Wedding dress designed by John Galliano, worn by Gwen Stefani, 2002
“Certainly, to talk about monogamy is to talk about virtually everything that might matter. . . . Monogamy is a kind of moral nexus, a keyhole through we can spy on our preoccupations.” – Adam Phillips, Monogamy, ii.
“Nothing defeats us like success. It is always more baffling—more essentially ironic—than failure.” — Adam Phillips, Monogamy, #47.
“Owe no one anything, except to love one another.” — Paul of Tarsus, Romans 13:8
I.
I am no apologist for monogamy.
Yet, most people desire it for themselves. And most people, even those for whom it seems to be working out well, don’t seem to love monogamy. I think that is interesting.
Most people don’t love monogamy, but yet they still believe in it. So, it is worth asking: What promises to make loving monogamy promising?
My answer is irony. Irony is the key to loving monogamy. Or so I will now argue.
Monogamy is a sacred cultural norm, but as Adam Phillips, in a fascinating interview regarding his book, Monogamy (1996), observes, “the flawed relationship, or the relationship that doesn’t work, gets all the press.” We have a lot of interest in relational failure.
What we don’t have, according to Phillips, “is . . . very good language for celebrating good relationships. There’s a sense in which the good monogamous relationship . . . doesn’t have very good language to describe it. I think that is interesting.”
In the aforementioned interview, Phillips searches for good enough language to describe “what makes relationships between people work.”
I think what makes relationships work between people is extremely mysterious. I mean, we used to call it chemistry. And if it weren’t so silly, I’d want to go back to using words like that. Something really quite mysterious and unpredictable happens between people.
The “mysterious and unpredictable” quality of relationships between people is likely what inspires us to lean on the language of faith to describe relationships that work, as the “mysterious and unpredictable” quality of those relationships likely calls forth our, to use Julia Kristeva’s idea for my own purposes, “incredible need to believe.”
“Believing in monogamy,” Phillips writes, “is not unlike believing in God” (Monogamy, #1).
II.
Mechthild of Magdeburg offers us one interesting example of what it is like to believe in God. In Flowing Light of the Godhead (written between 1250-1280 CE), Mechthild seeks sex with God. Advised instead “to refresh [herself] in love” by bowing “down to the small Child in the lap of the eternal virgin,” she refuses (see Book I, §44).
Mechthild refuses to accept the blessed child as a proxy for her Lover/God. “That is child’s love, that one suckle and rock a baby,” she asserts. “I am a full-grown bride. I want to go to my Lover” (§44).
She is warned about how dangerous is such a direct approach to God: “Oh, Lady, if you go there / We shall go completely blind / The Godhead is so blazing hot” (§44). So warned, she goes directly to God.
Upon meeting her Lover, Mechthild is encouraged to take off all of her clothes. What follows is a kind of anticipatory silence between them. She discreetly alludes to what happens next: “What happens to her then—she knows— / And that is fine with me” (§44).
Mechthild and God enjoy a quickie. “[T]his cannot last long,” she observes. And they depart from one another “inseparably” (§44).
The brief sexual meeting of Mechthild and God is described as taking place in secret: “When two lovers meet secretly / They must often part from one another inseparably” (§44). In seeking sexual intimacy with God through contemplation (the 13th-century virtual world?), the Beguine mystic secretly escapes her existing relationship to the world, including to the Church.
Mechthild’s theology is interesting because she explicitly includes sexual pleasure as a feature of what it is like to believe in God. “And about pleasure we are all mystics.” Or so Phillips argues. “We are all terrified of suffering too much of it. For some people the best solution to this is infidelity, for others monogamy. To each [their] own asceticism” (#71).
Mechthild’s asceticism is, I think, a form of infidelity. Infidelity, however, is not always what we think it is. In escaping her existing relationship to the world of people, she reveals the one with whom she is actually doing monogamy. She desires God. Infidelity is always intertwined with monogamy.
Infidelity, moreover, is not always as dangerous as we think it is. “People have relationships,” Phillips contends, “not because they want to feel safe—though they often think they do—but because they want to find out what the danger is. This is where infidelity can let people down” (#34).
Mechthild, warned about the danger of rawdogging God, ends up proving herself right: there is, in fact, no danger in having sex with God. Prior to hooking up with God, she argues: “A fish in water does not drown. / A bird in the air does not plummet. / Gold in fire does not perish. . . . / How, then, am I to resist my nature? / I must go from all things to God / Who is my Father by nature” (§44). Sex with God is, for Mechthild, the safest sex imaginable because it is sex with her very nature.
Her “nature” begins to take on meaning when she refuses the blessed Child. Her desire to go directly to God is about far more than an unwillingness to allow Jesus to fuck up her relationship with God. “Child’s love,” notice, is defined in parental, specifically maternal, terms. It is “child’s love, that one suckle and rock a baby.” In refusing the blessed Child, Mechthild is refusing to identify with the maternal figure of her love story. So “utterly formed to [God’s] nature, / not the slightest thing,” however, “can come between [her] and [God, her Father by nature]” (§44). Mechthild radically identifies with God the Father.
The meaning of her “nature” is also signified by the easy interchability of the main roles in her love story, Lover and beloved. Mechthild clearly defines God as the Lover of her story. Yet, she is the one who is obsessed with God. She is the one who knocks down the door to God’s bedchamber. She is the one who insists on sex with God. In this story, Mechthild is the Lover, or God (i.e., the subject of erôs)—and God is the beloved, or Mechthild (i.e., the love-object).
Sex with God is the safest sex one can think of because God is, at least in Book I, §44 of Flowing Light, Mechthild (and vice versa). Sex with God is the safest sex, the safest incest one can think of because it is not unlike masturbaton. “My sexual relationship with myself,” Phillips observes, “is a study in monogamy” (#60).
“The virtue of monogamy,” Phillips contends, “is the ease with which it can turn sex into masturbation [which Phillips also describes as “safe incest”]; the vice of monogamy is that it gives you nothing else. . . . The only truly monogamous relationship is the one we have with ourselves” (#101).
Believing in God is not unlike the incredible need to believe in ourselves.
Nonetheless, most people are not as faithful to God as is Mechthild. “Why,” wonders Phillips, “do we, at least apparently, [continue to] have sex with other people, why include them at all?” (#101). What is the danger?
III.
David M. Halperin identifies a surprising feature of sex that may account for why we want to include, apparently, other people in our sex lives. The danger of sex with an-other person is the promise of love.
In “What Is Sex For?” (2016), Halperin tries to make sense of why Adele’s hit song, “Someone Like You” (2011) is “blaring” from a gay bathhouse in Hanoi. To that end, he turns to Aristotle, specifically to Aristotle’s Prior Analytics, chapter 22 of part 2.
According to Halperin, Aristotle argues “that it is in the nature of erotic desire itself to seek—in and through sex, customarily—the experience of being loved. Love is the telos of erotic desire. It is not love that aims at sex as its goal or that seeks to express itself through the act of sex. It is sex that aims at love” (19, emphasis original).
To the subject of erôs, to the one inhabited by erotic desire (rather than by lust or by appetite), sex is, customarily, a means to love. I initially read Halperin’s summary of Aristotle to mean that sex mediates between erotic desire (or passion) and love: erotic desire, through sex, seeks love.
My initial reading of Halperin’s summary of Aristotle was a promising mis-reading, as it provoked thought about the space between erotic desire and love. However, as the last sentence of the summary above indicates, erotic desire is taking the form of sex in Aristotle’s argument. Erotic desire = sex.
Halperin goes on to significantly complicate Aristotle’s already subtle sexual logic. For example, he wonders if sex does, in fact, naturally seek love? Does erotic desire naturally seek what is beyond itself? Halperin does not directly answer that question in “What Is Sex For?,” but he does answer it in an earlier work, How To Be Gay (2012).
Sex, however, is not the subject of How To Be Gay. Erotic desire customarily, but not always, takes the form of sex. It can take other, cultural, forms. Erotic desire can take the form of an obsession with interior design or with feminine figures, like Joan Crawford. Halperin explores the cultural vicissitudes of erotic desire in How To Be Gay.
The lesson of How To Be Gay is that erotic desire does not, not naturally, seek love. Mechthild’s example teaches us the same lesson, but in a different erotic sphere: sex does not naturally seek love-objects: objects beyond the confines of its exacting criteria.
Erotic desire does not, not naturally, seek what is beyond itself. Its love-objects are always underwhelming. So, if what we want is to somehow love the objects of our desire, then we must learn to do something with our erotic desire.
If what we want is a loving monogamy, then we must learn to ironize sex.
IV.
In How To Be Gay, traditional gay male culture teaches its disciples how to re-direct erotic desire through irony, specifically through camp irony, to its love-objects. Describing camp irony may give us an example of how to ironize sex, of how to think of sex in terms of irony.
To that end, we may consult a promising section of How To Be Gay. Notice how camp and intimacy are intimately intertwined in the lengthy citation below. Moreover, camp and intimacy are linked in the context of explaining the lasting character of a monogamous relationship:
Many years ago I asked a friend of mine in Boston, who had been living with the same boyfriend for a very long time, if it had ever occurred to them to want to get married. “Oh, no,” he said with a laugh, “we’d have terrible fights over who got to wear the wedding dress.” That witticism, if it had been directed against someone other than oneself, or against someone other than the person one loved, would have registered as merely demeaning in its implicit demotion of a man from the noble rank of male dignity to the lower rank of female triviality. And it would be doubly demeaning in the context of gay male love: since male homosexuality sees in masculinity an essential erotic value, to portray oneself or one’s partner as characterized by feminine identification to public mockery, would be to depreciate oneself or one’s boyfriend as a sexual object and vehicle of sexual fantasy.
. . . .
Leo Bersani conveys powerfully the sense of gay chagrin at the ineluctable failure of gay masculinity by citing “the classic put-down: the butch number swaggering into a bar in a leather get-up opens his mouth and sounds like a pansy, takes you home where the first thing you notice is the complete works of Jane Austin, gets you into bed and—well, you know the rest.”
Or in the unlikely event that, even after getting you into bed, he still managed to keep up butch appearances, all your remaining illusions would be shattered—according to the lead character of Armistead Maupin’s Tale of The City (1978)—when you eventually excused yourself to use his bathroom and discovered his supply of personal cosmetics.
. . . .
It is in this context that my friend’s remark about his boyfriend and himself coveting the wedding dress reveals its true significance. To utter it is to know oneself and one’s love-object as unworthy of the serious consideration that is masculine dignity’s due. It is to disclaim the presence to masculine authenticity, and the erotic credit that accrues to it, and to refuse in camp fashion to dignify oneself at the expense of someone else’s shame. At the same time, it insists that such inauthenticity is not incompatible with gay love. . . . On the contrary, it demonstrates that inauthenticity is not fatal to love, that seriousness does not have to prevail over irony in order for love to thrive and to endure.
To see through one’s own erotic illusions without withdrawing from one’s love-object its worthiness to be loved, to disclaim one’s entitlement to respect while continuing to assert it, to love and be loved without endowing one’s love with dignity; this is the possibility that traditional gay male culture holds out to its adherents. The supreme wisdom consists in living one’s life knowingly as melodrama—understanding full well (if not necessarily explicitly) that melodrama signifies both a degraded genre of literary discourse and a debased pragmatic genre of emotional expression: a despised, feminized, laughable, trivial style of expressing one’s feelings.
No wonder my friends from Boston could build a lasting relationship together while the gay baths and back rooms and sex clubs and online cruising sites thrive on the business of gay romantics, who prefer their own illusions, their fantasies of love, to actual people—people who, after all, cannot sustain those illusions, not at least for very long. That last remark is hardly intended as a put-down of those who frequent the baths . . . ; it’s just a reminder of what those unique gay male institutions are for. Which is not to help us live happily ever after, but to enable us to crowd as many anti-social thrills as possible into the moment and to provide us with a structured communal space in which to . . . discharge our romantic fantasies—without doing ourselves or our partners any lasting harm.
To live one’s life as melodrama, to do so knowingly and deliberately, is not of course to refuse to take it seriously—as any gay Joan Crawford fan . . . can tell you. But it is to accept the inauthenticity at the core of romantic love, to understand romantic love as a social institution, an ideology, a role, a performance, a social genre, while still, self-consciously and undeceivedly, succumbing to it.
In short, it is to do what is otherwise culturally impossible—impossible for normal folks, that is to combine passion with irony (291-294).
Participation in gay male culture enables the boyfriends from Boston to do what would otherwise be impossible, “impossible for normal folks, that is to combine passion with irony.” By putting on, if you will, a wedding dress, the boyfriends from Boston reveal their identification with a particular form of irony, with a particular fashion style, namely camp.
“Camp fashion,” as Halperin defines it above, is a refusal “to dignify oneself at the expense of someone else’s shame.” The specific object of its refusal is seriousness. Camp refuses to take masculinity seriously, as something other than a role, an ideology, a melodramatic performance. And at the same time, camp does not dismiss the erotic value of masculinity simply because it is a performance. To the contrary, camp enables one to “self-consciously and undeceivedly” enjoy it—and even to “[succumb] to it.”
It is camp fashion, camp irony, that enables the boyfriends from Boston to live their lives “knowingly as melodrama,” to embody both passion and irony at once—and it promises to make their relationship promising or lasting.
The couple’s participation in camp culture is contrasted in the citation above with gay male participation in sexual institutions like “gay baths and back rooms and sex clubs and online cruising sites.” All those gay male romantics wandering the halls of the baths, clothed only in simple white towels, indicate that there is nothing essentially ironic about (gay male) sex.
That is why Adele’s hit song, “Someone Like You,” blaring from a bathhouse in Hanoi, is so interesting. Like the wedding dress, the song alerts us to the (probable) presence of gay male culture. “[I]t is probable,” Halperin writes in “What Is Sex For?,” “that at least some bathhouse patrons, especially those of us who go often, have a further purpose in returning to those venues again and again . . . . Could we be in search of something that sex promises but does not, by itself, offer us . . . ,” namely “someone like you”?
Sex “promises” something that it cannot, “by itself,” deliver—and the (probable) presence of gay male culture reveals what sex requires to get to love: irony. Subjects of erôs must learn to “see through” their erotic illusions. Seeing through their erotic illusions, they are enabled to enjoy the “butch number” or the hot sex while also refusing to withdraw from the other person, on account of the sound of their voice, their obsession with Jane Austen, or their personal cosmetics (on account of their failure to perfectly live up to the exacting demands of erotic desire), their worthiness to be loved.
V.
We now recognize camp as an erotic style, a way of combining what is serious and unserious, sacred and profane, passionate and ironic. But we are trying to describe the erotic style appropriate to sex. Describing how camp camps—how, that is, camp manages to combine traditionally opposed, unequal social values—will help us more precisely define the erotic style appropriate to our sex lives.
What camp does is teach us how to demean erotic desire. “Gay may culture,” Halperin writes in How To Be Gay, “has . . . elaborated a distinctive, dissident perspective on romantic love [i.e., erotic desire], which straight people often regard as cynical. . . ” (294). Straight people regard it as cynical because “its irony . . . seems to them to undermine the seriousness and sincerity of love, and thereby demean it” (294, emphasis mine).
“Camp doesn’t preach;” Halperin observes, “it demeans” (191). It demeans the serious, the sacred, the masculine. In other words, camp sets erotic desire free; it breaks “the romantic monopoly on it,” making it “more widely available” for “social uses,” ending “the antagonism between love [i.e., erotic desire] and society, between love [i.e., erotic desire] and friendship, between the happy couple and the community.” It is this “camp sensibility” that, “at their wisest, gay male love [i.e., erotic] relationships exemplify and embody” (295).
Camp demeans erotic desire in a cultural context. In our sexual relationships, fucking is a word that registers something other than respectul, self-edifying coitus. In the sexual sphere, it seems promising to ironize erotic desire by fucking it.
By fucking erotic desire, the subjects of erôs, at least those who participate in gay male culture, are enabled to “see through” their erotic illusions, to see through what is taken as deadly serious, and to recognize it as a role that can be “undeceivedly” enjoyed. The aim is to end antagonisms (e.g., between the sacred and the profane, self and other), to make love (or friendship) with an-other a promising possibility.
VI.
The reason why fucking or demeaning erotic desire matters is latent in the idea of what it promises to make promising: the end of antagonisms, love of/friendship with an-other one. Fucking erotic desire (e.g., masculinity, the Sacred, monogamy, etc.) is a means of democratizing it (or, as Halperin also argues, desublimating it [294]). Fucking erotic desire is the erotic fashion of embodying what are traditionally opposed, unequal social values (e.g., fidelity and infidelity).
Again, a simple social practice, one we may playfully describe as drinking erotic desire, may help us to more clearly define what is at stake in fucking it: democracy or love.
In “Small Town Boy: Neil Bartlett Learns How to Be Gay” (2007), Halperin highlights power inequalities between differently aged gay men. The social practice proposed as a means of negotiating power disparities between said men is, now citing Bartlett, “that man buying his younger boyfriend (slightly embarrassed, but happily drunk) another drink.”
Bartlett cannot think the seemingly simple, everyday practice of an older man buying his younger boyfriend a drink without remembering “that man,” Oscar Wilde: “I remember the bizarre twisting of mythologies [i.e., romantic illusions] Wilde used to justify his adoration of young men,” Bartlett writes, “the mixing of a pastiche of Classical pederasty with a missionary zeal for the ‘criminal classes,’ the sense that they, not the boys he left sleeping in [his home in] Chelsea, were his true sons . . . .” Remembering this history, “[o]ur history,” according to Bartlett, “becomes a way of understanding and exploring the change in our [present day] culture [i.e., of writing a history of the present], not simply of reading it as an ‘end.’”
From Bartlett’s perspective, an older man buying his younger boyfriend a drink “is not,” Halperin observes, “necessarily a mere recapitulation of archaic and unchanging forms of social hierarchy, upper-class sexual privilege and working-class sexual prostitution.” It is, at least potentially, now again citing Bartlett, “a new kind of relationship, an affair of the heart somehow appropriate to the meeting of two different men . . . .”
“Differences in age and wealth,” Halperin writes, “may actually be serving new, dynamic social functions, creating possibilities . . . among men who are asymmetrically situated according to conventional class hierarchies but are brought into approximate equality by the reciprocal exchanges of contemporary gay male life.”
Sex—well, at least understood from within the logic of Adele’s “Someone Like You”—may not be unlike that drink between an older man and his younger boyfriend (perhaps they are sitting at bar while Whitney Houston’s hit song, “How Will I Know?,” plays in the background?). That drink “may actually be serving new, dynamic social functions, creating possibilities . . . among men who” occupy differently valued social categories and by bringing them “into approximate equality.” Sex, like that drink, may become, to use Bartlett’s terms, “an affair of the heart somehow appropriate to the meeting of two different men.”
VII.
Monogamy/marriage can’t, as Phillips argues, be an affair—but it is possible that fucking sex may re-make it into a matter “of the heart somehow appropriate to the meeting of two different men,” two different women, two different people (#83).
Loving monogamy is not unlike dis-believing in God.
Un-faithfulness to God is not what we learn from Mechthild’s example. In Flowing Light, at least Book I, §44, we walk in on Mechthild masturbating; we witness Mechthild’s incredible need to believe in herself. She is both the subject and object of erotic desire.
Mechthild, however, is different from other subjects of erôs, such as the “romantics” we encountered in the lengthy citation from How To Be Gay. Romantics are constantly disappointed when their love-objects, recognized as distinct objects in the world, fail to conform to their erotic illusions. Mechthild is her own love-object.
Mechthild does not admit any space between her and her love-object. There is no room to hope for irony in Mechthild’s erotic life. She is “so utterly formed to [God’s] nature” that “not the slightest thing can be between [her] and [God, her Father by nature].”
Mechthild and gay male romantics do share one thing in common. They look up to the heavens. This is where fidelity can sometimes let people down.
Mechchild’s love story may prove promising, however, for the idea that God, the word par excellence for the deadly serious, the seriously masculine, the Sacred, wholeness/health, etc, is dtf.
The promise of a fuckable God, of a fuckable monogamy, a monogamy we learn to take im-personally or un-seriously, is what God’s fuckablity makes promising: a lasting, loving relationship with an-other, or a loving monogamy. Fucking God, we, at least potentially, empower an-other one, a different one, to excite us.
Significantly, fucking God does not come naturally to us. It is something we must learn to do. The irony is that being a participant in gay male culture is not unlike being a member of the Church. Halperin hints at this in How To Be Gay. The epigraph of the book, Albert Mollegen’s summary of Augustine’s theology, reads: “Let the Christians baptize and the pagans beget.”
Gay male culture, not unlike Christianity, entails enculturation. It is not a birthright. Gay male culture, not unlike monogamy, is unnatural. As such, anyone who finds it persuasive may participate in it. Which makes sense, as gay male culture, not unlike Christianity, not unlike monogamy, is an education in how to love who and what you erotically desire.
One, final irony: if a loving monogamy is what is desired, “it may be heterosexuals, nowadays . . . who need gay male culture more than gay men do themselves” (How To Be Gay, 456).
