Sexuality & Culture (2021) 25:835–851

https://doi.org/10.1007/s12119-020-09796-4

ORIGINAL PAPER

Hannah Arendt and Sigmund Freud on Sexual Identity

in 2020

Rayyan Dabbous1

Accepted: 2 December 2020 / Published online: 1 January 2021

© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC part of Springer Nature 2021

Abstract
While more and more scholars are turning to the respective works of Hannah Arendt
and Sigmund Freud to explain phenomena unknown to their times, such as the
impact of the internet, few are using a synthesis of their ideas in political theory and
psychoanalysis to understand modern topics. Even rarer is the inclination to draw
parallels between the two thinkers on the question of sexual identity. In this article, I
use Hannah Arendt and Sigmund Freud to discuss major features of modern sexual-
ity: the experience of coming out, the identification as straight, gay visibility online,
and the struggle for gay rights. I show that a knowledge of Arendtian and Freudian
concepts, and particularly a marriage between them, is essential to investigate recent
trends, topics and controversies related to sexual identity.

Keywords  Hannah Arendt · Sigmund Freud · Sexual identity · Identity politics ·

LGBT + rights

Introduction

If Hannah Arendt and Sigmund Freud were alive in 2020, neither of them would
receive an invitation to speak at the annual pride parade in New York or Vienna.
While some critics reproach the female political theorist for her exclusion of gen-
der and sexuality from politics (Honkasalo 2014), others see the psychoanalyst as
responsible for the medicalization of homosexuality during the twentieth century
(Zaretsky 2015). A few academics have recently queered their readings of the
two thinkers to absolve them from their respective charges (Lauretis 2017; Jones
2015; Maslin 2013). But what would Hannah Arendt and Sigmund Freud say,
together, as an entity, within a rarely exploited Freudian–Arendtian framework,
about sexual identity in 2020? I propose to use the two thinkers to discuss four

* Rayyan Dabbous
rayyandabbous@gmail.com
1
Louvain, Belgium

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staples for modern sexuality: the experience of coming out, the identification as
straight, gay visibility online, and the struggle for gay rights.

Coming Out

The act of coming out has developed a banal meaning in some parts of the West.
Sometimes, it is even unnecessary. If the magical words must be spelled out, it
is often met with celebration, at most; a nod of cool acknowledgement, at least.
In most countries around the world, however; children and adults alike can find
the experience of coming out as daunting; or worse, dangerous. Whatever one
believes of the act of coming out; whether one sees it as a western practice, as a
socio-economic privilege, or as a source of empowerment; Hannah Arendt and
Sigmund Freud might have endeavored to assess the origins, processes and out-
comes of the experience. The act of coming out, in spite of charges of its ahistori-
cal, geographically-dependent newness (Massad 2007), nevertheless meets the
three historical pre-requisites that the female political theorist has placed on her
ideal of action in the public realm. “Exasperation with the threefold frustration of
action,” she writes, “the unpredictability of its outcome, the irreversibility of the
process, and the anonymity of its authors—is almost as old as recorded history,”
(1958a, p. 220).
To verify whether the outcome of coming out is also unpredictable, one merely
ought to glance at the surprised expressions in the room in which the event
unfolds. Whether the utterance brings about offense to the religious father or a
smile to the supportive mother, or somehow, after missed calculations, the reverse
effect, most coming outs are tainted with this surprising element; be it in those
you had expected more from, or less. “It is in the nature of beginning that some-
thing new is started which cannot be expected from whatever may have happened
before,” Hannah Arendt reminds us. “This character of startling unexpectedness
is inherent in all beginnings and in all origins,” (1958a, p. 178).
That the process of coming out is, secondly, irreversible, one ought to con-
sider the bravery queers whip up to accept the permanent change of their fate as
a result of their decision to live their truths. He who embarks on that boat can
never sail backward: he must forever endure the social perception of the label he
has used on himself regardless of whether he continues to believe in it or not. He
must face not merely adversity or permanent exclusion in the realm of the public
and the private, but he can never retract or erase that irreversible action of their
childhood or recent past—as though the singular act of coming out were an open-
ended invitation for a chain of filtered glances. Here is a passage from Hannah
Arendt that queers, glancing backward at their own tumultuous lives, can relate
to:
That deeds possess such an enormous capacity for endurance, superior to
every other man-made product, could be a matter of pride if men were able
to bear its burden, the burden of irreversibility and unpredictability, from
which the action process draws its very strength. That this is impossible,

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men have always known. They have known that he who acts never quite
knows what he is doing, that he always becomes ‘guilty’ of consequences
he never intended or even foresaw, that no matter how disastrous and unex-
pected the consequences of his deed he can never undo it, that the process
he starts is never consummated unequivocally in one single deed or event,
and that its very meaning never discloses itself to the actor but only to the
backward glance of the historian who himself does not act, (1958a, p. 233).
If Hannah Arendt would have saluted the bravery of queers for diving into the
uncharted territories of the future uninhibited, unbothered of the unpredictability
or irreversibility of their act, she would have most felt ‘proud’ not of the roots or
origins of their action but of its fruits, its results. Queers, especially in circles or
eras with scarce signs of queerness, can recall with a suggestive easiness the first
person that ‘inspired’ them to come out—whether this person is the Ellen on tel-
evision or an Ellen in school. But for Hannah Arendt, none of these two sources
can ever take full credit for their helping hand: beyond the unpredictability or
irreversibility of action, it is especially the anonymity of its authors that most fas-
cinated the political theorist.
To understand the nature of this anonymity, one merely has to revisit the naive
statements of Mayor Pete Buttgieg, who stirred the anger of the gay community
he belonged to when he dismissed Bernie Sanders as a threatening return to the
‘radical politics of the 1960s’ (Lowder 2020). What is ironic about the mayor’s
comment is precisely his blindness to the anonymity of the authors behind his
free ability to run for office as a gay man in 2020: that is, even if the official
credit for his own coming out story is attributed to supportive friends and fam-
ily, or fellow queer contemporaries in public positions, he nevertheless remains
the ungrateful son of the radical politics of the 1960s, without which he might
have not even considered the possibility of coming out to himself at all. Hannah
Arendt understood very well the importance of tracing back the roots of human
deeds:
Consequences are boundless, because action, though it may proceed from
nowhere, so to speak, acts into a medium where every reaction becomes a
chain reaction and where every process is the cause of new processes […]
the smallest act in the most limited circumstances bears the seed of the same
boundlessness, because one deed, and sometimes one word, suffices to change
every constellation, (1958a, p. 190).
It is this invisible chain of coming outs, of one brave act engendering the other,
that defines the anonymous aspect of he who comes out; that we consider to do so,
at all, is never the fruit of our own deed but an extension of previous undertakings.
Whereas Hannah Arendt would congratulate he who comes out as the hero
in the public agora who communicates himself freely to others, Sigmund Freud
would see him as a patient that has finally risen victorious in his fight against
himself. If the unpredictable character of coming out is for the political theorist
a testament of the bravery of he who casts it unintimidated of the unknown, it
is this element of uncertainty that the psychoanalyst works with to analyze his

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patient; that is, to push him through the darkness of the closet so long as he lands
safely on his feet on the other side. “Was there any guarantee,” a patient once
asked Freud, “of what one’s attitude would be towards what was discovered? One
man would no doubt behave in such a way as to get the better of his self-reproach,
but another would not,” (1909, p. 175). For Freud, the unpredictable character of
coming out; that one cannot predict the emotive response of the analyzed patient;
goes hand in hand with its irreversible pre-requisite:
How, he asked, could the information that the self-reproach, the sense of
guilt, was justified have a therapeutic effect? I explained that it was not the
information that had this effect, but the discovery of the unknown content to
which the self-reproach was really attached […] everything conscious was
subject to a process of wearing-away, while what was unconscious was rela-
tively unchangeable; and I illustrated my remarks by pointing to the antiques
standing about in my room. They were, in fact, I said, only objects found in
a tomb, and their burial had been their preservation: the destruction of Pom-
peii was only beginning now that it had been dug up, (1909, p. 175).
What Freud means with his metaphor of archeology is that the discovery of
the treasures of our mind; of our essence; of our genuine identity, is neither a
certain beginning nor a conclusive end; in fact; what we discover in psychoa-
nalysis is barely graspable; barely palpable; so much that its therapeutic effect
lies not in what we discover but in the process of discovery itself, in the activ-
ity of excavation. Thus Freud would agree with Arendt that ‘he who acts never
quite knows what he is doing’ because similarly, he who is psychoanalyzed never
knows what he is discovering. That we first come out as gay and 1 day find bet-
ter fit as a pansexual does no disservice to the original deed for either Arendt or
Freud; for the political theorist, this development is expected; for the psychoana-
lyst, it is required, since ‘the destruction of Pompeii was only beginning now that
it had been dug up’; that is, the demise of our own sexual labels is triggered the
moment we discover them. That is how Hannah Arendt has viewed tyranny; in
that it develops “the germs of its own destruction the moment it comes into exist-
ence,” (1958a, p. 203); and I venture to say that to come out, in the realm of the
psyche in Freud, is tyrannical as well; that is, it is necessarily ‘subject to a pro-
cess of wearing-away’ no matter how permanent the discovery itself first stands
to be. To come out is for Freud and Arendt an act that is fleetingly ephemeral
but never futile; important but never critical; a deed cast in the open air and thus
never within reach again; only so for distant others; those who hear us and see us
when we display our singularity in public, and who can thus take advantage of its
boundless characteristic and adopt it as their own.

Identification as Straight

If Hannah Arendt and Sigmund Freud would have cherished the sweet political
or psychical fruits reaped from the act of coming out as queer, their expressions
would have conserved a sliver of hesitation if the civil agora or the psychoanalyst

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room had heard instead the utterance: ‘no, I’m straight.’ Freud mused more than
once that we all born bisexual: though the courses of our lives, he knew, brought
us to either extremes of the spectrum; this shift was never permanent but rather
oscillated almost continuously (Freud 1905). Thus the question is not whether
straightness, as much as gayness, is a myth; but whether there is psychical or
political relevance to the identification. We can all agree that the gay label, for
example, has helped the emancipation of the queers as a whole; in that, whenever
a thing is perceptibly visible, it asserts its existence far clearer and thus claims its
rights far better than fleeting and less tangible identities. But the same cannot be
said about straightness, which, besides the absence of a necessary political-legal
agenda, is hardly a label that one is permitted to feel pride toward in the way that
gays feel about their own identities once it is finally discovered and thus right-
fully celebrated. What thus explains Boston’s straight pride parade in 2019? More
importantly, what can we make, not of the few flag-waving bigots scattered here
and there but of ‘normal’ people who are not homophobic, whose heterosexual
disposition is indeed stronger than its counterpart, but yet whose use of the label
‘straight’ remains somewhat problematic? In short, where is the problem with
identifying as straight beyond the practical and verbal need, before a potential
lover or hook-up, to pronounce it?
In the beginning of Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt has pondered
the idea of differentiation, seeing a similarity between Jews and homosexu-
als upon their acceptance into the polite European society of the early twentieth
century:
The reason was that all marks of distinction were determined only by the
ensemble of the cliques, so that Jews or inverts [homosexuals] felt that they
would lose their distinctive character in a society of Jews or inverts, where
Jewishness or homosexuality would be the most natural, the most uninter-
esting, and the most banal thing in the world. The same, however, held true
of their hosts who also needed an ensemble of counterparts before whom
they could be different, non-aristocrats who would admire aristocrats as
these admired the Jews or the homosexuals, (1958b, p. 85).
The salons of Paris where this clashing of casts once unfolded might still exist
in 2020: now, we see it on Hollywood red carpets, where the way the camera
gazes at the select number of gay celebrities is dependent on how it ultimately
zooms backward onto the straighter whole; the narrow and the wider frame rely-
ing on each other as necessarily as the social dynamics described by Arendt.
But this collective of distinctive egos, both in old Paris and new Los Angeles,
requires a deeper analysis; a psychoanalysis, in fact; as Freud elaborated it in his
Group Psychology:
Men’s emotions are stirred in a group to a pitch that they seldom or never
attain under other conditions; and it is a pleasurable experience for those who
are concerned, to surrender themselves so unreservedly to their passions and
thus to become merged in the group and to lose the sense of the limits of their
individuality, (1921, p. 90).

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For Arendt, the heterosexual needs the homosexual to re-assert the borders of
his individuality; for Freud, the individual needs the group to blur those same
lines. For Arendt, the heterosexual clings onto a cluster of homosexuals to rise
distinguishable amidst their likeness; for Freud, it does not matter whether the
group is composed of people like or unlike us; the nature of groups in itself
brings us to surpass ourselves; to become two, or three, or four; as though the
bigger the group we belong in, the worthier we feel of ourselves; a feeling so
perceptible among sports fans of popular clubs. Thus today, as gays feel a sense
of pride in their limited numbers, not in their multitude, and given that they no
longer need heterosexual hosts to affirm their right to be invited to the salon, the
gay label is dispensed of Arendt’s and Freud’s warnings. But with strict regards
to straightness, it remains exposed deep into the red zone of the theorists’ claims;
in that, because straights identify with a multitude, not with a limited clique but
with a large ecosystem, and because they are the hosts of the salon, not the bohe-
mian guests who may leave at any point; straightness is confronted with a rigidity
that is dependent on the presence of others and thus never independent. The idea
of a straight parade is ridiculous only in so far as it overlooks the fact that the
host can never be the guest of his own party; he may relinquish his status of host
and his right to throw a party altogether; but only when he also denies himself the
privileges that comes with the title—chief among them, the ability ‘to surrender
themselves so unreservedly to their passions’ everywhere since he belongs to the
wider group and thus is never restricted to a specific place or time to throw a
parade.
But behind both the words of Arendt and Freud lies an insight on the origins
of straightness as a political need, not merely as a sexual desire. Hannah Arendt
sees an intricate relationship between the desire to be included and the desire to
exclude:
Parties and open societies in general will consider only those who expressly
oppose them to be their enemies, while it has always been the principle of
secret societies that ‘whosoever is not expressly included is excluded.’ This
esoteric principle seems to be entirely inappropriate for mass organiza-
tions; yet the Nazis gave their members at least the psychological equivalent
for the initiation ritual of secret societies when, instead of simply exclud-
ing Jews, from membership, they demanded proof of non-Jewish descent
from their members and set up a complicated machine to shed light on the
dark ancestry of some 80 million Germans. It was of course a comedy, and
even an expensive one, when 80 million Germans set out to look for Jewish
grandfathers; yet everybody came out of the examination with the feeling
that he belonged to a group of included which stood against an imaginary
multitude of ineligibles. The same principle is confirmed in the Bolshevik
movement through repeated party purges which inspire in everybody who is
not excluded a reaffirmation of his inclusion. (1958b, p. 377)
It can strike the reader as harsh, if not unfair, to include an analogy to the Nazi
regime in my analysis of straightness, especially since its objectives deals neither
with Donald Trump nor Mike Pence but with common people as you and me.

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Hannah Arendt, too, did not write her Origins of Totalitarianism to strictly expose
Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin; if she followed it with the book The Human Condi-
tion, it was because her analyses were on humaneness, not evil, and extended and
englobed everyone and anyone. Thus when she described the witch hunt for Jew-
ish grandfathers and said that ‘everybody came out of the examination with the
feeling that he belonged to a group of included,’ we can transpose this sense of
relief, for not turning out quarter-Jewish in Nazi Germany, to those youths today
who, fearful of potentially and equally alienating homosexual attractions, also,
after encountering the pleasure of the opposite sex for the first time, feel removed
of the burden that they might not belong to the larger class of humans but to ‘an
imaginary multitude of ineligibles.’ That we are relieved of this discovery betrays
the irreversible instability of straightness as opposed to the more fluidly revers-
ible instability of gayness: when a gay man discovers late in life that he can also
get off to some women, he rarely freaks out; but a grown-up straight man hardly
meets this possibility with the same light-heartedness, perhaps because the dis-
covery re-awakens the original trauma of doubting one’s eligibility to belong in
the larger and thus safer group of human beings.
This is where Freud would have reprimanded straightness: because of its ina-
bility to hold a critical gaze toward its own attractions and position in the world;
a musing between cause and effect that is in contrast existentially central in the
lives of gay men. Freud imagines that the appeal of groups originates in the hypo-
thetical scene of a primal father whose authority the tribesmen similarly obeyed
without question:
The selection of the leader is very much facilitated by this circumstance. He
need often only possess the typical qualities of the individuals concerned in a
particularly clearly marked and pure form, and need only give an impression
of greater force and of more freedom of libido; and in that case the need for a
strong chief will often meet him half-way and invest him with a predominance
to which he would otherwise perhaps have had no claim. The other members
of the group, whose ego ideal would not, apart from this, have become embod-
ied in his person without some correction, are then carried away with the rest
by ‘suggestion’, that is to say, by means of identification. (1921, p. 130)
Surely most straights, too, identify so ‘by suggestion’; that is, not through a con-
scious decision, not after coming out from a dark place, but ipso facto. But there is
more to Freud’s analogy of the primal father: straightness, too, is built on larger than
life figures that can satisfy our ego-ideal: John Wayne to Tom Brady. That today we
have, for the most part, moved away from machismo and welcomed with open hands
the rise of the metrosexual; of alternative looks for straightness; is of no relevance to
Arendt who noticed the lingering prejudices of the Parisian hosts who had brought
themselves to accept the Jews and homosexuals into their salons:
They did not doubt that homosexuals were ‘criminals’ or that Jews were ‘trai-
tors’; they only revised their attitude toward crime and treason. The trouble
with their new broadmindedness, of course, was not that they were no longer

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horrified by inverts but that they were no longer horrified by crime. They did
not in the least doubt the conventional judgment,” (1958b, p. 81).
For Arendt, when we accept others for their differences, we do not turn a blind
eye to them; instead, we revise our codes of perceptions. The line between us and
them never disappears. Thus our new appreciation of metrosexuals, who by defini-
tion are dandy but straight, after all hope is lost in ‘real straight men’, is not a rebel-
lion against ‘conventional judgement’ as we might expect but instead a revival of the
relic of straightness; that, sure, there are no more cowboys, and sure, our ‘real men’
look slightly different, but no matter what, they are at least the rightful inheritors of
the old prestige of straightness. It is no coincidence that metrosexuality was almost
immediately adopted by straights instead of acquiring finally a universalist, shar-
able meaning for all men; that I could identify as a metrosexual, at least, reminds
me of my straightness and thus of my rightful place in the rule of the majority. This
process of inheritance, of turning to metrosexuality for its treasures, is rarely done
consciously. When a fashionable young man casually jokes around his clique of
less-fashionable guys that he might as well be the metrosexual in the group; there is
not merely some rigid truth in his passing joke—that he truly likes the limits of his
role and the script he is given—but there is also a desperate need to pass as anything
but gay; as anything but the minority; as though the metrosexual, him, might as well
remain a rare breed, but is nevertheless the inheritor of the land in which he and his
male buddies find themselves in. He is not the inferior pariah of his world; he is not
the Jew nor the homosexual in his group of friends; he is still noble; the nephew of
the cousin of the primal king, sure, but a prince nonetheless. The problem thus is
not that people identify as straight, but that their identification comes with a heritage
that must, as a rule, make them uncomfortable. This heritage, Freud would indicate,
is unlike the inheritance gays, Jews, or any other minority receive:
What bound me to Jewry was (I am ashamed to admit) neither faith nor
national pride, for I have always been an unbeliever and was brought up with-
out any religion though not without respect for what are called the ‘ethical’
standards of human civilization. Whenever I felt an inclination to national
enthusiasm I strove to suppress it as being harmful and wrong, alarmed by the
warning of examples of the peoples among whom we Jews live. But plenty of
other things remained over to make the attraction of Jewry and Jews irresist-
ible – many obscure emotional forces, which were the more powerful the less
they could be expressed in words, as well as a clear consciousness of inner
identity, the safe privacy of a common mental construction, (1926, p. 274).
Freud places his finger on the Achilles’ heel of straightness: that, unlike Jewish-
ness, or gayness, its emotional forces are not ‘obscure’ but blindingly lit; the con-
sciousness of its inner identity is not ‘clear’ but blurry; its common mental construc-
tion is not in ‘safe privacy’ but out in the open; and finally, that it draws its power
not ‘the less [it] could be expressed in words’ but the more it is verbalized every-
where and anywhere, at the cinema, on television, at work, at school, and elsewhere;
so that its totality makes its no more suspect that the totalitarian ideologies Hannah
Arendt sought to expose.

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Gay Visibility Online

Whereas true equality requires straights to reckon with their position in the imbal-
anced struggle they find themselves in, Hannah Arendt and Sigmund Freud would
have also been severe with the queer community itself in its own recent modus oper-
andi for liberation: online visibility. In the digital age, it might strike as counter-pro-
ductive, if not counter-intuitive, to set up physical visibility campaigns. Large organ-
izations are banking in more and more of their annual budgets on online campaigns
and multimedia public service announcements; celebrities, queer and straight, are
leveraging from a range of mediated experiences (film, television, music, social
media) to develop and foster conversations on queerness. Only a select few, small
organizations, informal groups, and local activists, continue to employ supposedly-
old tactics in their campaigning: reaching out to people, setting up booths and local
talks, distributing flyers and informational leaflets. Whereas these strategies might
be deemed as passé for some, Arendt and Freud would have not only reminded us of
the power of offline activism but also warned us against relying too much on online
gay visibility.
“For us,” the political theorist tells us, “appearance—something that is being
seen and heard by others as well as by ourselves—constitutes reality,” (1958a, p.
50). Hannah Arendt does not take reality for granted as we do: she goes back to
the Romans, for whom the terms “to live” and “to be among men” and “to die” and
“to cease to be among be men” are synonyms (1958a, p. 8). In the digital era, we
have assumed that this ancient wisdom remains alive even when handshakes became
friend requests, hugs and kisses became emojis, and public debate became group
chats. On the subject of gay online visibility, I do not intend to dismiss the power of
all the gay couples we encounter as we roam down our Instagram timelines; nor do I
underestimate the impact behind inclusive news sites such as Buzzfeed, or inclusive
shows like Ru Paul or Queer Eye. All these, certainly, leave a mark on online users;
so much that it can help the acceptance of their own sexualities. But when Hannah
Arendt says that “the presence of others who see what we see and hear what we
hear assures us of the reality of the world and ourselves,” (1958a, p. 50) this reality,
surely, transcends the confines of the virtual net; this ‘presence of others’ ultimately
must translate into something graspable, something permanent. Because for Hannah
Arendt:
Power is actualized only where word and deed have not parted company,
where words are not empty and deeds not brutal, where words are not used to
veil intentions but to disclose realities, and deeds are not used to violate and
destroy but to establish relations and create new realities, (1958a, p. 200).
This requirement is a punch to professed ‘power’ of online networks: words are
empty in emojis; deeds are brutal upon signing out; words are used to veil intentions
on Instagram captions; deeds are used to violate and destroy relations in the use of
the ‘block’ button. That so many queers find online dating so useful and yet so frus-
trating sums up the modern malaise of online gay visibility: the great discovery that,
finally, there are so many people like us, somehow loses its magic the moment we

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swipe left and right with a prejudice but also a remoteness that makes us unable to
appreciate and tap into the powers of this false ‘space of appearances’, which Han-
nah Arendt equates with reality itself. Queerness that ‘appears’ online becomes the
bearer of this double-edged sword: that on one hand, it is the liberator of our alone-
ness, but that on the other hand, it is the reminder of our ultimate and deceptive
loneliness.
But Freud would help us go a step further than Arendt in our grapple with the
treacherous unreality of virtualness. “Every neurosis,” reminds us Freud, “has as its
result, and probably therefore as its purpose, a forcing of the patient out of real life,
an alienating of him from reality,” (1911, p. 217). If neurosis is indeed connected
to our turn away from reality, one might wonder whether online gay visibility, in
spite of its ability to pull us closer to queerness, can also neurotically repulse us
backwards. I do not mean of the typical cases who feel bothered by gayness online
or on television; the ones whose repulsion has something to do with specific neu-
rotic motivations. I mean those among us who, though open-minded and accepting
and perhaps openly queer too, also might be lured into neurosis when confronted
with the unreality of gay visibility. Instagram is a hotpot for such creeping feel-
ings; where the absence of genuine, non-filtered pictures that nevertheless ‘speak a
thousand words’ invites criticism within and beyond queer audiences. When Freud
says that “neurotics turn away from reality because they find it unbearable, either
the whole or parts of it,” (1911, p. 217) we can imagine online gay visibility, but as
much as anything else, be potentially responsible for this turn away from an inau-
thentic landscape that considers itself to be reality; and we see this paradox in news
reporting how technology has increased the sense of loneliness among children, not
decreased it (Felzer 2019).
Freud would understand the disservice gay online visibility might cause to gay
liberation itself. “The stranger characteristic of unconscious (repressed) processes,”
he has noted, “is due to their entire disregard of reality-testing; they equate reality of
thought with external actuality,” (1911, p. 224). Take for example a person who has
repressed their homosexuality in their teenage years. For Freud, this unconscious
process will be followed by a disregard of ‘reality-testing’; that is, a passivity toward
connecting these latent feelings with the world around us and an avoidance of exper-
imenting with them through what that world affords us as tools—in this case, to
hook up with someone of the same sex or to look up gay porn. To say that this per-
son equates ‘reality of thought with external actuality’ pushes us to see the limita-
tions of the online world for the liberation of our unconscious drives: our reality of
thought; that we are definitely not gay; superimposes itself onto external actuality,
onto the perceptible world; and if that world is one-dimensionally rigid and virtually
static as all online networks are, this superimposition works seamlessly. A gay per-
son who walks past a booth fundraising for gay rights, rather than sliding down an
ad for the same purpose, is confronted with more than static and passive images: he
hears the fundraisers, he sees them in three-dimensional form; his own cheeks might
blush and redden as he tries to glance at them inconspicuously while walking. That
is why Freud would never hold a psychoanalytical session via Skype: once again,
he, like Hannah Arendt, does not take the tumultuous and ‘queer’ nature of reality
for granted, its complexity and relations with our own physiology and identification

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processes. The political theorist is aware of the absence of these complexities in

‘subjective experiences’ such as online networks:
Under modern circumstances, this deprivation of ‘objective’ relationships to
others and of a reality guaranteed through them has become the mass phenom-
enon of loneliness, where it has assumed its most extreme and most antihuman
form. The reason for this extremity is that mass society not only destroys the
public realm but the private as well, deprives men not only of their place in
the world but of their private home, where they once felt sheltered against the
world and where, at any rate, even those excluded from the world could find
a substitute in the warmth of the hearth and the limited reality of family life.
(1958a, pp. 58–59)
Hannah Arendt helps us see the malaise that comes with online visibility, gay or
not: that the ubiquity of ‘subjective relationships to others’; that is, one that is guar-
anteed not through them, not in their actual presence, but in their shadows, in their
avatars; frustrates us both when we are outside in the streets and find real human
connection possible but unattainable and when we are inside at home and find that
this same human connection is fundamentally impossible and yet visibly attainable.
Thus the problem with gay visibility online is a subspecies of a larger issue: the
very deceptive nature of the internet itself; in its bipolar attitude in that it invites us
to come inside into its castle but gives us no keys to its bedrooms—thus not merely
can we not stay in the heights and glamor of the châteaux, but throughout the time
we are there, we are constantly reminded of those places in our vicinity that we can
never access. That is not a problem in physical life, whose reliance on contingency,
interactivity, and speech, for Freud, does not deceive our mental processes but in
fact liberates them:
In men there is an added complication through which internal processes in
the ego may also acquire the quality of consciousness. This is the work of the
function of speech, which brings material in the ego into a firm connection
with mnemic residues of visual, but more particularly of auditory, perceptions.
Thenceforward the perceptual periphery of the cortical layer can be excited to
a much greater extent from inside as well, internal events such as passages of
ideas and thought-processes can become conscious, (1938, p. 161).
The ‘mnemic residues of visual’ and ‘auditory perceptions’ unlocked by speech
and which for Freud help us reach ideas and thoughts hitherto unconscious are
absent in online networks: we are most of the time surfing around mutely; we see so
much but never get a chance to interact with them; not even in subtle ways such as
the rosy cheeks of the person who passes by the fundraising kiosk. It is this impos-
sibility to counter speech with speech; this unsustainability of a chain of action that
is normally boundless and fertile for further action, that lies at the root of both the
political theory of Hannah Arendt and the psychoanalytical treatment of Sigmund
Freud: both require a commitment from their peers that transcends a swipe or a like;
both require a continuous dialogue if the fruits of their crafts can ever be reaped.
The same goes with gay visibility, which, if waged online, can certainly help if not

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R. Dabbous

save queers and straights alike, but must parallel a far more extensive physical appa-
ratus on the ground, in the presence of others. That the visibility of the cast of Queer
Eye has reached the most conservative of lands is certainly a fantastic feat—but ulti-
mately, its visibility will forever remain a kind of myth to its onlookers; a shadowy
existence; and it can never reap the same fruits of what both Freud and Arendt see as
the opposite of mythos in classical terms: logos, a word that etymologically connects
our individual capacity for speech with the collective act of reasoning with others in
the public agora (Launderville 2003); a dyad that is inherently missing, or discon-
nected, online.

The Struggle of Gay Rights

It might be unsurprising to imagine Hannah Arendt and Sigmund Freud finally move
to assess the future of a political minority, of the struggle for its rights, following
their deconstructions of its past and present. I started the paper with the hypothesis
that neither of the two thinkers would receive an invitation to a pride parade—but
it is far more reasonable to presume that none of them would accept the invite in
the first place. Because both, I argue, would see pride parades, but also some of our
more general banners and ritualized initiatives for gay rights, as self-defeating prac-
tices. That today we connect the struggle for gay rights as a struggle toward ‘love
for all’ or ‘love wins,’ that we colloquially and officially argue for the existence of
homosexuals in their right to ‘love whomever,’ is a heart-lifting phenomenon that
would have nevertheless horrified, if not disappointed, both Hannah Arendt and Sig-
mund Freud. The female political theorist, on the question of racial rights, wrote to
James Baldwin:
“Dear Mr. Baldwin:
Your article in the New Yorker is a political event of a very high order, I think;
it certainly is an event in my understanding of what is involved in the Negro
question. And since this is a question which concerns us all, I feel I am entitled
to raise objections.
What frightened me in your essay was the gospel of love which you begin to
preach at the end. In politics, love is a stranger, and when it intrudes upon it
nothing is being achieved except hypocrisy. All the characteristics you stress in
the Negro people: their beauty, their capacity for joy, their warmth, and their
humanity, are well-known characteristics of all oppressed people. They grow
out of suffering and they are the proudest possession of all pariahs. Unfortu-
nately, they have never survived the hour of liberation by even five minutes.
Hatred and love belong together, and they are both destructive; you can afford
them only in the private and, as a people, only so long as you are not free,”
(1962, p. 1).
Hannah Arendt would sympathize with the emphasis on love in the gay rights
movement: like the elegies of Baldwin for blackness, it comes from a pride, which,

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for the political theorist, goes hand in hand with their alienated status. The ‘hour of
liberation’ however; the political struggle itself, must be stripped of emotive and thus
‘destructive’ connotations. If hate and love belong together for Arendt, for Freud
“hate is older than love” and “derives from the narcissistic ego’s primordial repudia-
tion of the external world with its outpouring of stimuli,” (1915, p. 138). That hate
and repudiation belong together for the psychoanalyst might help us understand the
‘vocabulary of disgust’ so common in homophobic discourse. But what Freud ulti-
mately questions is “how it is that love is so frequently accompanied by impulses of
hate against the same object,” (1915, p. 138) and what he arrives at does not neces-
sarily target the classic adage that ‘all homophobes are closeted homosexuals’ but
rather that “the admixed hate has as its source the self-preservative instincts.”
From a psychoanalytical perspective, it is not enough, nor is it interesting or
helpful in activist strategies, to say that the homophobia of Jair Bolsonaro or Mike
Pence, or the hate speech of whomever follows them, comes from repressed homo-
sexual desires. For Freud, these active, if not restless, attempts ‘outward’ to deny
the rights of others stem, as a general rule, from a surplus libido, a discharge, which
had failed to be repressed in childhood and which thus escapes into an aggressive or
otherwise emotive posture. The desire to take a stand on the issue of gay rights, for
or against, is thus in itself for Freud a remnant of a childhood anxiety that has failed
to be repressed. When this anxiety is absent, when children never lose their naive or
uncaring attitude toward homosexuality because of external pressure and thus never
turn to repressive mechanisms, a fully-developed ego would grow up to be neither
homophobic nor homophile: it is the indifferent, not the hateful or the loving, who
would take the issue of gay rights as he would consider the issue of apple trading.
This indifferent person, gay rights activists would have little problem deal-
ing with. It suffices to challenge their beliefs or preconceptions on a rational level.
Activists complain of two culprits that are difficult to handle: the hateful leaders,
and those that blindly follow them. It is as though, once again, we must deal either
with the head of the mob, Adolf Hitler, or with the headless member of the overall
organization, Adolf Eichmann; a major executor behind the Holocaust, who Hannah
Arendt had, not without controversy, argued to be not anti-Semitic but a mediocre
bureaucrat who merely followed orders:
Eichmann was not Iago and not Macbeth, and nothing would have been farther
from his mind than to determine with Richard III ‘to prove a villain.’ Except
for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement, he
had no motives at all. And this diligence in itself was in no way criminal; he
certainly would never have murdered his superior in order to inherit his post.
He merely, to put the matter colloquially, never realized what he was doing,
(1964, p. 134).
Eichmann belongs to the class of people who, as Freud once told Einstein, “stand
in need of an authority which will make decisions for them and to which they for the
most part offer an unqualified submission,” (1933, p. 211). The two target groups
of gay rights activists, the leaders and the followers, might diverge in the way with
which their outward homophobia presents itself to the world, but their origin is one
and the same for both the political theorist and the psychoanalyst. If Hannah Arendt

13
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R. Dabbous

asserts that Adolf Eichmann was neither Shakespeare’s Iago or Macbeth and that
he catered nothing more than to his ‘personal advancement’ surely she would have
accepted his resemblance to Moliere’s Le Bourgeois gentilhomme: flamboyance
aside, the motif of mechanic repetition, be it pronouncing vowels or signing deporta-
tion forms, is central to both their raison-d’être. Hannah Arendt sees the mediocrity
of Adolf Eichmann as the inevitable product of modern bourgeois society, the petti-
ness of which is the essential material for Moliere’s comedies. But she also sees the
bourgeoisie to be responsible not merely for its passive followers but for its active
mob leaders as well:
What the historians, sadly preoccupied with the phenomenon in itself, failed
to grasp was that the mob could not be identified with the growing industrial
working class, and certainly not with the people as a whole, but that it was
composed actually of the refuse of all classes. This composition made it seem
that the mob and its representatives had abolished class differences, that those,
standing outside the class-divided nation were the people itself rather than its
distortion and caricature […] What [historians] failed to understand was that
the mob was not only the refuse but also the by-product of bourgeois society,
directly produced by it and therefore never quite separable from it, (1958b, p.
155).
For Arendt, the social processes at works in modern bourgeoisie engender both
Adolfs, both the order-giving leader and the order-obeying follower: both of them
are outcasts, rejects; none of them is part of the elite; the difference between them is
that while Eichmann, out of mere passiveness, rather than good conscience, ‘would
never have murdered his superior in order to inherit his post’ and win a seat among
the elites, Hitler him did not care accessing higher circles of power and opted instead
to liquidate them altogether. Despite the way with which each operate to build their
future, the leader and the follower have a similar past for Hannah Arendt:
This is obvious for the new mass leaders whose careers reproduce the features
of earlier mob leaders: failure in professional and social life, perversion and
disaster in private life. The fact that their lives prior to their political careers
had been failures, naively held against them by the more respectable leaders
of the old parties, was the strongest factor in their mass appeal. It seemed to
prove that individually they embodied the mass destiny of the time and that
their desire to sacrifice everything for the movement, their assurance of devo-
tion to those who had been struck by catastrophe, their determination never
to be tempted back into the security of normal life, and their contempt for
respectability were quite sincere and not just inspired by passing ambitions.
(1958b, p. 327).
Hannah Arendt here reads more as a psychoanalyst than a political theorist: to
her, the rise of the mob, and its future totalitarian activities, is rooted in the failures
of its past. When in her 1915 letter to Freud, Lou Andreas-Salomé reflects on the
calls to fight during WWI and points out that “ethics is the supreme venture of nar-
cissism,” (1972, p. 30) the female psychoanalyst easily utters the word narcissism

13
Hannah Arendt and Sigmund Freud on Sexual Identity in 2020 849

which the political theorist has herself curiously abstained from using, not once,
in her Origins of Totalitarianism. That the loudest critics of gay rights are also
regarded as narcissists is unsurprising for Freud who might have agreed with Han-
nah Arendt’s psychoanalysis of the Nazi mob:
This ideal ego is now the target of the self-love which was enjoyed in childhood
by the actual ego. The subject’s narcissism makes its appearance displaced on
to this new ideal ego, which, like the infantile ego, finds itself possessed of
every perfection that is of value. As always where the libido is concerned, man
has here again shown himself incapable of giving up a satisfaction he had once
enjoyed. He is not willing to forgo the narcissistic perfection of his childhood;
and when, as he grows up, he is disturbed by the admonitions of others and by
the awakening of his own critical judgement, so that he can no longer retain
that perfection, he seeks to recover it in the new form of an ego ideal. What he
projects before him as his ideal is the substitute for the lost narcissism of his
childhood in which he was his own ideal, (1914, p. 93)
Freud is not far from the female political theorist’s assessment of the rejects of
society whose ‘lives prior to their political careers had been failures’. These disap-
pointments, for the psychoanalyst, are ‘the admonitions of others’ that cause the
adult, whose ideal had hitherto been himself, to find a substitute for his lost ideal
outside of himself. Freud can thus help us explain how this substitute can so easily
fall under the hands of bigoted ideologies:
The ego ideal opens up an important avenue for the understanding of group
psychology. In addition to its individual side, this ideal has a social side; it
is also the common ideal of a family, a class or a nation. It binds not only a
person’s narcissistic libido, but also a considerable amount of his homosexual
libido, which is in this way turned back into the ego. The want of satisfaction
which arises from the non-fulfilment of this ideal liberates homosexual libido,
and this is transformed into a sense of guilt (social anxiety). Originally this
sense of guilt was a fear of punishment by the parents, or, more correctly, the
fear of losing their love; later the parents are replaced by an indefinite number
of fellow-men, (1914, p. 100).
Here is how the classic adage of ‘all homosexuals are closeted homosexuals’
becomes relevant in our assessment of gay rights. For Freud, the source of homo-
phobia is not that Jair Bolsonaro or Mike Pence or Ali Khamenei are strictly homo-
sexual; for him, once again, we are all born bisexual; but rather that they have
become unable, as a result of ‘the admonitions of others,’ to accept their homosexual
libido, to properly appreciate, if not love, their own reflections, their own ideal. Thus
is how for the psychoanalyst such leaders turn away from their repudiated selves
and escape toward ‘the common ideal of a family, a class or a nation’—especially
if this common ideal can enviously hinder, if not eliminate, those whose anxious
childhoods had not so drastically shifted their ego-ideal away from their reflection
in the mirror and who now parade the anthems of self-love that the bigoted leaders
themselves never appreciated. The beacon of love, its rainbow colors, to them, and

13
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R. Dabbous

to their followers, neurotically propels their egos evermore toward anti-gay policies;
a governmental repression rooted in a far older mental repression.
For Hannah Arendt and Sigmund Freud, whose Jewishness has been the subject
of persecution for much longer than homosexuality, the modern struggle for gay
rights, in spite of its infancy, must reckon with the fact that homophobia is so intri-
cately tied to the narcissism of the social reject, whether he was a version of Adolf
Eichmann, the follower, or a version of Adolf Hitler, the leader. Because this knowl-
edge would thus call for more holistic (and preventive) gay visibility campaigns; ini-
tiatives that tackle the roots of the social malaise in place in bourgeois society, and
which, ideally, should have more to do with ‘the human condition’ than ‘the homo-
sexual problem’. To raise the rainbow flag is a token of visibility that is effective, if
not necessary, to assert the presence of a community that is excluded from the civil
agora and the psychoanalyst room, but ultimately, there is a need to insert this local
strategy within a larger framework of human empowerment. Otherwise, the struggle
for gay rights might—if it is not too late—crack with the same irreversible schism as
did the struggle for racial rights in America, a prediction that Hannah Arendt mused
with in 1959:
The principle of equality, even in its American form, is not omnipotent; it can-
not equalize natural, physical characteristics. This limit is reached only when
inequalities of economic and educational condition have been ironed out, but
at that juncture a danger point, well known to students of history, invariably
emerges: the more equal people have become in every respect, and the more
equality permeates the whole texture of society, the more will differences be
resented, the more conspicuous will those become who are visibly and by
nature unlike the others. It is therefore quite possible that the achievement
of social, economic, and educational equality for the Negro may sharpen the
color problem in this country instead of assuaging it. This, of course, does not
have to happen, but it would be only natural if it did, and it would be very
surprising if it did not. We have not yet reached the danger point, but we shall
reach it in the foreseeable future, and a number of developments have already
taken place which clearly point toward it. (1959, p. 48).
An absence of optimism is characteristic of the pens of Hannah Arendt and Sig-
mund Freud. Then again, it is perhaps their mutual aversion to sentimentality, which
the Nazis exploited so well, that explains the effectiveness of their bleak prose. But it
is not their seriousness alone that justifies their rebelling absence at the pride parade
of New York and Vienna. Beauty, joy, warmth, and humanity, reminds us Arendt,
never survived the hour of liberation by even 5 min. What survived was always that
which stimulated the logos, our minds, not the mythos, our hearts.

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