Notes on Gay Sexuality & Human Natures

Scott Tucker

{The following comments on Peter Drucker’s “Power and Sexuality” (Against the Current, Fall 1984) are excerpted from a personal letter to him. These excerpts in no way represent developed or final views.J

YOUR ARTICLE on Foucault is excellent, and I’d like to make copies to pass out at the lesbian and gay left group which meets monthly in NYC. I remain unclear about Jeffrey Weeks and other gay Marxists who seem to assimilate Foucault without much sign of critical indigestion. Piaget wrote a nice short book on Structuralism in which he says Foucault constructs “a structuralism without structure.” (You might care to look up Piaget’s book-you and he help clarify what has always dissatisfied me in Foucault; namely, his idealism, in the critical Marxist sense; a useful balance, in some ways, to the cruder forms of economic determinism.)

The distinction between power as empowerment and power as domination is relevant and useful. If Foucault really meant that the abolition of power as domination is “an undesirable utopia,” then his politics are antithetical to those of libertarian socialists and feminists.

There was an uprising of sorts which I helped instigate during the gay scholars’ conference in Amsterdam: Jeffrey Weeks and the conference organizers were pushing a Foucault line which had a curious political result. The organizers, at least, abstained from the annual Dutch Gay National March because homosexuality had been “socially constructed” and should be socially deconstructed-presumably by enlightened scholars such as themselves. I couldn’t see how this differed from a vague humanism which is pious and ineffectual: we aren’t really black or white, men or women, workers or bosses, straight or gay-we’re all just folks.

If one lives and works as an academic in Amsterdam, this humanism has a certain reality; but bigots are alive and well in this homeland of tolerance, and eggs were thrown at gay marchers as we rallied in Leiden. And why forget that much Dutch Protestantism is still death to desire?

Theory was the least interesting aspect of the conference; the exciting work was the historical research of scholars such as George Chauncey and Giovanni dall Orto, research which does not lead me to conclude that homoerotic identities were first invented and imposed by nineteenth century sexologists.

You write that Weeks, Katz and Boswell have collected evidence which shows how unlikely it is that we’re born either straight or gay. That really needs qualification. Katz takes social construction to its theoretical limits, saying sex itself is socially constructed, whereas Boswell reviews an old philosophical debate, namely, do categories exist because humans recognize real distinctions in the world around them, or are categories arbitrary conventions, simply names for things which have categorical force because humans agree to use them in certain ways?

George Chauncey (who is in the gay left group) was one of Boswell’s students and I asked him straight out whether he thinks Boswell believes gays are in some sense trans- (not a-) historical, and possibly whether gayness is a biological predisposition for many people across culture and history. Boswell does in fact use the term gay across different cultures and ages; as for predisposition, Chauncey says Boswell is open to the possibility.

So am I, which gets me into hot water. Biological determinisrn has been a crude weapon for reactionaries; but it doesn’t terrify or disconcert me that some elements of gay identity may be biological for some people; this still leaves a great deal up to culture. It says nothing absolute about character or social capacity. I am disgusted with gay movement politicos who claim “we’re born this way,” because no one as yet knows this for sure; because it is not, in any case, “better” to be born gay than to become gay, nor less nor more acceptable to bigots; and because the gay government should be helping many folks to become gay who would not otherwise pop out of the womb with this identity. If there is, indeed, any biological predisposition to gay identity, then it ranks no sense for gay progressives to shy away from the fact merely because gay dunderheads have seized on crude biological predestination to justify our social existence.

I say this because biological research will proceed in any case: and the politics of science will smack us in the face when researchers decide to “intervene” in sexual identity-through amniocentesis (already used to determine sex, which is problematic), through possible hormone “therapy,” through identification after birth of “the pre-homosexual child” (the phrase is Dr. Richard Green’s at Johns Hopkins), etc. Amniocentesis has already been used by parents who have aborted fetuses (female in most cases) in favor of male fetuses. The spectrum of normality is narrow enough, and I frankly don’t trust the ethics of many scientists: the danger is that they will further simplify human diversity.

Some theorists dismiss this scientific possibility as pure ideology: they say it smacks of the old sexology of The Third Sex-a distinct, transhistorical and biologically based identity. What I am saying and want to pursue in more detail as part of my book is this: that the winds of ideology may blow hither and yon, but we lesbian and gay people should not be terrified that we human animals have a spectrum of human natures (I stress the plural). It does not make sense to me that every animal alive has a nature except for the human animal, though certain Marxists have taken up this oddly anti­materialist position.

What distinguishes human animals from other animals is that it is in our nature to create complex cultures, and for those cultures to shape our natures. This culture creating capacity is rooted in our biological evolution as a species-the size and varied functions of our brain; the articulation of our limbs, etc.-but is historically and culturally defined, so that certain potentialities never materialize.

January-February 1986, ATC 1