Despite the mobilization on the occasion of the World Day Against Homophobia, part of the international community advocating for the universal decriminalization of homosexuality, Russia, one of the “wealthy and industrialized” members of the G8 and host of the 54th Eurovision contest, demonstrated the full extent of its political—and psychological—archaism by violently suppressing the “Slavic gay pride” in the center of the capital. One cannot help but regret the lack of solidarity shown by the singer and French representative, Patricia Kaas.
Even though 80 countries continue to criminalize this sexual orientation, with a handful still punishing it with the death penalty, fortunately, much water has flowed under the bridge since the 1974 decision by the American Psychiatric Association to no longer list homosexuality as a disorder in the Statistical and Diagnostic Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM III). This decision was extended in 1990 by the removal of homosexuality from the WHO’s list of mental illnesses. Denmark, the first country in the world to allow, on October 1, 1989, a “registered partnership” between homosexuals, has been widely followed by many Scandinavian but also Mediterranean countries like France or Spain. Already a pioneer in terms of adoption for homosexual couples, Sweden has just voted, by a very large majority, a law authorizing civil and religious homosexual marriages. In the United States, Vermont has recently become the fourth American state to legalize marriage between two people of the same sex. The Democratic governor of the state of New York, David Peterson, has already announced that he would support a similar bill in the state legislature to that adopted in Vermont. In France, the Minister of Health Roselyne Bachelot has recently approached the High Authority of Health (HAS) to remove transsexuality from the classification of mental illnesses. Last December 18, France and the Netherlands presented alongside the United Nations General Assembly, a draft declaration relating to the freedom of sexual orientation and gender identity.
The broad movement for social recognition should certainly be celebrated. In a letter to an American mother in April 1935, Sigmund Freud already expressed this sentiment: “Homosexuality is obviously not an advantage, but there is nothing in it to be ashamed of, nor is it a vice, nor a degradation, nor could it be classified as a disease.”
However, it must be acknowledged that difficulties persist in the daily living of what remains for many an identity suffering. The proliferation of festive venues for the gay community probably changes nothing. These venues, whatever the sexual or non-sexual purposes characterizing them, are actually revelatory of the distress that constitutes them. The sociopsychanalyst Gérard Mendel had indeed pointed out this illusion by recalling, for example, that “the thousands of participants in a trance at a rave party and the tens of thousands of spectators at a football match… seek to unburden, momentarily, from an individual identity too heavy to bear with its conflicts and contradictions.” The group in which the young homosexual seeks to fit aims to dispel a form of loneliness and wandering characteristic of this sexual orientation. This loneliness repeats by inscribing in the psyche “the lack of sufficiently satisfying relationships with the same-sex parent, whether that parent was absent, truly deficient or not, at any rate, this is what the individual has experienced.” It continues with the rejection of integration into the majority identity group, thus fostering the creation of a marginalized group with sometimes illusory rules of identification: despite the often very courageous efforts of active militants for the homosexual cause, particularly in sociologically and politically unfavorable contexts, the notion of a “gay ghetto”—and its underlying behavioral rules—carries in itself the risk of annihilating the “uniqueness of each individual” and establishing another form of “persecution”: according to the philosopher Hannah Arendt, to “bring those who suffer it closer to the point where that space ends up disappearing, leaving only the sharing of a common suffering.”
In his 1907 article, Freud acknowledged that “when a civilized sexual morality reigns, individuals are hindered in their health and ability to live and ultimately, the harm inflicted on these individuals by the sacrifices imposed on them reaches a degree that directly threatens their cultural aspiration.” The clinical and psychoanalytical practice incorporates in its listening this social and political dimension of the symptom, even though the analytical community now regards repression as a law internal to desire, a phenomenon from which civilization would also be built. Does the increasing demand by gays and lesbians to be recognized with a institutionalized access to the dominant heterosexual family model—the one of marriage and filiation—reflect this awareness?
