Gay Male Theory

The initial stages of gay male theory seem to derive predominantly from the social
constructionist precepts of Michel Foucault, whose influential The History of Sexuality sketches
the construction of sexuality as a technology of social control, an effort to construct an
identifiable meaning for people in Western societies. As such, gay male theory emerged,
ironically enough, with a notion of ignoring the gay male altogether and looking instead at the
category of "the homosexual" as a disembodied social construct.

The intersection of gay theory and social constructionism had its canonical moment in British
sociological writings of the early 1970s. In 1968, Mary McIntosh published an article, "The
Homosexual Role," that both predated and anticipated Foucault's work in arguing that "the
homosexual" was a social role that emerged in England in the seventeenth century. A number of
important early essays spurred by this work are collected in the anthology The Making of the
Modern Homosexual (1981).

McIntosh's stance, along with the emerging work of Foucault, resulted in a number of
sociological studies of sexuality that examined sexual roles as effects of the configurations of
power in culture; most notable among these are Jeffrey Weeks's Sex, Politics and Society (1981)
and Sexuality and Its Discontents (1985), and Dennis Altman's The Homosexualization of
America (1982), which focuses on the construction of gay male culture in contemporary
America.

One problem implicit in much of the social constructionist work is, again, the issue of subsuming
the lesbian. Work such as that of Foucault seems to avoid an undue attention to gender difference
by examining the categories of heterosexuality/homosexuality in cultural formations; yet, in
practice, the terms homosexual and gay--unless specified as female--generally connote male
homosexuality. And with only a few exceptions, social constructionist work has done little to
undermine this territorializing gender assumption.

The social constructionist movement also highlights the strong current of Marxism underpinning
much gay theory. One central but often overlooked voice in this respect is that of Guy
Hocquenghem. In 1968, Hocquenghem published his book Homosexual Desire, which is a
radical Marxist revision of Freudian analysis.

Strongly influenced by the French leftist rebellions of 1968, and also deeply indebted to the
theory of "schizoanalysis" proposed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in Anti-Oedipus,
Hocquenghem's theory examines the historical and psychological construction of "the
homosexual" as a displacement and repression of society's own homosexual desire.

Arguing that desire is an unbroken and polyvocal phenomenon, Homosexual Desire suggests that

the establishment of exclusive homosexuality is a way of isolating and expelling those segments
of desire that do not imitate the productive and reproductive goals of capitalism. Sexuality,
therefore, is not a "natural" phenomenon but is the effect of the economic relations of a given
culture.
Hocquenghem's tract shares much with the social constructionists, but by stressing a divide
between desire and identity, it also presages the concerns that have constellated around the
relatively new practices of queer theory.