Guy Hocquenghem
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Guy Hocquenghem was born in the suburbs of Paris in 1944 and was educated at the Ecole Normale Supérieure. His participation in the May 1968 student rebellion in France formed his allegiance to the Communist Party, which later expelled him because of his homosexuality. He taught philosophy at the University of Vincennes-Saint Denis, Paris and was the author of numerous novels and works of theory. He was the staff writer for the French publication, Libération. Hocquenghem was the first gay man to be a member of the Front Homosexuel d'Action Révolutionnaire (FHAR), originally formed by Lesbian separatists who split from the Mouvement Homophile de France in 1971. He wrote and produced a documentary film about gay history, Race d'Ep! Un siècle d'image de l'homosexualité[1]. Hocquenghem died of an AIDS-related illness in 1988.
Though Hocquenghem had a significant impact on leftist thinking in France, his reputation has failed to grow to international prominence. Only the first of his theoretical tracts, Homosexual Desire and his first novel, L'amour en relief have been translated into English, and though Race d'Ep! has been released in America as The Homosexual Century, like Hocquenghem, it is virtually unknown.
[edit] Works
[edit] Homosexual Desire (1972, English translation 1978)
Guy Hocquenghem's Homosexual Desire may be the first work of Queer Theory. Drawing on the theoretical work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Hocquenghem critiqued the influential models of the psyche and sexual desire derived from Lacan and Freud. The author also addressed the relation of capitalism to sexualities, the dynamics of desire, and the political effects of gay group-identities.
Jeffrey Weeks' 1978 preface to the first English language translation of Homosexual Desire is extreamily helpful in situating the essay in relation to the various, mostly French, theories of subjectiviey and desire surrounding and influencing Hocquenghem's thought.
Republished in French, 2000.
[edit] L'Après-Mai des faunes (1974)
The second and untranslated queer-theoretical text.
[edit] Co-ire, album systématique de l'enfance (Co-anger: systematic album of childhood) (1976)
Examines childhood sexuality from a Marxist perspective. Written with annother professor, René Schérer. It is rumored that Schérer and Hocquenghem began an affair in 1959, when the later was 15: see historical pederastic couples.
[edit] Le dérive homosexuelle (1977)
The third and yet to be translated queer-theoretical text.
[edit] La Beauté de métis (1979)
Analyzed French anti-Arab feeling and homophobia.
[edit] The Gay travels: guide and glance homosexual over the large metropolises (1980)
[edit] L'amour en relief (1982)
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 gives context to homosexual desire as a resistance to white supremacy and racism.
[edit] La Colére d'agneau (The Wrath of the Lamb) (1985)
An experiment in millenarian and apocoliptic narrative taking St. John the Evangelist as its subject.
[edit] L'âme atomique (The Atomic Heart) (1986)
Partly as a response to his deteriorating health, and again in collaboration with Schére, this work espouses a philosophy composed of dandyism, gnosticism, and epicureanism.
[edit] Letter open to those which passed from the Mao collar to the Rotary drill, Marseilles, Agone (1986)
republication in 2003 (foreword of Serge Halimi) - ISBN 2-7489-0005-7
[edit] Eve (1987)
This narrative carefully conbines the story of Genesis with the description of the changes in the body from AIDS related symptoms and written as Hocquenghem's own body deteriorated.
[edit] Vayages et adventures extraordinaires du Frère Angelo (1988)
Explores the mind of an Italian monk accompanying the conquistadors to the New World.
[edit] The amphitheatre of the dead ones: anticipated memories (1994)
[edit] Writing on Hocquenghem
Guy Hocquenghem, Gay Beyond Identity by Bill Marshall, Duke University Press, 1996
[edit] External Links
"The Danger of Child Sexuality", A dialogue with Foucault, Hocquenghem and Jean Danet
