Tuesday, October 31, 2006

Fragments from Modern Language Notes (the german issue) 1993
Literary sexualities
Camp
by Laurence Rickels:

What also fits in here is the synchronization of the onset of his homosexuality with the concluding year of the lost war. In 1918 the war bond between natural people spilled over into homosexual excess. First comes a depletion of outwardly directed heterosexual libido, then comes the upsurge (back in the barracks or inside oneself) of the basic need for self esteem.
The drunken one night stand belongs to a demonization of the home fron as the homo front, where libidinal depletion or excess no longer toed the line of the war effort. The “knife in the back” view of how the German soldiers lost the war is too hot to handle. But it’s a demonization that’s so far away (like all projection) but also (this time around) so close: homosexuality is a contagious disease that can strike down millions of all-natural men and thus deplete the future reserve or resource of the generations coming soon. (A regular feature of war-neurosis symptomatology was impotence, Ferenczi reminded those who in 1918 still resisted the psychoanalytic view of every neurosis’s sexual etiology.)

....

Fritz Mohr lifted the bio-blinders that obscured clearer view of a stronger homo-sexology trigger: psychic determination (amongst other things, such as the relation between coming out and alcohol consumption).
Rickels describes how one of Mohr's case studies ‘kept on getting caught being come on to by boys who got younger as the years went by’, down this road surely, lies pedophilia, given enough libertinitis.

"The couple that the group cannot admit or leave alone is at the same time the group’s reproductive agency, its future. That’s why homosexuals are always the mascots and trend setters of group psychologization: and that’s why they are the suicidal and sacrificial stars of mass (both communionist and consumerist) societiy. the’re the way to go and they’ve got to go. But that’s also why, in heterosexist culture, going straight has to come with a free gift of homo-bonding (via the woman among us) which, even though never completely consumated, is way more constant than what comes the way of gays. That’s also why lesbians aren’t a threat. All women get attributed to them a confusion or lack of direction of desires that’s the static on the transmission going through them. It’s like: what don’t they want (and who really cares anyway). But that’s also why by now, in our state of heterosexual preparedness, women (straight or whatever) can make their careers theorizing, that is, fantasizing about male bonding. Look at Leni .. .. .
Before the Roehm assasination, very few cases of homosexuality came up in the Hitler Youth, but afterwards they became shockingly frequent. The reprimand index (Warnkarten) of the Hitler Jugend .. .shows that between 34 and 39 about 25% of the 4.800 youths expelled from the movement were expelled for homosexuality, in addition to those expelled for ‘moral offenses’, some of which were basically homosexual; mutual masturbation penalty: 2.5 years inprisonment. (from “homosexuals in nazi germany”, p. 234)