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By Root 1199 0

natural about heterosexuality, there were also different “homosexualities,” not one homosexuality. This discussion lay at the heart of one of the major culture wars of the 1970s, between essentialists (who thought homosexuality was the same no matter when or where it appeared) and the social constructionists (who thought Alcibiades’ homosexuality bore no resemblance to Michelangelo’s and that his bore no resemblance to mine). Of course you could be a bit of both and claim, as I would, that the rules of homosexuality might be determined by your society (active or passive roles governed by age, bisexuality permitted or not, anal or “intercrural” penetration preferred, same-sex marriage legalized or not), but that the overpowering attraction to a member of the same sex despite rigorous taboos in certain cultures might actually be innate and biologically determined.

These debates that “naturalized” homosexuality (or that at least showed it was omnipresent, eternal) were backed up by new biological studies of homosexuality throughout the animal kingdom and new ethnological studies of homosexuality in other cultures. At this time I was beginning to read Foucault. His central idea had a liberating effect on me: that we are all—philosophers, children, and chemical engineers alike—constricted as to what we can think by the prevailing discourses of our period. As he put it, “We cannot think no matter what no matter when” (On ne peut pas penser n’importe quoi n’importe quand). Like me (and it sounds absurdly pretentious to put it that way), Foucault was a positivist who rejected metaphysics and all grand spiritual generalities à la Heidegger or class conspiracies à la Marx. Foucault disliked all general principles and held out for particularities, though he did recognize that at each historical moment people could think only certain thoughts and not others—and that these restrictions applied to the entire population. According to Foucault, no one was immune to the subduing power of discourse.

I felt that in the case of homosexuality no one before 1969 had been able to think of homosexuals as something like a minority group. Before that date there were many competing theories, all dismissive, and in the beginning of Cities of the Plain (Sodome et Gomorrhe), Proust presents at least five etiologies, many of them contradictory. He is obviously caught up in a delirium of theorizing. All other books touching on homosexuality then and later (from André Gide’s Corydon to James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room) cannot resist subscribing to a theory; indeed, they seem obliged to theorize. One sign of post-Stonewall liberation is that all this scaffolding of theory has fallen away; now no one friendly to homosexuality feels he or she must explain it, any more than a thinker or writer is forced to explain heterosexuality. Novels and plays treating homosexuality as a theme no longer indulge in presenting the characters’ etiology. Now characters are simply shown inhabiting their difference.

None of these ideas was racing through my head when I coauthored The Joy of Gay Sex, but Charles and I had certainly been influenced by all the intellectual activity bubbling through the Gay Academic Union. What we discovered in working on our book (aimed at an inexperienced young or old man living in the provinces, far from centers of gay sophistication) was that whereas sexual technique and the divide between male and female cultures were the primary problems for heterosexuals, in gay life your partner’s body was no more a mystery than his priorities and patterns of communication. No, the problem was gay life itself—coming out, dealing with religious prejudice, coping with the straight world of employment or with the problems of friendship, housing, and family, and handling such thorny practical and legal problems as how to leave your property to a gay lover. Then there were the lifestyle questions (cruising, “marriage,” fidelity or open relationships, role-playing).

My own problems in dealing with being gay were crippling—I’d devoted decades in therapy to coping