Desire’s Demise: The Uncoupling of Democracy and Sexual Liberation in Britain

• In Event: Gender, Desire, and Freedom

Abstract

This paper charts the rise and ultimate rejection of gay liberation as a part of the British left’s democratic theory in the 20th century. In doing so, it examines the possibility of elaborating a distinctly queer democratic theory. Although queer theorists and democratic theorists have tended to ignore one another, the history of gay liberation includes an audacious attempt to put sexuality at the core of political life. At the dawn of that century, a group of influential British socialists, motivated by their desire to defend homosexuality, elaborated an ethics of desire that placed eros, understood as the capacity for deep affection for others, at the core of democratic politics and citizenship. They argued that an erotic ethos was necessary in order for citizens to pursue a common good, and in order for democratic representatives to diagnose the alienation expressed by their constituents and respond to it by offering an account of the kind of rearrangement of society that would allow them to fulfill their desires. This erotic ethos required sexual freedom, because it could only be realized if all were free to develop their affections with persons of any gender, unconstrained by heteronormative social expectations. It was also a distinctly queer theory, because it argued that only societies in which homosocial and homosexual relations were valorized could democratic citizenship, and its attendant ethos, thrive.
The theorists who pioneered this queer democratic theory (Edward Carpenter, J.A. Symonds and C.R. Ashbee) had a substantial influence on the British left, but their commitment to sexual liberation, which had motivated much of their democratic theory, was ignored and then decisively rejected in the middle decades of the 20th century. Although homophobia played a role in the marginalization of sexuality on the British left, especially in the 1930’s with the spurious association of homosexuality with fascism, I argue that the most devastating blows to gay democratic theory were dealt by sympathetic opponents. George Bernard Shaw and Lytton Strachey each challenged the role of desire, and queer desire especially, in ethics and politics. Shaw decoupled sexual liberation from democratic theory by arguing that sexual liberationists and the emerging movement for sexual education were naïve to think that a democratic majority would support liberatory or enlightened sexual policies. Instead, he suggested that the regulation of, and education about, sex should be left to experts. A democratic ethos could not be an erotic one, because democratic theory has to take people as they are, and most people found love and sex between people of the same gender uncomfortable or revolting. The project of sexual liberation, on this view, needed to be achieved via non-democratic means, and theorized as a struggle for rights. Strachey, for his part, argued that Carpenter’s emphasis on the natural desire for sex could not support an ethics of sexual liberation, because the desire for sex was different in kind from other natural desires, and because one could not say for certain which desires were and were not natural. Contra Carpenter and Symonds, Strachey suggested that sexual desire could not generate political solidarity, because sexual desire was always a desire to use others. Shaw and Strachey shared a sense that desire (and erotic desire especially) was an unreliable moral and political force, which could as easily be turned against leftist aims and enlightened understandings of sexuality as it could be channeled in support of them. The paper concludes by discussing the strength of these criticisms, and the possibility of reconstructing a queer democratic theory that overcomes them.

Author

• Theophile Deslauriers, Amherst College