What is the ontological status of the gay man?1 What is the political status of the gay man? The circumstances in which the gay man has arisen as a human category have been such that these ontological and political questions have been (and continue to be) matters of how to accommodate the gay man within ontological and political schemes that are stubbornly heterosexual. This has made ontological and political accommodation of the gay man both awkward and hesitant. It is important to consider these questions in conjunction. The ontological question simply asks what the gay man is. The political question, which asks how the gay man to be politically accommodated, presupposes some sort of answer to the ontological question: if an entity (in this case, the gay man) is to be accommodated (given place) politically, at least some sort of understanding of what that entity is is presupposed. Moreover, because a given ontological scheme (that is, a given picture of the kinds of entity that make up reality) arises in concrete historico-political circumstances, an understanding of the how the gay man fits (or doesn’t fit) within a given political scheme is relevant to answering the ontological question. Socio-political arrangements, after all, influence how a given entity is to be placed within a culturally dominant ontological picture (arrangement, scheme).
Because these questions of accommodation touch fundamentally upon matters of how the gay man is, has been, and is to be accommodated by ontological and political schemes that are stubbornly heterosexual, a key question concerns how an ontological and political anomaly be given place, when by nature of being of anomalous that entity cannot be given proper place?2 Judith Butler discusses how institutional heterosexuality’s binary gender schema “presupposes not only a causal relation among sex, gender, and desire, but dictates as well that desire reflect or express gender and that gender reflect or express desire.”3 Put simply, this binary schema makes it a matter of necessity that one desire women in virtue of being a man and that one be a man in virtue of being sexed male. Thus, according to this schema, one’s desire toward “the opposite sex” follows from one’s gender, which follows from one’s biological sex. Because the onto-cultural laws dictate the a man (insofar as he is a man) desire “the opposite sex,” the homosexual man becomes unintelligible with the domain of the laws, and hence anomalous.
Now, within this heterosexual binary schema, the masculine is defined in opposition to the feminine, the male in opposition to female. Thus, one is a man insofar as one is not a woman, a male insofar as one is not a female. For a man to possess a feminine attribute would compromise his ontological status as a man. Thus, the requirement that one’s sex/gender be defined against an “opposite” sex/gender enforces the binary by leaving no room for those who are not discretely on one side of the binary. Those who possess the attributes of “both” sexes and genders become logical (and thus ontological) impossibilities (as is in the case of the homosexual male, who possesses the feminine attribute of desiring males), for this binary scheme only gives room to those who are discretely on one side or the other of the binary. The notion that masculine/male attributes cannot co-inhere in the same person/body as feminine/female attributes facilitates the heterosexualization of the social body, because it is through practices of desire that the genders are differentiated and enforced, and it is through such enforcement that compulsory heterosexuality emerges as a social institution.
Just as one is one’s gender to the extent that one is not the other gender, one is one’s gender to the extent that one desires the other gender. Married to this binary heterosexual ontology are norms governing gender development, norms according to which sex, gender, and direction desire are linked in a developmental (causal) sequence in which desire for women follows casually from being a man, which follows from being sexed male. But what about those for whom sex, gender and desire are not so linked, as in the case of the gay man? Granting such causal and expressive links between sex, gender, and desire, the ontological and political problem at hand becomes that of accommodating the gay man when, within such a heterosexual onto-political domain, the homosexual cannot exist. Within this domain, the expression ‘homosexual man’ becomes a contradiction of terms (notwithstanding common usage of the expression, usage that makes it appear that it is not oxymornic): to be a man, to be a real man, is to desire women (that is, heterosexual) (the homosexual is thus an anomalous quasi-man). The onto-cultural laws dictate that sex and direction of desire (toward “the opposite sex”) be incorporated into the very notion of manhood. The gay man thus represents a causal (developmental) and expressive discontinuity between sex, gender, and desire, and is himself an unintelligible creature, as sex, gender, and direction of desire are linked analytically in the concept of manhood.
1 We often see this question cashed out reductionistically as a question of the ontological categories into which the gay man is to be placed, the categories to which the gay man is reducible.
2 But this notion of the gay man as anomalous has been complicated as of late. If the gay man is allowed to be legally wed to another gay man and has been given place within a given legal scheme, is he still an anomaly standing outside the legal norm? And even if a particular legal system hasn’t yet granted him the legal right (the place, the arena) to marry, movements to grant him this right are based on the presupposition that he does have a legitimate claim to place, regardless of whether civil law has recognized this claim. Moreover, such cases can be seen as civil law lagging behind social practices and norms in which the gay man has ceased to be anomalous, but has been more-or-less fully integrated with respectable social life: whether or not civil marriage is granted to the gay man, his church and immediate community may very well have embraced his love for another gay man.
3 Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge Classics ed. New York: Routledge 2006, 31
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