Gay emancipation will destroy gay identity. This is a good thing, because gay identity sustains gay conformism.
If we want to overcome homophobia, we have to understand why it exists. Put crudely, the victimisation of lesbians and gay men has its roots in the non-acceptance of sexual diversity. The differences between heterosexuals and homosexuals are deemed to be a legitimate basis for privileging one sexuality over the other. Homophobia is the perpetuation of straight supremacism, based on a rejection of sexual difference.
The anti-gay majority have declared that ‘the homosexual’ must be labelled and pilloried as someone separate from ‘the heterosexual’. This process of differentiation and exclusion seeks to contain and control same-sex desire.
Homosexuality is thus a categorisation invented by straights to marginalise and constrain queerness within an identifiable, demonised minority. The gay-straight schism, by marking out queers as distinct and devalued human beings, helps sustain our oppression. It is, therefore, not in the interest of lesbians and gay men to maintain sexual difference. Our liberation is irrevocably bound up with the dissolution of separate, mutually exclusive, rival orientations and identities.
There is, however, a catch. Because queerness is currently disparaged, we have to first assert the right to be different in order to eventually create a pluralistic culture where sexual difference ceases to be a basis for the denial of respect and rights. Normalising and legitimising the otherness of homosexuality is the precondition for abolishing homophobia.
This is the great paradox. Only when sexual difference is fully accepted and valued will it cease to be important and consequently slide into oblivion.
The long-term implications are profound. Every success in emancipating queers from oppression hastens the demise of homosexuality as a separate, exclusive identity and behaviour. The process of winning moral legitimacy and legal equality for lesbians and gay men undermines the whole hetero-homo polarity, diluting the differences between the two sexualities and weakening the cultural significance attributed to them.
Without first securing the complete social validation of same-sex desire it’s impossible to forge a culture where the differences between straight and gay no longer matter. As long as there is still homophobic prejudice and discrimination, the differences will continue to matter a great deal to the lesbian, gay and bisexual people who suffer as a consequence. The differences can only begin to dim and die once there is genuine equality, both legally and attitudinally.
The idea of erasing the antithesis between queer and straight is very threatening to many gay people. Some homosexuals have become rather too attached to their gay identity. It defines their whole being. Providing more than a mere sexual orientation, it nowadays offers a complete, ready-made alternative lifestyle to those cut adrift from heterosexuality and traditional family life. There’s no need for anyone attracted to people of the same sex to feel lost and uncertain. Embracing the feelgood gay identity gives them cosy reassurance, defining their sense of personhood, place and purpose (and even their taste in bottled lager and designer underwear!). Uncomplicated and unchallenging, it obviates the need for critical thought and scepticism, offering instead a convenient mental refuge from the unpredictable sexual ambiguities and vagaries of the real world, where homo and hetero desires so often coincide and intermingle.
Gay identity has become, for some, a sexual security blanket which is clutched tight at all times. Its loss would undermine their whole being. So they cling tenaciously to their sense of gayness, with all its connotations of invariable sexual difference, certainty and exclusivity. Anything that clouds the distinctions between straight and gay is deemed suspect and dangerous. Hence the frequent irrational hostility to bisexuality and bisexuals.
Lesbians and gay men with this mindset are wedded to gay identity, not gay liberation. Happy with their homo niche in the straight world, they don’t want to disturb the status quo and jeopardise their increasingly comfortable allotted social space, where the frivolous joy of gay consumerism is offered as a tawdry compensation for the lack of human rights.
This particular form of gay identity is implicitly committed to the preservation of sexual difference and to the permanence of the gay-straight scission. Because there is so much emotional investment in being gay, there is often a concommitant resistance to resolving the division between homos and heteros. Even more so, there’s an intransigent unwillingness to admit the possibility that homosexuality, in the form we presently know it, might one day cease to exist.
When gay identity manifests itself in this manner, the end result is almost always a reformist gay rights agenda. Those who feel safe and satisfied with the idea of a predetermined, timeless and exclusive gayness are inevitably reluctant to disturb the system that gives them such reassurance. They are content to seek equal treatment within the framework of values, laws and institutions that heterosexuals have already established, and nothing else. The existing configurations of homosexuality are taken for granted as eternal, and the minority status and role of homosexuality in society is unquestioned.
Most gay people, if they ever had any vision of sexual emancipation, have long ago lost it. The idealism of the early, post-Stonewall lesbian and gay liberation movement has been since swamped by a short-sighted, short-termist realpolitik. Few homos aspire to anything more than assimilating into the hetero status quo. They happily conform to the straight system. The dominant battle cry is now gay equality, not gay emancipation.
There is a big difference between these two political perspectives. The gay equality agenda focuses on the limited goal of equal rights, which involves parity with heterosexuals within a social structure and moral framework which straights have devised and which they dominate. In other words, it’s equality on straight terms.
Those who advocate equal rights alone, without any commitment to a deeper sexual and social transformation, are concerned only with removing homophobic discrimination. They want to reform society, not fundamentally change it. Their insistence on nothing more than equality for queers, and their typical view of lesbians and gay men as a distinct class of people who are destined to remain forever a sexual minority separate from the straight majority, has the effect of reinforcing and sustaining the divisions between hetero and homo. It encourages the false essentialist idea that gay and straight are two pre-ordained, irreconcilable sexual orientations characteristic of two totally different types of people. Such attitudes preserve society as it is, inhibiting the movement for greater sexual choice and freedom.
While the conservative gay equality agenda is restricted to law reform, the visionary queer emancipation project reaches beyond equality. Instead of merely securing equal rights within the prior-existing parameters of straight society, it has the more radical aim of a broader sexual liberation that expands erotic boundaries in sex-positive directions. Queer activist organisations like OutRage!, for example, campaign for the age of consent to be reduced to 14 for everyone (gay and straight), the repeal of the puritanical laws against prostitution and pornography, the introduction of explicit sex education in schools from primary classes onwards, and for greater legal rights for all unwed couples (hetero and homo), rather than the conformist demand for gay marriage.
This queer emancipation project, as well as undermining heterosexual hegemony, sets its sights on subverting the whole sex phobic nature of contemporary culture. By so doing, it contributes to the diminution of all erotic guilt and repression, which benefits both queers and straights.
An edited version of this article appeared as “Same Difference”, Red Pepper, January 1997.
* Peter Tatchell is a contributor to “Anti-Gay” (Freedom Editions, £9.99). He is also the author of “Safer Sexy – The Guide To Gay Sex Safely” (Freedom Editions, £14.99), and We Don’t Want To March Straight – Masculinity, Queers & The Military (Cassell, £4.99).