Jean Cocteau never officially acknowledged his authorship of the
homosexual novel Le Livre Blanc, even though
he allowed it to be included in the authorized bibliography that
accompanied his Complete Works. Perhaps
Cocteau did not wish to hurt his mother, but this persistent anonymity
in the history of homosexual literature is typical of the curious bold-
yet-cowardly paradox of the homosexual imagination, similar to E.M.
Forster's suppression of his homosexual novel
Maurice. On the one hand, Cocteau was
compelled to write the work as a vindication of his own self-worth, as
proof of his integrity. But on the other hand it was written in 1928
when coming out would have been regarded as ostentatious as well as a
serious tarnish to his literary reputation.
Cocteau's intention has largely been ignored by most readers and
critics, who respond to the work as though it were a
"confession" of his homosexuality rather than a "white
paper" on homophobia. It has been read as an apology rather than
as a challenge, and scholars have busied themselves with biographical
speculation rather than sociological analysis.
Each episode in the novel is an illustration of social injustice, and
Cocteau's message is quite clearly stated:
Even the opening pages of his book indicate that its proper subject is
not homosexuality, but
homophobia. Most readers are startled by the
erotic details of the first scene — the vision of the farm-boy
bathing naked in a pool, the sunburned face and hands contrasting with
the whiteness of his body like "sweet chestnuts bursting out of
their husks," the penis in the midst of the "dark patch"
of his pubic hair — which causes the narrator to faint in an
ecstasy of joy and fear. Readers are so shocked — or titillated
— by this description that it colors their reading of the
remainder of the story. Thus Le Livre Blanc
has achieved a wholly unwarranted reputation as an underground erotic
classic.
The first portion of the book is designed not so much to record the
first stirrings of desire, as to record the first experiences of
homophobia. It is not insignificant, for example, that the pool in
which the farm-boy bathes "did not belong to the chateau"
— that is, it is outside the limits of
"the park," the proper social sphere whose boundaries, set up
by his homophobic father, the hero will transgress. The pool represents
an outcast space of potential homosexual experience, just as the
homosexual himself is a pariah, an out-law. The narrator faints because
his blood pounds "as though I had committed a murder," when
he is startled by a hare while out hunting. By fainting, he has indeed
accomplished the murderous goal of his hunt to annihilate his
homosexual desires — out of sight, out of mind.
This is one of "the three incidents" of his childhood that
are impressed upon the narrator's memory, partly because they are
homoerotic incidents, but mainly because they
are homophobic incidents. The narrator's
guilt has already been firmly internalized by the time of the
"first incident" with the farm-boy, but in the "second
incident" we see how that guilt is supported by external
pressures. The narrator recalls seeing two naked gypsy lads climbing
trees and joyfully gambolling about, symbolizing an example of
homosexual freedom and exuberance and lack of convention. This is
contrasted with the repressive homophobia of his nursemaid, who is
"terrified" by the scene and sternly admonishes the young
narrator to avert his eyes. He nevertheless takes a peek, and "my
disobedience gave the scene an unforgettable aura." It is the aura
of homophobic oppression and the possibility of rejecting that
oppression.
The "third incident" of this series of childhood memories
illustrates the wider social ramifications of homophobia. The narrator
recalls being fond of their table servant Gustave, whom on one occasion
he had the courage to grope. Gustave's homophobic reaction is first
embarrassment, then repulsion. This prompts a counter-reaction, a
typical "heterosexual" subterfuge whereby the narrator seeks
an excuse to become intimate with Gustave by showing him a picture of
a woman he has drawn. But the ruse does not work, and a few days later
Gustave is dismissed for stealing some wine. The is not a mere accident
of the narrative, but symbolically underscores the father's own inner
conflicts and repression.
The episodes concerned with the narrator's experience in the
Lycée Condorcet illustrate how homophobia in one's peer group
not only instills guilt and shame in the homosexual, but also
contributes to his alienation from society. The homophobic attitudes in
the young peer group are fostered by the agents of society, in this
case by the "sarcastic teachers." They keep an eye out for
boys who may be playing with themselves at their desks or simply have
an erection in the nature of things, and then "suddenly question
a boy who was on the point of orgasm," sadistically forcing him to
stand up and stammer an answer "while trying to turn a dictionary
into a fig-leaf." And of course the other boys reinforce the
teacher's shame-instilling technique by laughing at the boy's
predicament, making him even more embarrassed.
Instead of encouraging the recognition of masturbation as a joyful and
natural discovery proper to adolescent development, the atmosphere of
this "educational" institution brands it as a
"vice" to be practiced furtively: "Nothing but pockets
with holes in them and soiled handkerchiefs." Thus school becomes
a memory of sordidness: "The classroom smelt of gas, chalk and
sperm."
Cocteau is one of the first authors to record how this kind of commonly
experienced school situation paradoxically causes young homosexuals to
be more prudish than their fellows. The narrator is
"nauseated" by this situation of furtive masturbation not
because it is a "vice" — as the other boys believe it to
be — but because "it was the cheap parody of a type of love
that my instinct respected." Such "clandestine play"
degrades his ideal of homosexual love because it is more shameful than
celebratory, and consists more of mockery than respect.
The Dargelos episode at the school — in which masturbation-as-a-vice
is extended to include mutual masturbation and exhibitionism
— is again more revealing of homophobia than homosexuality. The
narrator's first puppy-love is for Dargelos, a boy of uncommon beauty,
virility, and arrogance, symbol of "the man" whom all the
other boys are trying to become, who cynically exploits their
admiration by exhibiting his genitals to them in return for their gifts
of stamps and tobacco. When the narrator tries to explain to one of his
classmates that his admiration goes beyond this, the other boy
typically fails to comprehend this love and homophobically assumes that
what the narrator desires is merely cheap sex:
Homophobia is intensified when the boys' voices begin breaking and they
take up shaving and smoking:
Cocteau may not have been the first gay man to note this damage, but he
was one of the first to chart its progress in the adolescent and to
note how it is formed to meet the expectations of the peer group. And
he correctly perceived that the heterosexual truth which promotes
homosexual falsehood is itself a falsehood of a different order:
braggadocio, over-assertive masculinity, unwarranted claims to
heterosexuality. Virtually nothing really "happens" when the
boys go to the brothels to prove themselves, for they are too shy when
they actually confront a real live whore. Cocteau humorously but
unsparingly satirizes the trivial adventures of these budding
heterophiliacs.
As is too usual, the narrator tries to go straight, but his first
heterosexual romance with the prostitute Jeanne is fraught with various
kinds of deceit, due largely to the homosexual's necessary self-
concealment within homophobic culture. The irony is that Jeanne herself
is deceiving him, not with other men, but with another prostitute named
Berthe, for she herself is basically a lesbian. When he discovers this,
he leaves her — supposedly enlightened by the realization that his
relationship with her was basically homosexual in so far as her
"masculine part" appealed to his "feminine part."
Cocteau has unfortunately succumbed to the feminine versus masculine
ideology about the nature of male and female homosexuals (as effeminate
men and butch women) — a view that is always oversimplified and
often mistaken. Fortunately Cocteau does not develop this theme much
further — unlike Proust, who was convinced that male homosexuals
were women in men's bodies and even constructed a patently idiotic
theory about "autofecundation" to account for it.
The narrator then takes up with another prostitute named Rose, but very
soon he falls in love with her pimp Alfred. Alfred "resembles the
farm-boy and the Gustave of my childhood." He is absolutely male:
"his body was more like the one I saw in my dreams than the young,
powerfully equipped body of an adolescent: a perfect body, rigged out
with muscles like a ship with ropes, its limbs appearing to open out
like a star around that fleece where there rises, in contrast to woman,
who is built for concealment, the only thing about a man which cannot
lie." Cocteau again succumbs to an ideological interpretation of
gender, specifically the silly theory that women's mostly-internal
genital organs mean that they are "built for concealment"
— a curious biological metaphysic held by far too many men,
homosexual and heterosexual alike. But it is prompted by his newly
awakened conviction that concealment of his gayness is wrong. Many a
gay man has tried to conceal his gayness in a prostitute's or wife's
vagina.
The affirmative value of his love for Alfred prompts an anti-homophobic
resolution:
The narrator escapes his disappointment by plunging into the
promiscuous variety of the underworld of prostitution. But the world of
the Faubourg Montmarte is an ultimately unsatisfying feast of
aperitifs. No appetizers of physical gratification pass untasted, but
the whole does not add up to a solid meal. Homophobic society is so
well constructed that more-or-less permanent relationships are reserved
for conventional heterosexual pairs, while fleeting impermanence is
prescribed for all others. There is no intermediary neutral zone where
people can freely discover themselves and each other, and self-
determine their own arrangements without regard to the expectations of
others.
Here the narrator meets a young sailor, and their relationship is one
of tenderness — the kind of intimacy generally forbidden by the
street life. "Our encounter was not like those he was used to:
brief moments of self-gratification." Here we are given an
exemplum of the kind of deceit — prompted by homophobic culture
— which denies us the right to love by giving us only the right to
lust. The sailor responds to the narrator as if the latter were a life-
belt approaching him in an open sea, but there is no real conversation
between them because true intimacy is something the sailor has been
conditioned never to express out in the open. The narrator resolves to
leave him:
The sailor resembles Tadzio, the symbol of the boy-god Eros in Thomas
Mann's Death in Venice. Like Tadzio, his body
is physically perfect except for one flaw; the former has decaying
teeth, and the latter has a broken nose. Like the birthmark in one of
Hawthorne's tales, this single flaw represents their link with
humanity, but nevertheless there is too much of the deity sublimated
within them to be attainable by mere mortals.
On the sailor's chest is tattooed the phrase PAS DE
CHANCE in blue capital letters. It means that he is fated to be
"unlucky" — just as a leatherman in one of Thom Gunn's
poems has tattooed on his shoulders the words "Born to be
Unlucky," signifying resignation to defeat. Cultural homophobia is
incorporated into the homosexual subculture by this kind of taboo
ritual. The ritual of submission is a means of
containing despair, of giving it limits in
order to prevent total helplessness. It is a typical rite of inversion,
often found in Genet's novels, by which one celebrates precisely that
which is condemned so as to mitigate its harmfulness. By accepting bad
luck as our "fate," we are better able to stoically cope with
life — though of course this also prevents us from challenging
homophobia.
It is difficult to gauge precisely at what points Cocteau is
deliberately exploiting symbolism. The episode with the sailor is a
miniature fabliau centering upon an
allegorical tattoo, the central moral being that of "doom" or
"fate." On a less explicit level, however, the episode
mirrors one of the "three episodes" of his childhood memory.
The sailor is named Tapageuse, meaning
"timid animal" — just as earlier the narrator had been
frightened by a "hare," and it perhaps is symbolic that as he
leaves Tapageuse he sees a man emerging from a door carrying a shotgun
— just as he himself had carried a gun long ago. Whether
deliberately symbolic or not, the impression in both incidents is that
he is fearful of part of himself and therefore represses part of
himself.
Margaret Crosland in a brief criticism of the novel, superficially
misunderstands this and other episodes, as have all critics. She says:
The narrator then moves on to the darker pleasures of an
établissement de bains, a combination
sauna and brothel. Cocteau makes it clear that this establishment
represents only one part of the gay world: "equivalent, in the
love of man for man, to clandestine rendezvous and meetings with whores
in the love of women." Though the sauna is an overtly homosexual
establishment, it actually performs an important function for
heterosexual culture: "Most of the customers were rich
industrialists who came from the north to satisfy their needs and then
rejoined their wives and children." Again the subject of this
episode is not homosexuality, but homophobia. The buyers and the
sellers in this establishment totally fail to comprehend the nature of
friendship or love, and regard mere physical gratification as something
separate from the personality of daily life. It is simply an adult
version of the furtive masturbation and "tricks" or boys'
schools.
The narrator of course realizes that this degrades his ideal of
homosexual love, and is filled with "bitterness" as well as
"satiety." But then he flies off to the opposite extreme
— from hell to heaven — and becomes a religious neophyte. The
motivation for conversion is homophobic self-disgust:
Homosexual behavior is of course the most overt — and in some ways
the most superficial — manifestation of the entire gay personality
or sensibility, and this personality cannot be transformed by religious
conversion. One can become celibate, but one cannot renounce one's
desire. Thus the homosexual religious convert can never escape the
conflict between (1) the need to chastise and purify "the sinful
self" created by the self-disgust of homophobia, and (2) the need
to affirm that very same self, for it is the authentic self. The
narrator never "succeeds" in achieving ecstasy by sublimating
his emotions toward Christ the great brother-figure, for he has gone
through too much experience and has already passed through various
stages of self-acceptance.
For a while he tries celibacy, by spending his time in solitary rides
in a row boat (no temptation in sight). On the symbolic level of the
novel, he has gone to the primordial pool which was on the edge of his
father's estate. He in a sense becomes the farm-boy bather that he saw
there, and, like Narcissus or Hyacinthus, he makes love to Apollo the
sun-god while masturbating:
But the narrator's love for H, like all his other loves, "seems
doomed to failure." It is as though homosexuals are indeed "a
race accursed," though again we must realize that the substantive
question is: Cursed by whom? And the answer, again, is: By cultural
homophobia. The relationship of the narrator and H is turbulent and
heart-rending and pitiable — because H is doomed to also love
women. Actually, he is not really bisexual, and he doesn't really love
women: he seeks them out in order to relieve his own homophobic self-
disgust, and because he believes that "the masculine" must
subjugate "the feminine" in order to remain
"manly." H's confession to the narrator is a paradigm of the
pseudo-bisexual:
Eventually H dies from the use of narcotics supplied by his Russian
mistress. "The addiction was too far advanced for him to turn
back" could well be a comment on the compensatory bisexuality by
which homosexuals succumb to society rather than affirm their gayness.
Like Alfred returning to Rose, H is strangled by his umbilical cord to
a homophobic and sexist culture.
In spite of his immense grief, the narrator feels unable "to turn
again to the Church," for during his affair with H he had sought
out, but been denied, consolation from this essentially homophobic
institution. Cocteau's deep bitterness toward the Church is kept well
under control, but is all the more effectively expressed through simple
understatement and irony, as in the following dialogue with Abbé'
X:
The style of Le Livre Blanc, as of all
Cocteau's fiction, is exceedingly sparse, and the last few pages of the
narrative are a bit unsatisfactory. One has the impression that Cocteau
is rushing toward a conclusion, perhaps because the events were too
painful for him to recount at length. In the space of a single page he
gives us the mere outline of the narrator's attempt to get married in
one last futile effort to go straight — the ultimate perversion of
the homosexual personality. But instead he falls in love with the
brother of his fiancee, and again we see the repeat of a familiar
pattern. Because of the sexist dialectic, the brother loves himself,
hates his sister, and is jealous that the narrator insists on marrying
her. He spitefully reveals to her that the narrator is homosexual; the
narrator strikes him; and the brother kills himself. Probably one
reason for the brevity of this passage is that Cocteau does not quite
want to show how brutal his homophobic hero has become. The narrator
"hasn't the courage" to tell the sister about his love for
her brother, and the homophobic secrecy which he requires from the
brother (in contrast to the secrecy earlier required from him by
Alfred) precipitates the catastrophe.
The final page of the book is a sudden cascade of the morals of the
tale — none of which condemn homosexuality, all of which condemn
homophobia. The final two lines have often been quoted by members of
the gay movement, for they were the cornerstone of the modern gay
liberation spirit in its struggle against liberal blandness:
It is a curiously weak response, characteristic of the sense of
yearning to escape experienced by homosexuals in the 1930s, when they
did not yet realize that they were against the wall with no place to
flee for refuge. However unrealistic this exile might be, the
narrator's decision is nevertheless squarely founded upon a rejection
of the homophobic judgment of society: "in exiling myself I am not
exiling a monster, but a man whom society will not allow to live, since
it considers one of the mysterious cogs in God's masterpiece to be a
mistake." He hopes that someone may publish these memoirs
precisely so that society may understand this fact: that
homophobia is the problem, not
homosexuality.
But twentieth-century Western society is so thoroughly heterosexist in
its structure that it has not accepted this analysis of the situation.
And the book leaves us with a bitter aftertaste, and impression of
Cocteau's essentially defeatist attitude: "The world accepts
dangerous experiments in the realm of art because it does not take art
seriously, but it condemns them in life." So in terms of its
relevance for social change, Le Livre Blanc
is probably all for naught: after the martyrdom of its hero, there are
only ashes.
Cocteau's analysis of homophobia is not quite "pure" or
politically correct. But in 1928 it could hardly be well-founded upon
the central premises of gay liberation. It is also typically French:
even today the most active members of the French homophile movement are
exceedingly conservative, and Arcadie, for example, was formally
denounced by the more militant Dutch gay organization COC (which
officially denied Arcadie members entry into its gay clubs). Many
modern French homosexuals since Cocteau's time have allowed themselves
to be slapped on both cheeks while pathetically muttering, "I am
not a monster."
Cocteau, like his hero, did in effect exile himself from society, by
cultivating a paradoxical style and surrealistic imagery inaccessible
to most people, and by generally refraining from social reform
commitments. The more liberated French gay usually rejects Cocteau's
aloofness in favour of Gide's sincerity. But in spite of the maudlin
self-pity that swamps the last few pages of Le Livre
Blanc, the book as a whole constitutes one of the first
— and still one of the most accurate — extended analyses of
homophobia in literature. Whether or not Cocteau's analysis will ever
be appreciated for what it is, remains a moot point.
Copyright © 1975, 1998 Rictor Norton
During the same period Marcel Proust had "boldly" written a
work in which he disguised his boyfriend Albert as the heroine
Albertine, upon the premise that one can say anything one wishes as
long as one reverses the gender of the pronouns. He was of course
mistaken: one cannot say anything one wishes if one is forced to lie.
André Gide was virtually the only French writer of the period
who nearly came out, but even he was more
than coy in the homoerotic passages in his works. So we can note and
then dismiss Cocteau's action as one "typical of the circumstances
of his age." It is typical, however, that Cocteau's anonymity was
a deliberate design suited to his purpose. The title of the book —
Le Livre Blanc — is equivalent to the
English phrase "White Paper," and the purpose of the book is
to present an impersonal and objective
report, "compiled by committee" as it were,
rather than a personal narrative.
My misfortunes are due to a society which condemns anything out of the
ordinary as a crime and forces us to reform our natural inclinations.
And his sociological comments about homophobia are both penetrating and
revealing, as in his evaluation of his father as a typical latent
homosexual:
There exist pederasts [the French apply pédé to all
"queers" regardless of age-preferences] who are unaware of
their own nature and live to the end of their days in a state of
uneasiness which they ascribe to poor health or a jealous nature. ...
My father was no doubt unaware of his inclination and instead of
pursuing it he strenuously followed another without knowing what made
his life so unbearable. ... Had he even discovered his tastes or found
the opportunity to develop them, he would have been astonished. At that
period people killed themselves for less. But no; he lived in ignorance
of himself and accepted his burden.
The point of this passage is not to analyze homosexuality or to provide
a sensational personal account of how a young man may become homosexual
due to his father's latent homosexuality, but to expose the subtle
workings of homophobia in the lives of people.
"You're silly," he told me. "It's easy. Invite Dargelos
one Sunday, take him behind the trees and that'll do the
trick!"
Cocteau treats with light irony the romantic extremes of the young
narrator's first infatuation, and the narrator literally falls sick
when the equally uncomprehending Dargelos rejects him. But the emphasis
is upon the clear lack of love and compassion among his homophobic
classmates. "Without actually describing my suffering as love, I
sense that it was very different from what went on in the classroom and
that it would find no response there." When Dargelos dies, only
the narrator weeps upon hearing of this tragedy, and the other boys
continue their ways "as normal."
"What trick?" There wasn't any trick. I muttered that it
wasn't a question of the kind of pleasure that could easily be had in
class and I tried in vain to describe my dreams in words. ... I
realized that it was impossible to make myself understood. ... My urge
would not be to amuse myself for five minutes but to live with him
forever.
Onanism gave way to boasting. Postcards circulated. All these young
things now turned towards women as plants turn to the sun. It was then,
in order to follow the others, that I began to falsify my nature. As
they hastened towards their own truth they dragged me towards
falsehood. I pretended to share their enthusiasms while having to
overcome my feelings of shame. In the end this self-discipline made my
task fairly easy.
This is quite a remarkable description of how homosexual self-
oppression develops in the young person, through the inculcation of
guilt, shame and anxiety. However, even though playing a dual role
builds up tension and anxiety and negative self-conceptions, practice
makes perfect and it becomes an easy habit.
I realized I had taken the wrong turning. I vowed that I would not get
lost again, that in future I would go straight along my own path
instead of going astray on someone else's, and that I would listen more
to the dictates of my senses than to the counsels of morality.
Unfortunately the decision to accept oneself — however just and
true and self-liberating — by no means guarantees happiness or
fulfilment. We are still bound by the strictures of the homophobic
culture that encircles us. The relationship of the narrator and Alfred
is "strengthened by deceit," for they conceal their affair
from Rose. Secrecy has the merit of intensifying private passion, but
the inability to express affection in public ultimately breaks down the
relationship. "Alfred, who was lazy, began to find lying
wearisome." The narrator comes from a slightly upper-class
background, and he is better enabled to play dual roles because he is
used to the polity of the facade. But Alfred comes from the underworld
background, where virtually nothing remains a secret for long, and the
dual role is a strain for him. He attempts to leave Rose for the
narrator, but he has already been too well conditioned to his
lifestyle. He returns slobbering to Rose out of habit. The ties that
bind a pimp to his prostitute (a heterosexual chain) are too strong to
be broken by the terrifying freedom offered by a homosocial lifestyle.
No, I thought, we don't belong to the same order. He's already
beautiful enough to move a flower, a tree or an animal. Impossible to
live with.
The logic of this decision may seem callous as well as satiric, but
part of the meaning is that the sailor, by trying to be the archetypal
hustler, has become an object of beauty
rather than a subject: merely one of the desserts on the menu of the
Faubourg. He is an icon before whom one can burn incense, but with whom
it is difficult to share oneself.
Each episode ends in death or heart-breaking separation. The general
impression is that homosexual love is doomed to failure,
disappointment, treachery or death, but there is no feeling, even
implicit, that these sufferings represent punishment in any way.
Crosland is responding to the novel within the traditional framework of
homophobic expectation. She entirely fails to appreciate the point that
homosexual love is not inherently doomed but
doomed by external forces. Homosexual love in
itself is not "fated" to disappointment: it is homophobic
society that decrees this fate. As the narrator makes explicit in a
later passage: "Why had I not foreseen this new trick of fate
which persecutes me and conceals beneath other guises a destiny which
is always the same?" The conflict is between the external
"fate" of homophobia that persecutes the internal
"destiny" of homosexual desire. When Crosland observes that
"the narrator tries to behave well but never succeeds," she
seems to accept without question the prejudice that the misfortunes of
homosexuals are due to an inherent weakness in their own characters,
rather than due to their strength in holding onto their basic nature in
the face of insuperable odds. Basically, Crosland has missed the
message of the novel. Traditional literary criticism fails to
comprehend homosexual literature because it fails to comprehend
homophobia.
I wanted to see only too quickly proof that I had taken the wrong road.
... Normal love, I thought, is not denied me. Nothing prevents me from
founding a family and returning to the straight and narrow path. ... I
will fight against the devil and I will be victorious.
By so starkly and melodramatically stating the narrator's feelings,
Cocteau underlines the narrator's error of judgment. Coupled with the
narrator's self-disgust is an even more basic need for self-
justification. He enters a church not so much because he wishes to
renounce his ways, but because he needs to be forgiven. When he prays
to the Virgin Mary he has already decided that homosexuality is not
really as bad as society thinks:
What men see to be indecent, surely you see it as we see the amorous
exchange of pollens and atoms! I will obey the orders of your son's
ministers on earth, but I know very well that his goodness does not
stop with the chicanery of Father Sinistrarius and the rules of an old
criminal code. Amen.
(The old criminal code is Leviticus and its anti-sodomy
statutes; Sinistrarius wrote an incredible treatise about witches,
demons and homosexuals.)
The sun is an old lover who knows his role well. He begins by holding
you down all over with firm hands. He puts his arms round you. He
seizes hold of you, throws you down, and then suddenly I would find
myself coming to in a stupefied state, my belly soaked with a liquid
resembling mistletoe berries.
His homosexual auto-eroticism again prompts homophobic disgust —
"I hated myself" — but again he cannot deny his true
self, and "in the end my prayer was reduced to a plea for
forgiveness." Forgiveness comes personified in the form of a young
man whom he discovers bathing in the nude — yet another
manifestation of the powerful image of the farm-boy of his childhood
memory. He falls in love with this man named "H" and adopts
the typical rationalization of the homosexual Christian (by which
modern gay Christians still attempt to harmonize their homosexuality
with their Christianity): "God loves me. In loving one another, we
prove to Christ that we know how to read between the lines, which are
inevitably those of a severe legislator."
There was both woman and man in me. The woman was subject to you; the
man rebelled against this subjection. I didn't like women. I sought
them out to sidetrack myself and prove to myself that I was free. The
vain, stupid man within me was the enemy of our love.
As a result of this homophobic/sexist conflict, their relationship is
fraught with lies, deceit, jealousy, confrontations, ultimatums, and
even violence.
"Monsieur l'Abbé," I asked him, "do you love
me?"
"I love you."
"Would you be glad to learn that at last I feel happy?"
"Very glad."
"Well, know that I am happy but in a way that the Church and the
world disapprove of, for it's friendship that makes me happy and for me
friendship has no limits." ...
"My dear boy," the Abbé told me in the vestry,
"if it were only a question of risking my place in heaven, I
wouldn't be risking very much, for I believe that God's goodness
surpasses what we imagine. But there is my place on earth. The Jesuits
are watching me closely."
We embraced. ... I thought how admirable was the economy of God. It
gives love when one lacks it, and, in order to avoid a pleonasm of the
heart, refuses it to those who have it.
But I will not agree to be tolerated. This damages my love
of love and of liberty.
A very fine statement, but the action accompanying it is precisely the
opposite of the modern gay activist. Instead of demanding freedom and
taking a resolute stand, the narrator decides to "withdraw from
this society" because of the "vice of society" —
i.e., homophobia.
CITATION: If you cite this Web page, please use the following form of citation:
Rictor Norton, "Cocteau's White Paper on Homophobia",
Gay History and Literature, updated 9 Jan. 2000 <http://rictornorton.co.uk/cocteau.htm>.
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