You Can't Fight

Homophobia and Protect

the Pornographers at the
Same Time An Analysis
of What Went Wrong
in Hardwick
John Stoltenberg

Like a lot of activists in the radical-feminist antipomography move

ment, I've been trying to figure out the hysterical animosity that has
come at us from the gay community. I want to sketch briefly what I
think is going on and why.
The situation we're dealing with goes back many years, of course,
almost to the beginning of the modem gay liberation movement in the
late 1960s and early 1970s. Though gay liberation emerged soon after
women's liberation, the male-dominated gay liberation movement never
really grasped how homophobia is rooted in the woman hating that is
a fixture of male supremacy. Quite simply, the male Viomosexual is
stigmatized because he is perceived to participate in the degraded sta
tus of the female and if he doesn't understand that, he'll never have
a radical political analysis.
I use the words "male supremacy" on purpose, because they imply
an angry point of view about the sex-class hierarchy, the political sys
tem of discrimination based on sex. Those of us who are queer have a
fairly obvious special interest in ending sex discrimination, because
homophobia is both a consequence of sex discrimination and an en
forcer of sex discrimination. The system of male supremacy requires
gender polarity with real men as different from real women as they
can be, and with men's social superiority to women expressed in public

and in private in every way imaginable. Homophobia is, in part, how

the system punishes those who deviate and seem to dissent from it.
The threat of homophobic insult or attack not only keeps men aimed
at women as their appropriate sexual prey; it also keeps men "real
men."
The system of gender polarity requires that people with penises treat
people without as objects, as things, as empty gaping vessels waiting
to be filled with turgid maleness, if necessary by force. Homophobia
is, in part, how the system punishes those whose object-choice is de
viant. Homophobia is a kind of sexualized contempt for someone whose
mere existence because he is smeared with female status threatens
to melt down the coat of armor by which men protect themselves from
other men. Homophobia keeps women the targets. And to men who
sexually objectify correctly, this homophobic setup assures a level of
safety, selfhood, self-respect, and social power.
Most men internalize cultural homophobia whomever they are at
tracted to. Inside men's bodies, homophobia becomes an ongoing dread
and loathing of anything about themselves that even hints at gender
ambiguity; it means a constant quest "to be the man there," whatever
that takes.
The political reality of the gender hierarchy in male supremacy re
quires that we make it resonate through our nerves, flesh, and vascular
system just as often as we can. We are supposed to respond orgasmically to power and powerlessness, to violence and violatedness; our
sexuality is supposed to be inhabited by a reverence for supremacy, for
unjust power over and against other human life. We are not supposed
to experience any other erotic possibility; we are not supposed to glimpse
eroticized justice. Our bodies are not supposed to abandon their sen
sory imprint of what male dominance and female subordination are
supposed to be to each other even if we are the same sex. Perhaps
especially if we are the same sex. Because if you and your sex partners
are not genitally different but you are emotionally and erotically at
tached to gender hierarchy, then you come to the point where you
have to impose hierarchy on every sex act you attempt otherwise it
doesn't feel like sex.
Erotically and politically, those who are queer live inside a bizarre
double bind. Sex discrimination and sex inequality require homophobia
in order to continue. The homophobia that results is what stigmatizes
our eroticism, makes us hateful for how we would love. Yet living in
side this system of sex discrimination and sex inequality, we too have
sexualized it; we have become sexually addicted to gender polarity; we
have learned how hate and hostility can become sexual stimulants; we
have learned sexualized antagonism toward the other in order to seem

to be able to stand ourselves and in order to get off. Sex discrimina

tion has ritualized a homosexuality that dares not deviate from alle
giance to gender polarity and gender hierarchy; sex discrimination has
constructed a homosexuality that must stay erotically attached to the
very male-supremacist social structures that produce homophobia. It's
a little like having a crush on one's own worst enemy and then mov
ing in for life.
If what I've said is true if in fact male supremacy simultaneously
produces both a homophobia that is erotically committed to the hatred
of homosexuality and a homosexuality that is erotically committed to
sex discrimination then it becomes easier to understand why the gay
community, taken as a whole, has become almost hysterically hostile
to radical-feminist antipomography activism. One might have thought
that gay people who are harassed, stigmatized, and jeopardized on
account of prejudice against their preference for same-sex sex would
want to make common cause with any radical challenge to systema
tized sex discrimination. One might have thought that gay people, re
alizing that their self-interest lies in the obliteration of homophobia,
would be among the first to endorse a political movement attempting
to root out sex inequality. One might have thought that gay people
would be among the first to recognize that so long as society tolerates
and actually celebrates the "pornographizing" of women so long as
there is an enormous economic incentive to traffic in the sexualized
subordination of women then the same terrorism that enforces the
sex-class system will surely continue to bludgeon faggots as well. One
might have thought, for that matter, tftat gay men would not require
the sexualized inequality of women in order to get a charge out of sex
or that a gay man walking through a porn store would stop and take
a look at the racks and racks of pictures of women gagged and splayed
and trussed up and ask himself exactly why this particular context of
woman hate is so damned important to him.
Sex discrimination: being put down or treated in a second-class or
subhuman way on account of the social meaning of one's anatomy.
That is what the bulk of pornography is for, and that is what the
radical-feminist antipornography movement is against.
But in many ways over the past decade, most gay and lesbian pub
lications, most gay advocacy organizations, and most gay leaders and
spokespeople have been rather obviously committed to a course of de
fending the rights of pornographers. Despite the presence of many les
bians and some gay men in the radical-feminist antipomography
movement, most gay people seem now to believe some cynically but
some very sincerely that if our nation does not impede its thriving
pornography industry, it will someday recognize the civil rights of gay

people; but if in any way you encroach on the rights of pornographers,

you will surely jeopardize gay liberation. People frame this point of
view in many different ways, of course, but it all basically comes down
to an equation between the future of gay civil rights and the freeenterprise rights of pornographers.
And this is not merely a philosophical meeting of minds between
gay-rights advocates and pornographers; there have been countless ac
tual coalitions and political convergences: substantial money contribu
tions to gay-rights organizations from pornographers, lawsuits brought
jointly by gay activists and pornographers, campaign support from
pornographers for pro-gay-rights politicians, page upon page in por
nography magazines offered to gay writers to trash the radical-feminist
antipomography movement, and so on. I don't think anyone needs
convincing that the gay community, taken as a whole, tends to view
its naked political self-interest as lying somewhere in bed with the likes
of A1 Goldstein, Hugh and Christie Hefner, Bob Guccione, and Larry
Flynt to say nothing of various notables in organized crime.
An ideological huddle between gay-rights activists and the propornography movement has also been at the very center of game plans
for getting homosexual sex acts decriminalized. Let me tell you what
really happened, for instance, in the recent Hardwick case.
In 1985 the Supreme Court agreed for the first time to hear a case,
Bowers v. Hardwick, that would bear on the constitutionality of broad
state laws against sodomy.1 Arguments put forth in the case from the
gay-rights camp turned primarily on the so-called right of privacy a
dim legal doctrine that exists only through constitutional inference.
Justice William O. Douglas first spelled out this privacy right in Gris
wold v. Connecticut in 1965, where it was applied to "the sacred pre
cincts of marital bedrooms."2 But the privacy principle really blazed
into the libertarian limelight with Stanley v. Georgia in 1969, in which
the Supreme Court ruled that a man may legally possess obscenity in
his home, even though the stuff is criminally banned everywhere else.
Basically, the Supreme Court declared, "A man's home is his castle,"
at least where obscenity is concerned;3 and this was the narrow crack
through which gay-rights advocates hoped the esteemed justices would
also want to slip when it came to consensual sodomy. The pro-sodomy
legal argument in Hardwick was written and choreographed mostly by
1Michael /. Bowers, Attorney General of Georgia, v. Michael Hardwick 478 U.S., October term,
1985.
2See The Douglas Opinions, edited by Vern Countryman (New York: Random House,
1977), 234-36.
3In Paris Adult Theatre I v. Slaton 413 U.S. 49 (1973), paraphrasing Stanley, in an opinion
written by Chief Justice Warren Burger.

Laurence H. Tribe of Harvard; he made quite explicit that gay sex in

private should be defended on the same grounds as the private pos
session of obscenity:
It would be ironic indeed if government were constitutionally barred,
whatever its justification, from entering a man's home to stop him from
obtaining sexual gratification by viewing an obscene film but were free,
without any burden of special justification, to enter the same dwelling to
interrupt his sexual acts with a willing adult partner. The home surely
protects more than our fantasies alone.4

In case you missed it, that ignoble equating of same-sex sex acts
with obscenity was the "liberal" position.
Tribe's single-minded privacy tactic might have seemed expedient
and pragmatic given the Supreme Court's historic hostility to homosex
uality.5 Legally, however, the tactic was sheer sophistry, claiming a
shield for criminal sodomy only "in the most private of enclaves," the
home (motel rooms, presumably, did not qualify), but completely con
ceding the state's power to delegitimatize homosexuality however and
wherever else it pleases: "There is thus no cause for worry," argued
Tribe, that a favorable ruling from the Supreme Court "would cast doubt
on any administrative programs that states might fashion to encourage
traditional heterosexual unions."6 That could only be reassuring if one
is a heterosexual man to whom women are invisible. And in the age
of AIDS, what exactly did he mean by "any administrative programs"?
Politically, Tribe's argument gets even worse. Consider, for in
stance, the fact that for women in heterosexual unions the home is the
most dangerous place on earth; it's where women get raped most, as
saulted most, and killed most. Moreover, Tribe's privacy-based argu
ment embarked on a slippery slope that could seriously erode the state's
ability to protect individuals from injury such as incest. Essentially, by
appealing narrowly to the privacy right, Tribe's line of argument paid
tribute to some linchpin precepts of male supremacy (among them,
men's right to sexual release, in fantasy and in fact, no matter at what
cost to anyone else) and opened not a single area of jurisprudential
discourse that might conceivably defy the forces that keep homophobia
alive and well.
One does not need a great legal mind to grasp that if your claim to
legal entitlement rests on a self-interested sellout of others who are
powerless, you've got a craven and shabby case.
4Laurence H. Tribe, et al., "Brief for Respondent," Bowers v. Hardwick 478 U .S., 16.
5In a 1976 case called Doe v. Commonwealth's Attorney 425 U.S. 901 (1976), the high court
flatly rejected a challenge to Virginia's sodomy law.
6Tribe, et al., p. 24.

The Supreme Court released its decision in Hardwick June in 1986,

and by a 5 -4 majority it rejected the argument that "prior cases have
construed the Constitution to confer a right of privacy that extends to
homosexual sodom y."7 Therefore, the court ruled, a state's antiso
domy laws are not intrinsically unconstitutional.
Across the country there were angry protests against the Supreme
Court's decision in Hardwick; and in the aftermath of outrage I was
approached, often sympathetically, by friends who assumed I was
heartbroken. But my response was not what they'd expected. I pointed
out that if the Supreme Court had struck down all state antisodomy
laws because it had accepted the privacy argument as put forth by Tribe
et al., it would have done so for wretchedly wrongheaded reasons. So
though my feelings about the Hardwick decision were very mixed, I was
hopeful that a more honorable argument might eventually come before
the court.
For instance, a braver strategy would be to argue from the state's
interest in eliminating sex discrimination. The argument might go like
this:
1. Because social homophobia perpetuates and reinforces sex discrimi
nation, and
2. because laws against sodomy perpetuate and reinforce social hom
ophobia,
3. it would be in the interest of the state to decriminalize homosexual
sex acts in order to diminish sex discrimination.
An important corollary of that argument might go like this:
1. Because social homophobia perpetuates a social climate in which overt
acts of homophobic personal violence are more likely to occur, and
2. because laws against sodomy, even if not enforced, actively contrib
ute to that climate of personal violence by legitimatizing social prej
udice and hatred,
3. it would be in the interest of the state to decriminalize homosexual
sex acts in order to more completely guarantee "ordered liberty."
Even to argue that laws against sodomy deny homosexuals Four
teenth Amendment equal-protection rights would be to say something
that is self-evidently true and also something that would strengthen
the body of sex-discrimination law rather than undermine it by ap
pealing to the right of privacy.
Of course such a strategy might not work at first, and it might need
7Justice Byron R. White, delivering the opinion of the court. The United States Law Week,
June 24, 1986, 4920.

buttressing by some years of activism and education before the Su

preme Court would "get it" (segregation, for instance, took them a very
long time), but at least it would have a credible human-rights politics
and the courage of a radical conviction: the nerve to reveal something
true about the interrelationship between homophobia, violence, laws,
and men's social power over and against women.
I have discussed the Hardwick case at some length, partly in order to
demonstrate the reactionary ideological alliance between gays and the
pro-pornography movement and partly to suggest what an antihomo
phobia agenda might look like if the gay-rights movement were ever
to take seriously what radical feminists have taught us about the way
male supremacy really works.
So long as the gay-rights movement is committed to dissociating it
self from the radical-feminist project to uproot sex discrimination com
pletely and to create sex equality, gay liberation is headed in a suicidal
direction. You can't have a political movement trying to erode homo
phobia while leaving male supremacy and misogyny in place. It won't
work. Gay rights without sexual justice is a male-supremacist reform.
So long as the gay community defends the rights of pornographers
to exploit and eroticize sex discrimination, we who are queer do not
stand a chance. So long as the pornographers get to own not only the
Constitution but also our most intimate sexual connections with one
another, we will have lost all hope. Sex discrimination is what we must
oppose, even if it turns us on. It's what puts queers down because it's
what puts women down, and ultimately it's what does us all in. You
can't fight sex discrimination and protect the pornographers at the same
time.