The Impossible Object of Queer Desire
The late British writer Quentin Crisp, despite being one of the first openly homosexual men in England, was lambasted as “homophobic” and “misogynistic” for his self-deprecatory quips about the “perversity” of homosexuality. His lament that gay men are incapable of caring about the well-being of others—a weakness he attributes to their narcissism and “feminine minds”—aroused the ire of LGBT activists like Peter Tatchell.
Crisp wasn’t just a curmudgeonly old queen—he had deep insights into the metaphysical nature of homoerotic desire. Gay men, he claimed in his 1968 book The Naked Civil Servant, are in “search perpetually” of the “great dark man” who embodies everything “they wish they themselves were”: young, beautiful, masculine—in other words, a “real man who desires passionately another man.” But in its essence, homoeroticism is a desire for the impossible, for the mysterious and elusive. Crisp knew he would never find a real heterosexual man to reciprocate his attraction. The men who found Crisp attractive were incapable of completely fulfilling his desire, as their homosexuality inevitably diminished their masculinity. Crisp recognized that homosexual desire, unless sublimated into an artistic or ascetic vocation, can only end in tragedy.
The Italian film director Luca Guadagnino is among the latest openly gay men to be criticized for failing to walk in step with the rainbow agenda, joining the ranks of other heterodox Italian gay artists like Dolce and Gabbana and Pier Paolo Pasolini. Upon announcing that Timothée Chalamet and Armie Hammer would play the lead roles in his 2017 adaptation of André Aciman’s novel Call Me By Your Name, Guadagnino was accused by gay media outlets of “straight casting.” Nevertheless, Guadagnino selected Daniel Craig and Drew Starkey, both heterosexual, to play the main characters in his recent adaptation of William S. Burroughs’s 1985 novella Queer. Asked whether he feared further backlash, Guadagnino replied that he finds the issue “idiotic.”
The irony of accusing Crisp and Guadagnino of homophobia is that their take on all matters queer are more faithful to the true nature of homosexuality than that of their gay activist critics. They understand that homosexuality is markedly distinct from heterosexuality. Love is incontrovertibly not love. When a male pursues a partner of his own sex, he is venturing into the realm of the unattainable, which will either end in the discovery of higher mysteries or in tragedy and his demise. Guadagnino’s decision to cast heterosexual actors to play gay roles projects Crisp’s impossible fantasy onto the screen—a feat much more interesting than promoting “queer visibility.”
Queer follows William Lee (Craig), an American expat living in Mexico City in the 1950s, who cruises for younger guys on the city’s gay scene. He comes across the young American G.I. Eugene Allerton (Starkey), with whom he becomes infatuated. Lee starts following him around, catching him flirting with both men and women at bars. Allerton, well aware of Lee’s attraction to him, plays hard to get, which only fans the flames of Lee’s desire. After a few sexual encounters, they visit the shack of Dr. Cotter (Lesley Manville) in an Ecuadorian jungle, where they trip on yagé (ayahuasca) and seemingly communicate with each other telepathically. “I’m not queer,” says Allerton while his body appears to be melded with Lee’s, “I’m disembodied.”
The plot and dialogue of the film exude the tragic drama of longing for a “dark” mysterious figure, a real man, or at least one who is sexually ambiguous or who, at minimum, is not a “screaming queer.” One of the older gay Americans in the Mexico City scene complains that one of his boy toys was “so queer that I lost interest in him.” Part of Allerton’s allure is that he is “cold, slippery, and hard to catch.” The old gays revel in watching him weave his way around the bar, flirting with both sexes. After first sleeping with Lee, Allerton emotionlessly rushes out—his aloofness and flippancy entrancing Lee all the more.
Guadagnino has also been accused of glorifying older men who groom naive younger ones. But contrary to the insistence of activists, pederasty is indeed linked to the very nature of male homosexuality. Large age gaps are not exactly uncommon among male same-sex couples, in part because their relationships tend to be driven more so by a dynamic of use and power than by mutual gift and complementarity. According to theologian Fabrice Hadjadj, “Sexuality presupposes a difference between the sexes.” Thus, the very “concept ‘homosexuality’ is a contradiction.” Sexuality classically understood, he says, is predicated on the pursuit of otherness, the uniting of opposites. “The Greeks were well aware of this,” he says, citing how, for them, “pederasty was a way of avoiding sexuality.”
Hadjadj echoes Crisp in his assertion that the sameness of gay eroticism often “ends in crisis,” in a clash rather than harmony, in covetousness rather than mutual gift. He even goes on to laud “the genius” of gay writers like Marcel Proust who understood that this attempt to “possess the other person [of the same sex] is impossible.”
The controversial feminist art and literary critic Camille Paglia also cites how Greek pederasty reflects the recognition that there is something inherently different about gay and straight pairings. And like Hadjadj, Paglia recognizes the unique genius of gay men, insisting that their constant “conflict with nature” enables them to understand it on a deeper level. Yet she warns that this prophetic, “shamanistic” sensibility can easily be “destroyed” when the gay man yields to the temptation to chase after a “beautiful boy.”
She lists Oscar Wilde, Paul Verlaine, and Hadrian among the “foolish gays” of history, whose genius got sucked into the vicious archetype of “the beautiful boy as destroyer.” They thereby lost their capacity to create great works of art and literature, to build spiritual and civic institutions for the sake of the common good—which is to say, their virility, their manhood, their ability to generate and be fathers in the truest sense of the word. Wiser men like Socrates and Fr. John Gray (the supposed real-life inspiration behind Dorian Gray) were smart enough to abstain from the vice of boy love, and sublimated their urges into nobler pursuits.
By casting straight actors to play queer characters, Guadagnino hints that there is something defective about sodomy. It saps the homoerotically inclined man of his genius and thus diminishes his manhood. If you’re going to show gay sex on the screen, it’s much more riveting when it’s happening between two “real” men—a fantasy both practically and ontologically impossible, but which speaks volumes about the true nature of homosexuality.
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