SEXUALITY RESEARCH & SOCIAL POLICY Journal of NSRC

Sexuality Research & Social Policy

Journal of NSRC http://nsrc.sfsu.edu

Foucault, Gay Marriage, and Gay

and Lesbian Studies in the United States
An Interview with David Halperin

Interview by Cymene Howe

Cymene Howe (CH): In terms of social and political
transformation in the United States, how do you think
Foucault’s work, or social constructionist ideas in
general, transformed the political and social climate of
the United States to bring us to the point where we are
today? Perhaps you can also include your thoughts
about how Foucault might have responded to the
current discussion regarding gay marriage in the U.S.
David Halperin (DH): First of all, I should say I’m
no expert on the United States, on the contemporary
scene here, or on social movements in general in the
United States. It might seem that Foucault’s thought
has been responsible for some of the recent political
transformations in this country, and it is certainly true
that a number of people who were involved in ACT UP
New York in its glory days during the late 1980s were
academics or graduate students who were versed in
Foucault and who thought of Foucault’s work,
especially The History of Sexuality, Volume One: An
Introduction (1976), as a charter for sexual politics. But
I believe the influence has largely been in the opposite
direction. Foucault was inspired and his thinking was
transformed by the social movements he saw going on
around him, including ones that he couldn’t have
anticipated, even though some of them did come out of
his own work—or at least, if they didn’t come out of his
own work, they referred to it. Here I am thinking of the
anti-psychiatry movement, the movement associated
with R. D. Laing (1959) in Britain and later Thomas
Szasz (1960) in the U.S. Foucault was unaware of such
a movement, perhaps it had not even started when he
wrote his first book on the history of madness, but
when that book was seized upon and taken up by the
anti-psychiatry movement, which developed and
gathered speed later, he was very pleased. He said on a
number of occasions that he hoped people would use
his books as toolboxes from which they could get
implements to short circuit the workings of various
forms of domination.
But I think Foucault himself was surprised by the
student movement in May of 1968. He wasn’t even in
France at the time; he was in Tunisia. He was
overtaken as well by the development of the women’s
movement and the children’s rights movement. He did
play a big role in the prisoner’s rights movement in
France, but he was also influenced by it, and ultimately
his thinking was very strongly affected by the
emergence of the lesbian and gay movement in the
United States. I do not believe that Foucault could have
predicted the development of those movements on the
basis of his experience in France, and they certainly
were not generated by his work. However, his own
work was changed by them, and when at the end of his
life he developed an interest in what he called the
“aesthetics of existence” and invoked the way Greek
ethics refused to normalize populations but rather
stylized freedom to create new possibilities for the
shaping of free existence through various technologies
of the self, he was reflecting his experiences with gay
communities in the United States as much as he was
providing them with theoretical reflections that may
have proved useful to certain intellectuals in queer
theory.

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to David M. Halperin, Department of English, University of
Michigan, 3187 Angell Hall, 435 S. State Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48109. E-mail: halperin@umich.edu; Cymene Howe,
National Sexuality Resource Center, 2017 Mission Street, Ste. 300, San Francisco, CA 94110. E-mail: cymene@sfsu.edu

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September 2004 Vol. 1, No. 3 32

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SEXUALITY RESEARCH & SOCIAL POLICY
I feel very strongly that the creative dynamics of
gay culture are much more fertile, much more
powerful, than anything that most academics could
come up with on their own. I think that work in queer
theory has been strongest when it’s been most directly
inspired and shaped by the explosive creative energies
of lesbian and gay life in the U.S. The situation that we
now confront, in which there is more and more of a
divide between the academic wing of the lesbian and
gay movement and the mainstream lesbian and gay
movement in the U.S, is impoverishing for both, but it’s
especially troubling for our current academic work,
because it deprives us of a real source of energy and
imagination. You can see the nature of this gap if you
compare the 1993 gay and lesbian march on
Washington with the Millennium March in 2000. Even
though a lot of the speeches at the 1993 march were
devoted to the themes of gays in the military and gay
marriage—two topics that had not been especially
prominent or promoted by the academic queer left—
there was still a very strong participation of left-wing
intellectuals and gay academics in this march, whereas
the 2000 march was pretty much boycotted en masse
by gay intellectuals and by the academic left. So at that
point, by 2000, you could see that the popular
movement and the academic wing of the movement
had pretty much gone in different directions. In some
sense it could be claimed now that certain important
cultural traditions of the gay movement are alive and
well only in the academic world, to the extent that
they’re alive at all.
CH: Which traditions in particular?
DH: Well, a lot of the gay movement in the 1970s and
1980s was very much opposed to the normalization of
queer life and therefore emphasized the importance of
sex, arguing that sex was good for you, that sex should
not be restricted by narrow theories of health or
adjustment or conservative therapeutic notions of
maturity, and that gay life was at its most creative when
it invented new possibilities for relationships beyond
the ones laid down since antiquity in the form of
kinship and conjugality. These were some of the most
creative parts of the gay movement, the most original
parts, and the most valuable parts. This is very
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different from a model of political activism in which
gay men, as Leo Bersani (1995) says, have no more
radical goal than that of “trying to persuade straight
society that [they] can be good parents, good soldiers,
good priests” (p. 113).
That radical dimension of the gay movement,
though it’s not extinct, flourishes today within the
academy, perhaps even chiefly within the academy, and
I think this is a very unfortunate state of affairs, both
for the movement as a whole and for the state of
academic theory.
CH: Could you elaborate on that idea a bit more?
DH: At the risk of repeating myself, I’d say that the
best work gets accomplished when academic theory can
draw on the kind of creative energies produced in a
social movement, because the cultural élan of the
movement is always more generative and more
surprising. Gay culture spontaneously produces many
more and diverse kinds of cultural contestation,
whether in the form of street theater or the overturning
of heterosexist social forms, than academics could have
come up with on their own. I know that, in my case at
least, it was very important for me to be able to
immerse myself in a gay world, especially the world of
the Castro in San Francisco in the 1970s and
throughout the 1980s. When I left the country in 1993,
I would come back to the Castro, looking to it as a
source of continual renewal and instruction. When that
cultural energy began to evaporate, or to move
elsewhere, I was not able to do the kind of work that I
had done earlier. For example, I was not able to reflect
in a theoretical idiom on the transformative potential of
gay culture, because I lacked the concrete, empirical
inspiration I had had earlier.
CH: It’s very similar to what has happened in women’s
and gender studies in so many ways. Women’s studies
was generated out of feminist organizing and gender-
based social movements but for the last twenty years
we have seen a real rift develop between academia and
advocacy.
DH: Absolutely. This is a much more generalized
phenomenon. I have an appointment in Women’s
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Studies at the University of Michigan and for the last
couple of years I’ve been on the executive committee of
the Institute for Research on Women and Gender
there. The phenomena are very similar in these
settings, except that I think that there is still so much
work to do to achieve equality for women within
academia—especially within fields in which they have
traditionally not been represented, such as
engineering—that one still feels a kind of political
fervor in these institutions, particularly within
departments of women’s studies, which to me is quite
significant.
Although many problems on college campuses
remain, particularly around transgender issues, on the
whole I think there is a lot of complacency, even among
lesbian and gay students. Nothing has really prepared
me for my current situation. I find myself as a professor
somehow representing the possibilities of a radical
movement to my students, many of whom have grown
up in a conservative or cynical culture and in the
absence of any broad idealistic movement to change the
world. This was not the case when I was a student. I
had some quite inspiring professors, but for the most
part I did not look to them to represent the cutting edge
of a movement for political or social change. For that,
we had the Black Panthers, the feminists, the hippies,
and the homosexuals. Of course, students today are
rightly impatient with professors who preen themselves
on various radical credentials that date back to the
Vietnam War but who don’t seem to have done
anything interesting since then. Students are also sick
and tired of being condescended to by professors
because of these students’ supposed political
backwardness: professors sometimes bathe themselves
in an aura of radical chic as if having good politics were
simply part and parcel of tenured privilege. I don’t
blame students for finding this attitude difficult to
tolerate. At the same time, it’s distinctly odd to find
that one is the only person in the classroom who thinks
both that the lesbian and gay movement has not yet
achieved all of its political or cultural goals and that it
is not yet completely obsolete.
And then there’s another consideration. When I
began to engage with lesbian and gay studies in the
mid-1980s, I did so because I wanted to change what
qualified as knowledge, to change the practice of
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knowledge as it existed at the time, and to change the
way academic institutions codified certain kinds of
knowledge. To that end, I collaborated closely with
both tenured and non-tenured colleagues, as well as
with graduate students. This effort was part of a larger
movement to try to create new possibilities for
scholarly and political practices that had not existed
before. And now, because of our success, we have
students who enroll in our courses in order to be
trained in the field of lesbian and gay studies or queer
theory as a discipline: they come to the university for
something that already exists at the university, not in
order to change what the university has to offer them.
This creates a very paradoxical situation in which,
without my wanting to occupy this role, I end up being
positioned as a kind of gatekeeper who controls access
to lesbian and gay studies as if it were a discipline like
any other, in which students, including gay students,
are graded up or down depending on how well they
know queer theory. So instead of being involved with
me in a collective movement to change what counts as
knowledge, students wind up treating me, more or less
necessarily, as someone who is authorized to determine
what’s valid knowledge and what isn’t, and to grade
them on the basis of how well they master a body of
thought that’s already in place. In other words, they
find in me an academic functionary like any other.
Once again, nothing in my entire career in queer
studies has prepared me for this role: I never played it
when the field was new. It’s a very troubling role for
those of us who went into this field not to impose
another discipline on our students but to engage with
them in a kind of large-scale collective experiment in
what could be thought and said.
CH: And yet it’s a pretty Foucauldian dilemma, isn’t it,
for you to be the gatekeeper of this particular body of
discourse?
DH: Foucault was very sensitive to the way that social
institutions both restricted certain kinds of possibilities
and also provided certain other opportunities. I think
he was very canny about how he used his own role as
an academic and as a prestigious intellectual in France
to make things happen, to undermine the kinds of
authority he himself enjoyed, and to try to use his own
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position strategically to make other things happen. And
I’ve tried to learn some of those lessons.
CH: What, in your estimation, would Foucault have to
say—twenty years after his death—about what has been
called the gay marriage movement in the United
States?
DH: Well, I’m not someone who can speak for
Foucault and I’m very bad at Foucauldian
ventriloquism. One of the pleasures for me of reading
interviews with Foucault is trying and failing to
anticipate what Foucault will say in response to a
question. Every time I think I know what Foucault is
going to say, I keep being surprised by what he says,
which goes off in some totally unexpected direction.
That’s all the more reason for me to be sure that I’m
not able to speak for him. My intuition, though, is that
he would be delighted by the whole gay marriage
movement, that he would find the trouble it was
causing for all sorts of social institutions to be
extremely enjoyable. Of course, once the question is
posed—“Should gay people have the right to marry?”—
there could only be one answer, which is, “Yes.” And, in
fact, although gay marriage isn’t an issue I care very
much about one way or another, I do think it’s notable
that no valid argument against gay marriage has ever
been put forward. In fact, there is no basis on which to
oppose gay marriage except prejudice. This makes the
arguments against gay marriage examples, particularly
striking examples, of intellectual or moral disgrace on
the part of the people who make them. Nonetheless, we
don’t have to imagine what Foucault would say about
the gay marriage movement, because we know some of
the things that he did say. For example, in 1963 over
dinner at the home of Jacques Lacan he said, “There
will be no civilization as long as marriage between men
is not accepted” (Eribon, 1991).
But beyond that, there’s a very interesting
interview Foucault gave to Gilles Barbedette that was
published in Christopher Street in 1982 called “The
Social Triumph of the Sexual Will: A Conversation with
Michel Foucault.” In that interview one of the things
that Foucault said is that we live in a world in which
relational possibilities, the possibilities for different
kinds of relationship, are extremely impoverished.
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There are family and marriage, and that’s about it.
Further, rather than calling for specific rights for gay
people—though he acknowledged they were also
important—he emphasized the necessity for defining
the right for all persons to have new relational
possibilities. He was aware of the fact that friendship in
the ancient world was often elitist and a part of other
social institutions that were deeply distasteful, but he
invoked friendship nonetheless as an example of how
earlier Western cultures had managed to
institutionalize other kinds of relationships besides just
kinship and conjugality. Foucault felt that if, in the
past, forms of friendship and elective kinship had been
more fully recognized, then they might be
institutionalized again; that if there was a wider range
in the pre-modern world of forms of relationality, then
in the post-modern world there might also be new
forms of relationships. And this, by the way, is an
argument that has been made now much more
explicitly and passionately by the late Alan Bray (2003)
in a wonderful book, The Friend. Foucault went on to
talk about—and I think here he was simply exploring
opportunities in the current legal system—the
possibility of using adoption, a legal option that already
exists, as a way of expanding relational choices.
Foucault asked: Why should one person not adopt
somebody unrelated to him who was younger? Why
could he not adopt someone who was older, in fact? He
said that instead of claiming that we should have rights
on the basis of who we are now, though that was
necessary, it was also important to imagine new rights,
to have new forms of relationship that did not already
exist.
In the end, although I think Foucault would have
been perfectly delighted by the push for gay marriage, I
also think he would have wanted the gay movement to
seize this opportunity to promote and to valorize many
different forms of relationships between two or more
people, what Foucault at one point called “relations of
provisional existence,” that is to say, relations between
people that are not necessarily intended to last for life
but that may be valued even though they last for a
shorter time. I think he would have wanted the gay
marriage debate to open a space for the discussion of a
plurality of possibilities for different kinds of
relationships that could be promoted alongside of
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marriage.
A number of left-wing intellectuals in the gay
movement and elsewhere are quite right to criticize the
inherently conservative and normalizing dimensions of
the push for gay marriage. But it is equally wrong not to
acknowledge the quite astounding anarchic
possibilities in the current wave of resistance to the
restrictions on gay marriage. I mean, when was the last
time that an elected public official in this country
engaged in a large-scale act of civil disobedience? The
way that the gay marriage debate has fueled a kind of
challenge to the legitimacy of existing anti-gay
discrimination is something that shouldn’t be despised.
So while I do not want to criticize the quite legitimate
critiques of gay marriage that people on the left have
put forward—I think Michael Warner in particular has
sketched out brilliantly in his book, The Trouble with
Normal (1999), what the downside is of the current gay
marriage movement—at the same time, it is worth
pointing out that even Warner did not anticipate that
gay marriage would provoke the kind of political
mobilization that it has. I think the political
mobilization and the questioning of the legitimacy of
existing laws that bar homosexuals from love and
family—at least in their socially recognized forms—are
very valuable, and I think that left-wing intellectuals
make a serious mistake when they simply dismiss those
developments.
CH: Going back to what you were saying at the
beginning of this conversation about the lack of
interchange between the popular gay movement in the
United States and intellectual approaches to
gay/lesbian/queer/transgender issues, is there
evidence that the gay marriage movement would
suggest, on some popular level, the failure of queer
theory as an intellectual intervention?
DH: Yes, I think it is possible. A lot of the radical
promise of queer theory, and of lesbian and gay studies
before it, to reach down or to reach across to the
relevant communities has not panned out. This lack of
communication was not always the case. Up through
about 1990, gay community newspapers were covering
developments in lesbian and gay studies; those
developments were big news. I know that I spent a lot
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Journal of NSRC
of time talking to gay community groups as well as to
doctors and psychiatrists. My work on ancient Greece
was reviewed in local gay papers; there was a great deal
of dialogue back and forth. Some have suggested that
the move into theory, into high theory, made lesbian
and gay studies inaccessible to people who were not
taking classes at universities. I think that is an
exaggeration, because it is also the case that the
hometown gay press across America largely went out of
business, except in San Francisco, when the highly
organized local gay communities that had existed in the
70s and 80s also disappeared. That disappearance was
one of the combined effects of the simultaneous advent
of AIDS and of real estate speculation in major U.S.
cities. Those changes served to disperse the highly
concentrated and urbanized gay populations, as Gayle
Rubin has shown (1997, 1998), and therefore
eliminated the structural foundation for a coherent,
informed social movement. What disappeared with
those populations was the base for most local gay
newspapers, which have vanished from one city after
another across the country and been replaced by
national lifestyle magazines, glossy magazines that
survive by promoting a generic version of gay identity
and aren’t really interested in the debates taking place
in local communities or in movement issues.
CH: Some of this lifestyle material has now evolved to
include television in shows like The L Word and Queer
as Folk.
DH: Or Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. So what you
have is not just that queer theory has become
inaccessible, but that the infrastructure of gay culture
that was responsible for disseminating lesbian and gay
studies to people outside universities, and also for
communicating the cultural dynamism of the gay
movement in the local communities to people at
universities, has broken down. That pattern of
circulation has been interrupted. Consequently, if
people outside of universities are hostile to queer
theory or hostile to what they see as left wing
academics’ abandonment of them, that’s not just
because our work is impossible to understand, or
because gay and lesbian individuals are uninformed or
uninterested, it also results from the fact that the
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means for disseminating our intellectual work to a
larger audience and explaining its relevance have
disappeared.
I think the first large-scale misunderstandings
took place during the controversy over the biological
origins of homosexuality, as represented by Simon
LeVay’s (1993) work on the “gay brain,” Dean Hamer
and Peter Copeland’s (1994) description of the “gay
gene,” and Michael Bailey and Richard Pillard’s (1991)
twin studies, all of which were discussed extensively in
national gay magazines like The Advocate. To the
extent that queer theorists had reservations about that
work, their concerns were not communicated well by
the national gay magazines—in fact, they were often
mischaracterized or simply dismissed. And this was not
because the objections to the biological studies were
necessarily encoded in highly abstract or sophisticated
language. It had to do with differences of purpose and
background and context between the delocalized gay
readership of those magazines and academic
communities. The fact is that the newly dispersed
members of gay communities were dealing with the
burden of church and other institutionally based
homophobia that drew a sharp division between
homosexuality as a natural condition—one which
appeared to be confirmed by the identification of a gay
gene—and as a sinful choice. By contrast, the academic
community was trying to deal with this new version of
positivism or essentialism in the context of a constantly
revised critique of identity categories, which had partly
originated in tendencies within the movement itself,
specifically in the work of women of color.
Interestingly, academic versions of social
constructionism had often played very well in local
communities when they were attached to the new gay
social history, but then turned out to play very badly
when they involved hostility to the new theories about
the gay gene. And this controversy marked, I think, the
beginning of an ongoing divide and misunderstanding
between queer theory and the larger social movement.
CH: Thank you very much for your comments. Š
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References
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male sexual orientation. Archives of General
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Bersani, L. (1995). Homos. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
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Bray, A. (2003). The friend. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Eribon, D. (1991). Michel Foucault (B. Wing, Trans.).
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Foucault, M. (1976). The history of sexuality, volume
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Hamer, D., & Copeland, P. (1994). The science of
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