would not only assure a high level of reproductive activity but also provide
socially available rewards unlimited by natural resources, rewards that promote
conforming behaviour in sectors of social life far more important than the sexual.

(Gagnon and Simon, 1973, p. 17, my italics)

Foucault makes much clearer a historical specification and locates the rise of the sexuality
apparatus in the eighteenth century, linked with specific historical processes. As a conse-
quence of this, a third point of contact lies in the rejection, both by the interactionists and
Foucault, of the notion that the history of sexuality can fruitfully be seen in terms of ‘repres-
sion’. Foucault, as Zinner has put it:

… offers four major arguments against the repression hypothesis. (1) it is based on an
outmoded model of power; (2) it leads to a narrow construction of the family’s function;
(3) it is class specific and applies historically to bourgeois sexuality; and (4) it often
results in a one-sided conception of how authority interacts with sexuality – a negative
rather than a positive conception.

(Zinner, 1978, pp. 215–16)

Again Gagnon and Simon have been less historically specific, but both interactionists and
Foucault tend to the view that sexuality is organized not by repression but through definition
and regulation. More specifically, regulation is organized though the creation of sexual cat-
egories – homosexual, paedophile, transvestite and so on. In the case of Gagnon and Simon
and those influenced by them (for example, Plummer) the theoretical framework derives both
from Meadean social psychology, which sees the individual as having a developing person-
ality that is created in an interaction with others, and from labelling theories of deviance. In
the case of Foucault it derives from his belief that it is through discourse that our relation to
reality is organized – or rather, language structures the real – and in particular Foucault anal-
yses discourse ‘as an act of violence imposed upon things’ (Zinner, 1978, p. 219).

Discourse, desire and sexual deviance 135

Fourth, however, in all three tendencies there is a curious relationship to history. Symbolic
interactionism, by stressing the subjective and the impact of particular labelling events, has
almost invariably displayed an ahistorical bias. The psychoanalytical school, almost by def-
inition, has based itself on supra-historical assumptions which have been almost valueless in
conjunctural analyses. Foucault stresses that his work is basically aimed at constructing a
‘genealogy’, the locating of the ‘traces’ of the present; it is basically a history of the present.
So while the interactional adherent by and large has stressed the contingent and personalist,
the tendency in the others is towards a form of structuralism in which ‘history cannot be a
study of man but only of determinate structures of social relations of which men and women
are “bearers”’ (History Workshop, 1978).

It is this ambiguous relationship of the critique of essentialism to traditional historical work
which has made it seem difficult to absorb unproblematically any one of the particular
approaches. Nevertheless, each in quite different ways ultimately poses problems which any
historical approach to homosexuality must confront, particularly in the difficult relationship
of historical structuration to individualized meanings. A close examination of the historical
implications of the various approaches will illustrate this.

Constructing the homosexual

The dominant theoretical framework in Britain and the USA has derived from ‘symbolic
interactionism’. Here ideas are not treated in terms of their historical roots or practical effect-
iveness, but are seen as forming the background to every social process so that social
processes are treated essentially in terms of ideas, and it is through ideas that we construct
social reality itself. Most of the important work that has informed the theoretical study of
homosexuality in Britain has derived from symbolic interactionism (for example, Kenneth
Plummer’s Sexual Stigma [1975], which is the major British study of how homosexual mean-
ings are acquired). In this theory sexual meanings are constructed in social interaction: a
homosexual identity is not inherent, but is socially created. This has had a vitally important
clarifying influence, and has, as we have seen, broken with lay ideas of sex as a goal-directed
instinct. Linked to labelling theories of deviance, it has been a valuable tool for exploring the
effects of public stigmatizations and their impact on sub-cultural formation.

But interactionism has been unable fully to theorize the sexual variations that it can so ably
describe; nor has it conceptualized the relations between possible sexual patterns and other
social variables. Although it recognizes the disparities of power between various groups and
the importance of the power to label, it has often had difficulties in theorizing questions of
structural power and authority. Nor has it been willing, in the field of sexuality, to investigate
the question of determination. It is unable to theorize why, despite the endless possibilities of
sexualization it suggests, the genitals continue to be the focus of sexual imagination, nor why
there are, at various times, shifts in the location of the sexual taboos. And there is a political
consequence too, for if meanings are entirely developed in social interaction, an act of collec-
tive will can transform them; this leads, as Mary McIntosh has suggested, to a politics of ‘col-
lective voluntarism’. Both in theory and practice it has ignored the historical location of
sexual taboos. Interactionism therefore stops precisely at the point where theorization seems
essential: at the point of historical determination and ideological structuring in the creation of
subjectivity.

It is for this reason that recently, particularly amongst feminists, interest has begun to
switch to a reassessment of Freud and psychoanalysis with a view to employing it as a tool for
developing a theoretical understanding of patriarchy. It is becoming apparent that if the

136 Jeffrey Weeks

emergence of a distinct homosexual identity is linked to the evolution of the family, then
within this it is the role of the male – theorized in terms of the symbolic role of the phallus and
the law of the father – that is of central significance. This, it is suggested, will allow the space
to begin to understand the relationship between gender and sex (for it is in the family that the
anatomical differences between the sexes acquire their social significance) and also to begin
to uncover the specific history of female sexuality, within which the social history of lesbi-
anism must ultimately be located. The focal point for most of the preliminary discussion has
been Juliet Mitchell’s Psychoanalysis and Feminism (1974), which takes as its starting point
the work of Lacan, Althusser and Lévi-Strauss and which, as it was recently put by a sympa-
thetic critic:

… opens the way to a re-evaluation of psychoanalysis as a theory which can provide
scientific knowledge of the way in which patriarchal ideology is maintained through the
foundation of psychological ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’.

(Albury, 1976, p. 7)

But though the question of sexuality (and its role in the creation of sexed and gendered
subjects) has now been strategically linked to the whole problematic of patriarchy, there has
been no effort to theorize the question of sexual variation.

The tendency of thought that Juliet Mitchell represents can be criticized on a number of
grounds. Politically she seems to accept that separation of the struggle against patriarchy
from the struggle against capitalism which most socialist feminist work has in theory
attempted to overcome. Historically she appears to accept the universality of the Oedipal
experience. A historical materialist when analysing capitalist social relations, she readily
accepts idealist notions of the primal father when discussing the origins of patriarchy. Theo-
retically in her universalizing of the Oedipal processes she comes close to accepting drive as
autonomous, pre-individual and again trans-historical and transcultural. It is a peculiar
feature of recent radical thought that while stressing the conjunctural forces which partly at
least shape the political, social and ideological, and while stressing the historical construction
of subjectivity, it has nevertheless at the same time implicitly fallen back on a form of psychic
determinism which it nominally rejects.

It is this which gives a particular interest to the recent appearance in English translation of
Guy Hocquenghem’s Homosexual Desire (1978 [first published in France as Le Désir Homo-
sexuel in 1972]). The essay is located in the general area generated by the Lacanian reinter-
pretation of Freud, linguistic theory and the question of ideology, but its specific debt is to
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, their work L’Anti Oedipe, their critique of Freudian (and
Lacanian) categories and their subsequent theory of ‘desire’ and their espousal of
schizoanalysis (Deleuze and Guattari, 1977). As in our argument, Hocquenghem recognizes
the culturally specific function of the concept of ‘the homosexual’; Hocquenghem makes
references to Foucault and he points to what he calls the ‘growing imperialism’ of society,
which seeks to attribute a social status to everything, even the unclassified. The result has
been that homosexuality has been ever more closely defined (see Weeks, 1978).

Hocquenghem argues that ‘homosexual desire’, indeed like heterosexual, is an arbitrary
division of the flux of desire, which in itself is polyvocal and undifferentiated, so that the notion
of exclusive homosexuality is a ‘fallacy of the imaginary’, a misrecognition and ideological
misperception. But despite this, homosexuality has a vivid social presence, and this is
because it expresses an aspect of desire which appears nowhere else. For the direct manifesta-
tion of homosexual desire opposes the relations of roles and identities necessarily imposed by

Discourse, desire and sexual deviance 137

the Oedipus complex in order to ensure the reproduction of society. Capitalism, in its neces-
sary employment of Oedipalization to control the tendency to decoding, manufactures
‘homosexuals’ just as it produces proletarians, and what is manufactured is a psychologically
repressive category. He argues that the principal ideological means of thinking about homo-
sexuality are ultimately, though not mechanically, connected with the advance of Western capi-
talism. They amount to a perverse ‘re-territorialization’, a massive effort to regain social
control, in a world tending towards disorder and decoding. As a result the establishment of
homosexuality as a separate category goes hand in hand with its repression. On the one hand,
we have the creation of a minority of ‘homosexuals’, on the other, the transformation in the
majority of the repressed homosexual elements of desire into the desire to repress. Hence subli-
mated homosexuality is the basis of the paranoia about homosexuality which pervades social
behaviour, which in turn is a guarantee of the survival of the Oedipal relations, the victory of the
law of the father. Hocquenghem argues that only one organ is allowed in the Oedipal triangle,
what Deleuze and Guattari call the ‘despotic signifier’, the phallus. And as money is the true
universal reference point for capitalism, so the phallus is the reference point for heterosexism.
The phallus determines, whether by absence or presence, the girl’s penis envy, the boy’s castra-
tion anxiety; it draws on libidinal energy in the same way as money draws on labour. And as this
comment underlines, this Oedipalization is itself a product of capitalism and not, as the
Lacanian school might argue, a law of culture or of all patriarchal societies.

Without going into further details several difficulties emerge. The first relates to the whole
question of homosexual paranoia – reminiscent in many ways of the recent discussion of
homophobia in Britain and the USA (Weinberg, 1973). The idea that repression of homosex-
uality in modern society is a product of suppressed homosexuality comes at times very close
to a hydraulic theory of sexuality, which both symbolic interactionism and Lacanian interpre-
tations of Freud have ostensibly rejected. It is not a sufficient explanatory principle simply to
reverse the idea that homosexuality is a paranoia, peddled by the medical profession in the
present century, into the idea that hostile attitudes to homosexuality are themselves paranoid.
Nor does the theory help explain the real, if limited, liberalization of attitudes that has taken
place in some Western countries or the range of attitudes that are empirically known to exist
in different countries and even in different families.

Second, following from this, there is the still unanswered problem of why some individuals
become ‘homosexual’ and others do not. The use of the concept of Oedipalization restores
some notion of social determinacy that symbolic interactionism lacks, but, by corollary, its
use loses any sense of the relevance of the specific family pressures, the educational and
labelling processes, the media images that reinforce the identity and the individual shaping of
meaning. Third, there is the ambiguous relationship of capitalism to patriarchy. If Mitchell
can be rightly criticized for creating two separate areas for political struggle, the economic
(against capitalism) and the ideological (against patriarchy), then Hocquenghem can be criti-
cized for collapsing them together.

Finally, there is Hocquenghem’s failure to explore the different modalities of lesbianism. It
is important to note that what Hocquenghem is discussing is essentially male homosexuality,
for in Hocquenghem’s view, although the law of the father dominates both the male and the
female, it is to the authority of the father in reproduction (both of the species and of
Oedipalization itself) that homosexuality poses the major challenge; as Deleuze and Guattari
note, male homosexuality, far from being a product of the Oedipus complex, as some Freud-
ians imply, itself constitutes a totally different mode of social relationships, no longer
vertical, but horizontal. Lesbianism, by implication, assumes its significance as a challenge to
the secondary position accorded to female sexuality in capitalist society. It is not so much

138 Jeffrey Weeks

lesbianism as female sexuality that society denies. But Hocquenghem quite fails to pursue the
point, which is central if we are to grasp the formation of sexual meanings. Despite these
objections, however, Hocquenghem’s essay raises important questions, some of which will
be taken up below.

Whereas Hocquenghem, following Deleuze and Guattari, is intent on developing a
philosophy of desire, Foucault, though much influenced by and having influence on this
tendency, is more concerned in his later works with delineating a theory of power and the
complex interplay between power and discourses. Foucault’s work marks a break with
conventional views of power. Power is not unitary, it does not reside in the state, it is not a
thing to hold.

By power, I do not mean ‘Power’ as a group of institutions and mechanisms that ensure
the subservience of the citizens of a given state. By power, I do not mean, either, a mode
of subjugation which, in contrast to violence, has the form of the rule. Finally, I do not
have in mind a general system of domination exerted by one group over another … these
are only the terminal forms power takes. It seems to me that power must be understood in
the first instance as the multiplicity of force relations, immanent in the sphere in which
they operate and which constitute their own organisation; as the process which, through
ceaseless struggles and confrontations transforms, strengthens, or reverses them; as the
support which these force relations find in one another, thus forming a chain or a system,
or on the contrary, the disfunctions and contradictions which isolate them from one
another; and lastly, as the strategies in which they take effect, whose general design or
institutional crystallization is embodied in the state apparatus, in the formulation of the
law, in the various social hegemonies.

(Foucault, 1979, pp. 92–3)

The problem with this theory of power is that by breaking with a reductive or negative view,
power ‘remains almost as a process, without specification within different instances’
(Coward, 1978, p. 20). And although he is unwilling to specify in advance any privileged
source of power, there nevertheless underlies his work what might be termed a ‘philosophical
monism’ (Zinner, 1978, p. 220), a conception of a will to power (and hence his complex
linkage with Nietzsche) forever expanding and bursting forth in the form of the will to know.
It is the complexes of power/knowledge that Foucault explores in his essay on The History of
Sexuality; the original French version of its ‘Introduction’ has the title ‘La volonté de savoir’,
‘The will to knowledge’, which makes his concerns transparent:

Things are accorded the weight of creation, while the human subject becomes a mere
appendage – the speaker, the knower, the listener, the transmitter – and above all the
spectator of the passage of discourse.

(Zinner, 1978, p. 220)

It is through discourse that the complex of power/knowledge is realized. Foucault is not inter-
ested in the history of mind but in the history of discourse:

The question which I ask is not of codes but of events: the law of existence of the state-
ments, that which has rendered them possible – these and none other in their place: the
conditions of their singular emergence; their correlations with other previous or simulta-
neous events, discursive or not. The question, however, I try to answer without referring

Discourse, desire and sexual deviance 139

to the consciousness, obscure or explicit, of speaking subjects; without relating the facts
of discourse to the will – perhaps involuntary – of their authors.

(Foucault, 1978b, p. 14)

What he is suggesting is that the relationship between symbol and symbolized is not only
referential but productive. The order of language produces its own material forms and desires
as much as the physical possibilities. But there is no single hidden hand of history, no
complex causative complex, no pre-ordained goal, no final truth of human history.
Discourses produce their own truths as the possibilities of seeing the world in fresh ways
emerge.

The history of sexuality therefore becomes a history of our discourses about sexuality. And
the Western experience of sex, he argues, is not the inhibition of discourse but a constant, and
historically changing, deployment of discourses on sex, and this ever-expanding discursive
explosion is part of a complex growth of control over individuals, partly though the apparatus
of sexuality. Power is articulated through discourse: it invests, creates, produces. ‘Power as
form of productivity forms the subject rather than simply imposing itself; power is desiring
rather than constraining’ (D’Amico, 1978, p. 179).

But behind the vast explosion of discourses on sexuality since the eighteenth century, there
is no single unifying strategy valid for the whole of society. And in particular, breaking with
an orthodox Marxist problematic, he denies that it can be simply interpreted in terms of prob-
lems of ‘reproduction’. In the ‘Introduction’ to The History of Sexuality (which is a method-
ological excursus, rather than a complete ‘history’) Foucault suggests four strategic unities,
linking together a host of practices and techniques, which formed specific mechanics of
knowledge and power centring on sex: a hysterization of women’s bodies, a pedagogization
of children’s sex, a socialization of procreative behaviour, a psychiatrization of perverse plea-
sures. And four figures emerged from these preoccupations, four objects of knowledge, four
subjects subjected, targets of and anchorages for the categories that were being
simultaneously investigated and regulated: the hysterical woman, the masturbating child,
the Malthusian couple and the perversive adult. The thrust of these discursive creations is
control, control not through denial or prohibition, but through production, through imposing
a grid of definition on the possibilities of the body.

The deployment of sexuality has its reasons for being, not in reproducing itself, but in
proliferating, innovating, annexing, creating, and penetrating bodies in an increasingly
detailed way, and in controlling populations in an increasingly comprehensive way.

(Foucault, 1979, p. 107)

This is obviously related to Foucault’s analysis of the genealogy of the disciplinary society, a
society of surveillance and control, in Discipline and Punish (Foucault, 1977a) and to his
argument that power proceeds not in the traditional model of sovereignty but through admin-
istering and fostering life.

The old power of death that symbolised sovereign power was now carefully supplanted
by the administration of bodies and the calculated management of life.

(Foucault, 1979, pp. 139–40)

The obvious question is why. Foucault’s ‘radical nominalism’ rejects the question of causa-
tion, but he quite clearly perceives the significance of extra-discursive references. In I, Pierre

140 Jeffrey Weeks

Riviere, the French revolution is perceived as having profound resonances (Foucault, 1978a).
In The History of Sexuality, as in Discipline and Punish, he refers to the profound changes of
the eighteenth century:

What occurred in the eighteenth century in some western countries, an event bound up
with the development of capitalism, was … nothing less than the entry of life into history.

(Foucault, 1979, p. 141)

And in the emergence of ‘bio-power’, Foucault’s characteristic term of ‘modern’ social
forms, sexuality becomes a key element. For sex, argues Foucault, is the pivot of two axes
along which the whole technology of life developed; it was the point of entry to the body, to
the harnessing, identification and distribution of forces over the body, and it was the entry to
control and regulation of populations. ‘Sex was a means of access both to the life of the body
and the life of the species’ (Foucault, 1979, p. 146). As a result, sex becomes a crucial target
of power organized around the management of life, rather than the sovereign threat of death
which organizes ‘pre-modern’ societies.

Foucault stresses not the historical cause of events but the conditions for the emergence of
discourses and practices. Nevertheless there appears to be a strong functionalist tendency in
his work. ‘Social control’ is no longer a product of a materially motivated ruling class but the
concept of subjection within discourse seems as ultimately enveloping a concept.

‘Where there is power, there is resistance’, he argues, but nevertheless, and because of this,
‘resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power’ (Foucault, 1979, p. 95).
Indeed the very existence of power relies on a multiplicity of points of resistance, which play
the role of ‘adversary, target, support, or handle in power relations’. Foucault apparently
envisages the power of social explosions in forcing new ways of seeing: the great social
changes (industrial capitalism?) of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the French Revo-
lution, the possibilities opened up by the ‘événements’ of 1968. But one reading of his work
would suggest that without such explosions, techniques of discipline and surveillance, strat-
egies of power/knowledge leave us always, already, trapped.

But an alternative reading is possible. First of all there is the possibility of struggles over
definition. This can be seen both in struggles over definitions of female sexuality and over the
various and subtle forms of control of homosexuality.

There is no question that the appearance in nineteenth century psychiatry, jurisprudence,
and literature of a whole series of discourses on the species and subspecies of
homosexuality, inversion, pederasty, and ‘psychic hermaphrodism’ made possible a
strong advance of social controls into this area of ‘perversity’; but it also made possible
the formation of a ‘reverse’ discourse: homosexuality began to speak on its own behalf,
to demand that its legitimacy or ‘naturality’ be acknowledged, often in the same vocabu-
lary, using the same categories by which it was radically disqualified.

(Foucault, 1979, p. 101)

This reverse affirmation is the sub-text of the history of the homosexual rights movement; it
points to the significance of the definitional struggle and to its limitations. Hence Foucault’s
comment:

I believe that the movements labelled ‘sexual liberation’ ought to be understood as
movements of affirmation starting with sexuality. Which means two things: they are

Discourse, desire and sexual deviance 141

movements that start with sexuality, with the apparatus of sexuality in the midst of which
we’re caught, and which make it function to the limit; but, at the same time, they are in
motion relative to it, disengaging themselves and surmounting it.

(Foucault, 1977b, p. 155)

The ramifications of this ‘surmounting’ are not clear, but it is apparent that both the evolution
of homosexual meanings and identities is not complete or ‘scientifically’ established and that
homosexuals are, possibly for the first time, self-consciously participating as a group in that
evolution.

The other point of high importance in Foucault’s work is the emphasis on the genesis of
particular institutions: of prisons, the clinic, medical and psychiatric practices that both
produce and regulate the objects of knowledge. Appreciation of this emphasis will draw us
away from such questions as: what is the relationship between the mode of production and
this form of sexuality? Instead we can concentrate on the practices that actually constitute
social and sexual categories and ensure their controlling impact. But, in turn, to do this we
need to recognize that discourses do not arbitrarily emerge from the flux of possibilities, nor
are discourses our only contact with the real: they have their conditions of existence and their
effects in concrete, historical, social, economic and ideological situations.

Perspectives and projects

We are now in a sounder position to indicate more effective lines of historical research, or
rather to pose the questions to which the historians of sexuality need to address themselves.
They are effectively in two parts. First, what were the conditions for the emergence of the
homosexual category (or indeed other sexual categories), the complex of factors which fixed
the possibilities of homosexual behaviours into a system of defining concepts? Second, what
were and are the factors which define the individual acceptance or rejection of categoriza-
tions? This is a question that many might regard as invalid but which seems to us of critical
importance in determining the impact of control and regulation.

Conditions

Foucault and others have stressed the growing importance of the ‘norm’ since the eighteenth
century.

Another consequence of this development of bio-power was the growing importance
assumed by the action of the norm at the expense of the juridical system of the law.

(Foucault, 1979, p. 149)

A power whose task is to take charge of life needs continuous regulatory and corrective
mechanisms. It has to qualify, measure, appraise and hierarchize: ‘it affects distributions
around the norms’. This is not far removed from a more commonplace observation that the
development of liberal (‘individualistic’) society in the nineteenth century led to an
increase of conventionality, or to discussions of ideological ‘interpellations’ in the
construction of hegemonic forms (Laclau, 1977); but the examination of the ‘norm’ does
point effectively to the centrality since the nineteenth century of the norm of the monoga-
mous, heterosexual family. The uncertain status of sodomy points to the fact that before the
nineteenth century, the codes governing sexual practices – canonical, pastoral, civil – all

142 Jeffrey Weeks

centred on non-reproductive relations. Sodomy was part of a continuum of non-procreative
practices, often more serious than rape precisely because it was barren. But these regula-
tions were not extra-marital; they entered the marriage bed, were directly about non-repro-
ductive sex in conjugality, whatever the effectiveness of enforcement. From the nineteenth
century the regulations are increasingly of non-conjugal relations: from incest and child-
hood sex to homosexuality. As sexuality is increasingly privatized, seen as the character-
istic of the personal sphere, as its public manifestations are challenged (in terms that speak
all the time of sex while denying it), so deviant forms of sex become subject to more closely
defined public regulation. The family norm is strengthened by a series of extra-marital
regulations, which refer back all the time to its normality and morality. This is, of course,
underlined by a whole series of other developments, from the enforcement of the Poor Laws
and the Factory Acts to the Welfare State support of particular household models in the
twentieth century. To repeat a point made earlier, the specification, and hence greater
regulation, of homosexual behaviour is closely interconnected with the revaluation and
construction of the bourgeois family, not necessarily as a conscious effort to support or
sustain the family but because, as Plummer has put it:

The family as a social institution does not of itself condemn homosexuality, but through
its mere existence it implicitly provides a model that renders the homosexual experience
invalid.

(Plummer, 1975, p. 210)

But if we accept this outline as a fruitful guideline for research we need, second, to stress its
class specificities. For if ‘sexuality’ and its derivative sexual categorizations are social
constructs, then they are constructions within specific class milieux, whatever the impact of
their ‘diffusion’ or reappropriation. We need to explore, in much greater depth than before,
the class application of the homosexual categorizations. The common interest among many
early twentieth-century middle-class, self-defined homosexuals with the male working class,
conceived of as relatively indifferent to homosexual behaviour, is a highly significant
element in the homosexual sub-culture.

There was in fact a notable predominance of upper-middle-class values. Perhaps on one
level only middle-class men had a sufficient sense of a ‘personal life’ through which to
develop a homosexual identity (Zaretsky, 1976). The stress that is evident among male homo-
sexual writers on cross-class liaisons and on youth (typically the representative idealized rela-
tionship is between an upper-middle-class man and a working-class youth) is striking, and not
dissimilar, it may be noted in passing, to certain middle-class heterosexual patterns of the
nineteenth century and earlier. See for example, the anonymous author, usually known as
Walter, of the nineteenth-century sexual chronicle My Secret Life (Anonymous, c.1880). The
impossibility of same-class liaisons is a constant theme of homosexual literature, demon-
strating the strong elements of guilt (class and sexual) that pervade the male identity. But it
also illustrates a pattern of what can be called ‘sexual colonialism’, which saw the working-
class youth or soldier as a source of ‘trade’, often coinciding uneasily with an idealization of
the reconciling effect of cross-class liaisons.

But if the idealization of working-class youth was one major theme, the attitude of these
working-class men themselves is less easy to trace. They appear in all the major scandals (for
example, the Wilde trial, the Cleveland Street scandal) but their self-conceptions are almost
impossible to disinter. We may hypothesize that the spread of a homosexual consciousness
was much less strong among working-class men than middle-class – for obvious family and

Discourse, desire and sexual deviance 143

social factors – even though the law in Britain (on, for example, importuning) probably
affected more working-class than middle-class men. We can also note the evidence regarding
the patterns of male prostitution as, for example, in the Brigade of Guards, a European-wide
phenomenon. Most of the so far sparse evidence on male prostitution suggests a reluctance on
the part of the ‘prostitute’ to define himself as homosexual (Weeks, 1980).

A third point relates to this, concerning the gender specificity of homosexual behaviour.
The lesbian sense of self has been much less pronounced than the male homosexual and the
sub-cultural development exiguous. If the Wilde trial was a major labelling event for men, the
comparable event for lesbianism, the trial of Radclyffe Hall’s lesbian novel, The Well of
Loneliness, was much less devastating in its impact, and a generation later. Even science, so
anxious to detail the characteristics of male homosexuals, largely ignored lesbianism.

These factors underline the fact that what is needed is not so much a monist explanation for
the emergence of a ‘homosexual identity’ as a differential social history of male homosexu-
ality and lesbianism. But this in turn demands an awareness of the construction of specific
gender definitions, and their relationship to sexual identities. Gagnon and Simon have noted
that:

… the patterns of overt sexual behaviour on the part of homosexual females tend to
resemble those of heterosexual females and to differ radically from the sexual patterns of
both heterosexual and homosexual males.

(Gagnon and Simon, 1973, p. 180)

The impact on lesbianism of, for example, the discourses on (basically male) homosexuality
has never been explored.

Fourth, this underscores again the need to explore the various practices that create the
terrain or space in which behaviour is constructed. There is a long historical tradition, as we
have seen, of exploring legal regulation, but its impact in constructing categories has never
been considered. The role of the medicalization of sexual deviance has also been tentatively
explored, but it is only now that its complexly differentiated impact is being traced. Equally
important are the various forms of ideological representations of homosexual behaviour,
whether through the press or through the dramatizing effects of major rituals of public
condemnation, such as the Oscar Wilde trial in the 1890s.

Fifth, there is an absence of any study of the political appropriation of concepts of sexual
perversity, although there is a great deal of empirical evidence from the nineteenth century to
the present that sexual deviance had a significant place in sexual-political discourse. This
indicates the need for a close attention to specific conjunctures of sexual politics and to the
social forces at work in constructing political alliances around crimes of morality. The role of
sexual respectability in helping to cement the dominant power bloc in the nineteenth century
and the relevance of sexual liberalism in constructing the social democratic hegemony of the
1960s in Britain and elsewhere are examples in point (Gray, 1977; Hall et al., 1978).

What this schematic sketch suggests is the importance of locating sexual categorization
within a complex of discourses and practices, but also at the same time it is important to reject
descriptions that ignore the importance of external referents. The agitation for legal regula-
tion, the impact of medicalization and the stereotyping of media representation all have
sources in perceptions of the world and in complex power situations. One may mention, for
example, the network of fears over moral decay, imperial decline and public vice behind the
1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act or the Cold War fears that form the background to the
establishment of the Wolfenden Committee in 1954. Or, with regard to the growth of a

144 Jeffrey Weeks

medical model, we cannot disregard the significance of the growing professionalization of
medicine in the nineteenth century, its ideological and material links with upper-middle-class
male society and its consequent role in defining sexuality as well as ‘sexual perversions’. So
although it would be wrong to see the regulation of homosexual behaviour as a simple effect
of capitalist development, it is intricately linked to wider changes within the growth of a
highly industrialized, bourgeois society.

Identities

All ideologies, Althusser has argued, work by interpellating (‘hailing’) particular subjects,
and the ideological discourses that establish the categories of sexual perversity address partic-
ular types of persons. They also, as Foucault suggests, create the possibility of reversals
within the discourses: where there is power, there is resistance. Foucault is here offering a
space for the self-creation of a homosexual identity, but what is absent is any interest in why
some are able to respond or recognize themselves in the interpellation and others are not
(Johnson, 1979, p. 75).

There are major problems in this area for which our guidelines are tentative. There is abun-
dant evidence that individual, self-defined homosexuals see their sexuality as deeply rooted,
and often manifest at a very early age. This would, on the surface at least, seem to deny that
interaction with significant others creates the desire (as opposed to the identity), hence under-
mining a purely voluntarist position. On the other hand, the notion of a deeply structured
homosexual component is equally questionable, if for no other reason than that all the
evidence of historical variations contradicts it. Labelling theory has been quite able to accept
the distinctions we are making, for example, between primary and secondary deviation.

Primary deviation, as contrasted with secondary, is polygenetic, arising out of a variety
of social, cultural, psychological, and adventitious or recurring combinations …
secondary deviance refers to a special class of socially defined responses which people
make to problems created by the societal reaction to their deviance … The secondary
deviant, as opposed to his actions, is a person whose life and identity are organised
around the facts of deviance.

(Lemert, 1967, p. 40)

This is a valuable distinction stressing the real (and hitherto ignored) importance of social
labelling, but it ignores precisely those historical (and hence variable) factors which structure
the differences. To put it another way, if the homosexual component is not a factor present
only in a fixed minority of people, but on the contrary an aspect of the body’s sexual possibili-
ties, what social and cultural forces are at work which ensure its dominance in some people,
whereas in others the heterosexual element is apparently as strong and determined? Social
labelling is obviously central in making the divide between ‘normal’ and ‘deviant’, but what
shapes the components at the level of the human animal?

This must lead us again to ask whether we can rescue any lessons from psychoanalytical
speculations. A recent attempt to reinterpret Freud’s analysis of Little Hans throws some light
on this question. Mia Campioni and Liz Gross appear to accept the arguments of Deleuze and
Guattari (and Foucault) that Freud’s work was simultaneously a recognition of, and another
form of control over, the organization of desire under capitalism (Campioni and Gross, 1978).
The function of Oedipus is thus to organize sexuality into properly different gender roles to
accord both with patriarchal norms and a society that privileges sexuality.

Discourse, desire and sexual deviance 145

The purpose of concentrating on the case of Little Hans is to reveal the precise mecha-
nisms whereby a system of representation (ideology), correlative with existing social
structures, is inscribed upon the child within the constraints of relations specified by the
family … the process by which Hans is inserted into his patriarchal heritage gives us an
indication of this process’s mechanisms – at least in the case of male socialization. …
Moreover, the case allows us to clarify the strategies by which the child is inscribed into
the power relations that stratify society, and to discover that this occurs by means of the
sexualization of privileged erogenous zones. It is by the privileging of sexual zones,
desires and objects, and by their social control through psychical defence mechanisms, in
particular repression, that class and patriarchal social values are instilled in the child
which are constructive of his or her very identity. Sexualization is the means both of the
production and the limitation of desire, and therefore is also the locus of the control of
desire. Sexual desire provides the socio-political structure with a specific site for power
relations (relations of domination and subordination in general) to be exercised.

(Campioni and Gross, 1978, p. 103)

At the beginning of Hans’ case what is most apparent are the overwhelming number of
objects and aims of his eroticism. Over the two years of the analysis this sexuality is chan-
nelled into the forms of masculine sexuality demanded by familial ideology, and in this we
can see, dramatically at work in Freud’s analysis and the father’s work as agent, the actual
imposition of the Oedipal network by the psychoanalytical institution, a paradigm of its
controlling role in the twentieth century.

Several points come out of this which are worth underlining. First, this re-analysis does not
assume the family is a natural, biological entity with single effects. On the contrary, it is seen
as historically constituted and a consequent intersection of various developments, including
the development of childhood and the social differentiation of women and men. Second, the
analysis does not assume the naturalness of heterosexuality. Instead it relates its privileging
precisely to the construction of masculinity and femininity within the monogamous (and
socially constituted) family. Third, it does not see the Oedipus complex as in any way
universal. Not only is it historically specific, but it is also class specific. Fourth, the analysis
suggests that the child’s development is neither natural nor internal to the family unit. The
young human animal, with all his or her potentialities, is structured within a family, which all
the time is a combination of social processes, and by constant reference to the social other.

It is within this context that psychological masculinity and femininity are structured at the
level of the emotions. It seems likely that the possibilities of heterosexuality and homosexu-
ality as socially structured limitations on the flux of potentialities are developed in this nexus
in the process of emotional socialization. The emotion thus draws on sexuality rather than
being created by it.

But what is created, this would suggest, is not an identity but a propensity. It is the whole
series of social interactions, encounters with peers, educational processes, rituals of exclusion,
labelling events, chance encounters, political identifications, and so on, which structure the
sexual identities. They are not pre-given in nature; probably like the propensities themselves
they are social creations, though at different levels in the formation of psychological individu-
ality. This again suggests a rich field for historical explorations: the conditions for the growth of
sub-cultural formations (urbanization, response to social pressure, etc.), the degree of sub-
cultural participation, the role of sub-cultural involvement in the fixing of sexual identities, the
impact of legal and ideological regulation, the political responses to the sub-culture, both from
within the homosexual community and without, and the possibilities for transformations.

146 Jeffrey Weeks

Conclusion

What has been offered here is neither a prescription for correct research procedures nor a
collection of dogmatic answers, but a posing of important and fundamentally historical ques-
tions which the historians of sexuality have generally ignored. Earlier in the paper, the
problem was posed on two levels: the level of the social categorization and the level of the
individual, subjective construction of meaning. Until very recently, as Mary McIntosh
pointed out, the latter level was exclusively concentrated on, to the extent that the question of
aetiology dominated. Since then, particularly with the rise of sociological studies, the social
has rightly been emphasized. What I am now tentatively suggesting is that we must see both
as aspects of the same process, which is above all a historical process. Social processes
construct subjectivities not just as ‘categories’ but at the level of individual desires. This
perception, rather than the search for epistemological purity, should be the starting point for
future social and historical studies of ‘homosexuality’ and indeed of ‘sexuality’ in general.

Notes

1 See, for example, Public Record Office, HO 79/1 66: Lord Hawkesbury to Lord Sydney, 8 November
1808.

2 Public Record Office: transcript of Regina v. Boulton and Others, 1871, DDP4/6, Day 1, p. 82; Day 3,
p. 299.

3 On youth, see Gillis (1974); Gorham (1978); and on housework and motherhood, see Oakley (1976)
and Davin (1978).

4 For comments on this theme, see Adams and Minson (1978), Coward (1978), Kuhn (1978, pp. 61–2).
5 For Wilhelm Reich’s comments on homosexuality, see Reich, 1970. ‘It can be reduced only by estab-

lishing all necessary prerequisites for a natural love life among the masses’ [n.p.n.]. For a useful
comment on the historical context of Reich’s views, see Mitchell, 1974, p. 141. A similar leftist view
that homosexuality was a ‘symptom of arrested or distorted development’ can be seen in Craig, 1934,
p. 129. Herbert Marcuse’s views are to be found in Eros and Civilization (1969). Reich, The Sexual
Revolution (1970), expresses a viewpoint that homosexuality is a product of capitalist distortion of
the libido.

6 Compare Plummer’s slightly different account in the SSRC Report (Plummer, 1979).
7 Campioni and Gross (1978, p. 100) in their paper on ‘Little Hans: The Production of Oedipus’

propose a useful critique of Mitchell. See also Hall’s point: ‘Surely, we must say that, without further
work, further historical specification, the mechanisms of the Oedipus in the discourse both of Freud
and Lacan are universalist, trans-historical and therefore “essentialist” … the concepts elaborated by
Freud (and reworked by Lacan) cannot, in their in-general and universalist form, enter the theoretical
space of historical materialism, without further specification and elaboration – specification at the
level at which the concepts of historical materialism operate’ (Hall, 1978, pp. 118–19).

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