We often understand community as a collective social and political actor comprised of those who share an identity with each other. Yet, as the history of the gay community shows, communities are often marked by insurmountable internal differences. Is there a future for community beyond identity?

Text by João FlorêncioPhotos by Alex Avgud

In October 1976, the cover of issue nine of US gay leather magazine Drummer featured drag-queen troupe the Cycle Sluts. Inside was an interview with Michael Bales, the group’s leader – or Cycle Slut Mother Goddam – accompanied by photographs of the queens. Bales took readers through the troupe’s history from its foundation two years earlier at a gay Halloween costume ball to audience reception at its more recent shows at home and abroad. At one point, when asked whether their beginning had been “terrifying”, Bales replied: “It really was. Thank god for the gay community! The support was many-fold: support in numbers, support in feeling that your own kind were out there, support by legions of friends. I suspect that even if the Sluts didn’t have anything to offer, the loyalty of the gay community would have seen us through the initial stages.” Yet, two issues later, in the readers’ letters section, the following appeared:

THINKS SLUTS SMUT

The cover picture and the associated article you used in your latest issue (No. 9) disgusted me beyond words. I thought, when you started out, that this was to be a unique magazine – for men – not for the campy bar queens. I was wrong. The Cycle Sluts have no place in my lifestyle or that of my friends. If I want to read that kind of trash I will subscribe to After Dark or The Advocate. Such junk should get you all sorts of subscribers off the street. You shouldn’t miss mine when it comes time for renewal. So have fun with your new format… and don’t forget heels and purses.

Bruce

Seattle, WA

So much for the “gay community”…

In October 1987, a Paris-based group called Comité Homosexuel et Lesbien Anti-Fasciste (CHLAF) published a pamphlet entitled Fascistes et Homosexuels, Idéologie et Stratégie: Le Cas Gaie France. The pamphlet was an attack on Gaie France, a magazine which had begun publication a year earlier under the direction of Michel Caignet, a paganist, white supremacist, and far-right homosexual pederast closely connected to neo-Nazi organisations in both France and Germany. CHLAF demanded that “Gaie France as a group not be accepted in initiatives of the [homosexual] movement.” Indeed, for the members of CHLAF, far-right homosexuals like Caignet advanced a political ideology sustained by “revisionist” myths, one that the anti-fascist collective set themselves to unmask:

In every issue, Gaie France deliberately mixes fantasy and ideology. Scouts and Vikings fill the pages with virile, warlike homosexuality and paedophilia. The repetition of these myths is not neutral. The myth of the Viking in Gaie France can be compared with that developed by Jean Mabire, founder, in Normandy, of a magazine called Viking, who was also known for his pro-Nazi sympathies. His attraction to virile fraternity and the Nietzschean vision of the combatant are two leitmotivs found in Gaie France.

So much for the “gay community”…

Appeals to “community” are always – as these two examples illustrate – also appeals to identity; all historical attempts to include or exclude people from certain communities have required a policing of identity. For Bruce from Seattle, the presence of the Cycle Sluts on the pages of Drummer, a magazine of the “leather fraternity”, was an attack on the very identity of leathermen, which, to him, hinged on a clear masculinist distinction between masculinity and femininity. Despite being made of the same material – leather – purses and chaps did not go together. To claim otherwise could only lead to disgust: the most visceral of sensations, triggered by the sight of boundaries being corrupted, of matter out of its rightful place. For the activists of CHLAF, a far-right magazine like Gaie France had no place in the homosexual movement. They understood any attempt to reconcile homosexuality and fascism as either a product of the ways in which the orthodox left had historically seen homosexuality, as a bourgeois vice, or as a perverse strategy to co-opt homosexuals into the revisionist ideological space of the postwar, post-Nazi “New Right”. At the core of both examples, we have a “community” that is, or was, always already fractured: an idealised constituency of individuals brought together by their shared identity, thought together as a collective political actor on the basis of that shared identity, and yet repeatedly having to deal with its own impossibility by policing the boundaries of who counts as a legitimate member and who should be perceived as a glitch or degenerate.

What if community was a “doing” in common, not a being in common?

Anyone who’s ever been to Royal Vauxhall Tavern or Hampstead Heath in London, who’s fucked (or not fucked!) at Berlin’s Lab.oratory or danced at one of that city’s many queer raves; anyone who’s had weekends away at the Fire Island Pines or partied at the many more-or-less-official gaybourhoods spread across the world, from Shanghai to Rio, knows that “belonging” is an extremely precarious feeling, even in like-minded “communities”.

To think about “community” is to think about identity, and to think about identity is to think about sameness. To identify with X or to identify as X is to be X. “Community” is produced by the coming together of people with shared characteristics, people who have something in common and identify with one another on the basis of what they share. British anthropologist Victor Turner famously described communitas as the feeling of belonging experienced by participants in rituals at moments when all personal differences would be suspended and participants would see themselves as equal members of a particular social formation. This, according to Turner, was a fundamental reason why ritual is deployed in many cultures to solve internal conflicts and maintain social order. Communitas is what happens when difference is subsumed by sameness, that is to say, by identity. Yet, in a social context such as ours, one increasingly split along identity lines and with consequential growth of political claims from imagined “communities” (despite the fact that most of us inhabit different communities at different times), it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain “community” as a space from within which to call for and advance meaningful political change. The interests of different “communities” are being scapegoated by the radical conservative right in order to promote reactionary and ultra-nationalistic political agendas, despite those “communities” themselves – our “communities” – having never really been spaces of sameness or consensus.

In allowing “us” to make political demands, “community” has trapped us by restricting and policing what “we” could become. Importantly, what “we” could become with others – alongside others – could be built based not on a shared identity but, instead, on shared needs. While “community” seems to remain very useful for marketeers to sell their products – think leather chaps; think “femtech”; think all the corporate floats at any Pride event in London, New York, Madrid – it traps us with expectations, demands, righteousness, the failure to meet who we’re already supposed to be. It traps us in the impossibility of articulating ourselves to others. Merely adding up identities in order to map the ways in which different communities may overlap – as many popular deployments of “intersectionality” do – does not account for the logic of community, which is less about who belongs and more about who doesn’t. Community builds walls, not bridges.

What if community was a “doing” in common, not a being in common? Italian philosopher Roberto Esposito points out that our understanding of “community” is inherently paradoxical, in that communities are constructed on something that is simultaneously the private property of each individual and the collective property of the group. What makes an individual a member of – say – the “gay communi- ty” is something that is lived as the innermost part of their individual being and subjectivity. What is most theirs as a person is somehow also something that belongs to others and from which others also go on to make claims in the world and of the world. What is supposedly most private is also something that is very much public. Tracing the etymology of the “common”, Esposito highlights that tension at the heart of our understanding of “community”:

In all neo-Latin languages…, “common” … is what is not proper …, that begins where what is proper ends: “Quod commune cum alio est desinit esse proprium” “What we share with one another ceases to be our own”, It is what belongs to more than one, to many or to everyone, and therefore is that which is “public” in opposition to “private” or “general” … in contrast to “individual”.

The result of this is that “community” is never about holding on to something but instead is about giving something away: that which is most personal to us. Esposito stresses this much when he notes that the munus from which communitas derives means “duty”, “obligation”, or “gift”.

If we were to think along those lines, “community” would become less a collective brought together through shared personal characteristics or a shared identity, and more something that comes into being, however ephemerally, through the giving away, the giving up, of identities and subject positions:

In the community, subjects do not find a principle of identification … They don’t find anything else except that void, that distance, that extraneousness that constitutes them as being missing from themselves; … Therefore, the community cannot be thought of as a body, as a corporation … in which individuals are founded in a larger individual.

What would it mean to think community as a doing – an unconditional giving something of ourselves to the other – that shatters the self rather than affirming it in its identity? What would it mean to think community as an ethics of living towards the other, of guiding one’s life by a duty of care towards the other that is not predicated on a recognition of the self in the other? What would a community of strangers look like? Most importantly, what could it achieve that existing communities of equals, communities of the same, have not managed to do?

When thinking about these questions, I have increasingly been drawn to what is perhaps an unconventional source of answers: queer-cruising environments and practices. While being mostly associated with gay men, and often governed by practices of exclusion and hierarchies of sexual desirability and value, cruising can – at its best – offer us a glimpse of what “community” could look like were it to be predicated on the insurmountable impossibility of knowing the other, not on a recognition of the self in the other. When queer people come together to look for sex, what brings them together is a want; it is something they aim for, something they desire – sometimes even something they don’t yet know they desire. They come together to come together. The ephemeral social architecture of cruising itself also does – again, when at its best – allow for surprise to happen, for new pleasures and wants to be forged and discovered. To enter a cruising space one has to be open to surprise, to let go of certainties and expectations, to become a little more malleable, more open to unknown bodies and to navigating their skin, their flesh, their breath, to be one of many strangers who seek one another despite not knowing each other.

In contexts like this, cruising requires of us that we make a leap of faith, that we open ourselves to strangers, as strangers. To the possibility of undoing ourselves that comes with gifting ourselves to them. Importantly, that we do so in the knowledge that cruising constituencies last only as long as we cruise. That is their reality, even though oftentimes cruising spaces can become rigid and governed by the very same identity structures that govern everything else. Yet, it is the fragility of the best cruising spaces and the fact that they often coincide with everyday spaces populated with other people – public parks, streets, public toilets – that makes cruising so productive to help us think about different ways of “doing” community. It is also for those very reasons that they require of us the most difficult thing of all: that we honour and care for others – for strangers – that we make ourselves a pathway to their pleasure, not because we see ourselves in them but simply because we’ve been brought together by our wanting to come together. How much more would we be able to achieve if we came together on the basis of what we need, rather than on the basis of who we are?

A couple of years ago I attended the sixth European Geographies of Sexualities conference in Cádiz, Spain. One of the conference keynote lectures argued for a way out of the miasma of “community” and of identity-based political claims. Delivered by Spanish trans sociologist and political theorist Lucas Platero, the lecture invited the audience to imagine political constituencies made stronger and more effective through their being brought together by shared needs, not shared identities. Clearly inspired by Marx’s historical materialist analysis, Platero argued for the value of collective political actors formed through the alliance of – for instance – trans people and cis women on the basis of their shared need for, say, legal name change. If a cis woman trying to escape a violent relationship may at times need a legal name change in order to avoid being stalked by her violent ex-partner, and if trans people require the same procedure in order to align their name with their gender, why – Platero asked – should the two groups not come together to demand a smoother and more accessible legal and bureaucratic mechanism through which to get what they want?

The proposition seemed to me to be at once self-evident and groundbreaking. Self-evident because political demands are always demands for something, because people have historically taken to the streets, to the public squares of the polis, to demand something they all wanted, often regardless of who they were. Demonstration is the political enactment of the demos – that is, of the people. Groundbreaking because, in the context of a social world in which political voice seems to increasingly only be possible if spoken on behalf of this or that community – the idea that many communities may want, may need, the same thing comes close to being a rather radical proposition. Yet, what Platero was calling for was certainly not a return to a political universalism at the expense of attending to the situatedness of every political demand – of how every demand emerges from the material conditions of an individual or collective life. Instead, what such a proposition can help us grasp is that different communities do share similar needs, and that it is only by coming together on the basis of those needs that they will be able to protect that which makes them different in their own identities.

Against the limitations of the “we’re here, we’re queer!” of representation politics, may we adopt the “what do we want? When do we want it?” of collective material demands. May we come together to speak for what we want. .