Ben Miller, January 28

!e Life and
Death of
Modern
Homosexuality
Abolish the capitalist forces that
produced “gay people”

Jordan Bohannon

Sexual Hegemony: Statecraft, Sodomy,

and Capital in the Rise of the World
System by Christopher Chitty. Duke
University Press, 240 pages.

EVER SINCE THE MODERN

INVENTION of homosexuality, many
homosexuals have been profoundly
invested in claiming that
homosexuality is not a modern
invention, or even an invention at all.
In some sense, they’re right:
congealment is probably a better term
for the consolidation of wildly
disparate homoerotic impulses,
socioeconomic structures, and
medical discourses under the tidy
term “homosexual” in the late
nineteenth century. That term has
survived, with an occasional costume
change, ever since. Nevertheless, at
every appearance, the people named
by it have been cast by the right as
some kind of utterly novel alien
invasion hellbent on dissolving the
nuclear family in a cauldron of
perversion.

In response, many said people have

looked to the past for proof that
they’re not the first such beings to land
on Earth. See, some of them say,
pointing to Michelangelo or Frederick
The Great, look! We’re not aliens! We’re
Great Men. Let’s call this Queer
History One. The more enlightened
look to patterns of behavior, finding
evidence of precolonial or
precapitalist queer lifeworlds subdued
and oppressed by Great Men (i.e.,
capitalist European heteropatriarchs).
We’re not aliens; we have always existed
in some form, they say, and the system
that screwed us then is the system that’s
screwing us today. Let’s call this Queer
History Two. Both versions are linked
to the trope that we queers are “born
this way,” an attempt to fight back
against the charge that queer and
trans subjectivities are a “lifestyle
choice” with the assertion that our
sexual identities are written into our
DNA. The claim that homosexuality is
part of “our” genes is itself a kind of
historicizing claim: the first histories,
after all, are written in our cells, in our
genetics and in our epigenetics; in
what, and in how, our bodies and
sexualities become. All this makes the
project of doing a history of queer
subjectivities very complicated. The
uncomfortable truth is that people
with same-sex romantic and sexual
impulses have been bosses and
workers, racialized and racist, queens
and street queens, and that very few of
us have ever fully or comfortably
inhabited today’s “gay” or “queer” or
“trans” subjectivities. But histories are
always incomplete, astral projections
of unrecoverable pasts, and so all of us
who do queer history choose only
some of our ancestors, and their
politics and lifeworlds, to endorse or
critique or elide.

It becomes difficult to
imagine same-sex
desire as opposed to
capitalism, whiteness,
and nationalism when
those institutions and
social relations now
welcome it with open
arms.
Any history of the field is thus a history
of this dialectic between Queer
History One and Queer History Two.
The earliest progressive sexologists of
the late nineteenth century, fighting
back against psychiatrists and doctors
who considered homosexuality and
gender “inversion” pathological,
offered counterexamples both from
history and, problematically, from
“primitive” peoples seen as living
examples of previous “stages” of
human development. They argued
that same-sex eros and gender
nonconformity were normal
variations of human behavior. Their
masculinist counterparts looked
instead to great historical heroes:
homosexual and homosocial
behavior, they thought, could liberate
heroism and reenchant modernity.
Sometimes this masculinist project
was oriented toward libertarian
socialism, with activists like Edward
Carpenter imagining a Whitmanesque
bearded brotherhood of utopian
democracy; other times, taking root in
German Männerbund associations, it
imagined Grecian heroes as proto-
Aryan figures liberated from evil
Jewish and feminine influence. (At
that time, there was no lesbian-
nationalist equivalent). Despite the
sometimes bitter battles between
Queer Histories One and Two, their
arguments were in one fundamental
way similar: they both constructed a
history of honor in which one could, in
the present day, take pride.

During gay liberation’s 1970s heyday,

focus shifted to the birth of
contemporary gender and sexuality.
In the essay “Capitalism and Gay
Identity,” John D’Emilio, who had
been a member of a reading group in
New York City called the Gay Socialist
Action Project, argued against what he
called “the myth of the eternal
homosexual,” claiming that only the
rise of wage labor enabled men (and,
later, women) to leave home and
begin to inhabit gay sexual identities.
In colonial New England, where
households functioned as self-
sufficient economic units dependent
on the labor of many offspring, sex
was yoked to procreation and
procreation to marriage: “The
Puritans,” writes D’Emilio, “did not
celebrate heterosexuality but rather
marriage; they condemned all sexual
expression outside the marriage
bond.” Under industrialization,
however, as men and women were
drawn into the labor market,
production became more socialized
and the family ceased to be a self-
sufficient economic unit. As a result,
sexuality could be “released,” to use
D’Emilio’s verb, from the imperative
to procreate: instead of needing to
make many children in order to help
with the all-consuming labor of
continuing life, sexual expression
could become a way of expressing
yourself through an identity, whether
heterosexual or homosexual. “Only
when individuals began to make their
living through wage labor, instead of
as parts of an interdependent family
unit,” D’Emilio argues, “was it
possible for homosexual desire to
coalesce into a personal identity.” The
village sodomite, confronted with the
new idea that sex wasn’t something
you did with the wife to maintain the
community and with the neighbor for
fun but was instead meant to be an
expression of your personhood,
moved to the city and became a
homosexual.

Even more influential was the model

offered by the French theorist Michel
Foucault, who, as part of a broader
theoretical project of arguing for an
understanding of power more diffuse
and decentralized than traditional
Marxist models, claimed that the
regulation of sexuality by late-
nineteenth century doctors didn’t
repress it, but in fact helped create it.
Sexuality itself, he argued––the
institution by which we consider our
sexual acts to be part of a coherent
identity––was one of the crucial forms
of modern social control. Far from not
talking about sex, he pointed out,
Victorians talked about little else:
filthy, perverted sex obsessed them.
Continuing to talk about it in the
context of the sexual liberation
movement represented—and by
implication, continues to represent—
an extension of that discourse, not a
radical break from it.

While some academics (like John

Boswell and Terry Castle) spent years
arguing, with ever-decreasing success,
that something like the contemporary
“gay” or “lesbian” had always existed
in relatively similar ways,
“constructionist” models like those
offered by Foucault and D’Emilio have
become dominant in today’s academic
histories about gay, lesbian, and trans
lives. In the mainstream, however, it’s
almost the reverse. If in the 1970s and
1980s there was a vibrant public
activist culture in which both Queer
History One and Two were debated,
today most gay and lesbian people
firmly rely on the former. The wages
of nationalism are generous, and
Queer History One’s story—you have
always existed, you have dignity because
you are like Great Men/Women—has
proven to be an easier position from
which to argue for the dispensation of
civil rights and protections from the
state. It’s unsurprising that this has
become the mass-market narrative
about homosexuality in the
contemporary West: we’re born this
way, and we always have been.
Recognize us, and we’ll marry, pay
taxes, and serve in the military. It
becomes difficult to imagine same-sex
desire as opposed to capitalism,
whiteness, and nationalism when
those institutions and social relations
now welcome it with open arms. It is
no accident that working-class, Black,
and trans queer activists and
academics (from established names in
trans and queer of color critique like
Susan Stryker and Jose Esteban
Muñoz to current PhD students and
early-career scholars like Michelle
Esther O’Brien and Blu Buchanan)
have offered many of the most
penetrating contemporary critiques of
both racial capitalism and mainstream
gay and lesbian organizing.

Maybe the problem is

precisely the ease with
which we assume that
there is a queer “us.”
Queer History Two’s defense
mechanism has been to decry
normativity: to assimilate into these
institutions, some queer radicals and
most queer theorists have argued, is to
not be queer at all. Yes, they insist, we
are aliens! The most blinkered form of
analysis based on normativity would
see the trust-fund faggot still high on
ecstasy at the anarchist warehouse
rave at nine a.m. on a Sunday morning
as more “radical” than the married
working-class lesbian clocking in
every morning at the same time to a
Walmart in the suburbs. Think of how
the campaign against same-sex
marriage as a priority of the official
gay rights movement in the United
States went. Arguments about how
marriage is a repressive institution
and everyone should have health care
and immigration rights regardless of
their marital status were subsumed to
the frankly bizarre slogan of “Against
Equality,” a claim about the inherent
superiority of queer people and lives
that made no sense outside the four
zip codes where it ever caught on. This
rubric, as Holly Lewis and others have
pointed out, fails by privileging the
performance of radical acts over the
analysis of structures. In her excellent
monograph The Politics of Everybody,
Lewis goes back to one of the
foundational narratives of
“homonormativity:” the eviction of
working-class Black queer youth from
the Christopher Street Piers in New
York City by gay and lesbian property
and business owners in the mid-
1990s, which influential queer
theorists attributed to those youths’
flamboyant and non-normative
gender presentation. “I see no
evidence,” Lewis writes, “that this is a
case of a gay elite patrolling queer
identity. Instead, I see business
owners expelling non-customers. I see
landlords concerned with property
value. I see the racist assumption that
Black youth are dangerous . . . Class
dynamics are rewritten as a problem
of affect.”

Maybe the problem is precisely the

ease with which we assume that there
is a queer “us”— this idea, of a united
queer identity forged in the crucible of
decades or centuries of homophobia,
often lurks behind even those histories
that insist that homosexuality is a
modern invention. It’s easy to
understand that the structural position
of a Black trans woman experiencing
homelessness or a working-class
Native lesbian are not the same as
those of a white gay male corporate
lawyer, no matter how much that
movement’s nonprofit organs might
want to feature the former two in ad
campaigns for policy proposals that
mostly benefit the latter. It is difficult
to write queer histories that don’t
smuggle those assumptions in the
back door, but there are many reasons
to talk about sexuality in history as a
rich site of identity formation, control,
and meaning-making. Throwing it out
entirely won’t do.

Christopher Chitty’s Sexual Hegemony

addresses itself to this contradiction.
It is major, a synthesis of the socialist
and Foucauldian understandings of
the birth of contemporary
homosexuality which tracks the
specific relationships between one
form of same-sex behavior (sodomy)
and class politics across the transition
to capitalism in the Global North. The
history of homosexualities is
presented as contingent on political
economy and class struggle; in the
book’s introduction, Christopher
Nealon describes the perspective as
“an anticapitalist politics that is
committed to abolishing the forces
that produced ‘gay people.’”

Instead of questioning the extent to

which the sodomites in his study
deviated from stated social norms,
Chitty focuses on “whether and how
sexuality outside marriage and
property relations congealed into
opposition, defiance, or open
antagonism toward socially dominant
groups and their institutions.” This is
a subtle but crucial difference: at
certain junctures, and for some
people, he points out, deviating from a
society’s stated moral and sexual
norms has not been particularly
revolutionary. Popes have had
mistresses without disrupting their
sovereignty over the church and its
vast wealth; merchants have fucked
young men while still using marriage
to pass property and title on to their
biological sons. Instead of
understanding, to use one example
from the book, fifteenth-century
Florentine sodomites as an identity
category unified by buggery and
threatened by its repression, he
instead teases out the potentially
more-important ways in which they
were different from each other. For
upper-class men who participated in
same-sex activity, targeted repression
of working-class men allowed their
conduct to continue without it
fundamentally threatening either their
freedom or their class position. It was
the working-class men who were
punished––and this punishment, along
with its constant threat, circumscribed
the potentially revolutionary quality of
intimate, cross-class contact. Knowing
that your lover might be imprisoned,
and you definitely won’t be, makes
fucking them and then fucking them
over all the easier. Punishing only
working-class men who have sex with
men is not evidence of some kind of
blanket phobia of male sexual contact,
but evidence of how the regulation of
male-male sexual contact can be used
to discipline some working-class men.

Chitty binds these detailed analyses

into a broad historical narrative, in
which he understands conflict over
and crackdowns on sodomy as
corresponding with the “terminal
phases” of Italian, Dutch, British, and
American-dominated hegemonies of
capitalism from the fifteenth century
to today. (This narrative focus on the
centers of capitalist power in the early
modern and modern eras leads Chitty
to focus on the global North, not least
as the place where the discourse of
“sexuality” itself, and attendant
sodomy laws, would be created in a
colonialist crucible and then violently
exported to much of the global South.)
In these terminal phases, a
“heightened sense of moral crisis”
arose as restorations of power and
geopolitical realignments overturned
the status quo. Between the fall of the
old regime and the birth of the new
one, something queer could flourish.

This narrative alone would be an

exciting historical intervention. The
method is even more so. Chitty calls it
“queer realism”—a move from
thinking about, as Foucault did, how
power shapes sexuality, toward
thinking about how sexuality
contributes, in different ways, at
different places and times, to the
exercise of power. Normalcy, Chitty
points out, is not some abstract
standard; it is “a status . . . which
accrues material advantages to those
who achieve it or happen to be born
into it.” Queerness, for Chitty,
signifies the lack of that status—
“forms of love and intimacy with a
precarious social status outside the
institutions of family, property, and
couple form.” If D’Emilio taught us
how free labor systems helped
produce the modern homosexual, and
Foucault pointed to the role of
sexological discourses in doing the
same, Chitty makes the analytic
mobile: not content to retell the story
of the birth of the modern, he instead
provides a way of relating different
same-sex forms to one another over
time without departing from the
important overarching story of
developing capitalist accumulation,
smuggling contemporary assumptions
about sexuality into the past, or
smothering our understanding of
power in a thick blanket of
overidentification. Even histories that
have supposedly integrated Foucault’s
insights about how sexuality feeds off
repression like the mutant weeds that
spring up around Chernobyl often,
quietly and in the background, assume
that some form of homophobia or
anti-gay bias, even if in an older and
different form, has always existed and
shaped same-sex erotic contact.
Chitty replaces this with a colder view
of ruling class interests, while arguing
that same-sex erotic behavior has
often been a particular flashpoint for
class conflict.

!ose of us who inhabit

today’s homosexual
subjectivities will need
to do more than
assume that our
cocksucking makes us
radical.
Chitty’s tragic death by suicide in
2015 was surely an unfathomable
personal tragedy for those who knew
him. It casts a shadow over this slim
and explosive volume, which is
composed of material for his PhD
dissertation and was pieced together
and shepherded through peer review
by his friend, the writer Max Fox.
Reading a text this provocative and
disruptive, one wants to question, to
provoke, to challenge, to hear what its
writer might have to say next. The task
of what to say next has been left up to
us. Boswell and Foucault, those