The Queer Psychoanalysis Society

Archive for September, 2012|Monthly archive page

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Cruising is Cruising: What Have 15 Years of Digital Sex Taught Us?

In Cruising, Freud, LGBT, Sex, Sublimation on September 25, 2012 at 8:11 pm

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by Diego Costa

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When I was cruising on Gay.com as a young teen in the late 90s and I “ran into” someone who was in his 30s or 40s (quelle horreur!) I remember thinking, or perhaps praying: Damn me if at their age I am still hanging out at such depressing dens for the embarrassingly lonely. It was a mixture of repulsion, pity, and anxiety.  Only an ugly or inept gay would make it to their 35th birthday and still be looking. Only a loser fag would by then be willing to stoop down to that level of desperation (please fuck/love/fucking love me now) in order to find a mate. The compulsion to cruise, to reach out for someone out there in the universe to come along and save us from our predicaments, was sure to be a burden of broke young boys who would eventually master the art of being alone and still alive.

This was a time when queer sex was beginning to enter its hyper-commodification phase. Suddenly we didn’t have to settle for whatever guy happened to cross our paths (a curious cousin, a drunk hetero) and, as in a fluke, not find us disgusting. Even if, at, first, we didn’t have the technology to easily exchange digital photographs of photoshopped selves, we could list our frantic likes (straight acting guys only!) and fascist dislikes (No Fems, Fats, Asians, apparently). Like a database of, in theory, easily available men, we were able to sort through, pick and choose, discriminate and reinforce the inherited prejudices of the general culture. And, somehow, demanding through exclusion passed for getting in touch with authentic desire.

By the time kids like myself, whose sexual lives coincided with the development of ubiquitous computing, got to college requesting an impossibly normative masculinity from strangers who were to commit to fucking us before having met us was part and parcel of what it meant to be a queered human being. Now we could make even more demands: photographic evidence of our potential tricks’ muscles, six-packs and convincingly well-acted straightness ad infinitum (More face pics!). The few who could “host” were lucky enough to be able to script their encounters down to their very details. Sometimes the scripting of these narratives were so pleasurable little did it matter if the countless cruising hours led up to an actual encounter or with one nutting all over the keyboard and calling it a night.

We told ourselves we would exit the chat room in 15 minutes, which soon became 2 hours, 4 hours, the entire night. The faceless screen names became too familiar, the logging on to the same old sites automatic, the disturbed sleeping patterns more constant. But what if we leave and the stranger who is supposed to sweep us off our feet and fix us arrives? It became quite hard to tell if what we were really interested was in the potential lovers the digital seemed to promise or in the endless deferral from ultimately frustrating encounters (butch in the picture, a flamer in person) that it certainly provided us.

Eventually, of course, one of these immaterial strangers would show up at the door and something would happen, generally something you hadn’t scripted or accounted for, a mannerism, an unexpected reply, a certain kind of non-desperate availability, or a je ne sais quoi-like shining on the nose, as Freud would have it, and the endless cruising would flirt with an interruption. The stranger would stay a bit longer and not foreclose the possibility for a shameful moment like this, in which horniness just takes the best out of otherwise normal boys (this is my first time on the site), to become something the straight world recognizes as meaningful. The stranger responds to you. Read the rest of this entry »

Report On The Paris-USA Lacanian Seminar

In Freud, Gender Studies, Lacan on September 13, 2012 at 12:18 pm

by Albert Herter

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“In the final analysis I consider the contemporary era to be a kind of interregnum for the poet, who has nothing to do with it: it is too fallen or too full of preparatory effervescence for him to do anything but keep working, with mystery, so that later, or never, and from time to time sending the living his calling card- some stanza or sonnet- so as not to be stoned by them, if they new he suspected that they didn’t exist.”
 – Mallarme

The seminar cost 90 euros, lasted two days from 9:00 am to 11:00pm and consisted of twenty-four papers, one film, and two keynote speakers. I attended the seminar as an analysand, which the woman next to me said was very unusual. I was curious to put faces to the names, flesh behind the words. I wanted to see how analysts handle a microphone, the logistics of ordinary order which can be so difficult for those accustomed to the thin air of high altitudes. I wanted to see the fabric of their vestments. In fact it all went smoothly and cordially.

The Congress had been held a few days before and we talked about how there was no English translation and why not.

The topic of the seminar was “Entering Analysis”. Papers were to be first person accounts of the beginning of analysis.

The room was lit by skylight, a diffuse grey light, like the wandering attention of an analyst, rigorously soft-focused.

My memories of the papers remain amorphous despite my effort to recollect details. The rhythm of the presentations and terms lulled me into a mild stupor.

There were several reoccurring themes. The debate on the validity of “phone analysis”. There were references to how an analysts gesture of the hand, tapping of the fingers, or movement through the room had proved meaningful. It was also pointed out that phone analysis, due to the prevalence of cell phones, no longer dictated any set space.

Eric Laurent’s presentation recalled to mind Lacan’s description of Freud’s handling of concepts as that of a man who holds a hammer which fits comfortably in his hand and says “This is how I hold it for best effect. You may need to hold it some other way.”

Laurent spoke of the nonsensical past which could not have been otherwise, and the future of contingency, when, quoting the Porgie and Bess song, “It Ain’t Necessarily So.” It could be as it ought to be.

There was some talk of humor and one individual remarked “When there is the phallus there can be a lot of fun!” As soon as the phallus is there it’s a comedy.

I wondered if there was a phallus in the American Lacanian movement.

Miller’s talk began at eleven pm. I remembered the only video I could find of him speaking (on YouTube- Rally of the Impossible Professions) where he prefaces his talk by saying he prefers to speak to a tired audience, because their defenses are down and they don’t ask so many questions. He was introduced and someone said it’s not every day you get to speak to Jacques-Alain Miller. I think Miller opened the palms of his hands to this audience of English speakers as if to say “What do you have to offer? What can you contribute?” Read the rest of this entry »

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