200
KATE MILLETT
condemnation, than ever threatened Mailer's bullying "White Negro."
In a great many places homosexual acts are still crimes under law,
whereas Mailer's heroes, eager to offend society, must push on
all
the
way to murder. In nearly any bar Divine could stand at bay and hear
"herself" judged:
She smiled all around, and each one answered only by turning away,
but that was a way of answering. The whole cafe thought that the
smile of (for the colonel: the invert; for the shopkeepers: the fairy;
for the banker and the waiters: the fag; for the gigolos:
that
one;
etc.) was despicable. Divine did not press the point. From a tiny
black satin purse she took a few coins which she laid noiselessly on
the marble table. The cafe disappeared, and Divine was meta–
morphosed into one of those monsters that are painted on walls–
chimeras or griffins - for a customer, in spite of himself, murmured
a magic word as he thought of her: "Homoseckshual."
In pariah state there is some magic still, and the myth of romantic
love has always prospered on the social hostility directed at star–
crossed lovers, adulterers or those who transgress the boundaries of
caste and class. Its clandestine and forbidden character alone tends to
grant homosexual love the glamour waning in heterosexuality, lost
together with its literary inhibition and, regrettably, its tenderness.
Notwithstanding its romance trappings of sighs and roses, the
love ethic of Genet's novels is even more atavistic than the romantic
variety. Courtly in fact, it observes the traditional virtues of loyalty,
secrecy, humility and idolatry. From the perspective of sexual politics,
it is possible to regard European courtly love as either a cruel joke -
or the first wedge in patriarchal consistency. For by an anomaly
social history is helpless to explain, the courtly lover, though
de fact()
master, chose to play the role of servant to his lady. Genet has, with
considerable political realism, turned this situation back upon its feet,
and in the feudalistic hierarchy of his prisons, converted French ab–
beys founded by the nobility of the
ancien regime
and haunted still
a male fantasy which intervenes heroically between them, taking on the pair
at once. Hollywood's
The Fox
and other productions of popular cinema are
likely to be directed at masculine audiences too, while Underground or art
films ignore lesbians for the more explosive (because more realistically con–
ceived) topic of male homosexuality. Whatever its potentiality in sexual
politics, female homosexuality is currently so dead as issue that while male
homosexuality gains a grudging tolerance, in women the event is observed
in scorn or in silence.
