Wonder Waif Meets Super Neuter

Abstract

OCTOBER 132, Spring 2010, pp. 135–163. © 2010 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “As far as I’m concerned, the guy was a fucking saint.”1 The fucking saint is Michel Foucault. The guy who wrote the sentence is David Halperin, whose Saint Foucault: Toward a Gay Hagiography is one of the most battered books in my library. I scribble and underline not because I revere Michel Foucault, or David, although I do, in different ways, but because I cannot resist a good polemic: Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis, for example, Malcolm X on white devils, and Yvonne Rainer’s No to everything she could think of in 1965. To write a polemic is a formal challenge. It is to connect the most miniscule of details with the widest of panoramas, to walk a tightrope between rage and reason, to insist that ideas are nothing but lived emotion, and vice versa. To write a polemic is to try to dig oneself out of the grave that is the margin, that already shrill, already colored, already feminized, already queered location in which words, any words, any combination of words are either symptoms of madness or proof incontrovertible of guilt by association. Halperin’s beatification of Foucault is a disciplined absurdity, at once an evisceration of homophobia and an aria to the fashioning of a queer self. You don’t get to be a saint without pulling off a miracle or two. Foucault’s History of Sexuality was, says Halperin, the “single most important source of political