#daniel guerin

[meatthawsmoth]

It was Proudhon’s belief that homosexuality…. was hardly practiced by the laboring classes. Its adepts were, rather, according to him, ‘the refined, the artists, people of letters, magistrates, priests.’ Why? Because workers were not advanced enough in the cult of the ideal,’ by the pursuit of 'the beautiful and the good.’ What struck him about the mores of antiquity was that it was only 'great poets who came to celebrate this monstrous passion, a privilege, in their words, of gods and heroes.’ […] - Returning to the origins of Greek love, Proudhon suggests, and he’s right, that homosexuality existed in Greece long before Socrates…. At the origins of humanity an 'erotic pantheism’ reigned, which Charles Fourier, to whom Proudhon owed so much, called omnigamy and which Proudhon evokes in these terms: - 'This supreme love, which brought order to chaos and which animates all beings, does not need the human form to sense pleasure. For it, the kingdoms, the genera, the species, the sexes, all is a jumble…. Caeneus changed from a girl into a boy; Hermaphrodite, at once male and female; Proteus, with his thousand metamorphoses…. Theocritus goes further: in a lament for the death of Adonis, he claims that the boar who killed him with one stroke of the tusk was only culpable for clumsiness. The poor animal wanted to give a kiss to this handsome young man: in the transports of his passion he tore him apart!’

Daniel Guerin, “Proudhon’s Repressed Sexuality“

[meatthawsmoth]

If you search into the smallest crevices of Proudhon's youth, you won't find.... a single feminine affair. His biographer, Daniel Halevy, admitted that 'fooling around with the fair sex was not something he was fond of.' He himself avows that when he still lived in the country and saw farm girls masturbating bulls, 'he never felt anything for these lasses.' - On the other hand, we do discover a male liaison. At age 22, he met a young student from Besancon at the printshop where he worked. Although from different social origins, the two young men became inseparable friends. 'I have known you, I have loved you,' Gustave Fallot with write later to Proudhon. .... They shared everything: room, bed, table, library, savings.

Daniel Guerin, “Proudhon’s Repressed Sexuality”

[meatthawsmoth]

There were other influences on Guérin’s thinking about sexual liberation, notably among the anarchists. In his youth, Guérin read E. Armand’s individualist anarchist organ L’en dehors, which used to campaign for complete sexual freedom, and for which homosexuality was regarded as an entirely valid form of 'free love'. Much later, Guérin discovered the German individualist anarchist, Max Stirner. If some anarchist-communists have been a little puzzled by Guérin’s interest in Stirner — generally anathema to the non-individualist wing of the movement — the answer lies in what Guérin perceived to be Stirner’s latent homosexuality, his concern with sexual liberation and his determination to attack bourgeois prejudice and puritanism: 'Stirner was a precursor of May 68'.

David Berry, “For a dialectic of homosexuality and revolution”

[meatthawsmoth]

Indeed the two sins — his homosexuality and his class background — were of course linked, in that it was a common misconception that homosexuality was a 'bourgeois vice', similarly to the way in which it would in later years be seen as being in some way intrinsically linked to fascism. This is doubtless why Guérin put some effort into disseminating research as early as the 1950s which demonstrated that homosexuality was just as common among the working class as any other class, but which also highlighted the differential experiences of working-class and bourgeois homosexuals — both in terms of the conditions that working-class homosexuals were forced to endure in their attempts to meet other homosexuals (public urinals as opposed to private clubs and salons) and in terms of harassment by the authorities (as contrasted with the relative tolerance of homosexuality in bourgeois and artistic circles).

David Berry, “For a dialectic of homosexuality and revolution”

[meatthawsmoth]

Not so many years ago, to declare oneself a revolutionary and to confess to being homosexual were incompatible.

Daniel Guérin

[meatthawsmoth]

When he happened to write about a beautiful man, Proudhon could hardly contain his excitement. In a curious parable, he describes a man of plebeian blood, whose 'passionate energy, the firmness of his muscles, the timber of his voice.... exerted an irresistible seduction" to the point where the young widow who was one his admirers 'could not, in his presence, refrain from trembling with delight.' .... Elsewhere Proudhon reveals his predilection for male anatomy.

Daniel Guerin, “Proudhon’s Repressed Sexuality”

[meatthawsmoth]

Daniel Guerin’s article “Proudhon’s Repressed Sexuality” is excellent. Proudhon feared the tormenting temptations of falling off the straight path. He compared gay sex to cannibalism, as cannibals were said to, having tasted human flesh, never be satisfied with anything else again.

[meatthawsmoth]

....Proudhon, an anarchist in matters of social organization, sunk to the most authoritarian of puritanisms. Thusly he proves by contradiction that a sexual revolution is needed to liberate victims from the likes of him.

Daniel Guerin, “Proudhon’s Repressed Sexuality”