Guy Hocquenghem

Guy Hocquenghem (10 December 1946 – 28 August 1988) was a French writer, philosopher, and queer theorist.

At the age of 15, Hocquenghem began a homosexual affair with his high school philosophy teacher René Schérer and they remained lifelong friends. Hocquenghem was an academic peer to many of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century, including Michel Foucault and others who (alongside his lover René Schérer) signed the 1977 French petition against age of consent laws. In 1978, he participated in a radio conversation in Paris between himself, philosopher Michel Foucault, and playwright/actor/lawyer Jean Danet, debating sexual consent and reform to the age of consent. It was transcribed and published as "The Danger of Child Sexuality" and, later, "Sexual Morality and the Law", and can be read online here.

Hocquenghem was a militant left-wing radical who participated in the May 1968 student rebellion in France. He was the staff writer for the French publication Libération, and a prominent member of the Front Homosexuel d'Action Révolutionnaire (FHAR), which opposed the age of consent. He was loyal to the French Communist Party, but was expelled because of his homosexuality.

Hocquenghem taught philosophy at the University of Vincennes-Saint Denis, Paris, and wrote numerous novels and works of theory. He had a significant impact on leftist thinking in France but is not very well known outside of academic spaces frequented by gay and queer theorists such as Jeffrey Weeks, who wrote the 1978 preface to the first English translation of Hocquenghem's revolutionary theoretical tract Homosexual Desire (1972, English translation 1978), speculated to be the first work of Queer Theory. Some of his writing and thought concerns pederasty/age-disparate homosexuality, intergenerational sex, and the social construction and institution of childhood.

Hocquenghem died of AIDS-related complications on 28 August 1988, aged 41.

Relevant and English publications

Other than Homosexual Desire (1972), his works include:

• The Screwball Asses (1973) (English translation by Noura Wedell, Semiotext(e), 2010) - His 2nd most noted work, this essay originally appeared in the twelfth (March 1973) issue of Recherches, a French journal. Edited by Félix Guattari and the FHAR, the issue was devoted to homosexuality and included positive testimony of male same-sex age-gap sex. The issue bore the title Trois milliards de pervers: Grande Encyclopédie des Homosexualités (Three Billion Perverts: Grand Encyclopedia of Homosexualities). In an example of state enforced censorship, shortly after publication, copies of the issue were seized by French authorities where the issue was ordered destroyed and Guattari was fined 600 francs for his role in the issue's creation.

On the publication, the historian Amin (2014) wrote:

"composed of a combination of erotic photos and drawings, homosexual "détournements" of comics and illustrations from French Boy Scout novels, masturbatory autobiographic narratives, and transcribed conversations, along with more recognizably political declarations and analyses. [...] This erotic and, indeed, pornographic frankness is likely why Guattari was found guilty, as the editor, of affronting public decency: his apartment was searched, and the existing journal issues were confiscated. [...] The chapter on pedophilia [...] censored as recently as 2002 in the special issue’s online publication, opens with a transcribed dialogue between Max, a forty-year-old pederast who prefers adolescents but occasionally has sex with prepubescent boys, and his former boy beloveds, twenty-five-year-old Truc and nineteen-year-old Albert, both of whom are now heterosexual."

• L'Après-Mai des faunes (1974) (Published in English as Gay Liberation After May '68, translated by Scott Branson (Duke University Press, 2022). Details the rise of the French militant gay liberation movement alongside the women’s movement and other revolutionary organizing, from Hocquenghem's perspective and others. According to the publisher:

"Hocquenghem situates his theories of homosexual desire in the realm of revolutionary practice, arguing that revolutionary movements must be rethought through ideas of desire and sexuality that undo stable gender and sexual identities. Throughout, he persists in a radical vision of the world framed through a queerness that can dismantle the oppressions of capitalism and empire, the family, institutions, and, ultimately, civilization."

• Co-ire, album systématique de l'enfance (Co-anger: systematic album of childhood) (1976) examines childhood sexuality from a Marxist perspective, co-authored with professor and lover René Schérer. In French only.

• L'Amour en relief (Love in Relief) (1982, English translation 1985) is Hocquenghem's first and most famous novel. A blind Tunisian boy explores French society and discovers the ways in which pleasure can form a resistance to totalitarianism. The novel contextualizes homosexual desire as a resistance to white supremacy and racism.

Hocquenghem on intergenerational sex

In Sexual Morality and the Law (1973), alongside Michel Foucault and Jean Danet, Hocquenghem famously stated that the "notion of consent is a trap [...] No one signs a contract before making love". He said:

As far as this question of consent is concerned, I prefer the terms used by Michel Foucault: listen to what the child says and give it a certain credence. This notion of consent is a trap, in any case. What is sure is that the legal form of an intersexual consent is nonsense. No one signs a contract before making love. [...]

When we say that children are "consenting" in these cases, all we intend to say is this: in any case, there was no violence, or organized manipulation in order to wrench out of them affective or erotic relations. It's an important point, all the more important for the children because it's an ambiguous victory in that to get a judge to organize a ceremony in which the children come and say that they were actually consenting is an ambiguous victory. The public affirmation of consent to such acts is extremely difficult, as we know. Everybody - judges, doctors, the defendant - knows that the child was consenting - but nobody says anything, because, apart from anything else, there's no way it can be introduced [because their self-perception of consent is legally and socially invalidated - Newgon editors]. It's not simply the effect of a prohibition by law: it's really impossible to express a very complete relationship between a child and an adult - a relation that is progressive, long, goes through all kinds of stages, which are not all exclusively sexual, through all kinds of affective contacts. To express this in terms of legal consent is an absurdity. In any case, if one listens to what a child says and if he says" I didn't mind," that doesn't have the legal value of "I consent." But I'm also very mistrustful of that formal recognition of consent on the part of a minor, because I know it will never be obtained and is meaningless in any case.

Hocquenghem's thought on pedophilia is discussed by Bill Marshall's English language biography, Guy Hocquenghem: Theorising the Gay Nation (1996).

For Marshall, Hocquenghem sees revolutionary potential in "the margins of homosexualities, those non-totalisable practices which fall through the system, such as les folles (camp or drag queens), 'on the frontier between art and life, outside politics', 'that patchwork of street culture, art, preciosity and vulgarity which formed the complex tissue of a mode of apprehending the world without dullness or common sense', and delinquency."

However,

he also seeks to challenge the homo-hetero binary, as well as the segregation of generations to be found in the discursive system surrounding children's sexuality: 'When you look at the desiring relations between majors and minors, you touch the system of distribution that cuts the child from the adult in all of us, and which segregates them in the social body.'

For The child is caught in panoptic fields (the metaphor from Foucault's Surveiller et punir for that internalising social surveillance characteristic of the prison cell observable from a central tower) which mean that he or she is always localised and observed in the institutions of school and family. (Hocquenghem and Schérer's 1974 article in Les Temps modernes emphasises the importance, in this process, of surveillance to prevent masturbation.) [...]

The child is disciplined into personhood. So what a liberation of the child actually means is the undermining of the adult/child distinction and the consequences of that for the liberation of all: 'childhood is not a fixed state which adulthood simply succeeds, but . . . there is a permanence of childhood that also concerns society in general'. [...]

Children's bodies are not yet organisms, they are like Deleuze and Guattari's Body without Organs, surfaces of shifting intensities and potentialities, incomplete in the sense of being unassigned to personhood and even gender. They are complete in another sense, however, fully erogenous, as opposed to the supremely ideological sexuality of adults, centred on genitalia, often the phallus.

Hocquenghem and Schérer place such sexual activity in the context of a transformed status of children, and seek to dislodge genital-centred sex from its privileged position. [...] The argument that children's lot in contemporary society, with its consequences for adult life, is one of the catastrophes of modernity, is a strong one. [... For them,] children should be allowed to consent, and the fact that they are not is part of their social disempowerment. (pp. 49-50).

See also

• Michel Foucault
• Gayle Rubin
• Judith Butler
• René Schérer
• Steven Angelides
• Gert Hekma
• Andre Gide
• Tony Duvert
• Historical examples of LGBT-MAP unity