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PARTISAN REVIEW
which Pollak's meticulous research found to be untrue. Even so, I would not
discount his achievements-which, whether true or false, are part of the
story of a man who invented himself and thereby helped a number of autis–
tic children live full lives.
mlTH KURZWElL
The Myths of Eros
EROS. By Bru ce
T hornton.
Westview Press. $28.00
Sexuality, the French historian Michel Foucault assures us, is "discur–
sively constructed." Humans have sexual impulses derived from nature but
how these manifest themselves in social relations is always a product of "dis–
course" or of the prevailing ideology. Moreover, our underlying nature,
Foucault maintains, is nothing as fixed or certain as what we moderns call het–
erosexuality or homosexuality. Nature made us androgynous creatures but
today we accept more limited sexual preferences simply because of the dic–
tates of discourse. In
The Uses
if
Pleasure
(1984), volume two of his
History
if
Sexuality,
Foucault says the ancient Greeks were more in tune with their nat–
ural instincts. Greek men, Foucault claims, were bisexual and "could,
simultaneously or in turn, be enamored of a boy or a girl. To their way of
thinking, what made it possible to desire a man or a woman was simply the
appetite that nature had implanted in man's heart for 'beautiful' human beings,
whatever their sex might be."
This claim has since been taken up by the homosexual liberation move–
ment to argue that those of us who remain exclusively heterosexual are con–
formists and reactionaries who deny nature and allow ourselves to be blindly
led by ideology. According to Jonathan Ned Katz, author of
The Invention
if
Heterosexuality
(1993), rather than being timeless, the concept of exclusive het–
erosexuality is an invention of the modern era, specifically of the psy–
chotherapy movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The bisexuality of the ancient Greeks, he concludes
a
fa
Foucault, indicates
our true sexual potential. This claim is supported by no less an authority than
Gore Vidal. In his introduction to Katz's book, Vidal describes heterosexual–
ity as a "weird concept of recent origin and terrible consequences."
However, other political movements that have looked to ancient Greece
to provide a touchstone for their views have seen it providing a different per–
spective. Instead of the gay view of the Greeks posing a counter-example to
