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by Edward Jayne
September, 1975

Published as the initial response in "Comments on The Homosexual Imagination,"
College English, November 1974, pp. 62-67.

I agree with gay liberationists that homosexuality has been much more important to creativity than is generally recognized. But it is surprising that they have not taken their argument to its logical conclusion with the recognition that homosexual aversion, labeled "homophobia," has been equally important as a countervailing source of inspiration. Moreover, it seems regrettable that they have inverted a simplistic double standard by treating gay as normal and straight as neurotic without having recognized the level of complexity to be recognized in all experience, including art and literature, when normal gay tendencies complement normal straight tendencies, and homophobia provides an equally normal defense of "straight" thinking against gay temptation. They consider homophobia to be pathological, an exaggerated reaction formation against homosexual tendencies in oneself through the rejection of their overt manifestation in others. But this is not always the case. Of course reaction formation occurs, but just as both straight and gay alternatives can be either healthy or unhealthy (for example with rape), homophobia may be judged based on a similar distinction between acceptable and excessive modes of expression. For homophobia remains a remarkable syndrome which necessarily navigates a complex interaction between animus and anima, the inescapable antipodes of personality, and sometimes with extraordinary creative success.

An enormous number of poets and authors, including Homer, Shakespeare, Goethe, and Melville, even Whitman, Proust and Gide should be recognized to have been grappling with their homosexual inclinations by disguising and bringing them under control in the context of literary expression. Their accomplishment was essentially homophobic. They weren't shouting their passion to the wind, but finding some compromise to adopt it to the apparently inescapable heterosexual circumstances of their lives. Having internalized collective mores and inhibitions, they shaped homosexual inclinations to meet heterosexual demands, testing and confirming homophobic constraints they shared with most of their readers. As a result, the criticism of their works should surpass either a simplistic gay or straight approach to come to terms with their complex effort to manage forbidden tendencies through the medium of aesthetic experience. Homophobic much of our literature has been, so homophobic its analysis must be, either as a strenuous objective scrutiny of all issues except the sexual issues at stake, or as an honest inquiry of literary tensions which arise between homosexual temptation and its homophobic consequences--both in the text itself and its author, and ultimately in critics who refuse to acknowledge this tension.

A major problem, however, is that homophobia isn't exactly a phobia. Its symptoms are different in several respects from those of the common phobic response, which involves unconscious displacement from a fundamental aversion one refuses to recognize to mounting fear regarding a specific and impersonal external threat such as of dogs, space or height. As an obsessional neurosis, homophobia does have some characteristics in common with the phobic response, but, atypically, it can be a source of pride to those who suffer from it, and more often than not its dynamics provide a "normal" functional component of an individual's personality. Actually, homophobia is more suggestive of the classical paranoid syndrome described by Freud in his important 1911 Schreber study in which he emphasized projective mechanisms rather than phobic displacement 1. According to Freud, the paranoid individual gains his sense of persecution through a double evasion in repressing his latent homosexuality: first by means of denial in rejecting the possibility of homosexual attraction ("I am not attracted to this male; in fact I hate him"), then by means of projection to blame his hatred on others, preferably those who attract him ("It's not that I hate him--rather he hates me"). If there is no clear evidence of this hatred, it becomes a matter of conspiracy, and the paranoiac usually arouses enough antagonism through his defensiveness to be able to find scattered evidence of such a conspiracy. Not all victims of homophobia suffer from paranoia, but I think it can be maintained that most who experience homophobia suffer from this particular syndrome, and with both displacements involved. Even the individual with mild paranoid tendencies which fall well short of psychosis is likely to put into effect this double displacement through his wariness against nonspecific aggression by others. His self-denial involves the Freudian principle of reaction formation that is reinforced by his rejection of others who enact the inclinations he has successfully resisted in himself.

The similarity between homophobia and paranoia was apparently overlooked by Dr. George Weinberg when formulating his theory of homophobia, and by Louie Crew and Rictor Norton in their extension of his theory to literary criticism 2. Yet it offers the key both to homophobic aggression and literary structure, each of which combines the dynamics of projection and denial, though apparently in reverse order, a transposition which perhaps helps to clarify the qualitative difference in their outcomes. Like paranoia, fiction involves projection, the effort of readers to put themselves into the story without exactly being able to recognize the nature of their commitment. In fact, it is essential for them to overlook the extent to which literary characters exemplify their traits and circumstances of concern to themselves. Readers are able to probe and enjoy threatening experience precisely because it is projected to a fictive situation to be felt at second hand. And because their exploratory behavior seems to have been externalized and removed from themselves, they can try out alternative patterns of behavior in the very act of rejecting them. Their vicarious objectification is even sanctioned by the liberating tenets of modern criticism which condemn as affective fallacy any acknowledgement of the personal significance readers might find in literature. Having immersed themselves in feelings they do not wish to acknowledge in themselves, they complete this task by insisting it is strictly literary behavior organized by literary form to guarantee its irrelevance to their own feelings.

Denial, the initial displacement in the paranoid syndrome, becomes the second displacement in fiction through the advancement of plot from one state of affairs to its opposite as defined by Aristotle--usually fulfillment as opposed to its postponement earlier in the story. In the case of paranoia, this process is an unconscious transition from attraction to hostility, but in fiction one's affinity with the text must be sustained so plot itself can carry out the job of denial, an objective transition from "it (the story) expresses my anxiety," to it (the story) resolves this anxiety." Because denial is transposed from the first to the second stage, story avoids being rejected for "plotting" against readers (pun intended), as in the case of paranoia, and in fact can be admired and introjected since it is "plotting" for them, that is to say, "plotting" against their feelings of malaise and inadequacy in order to help them attain their desire, a comfortable sense of accomplishment resulting from its suitable resolution. This function of plot carries out Aristotle's formulation that it must be a complete action--in dialectic terms, a double-negative advancement that permits readers to surmount the inefficiency of their defenses against anxiety, homophobic or otherwise.

The negative theory of plot which I am proposing conflicts with most concepts of negation, including Keats's "negative capability," Marcuse's theory of "negative freedom," and Charles Rycroft's recent suggestion in The New York Review of Books (April 3, 1975) that negation is essentially a matter of "diminished ego boundaries." All these associate negation with androgyny rather than with its homophobic rejection through "denial," an issue of tension and resistance rather than unbridled expressiveness. In literature, I would argue, negation usually occurs through metonymic advancement from one state of affairs to its opposite, an essentially linear process that involves Aristotle's concept of plotted sequence among beginning, middle, and end. Androgynous spontaneity might be evoked through innuendo, ambiguous characterization, etc., even through bold exhibitionism of one sort or another, but all such manifestations of freedom are usually superimposed as a secondary, countervailing negation which obstructs and thus presumably transcends plot's inhibitive gratification. In psychoanalytic terms, they impede denial; in dialectic terms they negate negation (a process described as Negationsnegierung), but in either case with only transient success against the unrelenting negative accomplishment of literary convention organized by plot. By ignoring this additional complexity, those who have proposed unbridled spontaneity as the key to dialectic aesthetics have simplified literary achievement, as perhaps best illustrated by the concept of polymorphous perversity as proposed by Norman O. Brown and transcendent freedom proposed by Herbert Marcuse.

Once the projection displacement shifts readers' emotions to the literary text, plot enacts their satisfaction. In effect, it denies unacceptable feelings after they have been removed a safe distance from oneself through the projective function of literary experience--rather as a bomb would be taken to the street before any attempt is made to defuse it. By means of plot, once aesthetic distance has been achieved, homophobic catharsis is specifically evoked whether through adventure which ends in "masculine" success against enemies of one sort or another (temptresses included), through comedy which ends in marriage that ritualizes and thus exaggerates heterosexual role differentiation, or through tragedy which ends in transcendent self-fulfillment for a protagonist who is unable to manage his emotional contradictions except by the passive (hence effeminate) acceptance of his destruction because of his inadequacies. The irony, of course, is that in all instances readers no less passively identify with active heroes in order to share their accomplishment, a task paradoxically more "feminine" than "masculine" as a source of vicarious gratification from Homer to the cheapest, most transparent westerns and detective stories on the market today, especially on television and in the movies.

As indicated by Macalpine and Hunter, op cit., paranoia in women is likely to involve heterosexual rather than homosexual anxiety through the concern that others might treat one as being promiscuous and an easy conquest. This heterosexual variant of paranoia would probably be resolved in fiction either through a total rejection or men or through harnessing male appetite through virtue's triumph in the marriage contract, for example as happens in Jane Austen's novels, and without so much as a kiss bestowed to the elated prospective bridegroom. I expect this syndrome also underlies the theme of transcendent love in Wuthering Heights and postponed love in Middlemarch, both of which involve spiritual union as a higher marriage contract. Virginia Woolf escapes this obsession but apparently by sacrificing to disembodied impressionism the conventional dynamics of plot and character that would be more directly symptomatic of the paranoid syndrome.

As plot goes, so goes character. It would be a mistake to grant that plot might involve the paranoid syndrome as the simplest (and, tautologically, the most "plot-ridden") aspect of fiction, while maintaining that character and style are more complex and sophisticated, thus presumably transcending the vulgarity of the homophobic imagination. Aristotle defined character as the agent of plot which must be subsidiary to it since plot comprises the behavior of its protagonists. What happens is what characters do, but their personalities are also brought into play, so homophobic plot obliges what amounts to homophobic characterization--i.e., men and women totally differentiated in their roles, too often with men the aggressors and women their passive admirers. If plot is the accomplishment of homophobic denial, its protagonists effect this denial as homophobic agents locked into these complementary identities, in the case of males through "masculine" identity as confirmed by victory, financial success, or any other conventional "masculine" accomplishment. Odysseus is a homophobic protagonist to the extent that he out-plots and kills over a hundred enemies to regain his wife Penelopeas well as his status as the king of Ithaca; and Pip is a homophobic protagonist to the extent that he gains experience and competence enough to become the true master of his destiny. In both these instances, and in most others as well, the hero is first beset with major impediments which it seems he might not be able to overcome. He must engage in Dionysian conflict involving passion, confusion, and uncertainty in order to bring about a satisfactory resolution which affirms "masculine" adequacy and offers simplistic Apollonian clarity in the rational (hence "masculine") distinction imposed between good and evil, strength and weakness, and of course the masculine and feminine genders. Jung's principle of anima has been purged from his identity, both projected and objectified in a heroine he is now able to marry, but also in the ambiguous waywardness of a villain he has defeated. Such a hero is essentially homophobic, whatever his specific traits, and his story is in fact a homophobic quest to emphasize masculinity at the expense of feminine acquiescence. The paranoid dialectic between animus and anima has been removed one step from the reader to the hero, then another step to the hero's crisis to be resolved in his advancement from Dionysian convulsion to Apollonian mastery, a transition from androgynous anxiety to homophobic triumph--also from the truth of the human condition to a useful and gratifying pseudo-truth inevitable to fiction.

Only style, the third of Francis Fergusson's hierarchy of actualizations, is likely to be successful in resisting the compensatory denial strategy imposed by plot, principally because image and metaphor easily bootleg forbidden implications overlooked by both the author and his readers 3. At its face value, style reinforces the advancement toward homophobic resolution mediated by plot, for example in the dialogue and inner voice of characters in pursuit of homophobic goals or in the narrative voice of the author in overseeing and sympathetically commenting upon their behavior and feelings. Moderate anxieties can thus be satisfactorily managed by moderate defenses, so style does little more than confirm narrative development. However, with increased homosexual anxiety, style is likely to become overdetermined in the sense that much more is implied than the author consciously intends, as I have elsewhere tried to demonstrate regarding Shakespeare's Hamlet, Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," and Frost's "Mending Wall," all of which involve homophobic repression 4. In such instances, the expressive content of style contradicts and even obstructs the negative advancement of plot, very likely putting characterization in uncomfortable compromise between the two. Shakespeare's characters, for example, are often driven by the conflict between language and behavior, particularly in the case of his tragedies. Style repeatedly suggests either homosexual affinity or heterosexual aversion, usually through imagery implying phallic gratification and the fear of feminine engulfment. As a result plot has to mediate the rejection of style through the sequence of events that culminates in tragic sacrifice, followed, as it were, by silence.

Also typical of paranoia is the use of formal complexity to afford homophobic gratification through an allopathic transition from unfocused anxiety to accomplishment mediated by literary structure. This process of focussed simplification enables writers and their readers to affirm positive values at the expense of less gratifying experience, for example awkwardness, indecisiveness, confusion, nervousness, foolishness, pomposity, vindictiveness, and petty selfishness, all of which are fully as involved in our lives as the virtues we want to ascribe to ourselves. Once this assortment of concerns is subsumed to masculine adequacy, this more definable problem becomes accessible to a quick resolution organized by plot and literary convention. And, needless to say, such an outcome too often depends on a homophobic sequence from animus plus anima to animus at the expense of anima, the only result acceptable to homophobic anxiety, as illustrated by westerns, detective stories, and the like. Most literature accordingly protects readers from total exposure to their fullest range and depth of experience, since homophobic structure provides a temporary voice to ambiguity, sensitivity, and sustained intellectual complexity only in order to override and essentially deny their relevance by means of narrative closure. Yet the homophobic imagination does remain at least somewhat faithful to these values in the final analysis, since its obsessive concern repeatedly brings it back again to its wellspring in androgyny and homosexual temptation, if only to reinforce their denial through literary structure, a paranoid objective of enough importance to have given fiction a major role in patriarchal history.

Today, of course, the nuclear family is under threat of dissolution and sexual liberation has occurred at the expense of both patriarchy and the homophobic imagination. Also at risk have been conventional literary structure and old-fashioned ideas of human accomplishment as once explored in serious fiction. This relatively quick historic transition as compared to the tectonic advancement of civilization on a global scale is perhaps inevitable to the American crisis upon our defeat in Vietnam and subsequent trends in social decline--job losses, reduced real income, spiraling costs in health and education, etc. Gay liberationists are of course welcome to try to accelerate this revolution by rejecting homophobic standards both in literature and social behavior, but they should not overlook a John Wayne-style collective reaction through massive denial by the public at large. And especially dangerous would be compensatory homophobes at the closet door who are all the more eager to affirm their masculine adequacy through an almost literary achievement of success at the expense of evil forces both at home and abroad. In the end nobody would be the victor, ashes and rubble the primary legacy of pseudo-macho psychodynamics that might not otherwise have come to the fore.

It would also be a serious mistake to overlook the historic importance of homophobia and the authoritarian inspiration it has provided to individuals with limited capabilities who are unable to cope with their difficulties except by joining a cause bigger than themselves. Again, it is their task to deny their inadequacy, in this instance through ardent patriotism as a political version of homophobic denial. Fervent projective identification with their nation affords the narrative opportunity to share in the achievement of success against enemies abroad. These young homophobes are patriots, hence men, hence impervious to doubts about their masculinity. And since the beginning of time, in fact, homophobia has energized simplistic values essential to both collective stability and social progress short of revolutionary upheaval. Homophobia has delivered mankind through five thousand years of war and peace, wealth and poverty, crisis and stagnation. For some of us it is a grotesque impediment to our self-fulfillment. For most of us, however, its rejection would be essentially to steer us through life--in other words, to deny our capacity for denial, the root of our identity, with consequences almost too dangerous to imagine.

1. Psycho-analytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XII (Toronto, 1958), esp. ch. 3, "On the Mechanism of Paranoia," pp. 59-79. The subsequent development of the concept of paranoia in psychoanalytic theory is traced by Otto Fenichel in The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis (New York, 1945), pp. 427-36. It should also be mentioned that objections to a strictly homosexual interpretation of paranoia, as provided by Freud and Fenichel, are made by Harry Stack Sullivan in Clinical Studies in Psychiatry (New York, 1945), pp. 145-65, and by Ida Macalpine and Richard Hunter in their introduction to Memoirs of my Nervous Illness, by Daniel Paul Schreber (London, 1955), pp. 8-28.

2. Society and the Healthy Homosexual (New York, 1972).

3. Francis Fergusson, The Idea of a Theater (Princeton, 1949), p. 36. Fergusson borrows the concept from Kenneth Burke, and I myself add fragments of theory derived from Rank, Holland, Marcuse, and Wilhelm Reich, among others, whose theories have been important to my argument.

4. "Up against the 'Mending Wall': The psychoanalysis of a Poem by Frost,'" College English, vol. 37, no 7 (April, 1973), pp. 934-51.