Those eyes that panic your dreaming
To Carlos Monsivaís
Has the reader one time stumbled across some
puto in the street? Have they felt their gaze fixed; have they seen him on the
point of requesting a cigarrete, making conversation, suggesting…? While I become
embroiled with ideas, which I will try to develop in this article, I walk
through the Parque México watching
the muchachos that I like with that particular “puto gaze” whose scandalized
description would overwhelm the writing of a piece of yellow journalism. I
cannot know how those muchachos see my eyes, except one of them, with whom I
made a date; but I remember that in many of the novels that I have read, when
some homosexual character appears, the author delays nervously, intrigued by their gazed. “Eyes I dare not meet
in dream,” wrote Eliot. They qualify as slanted, fixed, luxurious, sentimental,
sarcastic, shining, evasive, anxious, rebellious, revile, ironic, etcetera.
These adjectives speak not of the eyes of homosexuals in themselves but of how
the established society sees them: we are a part of herself, above all of her
middle class, and at the same time we contradict her; we become her beneficiaries
and her critics. Voluntarily or involuntarily, to decide to be as we are, we do
it against her and we collaborate
towards her dissolution. Her theorists would define us as infectious microbes
which undermine her, but although we do not constitute an enemy class,
certainly we become uncontrollable enemies within her own ranks and at the same
time we collaborate in the siege of her basic institutions. If the reader –in
some bad dream—saw his spouse, his child, his father, his friends, some of his
heroes or best comrades, watching him with such timid eyes certainly he would
not want, startled, to awaken?
Nevertheless,
homosexuality –like any other sexual conduct—does not have an essence, but a
history. And that which is seen to be different
in homosexuals is not something essential about individuals who choose to love
and fuck people of the same sex, but the distinctive features of people who
choose and/or are obligated to invent a live – thoughts, emotions, sexuality,
tastes, customs, humor, ambitions, compromises – independently, in the
periphery or in the hidden basements of social life. (In a work of André Gide, Theseus, the eyes which make panic dream
were those of a heterosexual who, in the homosexual society of Crete, dared to
invent a life of his own choosing.) And the concrete fact that someone lives in
another way – much more than if this someone was multiplied in hundreds,
thousands or millions – breaks the indispensible unanimity to establish a
vertical domination in society. The vertical governments, even the socialist
ones (the USSR, Cuba) have sought to exterminate the live difference of
homosexuals, with recourses that don’t exclude concentration camps. The
capitalist “democracies” have followed a policy no less criminal, but more
sophisticated: to domesticate a population, now does not have to do with the
imposition of norms regarding with whom one makes love, but how one does it: a hedonist sexuality of
consumption, prefabricated and over-stimulated with technological resources, in
which sex is banalized and objectified, and now no sexual transgression matters
because sex, like all of the body, has been left where it has no importance.
Within the
business of sexual tolerance observable in these capitalist “democracies”, the
dangerous eyes now are not characteristics of any traditional sexual minority,
but of a new minority even more marginal and more harassed, and almost more
solidary within it: the minority of those who, independently of the sex of the
people whom they love, insist that sex and the body are radical forms of life,
sources of transformation and creativity, which irradiate their energy into all
the acts of daily life, making them more generous, intelligent and worthy of
being alive. In the centers of sexual tolerance of consumption, for example,
can sometimes be found a large marginality and rebellion in an old-fashioned
pairing, profound and loving, that in many of the more prestigious “sexual
aberrations” of plastic and in the cinema.
I do not
intend to say what homosexuality is – “who wants a blue sky, that lays down”,
says Efraín Huerta in a small poem (poemínimo). It only concerns me to explain a
few points of view on their history today in the city of México, in order to
convene publicly for discussion and not only in the tabloids, the private jokes
and gossip; and to expose it personally, as the only form of breaking the overwhelming
social pressure is to individually confront it in the personal environment,
even running the domestic risks of the cry of the mother, the slanted knowing
smiles in the office, the disconsolate discussion of family and even the unruly
joy of a professional rival or an envious cousin. From there, my points of view
will not coincide with the homosexual others – I do not seek a polemic, but to
air some things—nor are they pretended as an apolopy nor a proselytic tactic.
My thesis,
although a bit vague, is that Mexican homosexuals today – not necessarily those
of yesterday nor those of tomorrow --, in suffering the persecutions,
repressions, discriminations of an intolerant system, necessarily are living a
marginality which even more than its fucking has its benefits: the valuable benefits of rebellion, which are
not intrinsic to some sexual option but to a political one: the struggle that
it costs us to survive has given beautiful reasons and emotions to our lives,
and it would be a tragedy to lose them in exchange for the tolerance of
consumption which foreseeably – through the economic and social process which
our middle class experiments, as subsidiary as it is to the capitalist
“democracies” – soon will be imposed in Mexico in the terrain of sex.
I speak of
middle class homosexuals. I do not dare to speak of homosexuality in poverty.
We are such a small thing in front of her: those homosexuals of the barrio,
fucking for employment, the poverty, the malnutrition, the malnutrition, the
bad health, the brutal pillaging in which live all those who cannot buy a guarantee of some civility; and
who moreover are the target of the hatred of their own clase, who discharge in
them the aggresions which they cannot direct against the true culprits of their
misery: those extremely precious crazy ones, who against all and above all, are
as I they are valiantly, with a dignity, a force and a will to live, of those
whom I and maybe also the reader lack. Shining eyes which are panicked by dreaming,
because compared with them ours would seem to be blind.
++++
It is urgent to de-melodramaticize
the public discussion of the homosexual in Mexico. We are not, by a long shot,
the ugly duckings of the system: we are well inside of it, and if we have to be
honest, we will recognize that in the majority of cases we are more often
accomplices of our class, of our jobs, our stores, social prejudices,
commodities and privileges, than in solidarity with whose who are broken,
including the fucked over homosexuals. In general, we bring homosexual life to
light in the sharp moments of repression, protesting the abuses and demanding
respect for our civil rights, although in the background we know that if every
day millions of the uemployed, of peasants and workers are exploited and with impunity,
only with difficulty will we be able to ochieve that we will be permanently
privileged with a manner of true justice
that for them is not given. Newly, we remain enclosed in our middle class
environment: as if we have a privileged mode of life we demand a preferencial
policing of behavior, like that which more or less has been achieved by the
heterosexuals of our class.
And little by little it is being
given to us, not through justice but through the capacity of our purses: to
grow the city of Mexico, for example, augmenting by thousands the quantity of
homosexuals, of the manner which begins to be a good business – for
politicians, businessmen, and police—to establish bars, baths, cafés, goods and
services of the kind which we leave our banknotes. Outside of those prosperous
business, including to protect them, the persecution continues the same. I
suspect that in a few years, when the quantity of homosexuals in the capital is
much bigger, and of course much stronger in public opinion, there will have to
be a diminishing of the police persecution against the homosexuals of our
class, but to the disempowered homosexuals they will continue being exploited
in the same way. What is more, being, as we are, elements dissolved within the
system, it will be wanted for us to domesticate ourselves by means of a trick: in
exchange for abandoning the subversive possibilities of the complete drop out
we will be given guarantees and police respect, there will be propaganda in the
mass media so that we will be respected in our job and in daily life, as in the
United Stated, until we are left content but inoffensive.
No sexuality is spontaneous. There
have been civilizations in which homosexuality, polygamy, exogamy, promiscuity,
pederasty, nymphomania or gerontofilia
have been the norms as much heterosexual monogamy is in ours. In the same way,
no sexuality is foreign, but directly conditioned by the level of life of
people and their location (ubicación –
geographical location/placement) in social classes at any given moment. We
may observe, for example, that in the most miserable impoverished slums
frequently the norms and sentiments of the sacred family do not function,
nevertheless an enormous social pressure makes it so that the disempowered will
also be so in their intimacy and in their relations with others: not only in
the highest level of malnutrition, bad health, and illiteracy, but also in
desperate promiscuity, tragic incest, rape, prostitution, natural children (hijos naturales), and venereal health
risks. The reality is more atrocious than social realism, and in many
occasions, the condemned of the earth don’t only live in the hell of labor
exploitation, police repression, ignorance and miserable health, but all of it
penetrates into their intimacy, their sexuality, and their conscience, and
configures them into the known hells of the ghettos.
As such, as much as the homosexual
option is like the heterosexual, in the civilized and noble acceptations that
we give them, are affordable privileges only once the level of income has been
achieved, and indispensible institutions to situate oneself in a level of life.
Still there are many jobs (laborers?) for whom it is unthinkable to have a
decent home and cultivate public relations with other decent homes; in the
province, where the person is not an individual but a part of a family, a
marriage of a determinate form is indispensable in order to occupy a place in
the clannish societies. In many cases, the open practice of homosexuality is a
privilege even more difficult. Excepting extraordinary cases of courage, the
natural thing in our country is that many homosexuals reject being themselves,
because it would complicate survival for them to make enemies of their
families, their friends, the work opportunities, etc. With the growing of the
cities anonymity becomes possible, and the variety of work and of communities
dramatically removes the drama the possibility that suddenly they will be
recognized. By losing themself in the urban mass the homosexual achieves
freedom, always and when they have a sufficient standard of living to move
around without terror in clandestine places, to pay the high costs of the
places and the customs tolerated by explicit or illicit extortion, and above
all to feel as if they have the right to live a different lifestyle. Because of
this in past centuries, only a few artists, aristocrats or the bourgeois could
be given that luxury.
The landscape of homosexuality is
extremely different if it is conserved from the perspective of privilege. And
impersonal and irreversible privilege, the development of our middle class,
which suddenly permits many people, who otherwise would not have another option
than to suppress themselves and adhere to the strictest of norms, to decide
their lives with the greatest freedom. It is true: we are persecuted, we are
humiliated, we are extorted; we are identified and confused for criminals; many
of us have suffered raids, harassment on the street and inside jail cells,
beatings, threats; there have been discriminations or firings; it is frequently
the case that they are detained and obligated to dress and declare oneself in
accordance with the tabloids that collude with the police, like Alarma o Alerta; that many poor devils are delighted by the public image of
the denegration of the puto so that the poor are able to feel, without other
satisfaction of their vanity, superior at least (a gesture of disgust) to the
faggot.
It is true: we are given trouble
with all kinds of adjectives: cowardly, filthy, weak, servile, sophisticated, horde
(asaltabraguetas?), etc.; we are the
captive victims of dirty cops and idiots, and sometimes we even have to swallow
the commiseration of “liberals”.
It doesn’t matter. It was
coincidence that the typical historical and social process would privilege us;
we will be privileged more with the terror of demographic growth and the licentiousness
of consumption. We are, many times without realizing it and without having
voluntarily collaborated in it, more free and stronger than our fellow men for
almost ten years. The repression which we suffer is only a mode of that which
the whole population suffers, and although in many cases it goes on being
brutal, in others we narrate with the unthinkable means of defense of our
standard of living and with the weight of public opinion. It is predictable
that our “marginality” will stop being so, like in the United States, and will
turn into a mode of imperative comformity. It will make us privileged because
to tolerate us will be an entrance to our pockets. Our eyes will not cause
panic, but the amiability of the “customer who is always right”.
++++
If homosexuality in Mexico is
approached as a repression within privilege and as a subversion within
conformity to our middle class status, it can be understood that a politics of
tolerance will tend to reinforce the positions of privilege and conformity of class, and to eliminate the
subversive elements of a minority born out of intolerant persecution. It is
said, to eliminate the political
difference of homosexuality today to trade it in for the same commodified
and banalized option into which established sexual conduct has converted it. A
beautiful homosexual character, in the work of Jean Cocteau, commits suicide at
the same time he is offered tolerance, because no dignified man can accept can
accept the vexation of being “tolerated”.
Our homosexuality made us enemies
of the dominant models of society. It gave us a political difference before all aspects of life, far beyond the
bed. In front of the moral commodification of marriage and reproduction, we
were faced with the reality of sex without subterfuge. The hard ugly truth of
sex. It cost us years –the most vigorous years of our adolescence and youth—to
rid ourselves of social domestication and learn ourselves as if through
physiology. To clean our bodies of the shit of dominant morality. The home expelled
us, but allowed us as well to disregard propriety, sometimes (without the
family institution, the accumulation of wealth loses much sense); and the family
ties, in order to find family between strangers in solidarity, and to create
meanings for life more fundamental than the fetish of money. It made us brave:
spaces of opposition and of risky decisions. To know that society disregards us
could transform into disdain for their prizes and their tricks. It made us
strong to obligate ourselves to form callouses. In the nocturnal alley we broke
barriers of class, of religion, of nationality and party. I remember how
Pasolini, answering the academic sociologists asked: “Are you, Marxists of the
cubicle and assemblies, accusing me of not being familiar with the proletariat?
If I spend thirty years sleeping with them, dealing with them, while you have
stayed closed up in petit-bourgeois status!”
We did not only struggle against
superficial racism (el racismo exterior),
but against racism in ourselves internalized through family and social education,
which made us discount and dislike ourselves because we did not tally with the
model of the docile conventional citizen. If we were converted into monsters
and caricatures, in these depths we constructed another dignity. We learned
solitude and that the only emotional strength is work. We also learned pleasure
and its declines, without institutional webs of protection. Above all we
learned good humor: we were able to laugh at society and also at ourselves over
and over to inhabit inhabitable days and years. The conscience of our condition
could carry us to be more sensitive in front of the condition of others.
Just as our amorous relationships
were not directed to construct a patrimony, to erect an institution of good
conscience, to drop in social status nor to achieve a better place in the
established hierarchy, we lived them ephemerally and often, even more, corrosively;
we learned to love the lover as an other,
and not as an object of our ownership. In the school of ridicule we lost in
good time many silly prejudices and vanities. We had, in all, to explore the
hell which we were given to live, and so we knew also how to love our caves.
We were obligated to create a
secret language, and we made it beautiful and entertaining. As much as society
gave to take, mediating them, many of our forms of art and sensibility. We
recovered a sense of play and our fame as ingenious and playful was
universalized. We had to invent our defenses and make ourselves,
simultaneously, sharper, more refined, simpler, more lucid, more generous, and
tougher (cabrones). In each fight of
our era we have collaborated –almost always fro the shadows, which imprison
us—some of us.
And, these benefits—I could fill
pages and pages with their litany—delivered us to persecution. They will not
necessarily have defined us through a politics of tolerance. There will ne a new dominant sexual norm:
that will be characterized by the commodification of sex, turning it into a
banal and momentary satisfaction of bodies of their own objectifications,
without adventure or creativity, belonging to the conformism of the middle
class, which has perhaps forgotten completely the disempowered others and their
experiences when they were persecuted, as soon as the tolerance of consumption
has given them pacification.
But there will also be –there
already is, sprinkled through the anonymous population—a new sexual minority, faithful to radical pleasure, to the
indissoluble union between the bed and labor, intimacy and the political, the sexual
act and human solidarity. (No poor devil, no single son of a bitch could be a
good lover; and no good lover can go on existing if he begins to transform into
a bad man. Love and honesty are mutual interests).
A new minority of radical lovers,
now more visible between still young “homosexuals” and “heterosexuals” (but now
more similar in their attitudes towards life, more reciprocally in solidarity),
will be braver and blessed, more revolutionary, than the homosexuals of
intolerance we now our.
Our dissidence will perhaps be only
a precursor of this new minority, in which we owe it to ourselves to hurry up
and participate. Homosexualities, heterosexualities and other slogans will
disappear. We will recover polymorphous sexuality, without obstacles or mystifications:
the sacred fire of Prometheus, the force which will permit –perhaps—the
realization of utopia: and very soon, the formidable force which will give us a
daily life containing joy, generosity and talented creation of our own hours.
Our own, personal, and most important minutes.
