R E C E N T L Y
I'll take religion over gay culture
The affirmative action of Gwyneth Paltrow
America's New Age obsessions: The good, the bad and the inner child-y
Tom Cruise is no cruiser
Celebrities' fatal attraction to public sex
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A L S O
About Camille Paglia
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C O L U M N I S T S
Sexpert Opinion
Bestseller Hell
Left Hook
From Niagara to Viagra
Right On!
Lovers and Writers
Under the Covers
Second Thoughts
American Squirm
Unzipped
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A S K_C A M I L L E +|+ C A M I L L E+P A G L I A | PAGE 2 OF 2
Dear Camille:
You are my model for being an intellectual gay man.
A few years ago, I read in a marvelous (Boy) George Dowd interview that
"after many years of psychoanalysis, I had realized that at the bottom
of it, I was actually afraid of women." What he said bothered me, so
when I, as a gay man, took an honest look at my feelings about
femaleness, I had to admit there was an element of truth. I have
witnessed gay men excited beyond reason by female divas and male
impersonators, and felt the barely subliminal libido and the mixed-up desires. Is there something "heterosexual" about gay males' attraction toward female figures?
-- Finch
Dear Finch:
Woman is the colossal missing term in postmodernist queer theory, which is why gay studies programs cannot be trusted to pursue the truth objectively and also why they have had so little impact outside the insular academy. Except for a half-dozen gay male dissenters, mostly free-ranging journalists like Andrew Sullivan, Bruce Bawer and Daniel Mendelsohn (who also teaches classics part-time), the party line still hangs heavy in the gay world. Sniggering exhibitionism has become a substitute for authentic self-examination.
My position has always been (as in the main theoretical essay of "Vamps & Tramps") that the sexes will never understand each other and don't really get along but that, at puberty, nature triggers a flood of hormones that drive the sexes compulsively together. Everyone has a bisexual potential, I've argued, but for any adult person, male or female, to be totally incapable of erotic response to the opposite sex indicates that some protracted childhood trauma has overwhelmed nature's pleasure-giving hormonal promptings.
In gays there has been, from my lifetime of observation, a disturbance or
interruption in the process of sexual identity. There is both flight and
quest in homosexual love, which supplies something that is fundamentally
missing. The energy of opposition to sexual convention also powers art and
intellect, which is why so many leading artists and writers have been gay or
gay-tending.
In gay men's early development, there is usually a painful wound from lack of acceptance by other males -- father, brothers, schoolmates -- and then a driving need to gain that attention and acceptance, eventually taking sexual form. There is also, most of the time, some smothering female presence, either too hot or too cold, from which the boy will escape to other men, where he can breathe free. Archetypally, the mawlike female genitalia threaten both claustrophobia and castration and can seem to men as fetid as mulch. Hence male homosexuality is ultimately about human freedom from nature's power -- which is why I have celebrated gay men for advancing the cause of civilization.
The cult of divas, to which certainly not all gay men subscribe, is obviously a dance of identification with and ambivalence toward women. It has ancient antecedents in the Anatolian worship of Cybele, whose castrated priests wore the goddess's saffron robes. The queer theorists who idolize that uptight windbag, Michel Foucault, are precisely the people who fear Cybele the most and try to deny her existence, for she is nature -- the pitiless physical laws of the universe.
Even as we continue to demand that government know its place and stay out of our sex lives, we need to recover the more profound insights of pre-Stonewall gay men and women, who saw life as it is, because they did not live in a gilded or ideological ghetto. The latest, liberal media dogma that we are "born gay" is an absurdly premature claim based on fragmentary and inconclusive evidence that I have publicly questioned for years, since there are other, less sweeping hypotheses that can organize and explain that data. At a 1993 symposium on homosexuality and biology at the Harvard Medical School, where I was a speaker, I had the opportunity to meet or observe firsthand the principal gay figures in psychoanalysis and science who have spearheaded these issues for 30 years. As a scholar, I was horrified by what I saw and heard.
To gays everywhere, I say, wake up, and think for yourself! The key to self-knowledge lies at home, not with a cabal of self-appointed, self-interested leaders whose academic degrees mean little if they are not used wisely or ethically. Each person's erotic journey is different. If you want to know the truth, you must start with your own dreams and emotions and retrace your steps. In epic poetry, this is called the descent to the underworld. The true hero must confront not only the monsters without but the hell within.
Until gays renounce collusion and agitprop, they will be wedded to lies. Activists must stop surrendering the moral high ground to religious conservatives, who have history, tradition and the Bible on their side. I prescribe a diet of Plato, along with the other Greek and Roman philosophers, to break gay activists out of their small, shrill modernity.
Postscript:
My essay on the charismatic women of Alfred Hitchcock's films has just
appeared as the summer cover story of W, the magazine of the Waterstone's
bookstore chain in England. It was specially commissioned to coincide with
the release of my book on Hitchcock's "The Birds" for the British Film
Institute, which has invited me to London to meet the media this week,
culminating in my presentation after a screening of an archival print of "The
Birds" at the National Film Theatre on July 11.
A media tempest has already erupted over my dramatically walking out of an interview with the dull-witted Jonathan Dimbleby, apparently a pampered pasha of the London television establishment. "Pretty angry woman Paglia quits Dimbleby interview," announced a front-page article of the June 24 Guardian (illustrated by a fierce photo of me in a purple-velvet Moschino cavalier's jacket from a 1994 Daily Mail shoot).
The incident began with Dimbleby and company boastfully commandeering a luxury Philadelphia hotel suite where Julia Roberts had played a prostitute in "Pretty Woman" -- and then daring to lecture me on date-rape, meanwhile never bothering to mention the poor, sainted Alfred Hitchcock, who was the entire reason the British Film Institute granted the interview in the first place.
As suggested in the New York Post's June 27 account ("Paglia bolts Brit's TV 'ambush'"), the Dimbleby show's three other U.S. interviewees -- author Norman Mailer, Attorney General Janet Reno and U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan -- gave Dimbleby far less trouble. Amazonian Italian-American feminism rules!
An interview with Camille Paglia appears in the June issue of the Australian Web zine Seven.
Are you an uncooperative witness before life's grand jury? Ask Camille.
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