The ontological question of the meaning of Being must be pursued to the question of the queer and, in specificity, the gay man.  Psychoanalysis, in both Freud and Lacan, isolates the Being under erasure of the woman in the Oedipus complex and the scene of the discovery of sexual difference.  From the privileged perspective of the little boy, the image of the little girl and the female genitals — the vagina but, more specifically, the clitoris — strike horror in the little boy who fantasizes a castration (the realization of the father’s threat against masturbation) in the place of the sex organs of the little girl.  Qua castrated, the clitoris can only be understood as a not-penis, and the woman can only be understood as a not-man — an atrophied and lost apparition of death and Nothingness in an exiled space of the Outside.  As negativity, the little girl (and the woman) can only be defined by the negative — the not of structuralism and the diacritics of linguistic value in Saussure’s work — which deposes her of identity, essence, and any definition within the symbolic order.  The woman is the negative underside of the masculine symbolic order and its structure of distinction, opposition, and the sign.  The woman is not.  Freud’s cited query — “What is a woman?”— can only be differed and deferred because the woman is stripped of any Being — under erasure — which would posit an answer to the question of the meaning of the Being of the woman.  Deconstruction, in the work of both Heidegger and Derrida, profoundly ruptures the consistency and continuity of Being — is –— such that any entity (“woman,” “man,” and so on) is decentered and dislocated in differed spatiality and deferred temporality from presence, Being, is, as such, qua, by definition, il’y a, and so on.  Freud discovers the phallocentrism of the Western unconscious: the clitoris (not-penis) and the woman (not-man) are the negative foundation of the system of gender, sexuality, desire, and pleasure.

 

In her work, Amy Villajero poses the question of the “lesbian difference.”  What is a lesbian?  If not adequately defined, then does the lesbian exist?  Villajero cites the rhetorical figure of “catachresis” which is hastily defined as a word with an inadequate referent.  To what does “lesbian” refer?  If the sign “lesbian” is a catachresis with an inadequate referent, then the possibility of a “lesbian difference” — simply put: the existence or Being of the lesbian — is put under suspicion.  Qua catachresis, the gap between sign and referent, or between words and bodies, or between images and persons, is wide, and the referent for “lesbian” cannot apply to sentient lesbian bodies, identities, and communities.  But then, to what does “lesbian” refer?  The referent for “lesbian” — body, identity, community — can only be the infinitely expansive set of signs in differed space and deferred time.  This pulsation toward the ends of the textual universe — Other to the Other to the Other, and so on — is the paradoxical economy of the signifier that Derrida cites as the foundation of the collapse of Being and any presence — Being, is, as such, qua, by definition, il’y a, and so on — of a lesbian difference.  Does the lesbian exist?  This question cannot even be posed by a system in which Being is destructured at the arche of presence in any coordination of space and time.

 

The reduction of “lesbian” to an inadequately referenced catachresis is structurally different from the erasure of “woman” in the scene of the discovery of sexual difference in the oedipus complex.  The woman (little girl) is erased qua non existent — not-man and not-penis — from the perspective of the masculine retrospective confrontation with the law against jouissance.  The psychoanalytic oedipal fable narrates the little boy’s delayed response to the father’s threat of castration against the little boy and his prized possession, the penis.  The visual sight of the little girl’s difference — woman difference — is such that he fantasmatically interprets this woman difference  (woman, clitoris) as woman deficit (not-man, not-penis).  This castration makes retroactive sense of the father’s threat.  The proper resolution of the oedipus complex is the repression of pleasure (and desire) and the subordination to the law and rule of the culture.  The return of the repressed — symptom — is the manifest expression of the repressed desire and pleasure whose exchange for identity and identification is the enculturation of the subject to the codes and regulations of society.  Patriarchy reproduces itself on the basis of this masculine system of the denigration of the not-man and the not-penis and the identification with the man and the penis of the father.

 

The erasure of the “lesbian difference” is structured differently from the obliteration of the “woman.”  The lesbian (and the queer generally) is distinct and opposed to the heteronormative system because she is the Outside to the one story that America has invented: you grow up, you get married, and you have kids.  This heteronormative “reproductive futurity,” as Edelman calls it, excludes the lesbian (and the gay man) from the American story, the future, and even the species.  Oedipally, the “woman” simply is not.  The “woman” is excluded from the system of identity, essence, meaning, and symbolism tout court.  Alternatively, the “lesbian” is — but she is a failure.  Following Halberstam, the lesbian (and the queer generally) represents and performs the “queer art of failure” — or the various and nuanced ways that queers (and even deviant straight folks) “fail” the ideal of the American story of heteronormative reproductive futurity.  Lesbianism is a failure of the script of grow up, get married, and have kids.  But gay men also artfully fail this ideal.  Even more, there are several other ways of failing the American story of institutionalized romance and normative domesticity: cheating, infertility, abortion, single-parent, without children, divorced, widowed, and so on.  The one American story — single script, exclusive party, one ideal — is regularly failed.  This failure is not exclusive to gay men or lesbians.  Rather, this queer art of failure is at the center of the American story of heteronormativity and reproductive futurity.  Perhaps we are all queer now — or have always been queer.  It is the American story — and the future — which is yet to n’existe pas: the marriage is broken, the husband and wife are dead, the father is impotent, and the child is aborted.  The future is dead, and the species is at the brink of extinction.  The “lesbian” is this deathly art of the failure of the species of Homo sapiens.  The “lesbian difference” can only be understood as the Outside to life and the child, and the embodiment of death and extinction.  The lesbian (and the queer generally) is precisely the future of life: death and loss.  The figure of the lesbian is the ghostly reminder that — you can’t take it with you.

 

The gay difference for homosexual men is also scripted as an artful failure.  With reference to gay men, I want to raise the prospect not simply of the “bad homosexual” and his deviance from heteronormative reproductive futurity and the script of family and the party of domesticity.  I also want to suggest that the bad homosexual can be contrasted with doing homosexuality badly.  What would this mean?  First, the idea of doing homosexuality badly implies a model or ideal — or at least figure — of homosexuality.  The gay man is — at least an identifiable and legible set of reference.  If there is a bad lesbian, there may not be a doing lesbianism badly, especially if “lesbian” is a catachresis of identity without an inadequate referent.  The lesbian is the excluded death of the American script and the heteronormative party, and the lesbian n’est pas existe because she is the Outside to the symbolic order of life.  But a gay male doing homosexuality badly implies a coherent figuration of gay maleness which can be articulated and elaborated in the culture as a screen and mirror for identification, and for identity and community.  If the lesbian is the unrepresentable referent of death, then the gay man is the (various) ideals whose figurations can only be approximated by a “queer art of failure” to approach the ideal of homosexuality.  The bad homosexual fails the heteronormative model — grow up, get married, have kids — but a doing homosexuality badly fails the failure — he fails the anti-script, the other-party, and the representation and embodiment of artistic failure.  It may be true that nothing succeeds like failure — the bad homosexual — but is there a success in failing failure itself?  If there is a failure in art — or an art in failure — then what happens to a doing art badly or a doing failure badly?  How does the gay male failure fail — or: what is the figuration of success and its representational modes of inadequacy to success?

 

The lesbian difference is an inadequacy to representation (catachresis) and a position of the necromantic Outside of the symbolic order of life.  This means that the lesbian is not properly represented in the culture.  There is a gap between sentient empirical lesbians being-in-the-world and metaphorical figurations of the lesbian and her difference.  The lesbian is situated in the unsymbolizable Real and the ends of the symbolic order.  In contrast, the gay male difference is an inadequacy to an ideal or model.  The gay male is not only the bad homosexual but this homosexuality — is, Being, existence, il’y a — is also the objective ideal for doing homosexuality — and doing homosexuality badly.  The question of the meaning of Being — ontology — of the lesbian and the gay man are fundamentally different.  The catechetic “lesbian” is the Outside of representation.  The lesbian is reduced to matter and materiality — the signifier — which is untouched by abstraction and conceptuality — the signified.  Saussure productively claims that only the signifier (material embodiment) and signified (conceptual meaning) can be isolated in theory; in practice, the conjoinment of body and mind — the sign — is structural.  The lesbian is strangely theoretical.  The lesbian is a material body which is Outside of the symbolic order — theoretically.  In practice, the lesbian n’est pas existe.  In contrast, the gay man is moored to signification and the system of representation.  His failure is not the Outside of the symbolic order and its scripts and parties.  Rather, the gay man has reference — to a homosexuality of failure, of the bad homosexual who fails the heteronormative reproductive futurity of the system, and of the doing homosexuality badly which fails the abstract and conceptual representation of the gay man and his signified.  The lesbian is unmarked materiality, and she cannot see herself in cultural representation — or she experiences the gap between signifier and referent as a catechetic suspension.  Alternatively, the gay man is situated within the split between the body and the mind, and between self and representation.  The lesbian fails representation, and the gay man fails himself.

 

But why does the gay man exist?  Why is there a gay difference in the system of representation but not a lesbian difference?  To return to psychoanalysis, the male body is originarily marked as presence.  It is the standard of reference by which the female anatomy is judged to be inferior.  But this standard of reference of the penis is also subordinate to the phallus as the general equivalence in the comparison and contrast of what Freud identifies as “size” and “visibility” which marks the morphological superiority of the penis against the clitoris (“castrated”).  I would argue that the gay difference in presence and Being — what is a homosexual? — is possible because of its reference to the system of standardization which is metaphorized in the concept of the phallus: penis/not-penis, man/not-man.  The woman is not, and the lesbian is not, but the gay man is — as embodied link (penis) to the system of standardization (phallus).  But this link — but also gap — between penis and phallus positions the man and masculinity in a fiercely proximate relationship to failure.  The first level of this failure is based on the meager criteria of size and visibility of the penis in comparison and contrast with the clitoris and other penises.  But the dimensions of failure in the gay difference — the homosexual as such as an art of failure — exponentially multiply as different criteria and standards are elaborated and extended in the culture.  These modalities of failure are internal to masculinity in a way that cannot be approached by variants of femininity (including lesbianism).  The straight man and the gay man are structured by this failure in different ways.

 

The heterosexual man’s failure is structured by the nuances of deviation from the heteronormative model.  The gay man shares this failure to properly perform the script: grow up, get married, and have kids.  The gay man is the bad homosexual in the sense of a deviation from the proper script.  But the other side of this failure of the ideal of the signified is the failure of the ideal of this deviance.  The most practical of these failures is the unexpected difficulty of writing a new script and throwing a new party: what is the homosexual script of failure? — what is the queer party in excess of heteronormativity?  What does the gay man do within the symbolic order if not grow up, get married, and have kids?  There is an “art of the self” or “care of the self,” as Foucault would put it, to the demand and necessity to aestheticize queerness and write the script and throw the party that rivals the one story that America has invented.  This creative task — scripting the no-future — is the context in which the bad homosexual can either do homosexuality well or do homosexuality badly.

 

The decision to be the bad homosexual (which is a priori) or to do homosexuality badly (a threatened possibility) situates male homosexuality in reference to the signified — conceptuality and abstraction — and also to the phallus and a system of standardization of comparison and contrast of equivalence (size and visibility and beyond).  The quirkiness of the gay man’s plight is that he must erect an alternative phallus — set of criteria, basis of exchange — for doing homosexuality, either well or badly.  But the production and evolution of any creative tweaks of this function are not only arbitrary but conventionalized but also a forced invention that requires the creative constitution of representation: scripts, parties, costumes, masks, characters, and so on.  The queer writes a screenplay, and he casts himself in a musical version with a different plot and an alternative set of lines.

 

This situation begins to explain one of Halperin’s insights: that gay men like figuration, or what he refers to as “queer figuration.”  Queer figuration is a will toward typology and types.  The literalist speaks in terms of empirical subjects: my boyfriend, my plumber, my mother, my boss.  In contrast, the figuralist speaks in terms of generalizable types: the boyfriend, the plumber, the mother, the boss.  Queer figuration isolates types — figures — whose description can be articulated to others, like from teacher to student, who can recognize these types in a way that mediates and explains the relationship between figure and referent, or between empirical subject and generalizable type.  There is a gap between my boyfriend and the boyfriend, and this gap enables the further development of more nuanced figures: the manic-depressive boyfriend, the cheating boyfriend, the white trash boyfriend, the he-never-calls boyfriend, the unemployed boyfriend, the drugie boyfriend, and so on.  Any talented queer figuralist can forge ever more narrow and nuanced versions of the boyfriend — all of which his audience recognizes as figural representations for the mediation between commonly recognized types and individual experiences.  Like a good The New Yorker cartoon, the queerly drawn figure reminds the reader of someone he has seen before but forgot to notice.

 

But the gap between my and the — my leather daddy and the leather daddy — is crucial.  It is in this gap that the queer failure for gay men emerges.  The gap between the literal and the figure opens the space of deviation — not simply deviance — between the materiality of the gay man and the conceptuality of his figuration in the scripts and parties of no-future lives.  The gap between the ideality of figuration and the reality of lives reinforces the phallic system of exchange in comparison and contrast between the my and the the.  If the gay man’s art is figuration, then why is it that gay men like stereotypes — and have the talent to invent nuanced stereotypes, subtle monotypes, and insightful types — for alternative scripts and marginal parties?  Why do gay men like cartoons in The New Yorker?  Why are we attuned to the occupational, residential, religious, and aesthetic differences between a gay man who shops at Pottery Barn versus a gay man who shops at Restoration Hardware?  Why do we know the difference between a punk homo and an opera queen? — and the clothing style, income level, family constitution, cigarette brand, home furnishing styles, and cuisine preferences of these two gay men?  Why is gay male culture so typologized, classified, and figured?  Why do we like — and see — figuration in others and ourselves?  What does the figure do for us? — and what has it done to us?

 

Granted, a penchant for queer figuration is not a happy biochemical genetic mutation.  There must be a socialization process — survival of the figuralist — which promotes queer figuration for gay men.  The practice of figuration could be considered a brash and violent form of stereotyping — and it is — but the art of figuration is in the detail: the difference between J.Crew and Banana Republic, or the difference between an Audi and an Acura, or the difference between Diet Coke and Diet Pepsi, or the difference between Helvetica and Times New Roman, or the difference between Newports and Camels, or even the difference between McDonald’s and Burger King.  These differentiations — market segmentations — upon which queer figuration turns — are structured by correlation: this brand of toothpaste goes with this style of sneaker, which goes with this tone of voice, which goes with this type of formal education, which goes with this type of occupation, which goes with this genre of music, which goes with this brand of cigarettes, which goes with this type of sexual act, and so on.  Queer figuration is an art of generalization, typification, correlation, and nuance — this shirt goes with these jeans, the perfect outfit for the party, or the perfect costume for the script.  There is a difference between my J.Crew sweater that I wore when I went out last night and The J.Crew Sweater to Wear at the Party, between my Audi that I drive to work and The Audi for Work, between my Diet Coke at lunch and the Diet Coke with Vodka with a Twist of Lime at the Club, between my manuscript with Helvetica and The Helvetica Photo Book, between my trip to McDonald’s one night and The Post-Bar Run to McDonald’s, and so on. Gay men like the look.  We like to mix and match the bits of the outfit.  We like to color coordinate the garments.  We like the types that are our types.  Why?

 

This question returns us to the question of the queer artful failure of the heteronormative ideal.  Young gay kids are struck with an affect in their lives that is queer — meaning: it is strange, different, and fundamentally unrepresented in the culture as part of the one story that America has invented: grow up, get married, and have kids.  The alienated split between the young queer affect and the Real unsymbolized trauma of its distance from representation provokes the queerness of the young child to look for, seek out, and make visible figures in the culture that can be queered — made deviant and otherwise than themselves in a secret code and semantic twist.  This identification is not structured by an individual image or empirical ideal.  Rather, the gay man is socialized to look for repetitions — and their internal differences — in the culture.  The queer is socialized to find these repetitions that can be consolidated as figures.  The queer child learns to figure — and configure — objects in his world into pastiche maps of queerness — this goes with that, putting the outfit together.  The young queer sutures the gap between his strange and unrepresented affect and a symbolization with the repetitions of generalization, typification, correlation, and nuance.  The praxis of this coordination is queer figuration.  What are the consequences of the art and science of queer figuration?  We have The Twink, The Leather Daddy, The Son, The Cub, The Otter, The Jock, The Queen, The Bear, and so on — and, why not? — The Blond Faggot, The Surfer Queer, The Asian Gay, The Thug Gay, The Opera Queen, The Scotch & Soda Gay, The Republican Homo, The Little Dutch Boy, and so on.  But there is a gap between these ideal figurations and the various empirical gay beings whose nuanced approximations of these phallic ideals exceed even the most artfully nuanced figurations of gay men.  The queer art of gay male failure is this distance between our collective queer figurations of types and our individual deviations — doing homosexuality badly —of our everyday performances.  As queer figuralists, we establish a colorful bouquet of types and their various generalizations, correlations, and nuances, but at the same time we structure our identities and communities — the praxis of the symbolization of the Real — in the outfits and costumes of idealized looks and images.  Strangely, the phallic ideal and the imago of the father — The Father — is central to the queer body and soul.  Gay maleness enforces The Father and his anti-normative rule — The Bad Homosexual — but also simultaneously cultivates The Son and his deviance from the anti-normative law — Doing Homosexuality Badly.  This is its own queer figuration itself: Daddy-Son, discipline and rebellion.  If the Bad ‘Bad Homosexual’ fails, then what of us queers and our doing homosexuality badly?  What is the psychical and social space between the figure and the empirical, and between the ideal and the ego?  What is lost — ourselves — in this space of failing the failure of homosexuality?  Is doing homosexuality badly doing something other than homosexuality itself?  Are we becoming-figure — Becoming-The-Blond-Faggot?  Or, are we unbecoming-figure — Unbecoming-The-Little-Dutch-Boy?  The gay man is faced with the effort to write a script and plan a party of virtuality and suspension rather than actuality and reality.  The script is a fantasy, the party is a movie, and the no-future is the figuration of a dreamscape of roles and gestures, fashions and one-liners, and props and mise-en-scene.  Is it any wonder that we queer figuralists find ourselves in advertising, fashion, photography, and theater — the arts of the detail?