Homosexuality's Frustration and Shame

Among the more amusing posters displayed by the BGLSA in reaction to recent criticism of homosexuality by Kenan Professor of Government Harvey C. Manfield '53 was the outraged allegation that "Harvey Mansfield thinks FOUCAULT undermines civilization." With all due respect to this uncannily popular French intellectuel, please: what on earth is Michel Foucault trying to do if not to undermine civilization?

Once again, Harvard's Bisexual, Gay and Lesbian Student Association has rallied to condemn the suggestion that there is any ethical consideration pertinent to the discussion of sexual behavior. And they have also made the philosophical leap that Mansfield is not only mistaken, but speaks out of "erroneous and harmful prejudice."

The Colorado amendment which Mansfield was defending denies homosexuals no civil or political rights; what it does prohibit is legislation defining gays and lesbians as a protected minority. Should the government be forced to enact employment quotas for homosexuals, prevented from considering homosexuality in adoption placements, prohibited from encouraging marriage and family life?

If "what one might choose to do in bed with a consenting partner" is a matter of indifference, as the BGLSA now claims, isolated from the rest of one's life, it cannot at the same time be a radical act of "queer" rebellion against society. The BGLSA cannot have it both ways.

Still, it is ironic that the BGLSA has taken such strong public exception to the idea that homosexuality "undermines civilization." After all, if Western culture has been institutionally homophobic for thousands of years, what is wrong with undermining it? If the heterosexual, patriarchal family is so deeply entrenched in Western social and political institutions, then homosexual activity clearly must unravel the fabric of such a society and "undermine civilization." The "queer" polemicists at least have the advantage of facing squarely the radical implications of their social and political program; the BGLSA's attempt to hide behind a screen of stolid social respectability is simply naive.

The BGLSA's idea that the best way of demonstrating the happiness of those engaged in habitual same-sex activity is to interview them all does little to prove the happiness of practicing homosexuals. In polls, the vast majority of American schoolchildren report themselves to be "very good" at math, but that doesn't mean that they can add or subtract. Mansfield does not mean that because homosexual acts are shameful, all homosexuals feel ashamed (quite the opposite); he does not mean that because homosexual love is "imperfect and stunted and frustrated," all homosexuals feel unhappy.

What, then, does Mansfield mean? Homosexual attachments are "stunted" precisely because their object of affection is another person fundamentally like the self; there is a kind of narcissism involved at the root of homoeroticism. The "civilizing" effect which Mansfield attributes to heterosexual relationships is precisely that of drawing the individual out of narcissistic self-preoccupation into relation with another human being. It is not merely the difference between men and women (lest the BGLSA seize upon the argument as an apology for bestiality) but the psychological complementarity of male and female which make man and woman necessary counterparts one to the other. Quite apart from the biological urge to reproduce, the unique properties of the relation between man and woman are such that a life lived apart from that relation will be "imperfect and stunted." Human sexuality is not simply a means of physical gratification, nor simply a mental construct, but a compound of the physical and psychological close to the root of our humanity.

Mansfield has been derided for his emphasis on the importance of procreative heterosexual relations as opposed to sterile homosexual ones. It has been pointed out that homosexuals are, in fact, biologically capable of producing children. But a homosexual couple is simply incapable of producing a child together. Insofar as sexual love is more than a release of libidinal tension, more even than an mutual exchange of pleasure, it finds its goal in the mutual creation of a child. Homoerotic sexual release is psychologically frustrated precisely because homosexual love cannot reproduce itself.

Under the guidance of the BGLSA and other student groups, and under the auspices of the University, discussion of the ethics of sexual behavior has become a matter principally of deciding what contraceptive or other gadgets ought to be employed. Decisions about the relation of sexual activity to marriage, about homosexual activity, soon perhaps even about pederasty, are all not merely left to the individual, but the very suggestion that such choices might be criticized--that there might be some ground other than individual whim for making them--is denounced as "bigotry" or "harmful prejudice." Is nothing shameful, nothing harmful, so long as "consent" is not violated? It is a sad commentary on the current state of sexual morality and of society in general that, all sense of shame having been extinguished or suppressed, only the fear of death is left to serve as a check on human libido.

Christopher B. Brown '94 is President of the Harvard Conservative Club.