Homosexual Desire

Guy Hocquenghem was a 25-year-old intellectual who founded the Front homosexuel d'action révolutionnaire, a radical French organization that opposed standard political organization and disassociated itself with making demands for the future.[1] He was active in the New Left and its internal disagreements over the nature of homosexuality, as well as the psychoanalytic theoretical scene in France.[2] He was a close friend of René Schérer, a French theorist who sought to eliminate negative cultural attitudes toward pedophilia and child sexuality.[3]

Homosexual Desire, originally Le désir homosexuel,[4] was written by Guy Hocquenghem and published in the French language by Editions Universitaires in 1972.[5] The book was translated into English in 1978 by Daniella Dangoor;[4] this translation was reprinted in the United States in 1993.[6] In 2017, the book was translated into Spanish as El deseo homosexual and Spanish critical theorist Paul B. Preciado contributed an afterword.[7]

The book is polemical and sought the liberation of homosexual men over their assimilation.[8] The primary aim of the book is to reduce the symbolic value of the phallus over society; for Hocquenghem, the dominance of the phallus leads to the subordination of women and homosexual men, and many social problems can be traced to the phallus.[9] He argues that homosexual desire – inward feelings of same-sex attraction that are at once produced and repressed by heterosexist society[upper-alpha 1] – can be political, and that like the civil unrest in the May 68 movement, it can lead to the liberation of homosexual men.[11] In his argument, homosexual desire is focused on the anus (a valueless organ),[12] so it cannot be concerned with futurity.[1] He argues that the repression of homosexual desire – not the death drive of Freud's psychoanalysis – leads to men lashing out in masochist fits of rage in attempts to liberate themselves (in modern parlance, internalised homophobia).[10] Hocquenghem's notion of sexual liberation also included children; he argued that children are oppressed by society for their sexuality, and that adult–child sex is not an inherently abusive practice.[13]

The publication of Homosexual Desire preceded Michel Foucault's The History of Sexuality by four years, another influential book in the study of desire and homosexual identity.[6] It was the first queer theoretic work about queer antisociality,[upper-alpha 2] a theory – advanced by writers like Lee Edelman – declaring homosexuality incompatible with many of society's values.[14]