Not All Homosexuals Are Perverts

Elaboration as a Duty

There is a duty, for every human subject, to elaborate what they live through. To say of something that concerns us "it's just how it is, there's nothing to say about it" is to renounce the bare minimum of what is human. And yet, this position is becoming widespread — particularly when it comes to questions touching on desire, sexuality, identity. We are told that certain things are given, that they do not have to be questioned, that we must accept them, and that any attempt to think them would be a form of violence.

Homosexuality is today one of the topics most exposed to this lockdown. It can be spoken of in defense, in celebration, in self-affirmation — but not thought clinically, not interrogated as to what it articulates for this or that subject, not questioned in any way that would not be an affirmation. This prohibition dispossesses the subjects concerned of what could free them: access to their own truth.

"I Have a Right to Suffer, It's the Other Who Makes Me Suffer"

Much of the contemporary difficulty in speaking about these questions comes from a massive shift in the way subjects speak about their suffering. The phrase that comes back everywhere, in a thousand forms, is: no, I have a right to suffer, because it's the other who makes me suffer. I would be fine if it weren't for… And then the subject names the context: capitalism, patriarchy, society, the system, norms, their family, their past.

This formulation is more devious than it appears. To say I have a right to suffer ranks subjects according to the legitimacy of their pain. And to claim that one would be fine if it weren't for the environment is to imagine existing outside one's own context. The subject is their way of arranging themselves with what has happened to them — there is no pure self underneath.

Therapy does not consist of counting up wrongs. It is always therapy of the relation to the other. The question is not "whose fault is it" — that question has no way out. The question is: what can we make of it? The analytic position consists in knowing what we do with what happens to us, even when we did not choose it.

That question — whether therapy concerns itself only with what we can control — deserves an article of its own that we will develop soon. If it interests you, subscribe to the newsletter so you don't miss it.

"Born That Way": Biologism as the New Obscurantism

Contemporary discourse on homosexuality relies on a formula it takes for the height of benevolence: they were born that way, they can't help it. This formula is not harmless. To claim that a position of the subject is entirely determined by their biology is obscurantism — totalitarian thought in its most ancient version. That this biologism takes the form of a benevolent defense of minorities changes nothing about its structure: it reduces the subject to a biological substrate and cuts away everything that belongs to the symbolic, to history, to desire, to speech.

One is not born homosexual. One becomes it — and even, one chooses it.

Contemporary subjects hear "to choose" in the sense of conscious and deliberate — as if they could have willed otherwise. They are right on one point: they did not choose consciously. But their error is to have banished the unconscious from thought. The subject is for the most part unconscious. They choose, constantly, things they do not know they are choosing — and this unconscious choice is far more genuinely theirs than the rationalizations they then deploy to explain it.

What the defenders of born that way refuse is not responsibility in the moral sense. It is responsibility in the analytic sense: the idea that they are the author, even unwittingly, of what happens to them. I didn't choose, I chose nothing, it fell upon me. It is precisely this position that makes therapy impossible — because for them, therapy would consist of learning to live as one is, that is, of not touching anything. To say that homosexuality is an unconscious choice is neither to pathologize it nor to condemn it: it is to give the homosexual subject the dignity of having a destiny that thought can illuminate.

The Denial Betrays Itself in Its Paradoxes

Contemporary discourse on homosexuality holds simultaneously two statements that cannot stand together. It is not a symptom, it is not a pathology, it says. And in the same breath: recognize the singularity of my journey, my suffering, what I have been through.

But what is called "the singularity of a journey" is exactly what clinical practice calls a symptom — in the psychoanalytic sense, that is, a subjective formation that condenses a history and a truth. The subject wants to be recognized for their symptom and demands that no one touch it. They ask for the dignity of having a destiny and the exemption from the work of thinking it.

It is the paradoxes of discourse that betray the repression. Psychoanalytic denial always rests on bad faith: one knows, but one does not want to know that one knows. This repressed knowledge returns in the contradictions of discourse, in the obligatory turns that do not hold up the moment one looks at them.

What Freud Did — and Why It Took Courage to Do It

Many today describe Freud as a misogynist, a latent homophobe, a man of his century caught in prejudice. The exact opposite is true. For Freud's relation to women, see our article Was Freud a Misogynist?.

In his famous letter to the American mother who questioned him about her son, in April 1935, Freud writes that homosexuality is neither an advantage, nor a shame, nor a vice, nor a degradation, and that it cannot be classified as an illness. One must measure how sharp this position was at the time. Homosexuality was considered a crime in most Western countries. It was treated by medical institutions as a sexual perversion in the psychiatric sense of the term, that is, as a pathology calling for treatment. And Freud, absolutely against the current, refuses this classification.

It is exactly the same gesture he had made decades earlier regarding hysteria — by removing it from the category of madness where the psychiatry of his time had relegated it, and by showing that it was a subjective formation that could be heard, spoken, elaborated. Freud did not pathologize. Freud depathologized, against his era.

And Freud went further. His essays on Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo are analyses of the homosexual position as it articulated itself in these men, unfolding the knots between the subject's history, his identifications, his work — giving them, by that listening, the dignity of a destiny that thought can illuminate. That is the analytic gesture. It is what contemporary discourse, by forbidding speech about homosexuality, refuses homosexual subjects today.

Homosexuality Is a Symptom — So What?

Homosexuality is a symptom. Like any sexual orientation. In psychoanalysis, the symptom is not the illness but the formation by which a subject articulates their truth — often unbeknownst to themselves. Every subject has symptoms. The cure does not aim to eradicate them but to make them intelligible, to allow the subject to know something of them, and possibly to arrange themselves with them differently.

Sexuality is the place where symptoms condense, for a structural reason: it is the locus of the relation to the other in what is most radical, most traversed by the unconscious. Everything that makes symptom for a subject — their history, their identifications, their traumas, their relation to castration — comes to make a sign there. It applies to everyone.

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Perversion as "Father-Version"

We must now say something precise about what perversion designates in Lacanian clinical practice, because the word has become, in everyday language, more or less unusable. Pervert in the street means: someone who does strange things in bed. That is not at all what the word means in analysis.

Perversion, in Lacan, is a clinical structure — on the same level as neurosis and psychosis. It does not designate a sexual practice. It does not designate an orientation. It designates a mode of the subject's articulation to law and desire, which is constituted very early in the subject's history and which remains, thereafter, their particular way of being in the world.

In Seminar XXIII (The Sinthome), Lacan proposes a reading that illuminates what perversion really carries. He plays on the homophony in French between perversion and père-version (father-version): perversion would be a certain version of the father. A particular way of relating to the paternal function — that is, to what, in the structure of the subject, carries the law, the limit, the prohibition, castration. The pervert has a certain way of arranging themselves with the symbolic father. They do not deny it as the psychotic does. They do not repress it as the neurotic does. They make something else of it, which passes through disavowal — they know, and they do not know, and they organize a staging that sutures the division.

What must be heard is that perversion as structure presupposes a certain relation to the symbolic father — not the real father, but the father as function, as principle of prohibition and order in the structure. The pervert's position is not outside the law; it is arranged with the law in a particular way.

Now, our era has made the rejection of "patriarchy" one of its most structuring slogans. In its militant political form, this rejection never distinguishes between the real father — who may indeed have abused his power — and the symbolic father, which is a structural function without which no subject is constituted. Everything is thrown out together. And the Lacanian reading becomes pointed today: perversion, far from being an excess of paternal law, is a version of the relation to the father. One does not rid oneself of perversion by rejecting the father — one produces new configurations of it that one can no longer recognize, having lost the tools to think them.

There Is Not One Homosexuality

Lacan stated that The Woman does not exist — there are women, one by one, each in their singular relation to jouissance and lack. The same logic applies to homosexuality: there is not one homosexuality. There are homosexual subjects, each in their singular relation to desire, to the object, to the Other. This plurality is what clinical practice constantly encounters, and it is precisely this plurality that must prevent any global judgment on "homosexuality" as a category.

Depending on configurations, homosexuality articulates very different things for the subject. For some, it ties itself to a happy speech, a sublimation, a rich life of desire. For others, it articulates a detour, an avoidance, a compromise with something more difficult. And yes, in certain configurations, it can touch on perversion as structure — not systematically, not for all, but what can be true for some must remain thinkable in order for them to be heard.

The Case of Dora and Lacanian Dialectization

The most decisive theoretical moment is Lacan's rereading of the case of Dora. Where Freud saw a heterosexual desire for Mr. K, Lacan proposed a dialectization: Dora's desire was addressed to Mrs. K — Mr. K only served as a compass pointing toward her. The detour through the man was a way of designating the woman.

This structure illuminates something essential about the hysteric position. In hysteria, the subject seeks desire as what is found in front of them — in the one they take as bearer of the phallus. This is why the hysteric subject, even when their desire is addressed to another woman, can pass through the detour of the man: the man serves to indicate where it is, to give the direction.

And this play is found in the clinic of female homosexuality itself. A phrase one often hears testifies to this: I would like to have her body — a phrase that holds two meanings together. To have her body in place of one's own: identification with the desired woman, desire to be her. To have her body against one's own: desire in the proper sense, encounter of bodies. The in-between is exactly where the clinical work lives.

Why Communitarianism Abolishes Subjectivity

Contemporary identity movements have become the main machine for preventing the subjects concerned from elaborating their own position. All these movements — whatever their apparent cause — function in the same mode. They banish self-questioning. They offer the subject a ready-made self, a solid identity, a belonging that dispenses with the work of subjectivation. They are the love of the in-group for the hatred of the other. And the most dangerous of them are those that present themselves as inclusive and progressive — wearing white gloves the better to keep their hands dirty underneath.

This operation is structurally narcissistic. The subject seeks in the same their reflection and their validation, they fix their identity in a closed image. And narcissism, as developed elsewhere, mobilizes an economy that does not make for life — see our article Loving Oneself Before Loving Others, or Spending One's Time Putting Oneself Down: Narcissism.

What is lost in this operation is precisely what could save the subject: the possibility that their case is singular, that their history is not reducible to that of their group, that their suffering has something to say about them and not only about the general condition attributed to them. When homosexuality becomes "LGBT identity," it ceases to be what it is in each case — a precious subjective articulation, a rich symbolic formation, a knot of history — to become a belonging without content.

To Conclude: The Dignity of the Subject Is Being Able to Think What Concerns Them

The title of this article says not all homosexuals are perverts. This formula announces less a defense than an opening. It says: the question can be asked. It can be asked with rigor, without prejudice, without demagoguery, and every subject has the right — which is denied to them today from all sides — to think what concerns them.

The discourse that claims to protect homosexual subjects by forbidding questioning does not protect them — it dispossesses them. Psychoanalysis proposes something else: the possibility of elaborating one's own truth — not a collective truth, not a prefabricated one. To think is not to accuse. To question is not to pathologize. And to refuse the subject the right to think what they are, what they desire, under the pretext of defending them, is the worst of dispossessions.

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References

• /Freud, S. (1905). Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. Standard Edition, vol. VII.
• /Freud, S. (1905). Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (Dora). Standard Edition, vol. VII.
• /Freud, S. (1910). Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood. Standard Edition, vol. XI.
• /Freud, S. (1914). The Moses of Michelangelo. Standard Edition, vol. XIII.
• /Freud, S. (1935). Letter to an American Mother, April 9, 1935.
• /Lacan, J. (1951). Intervention on Transference. In Écrits, Norton.
• /Lacan, J. (1956–1957). The Seminar, Book IV: The Object Relation.
• /Lacan, J. (1972–1973). The Seminar, Book XX: Encore. Norton.
• /Lacan, J. (1975–1976). The Seminar, Book XXIII: The Sinthome. Polity.
• /André, S. (1995). L'imposture perverse. Seuil.

Léo Gayrard, clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst