Sally R Munt. Cultural Studies. Volume 33, Issue 2. March 2019.

With the developing acceptance of gay equality in the west, it is assumed that we live in a post-shame era, with ‘the world we have won’. However, this is a chimeric cliché of neoliberalism (rather like the idea that we are all postfeminist now). The ‘proud’ homosexual of the west is discursively constructed against the ‘shamed’ homosexual of the east, a typecasting resonant with postcolonial clichés of the primal, religious, and homophobic savagery of the global south in contrast with the civilising, liberal evolution of the secular global north. Shame displacement is of course a dynamic of shame itself. The perceived failure in achieving the ‘proud iconic gay’ of media cultures in the global North results in a traumatic double bind of being ashamed of being ashamed. This article will reconsider the cultural politics and temporality of shame for primarily white gay identities after the ‘War on Terror’. As Islamophobia has exponentially increased, some western gays translocate their unacknowledged shame onto a misconceived ‘brown threat’ in a complex, aggressive, and racist shame loop [Lewis, H.B., 1971. Shame and guilt in neurosis. New York: International Universities Press; Scheff, T.J., and Retzinger, S.M., 1991. Emotions and violence: shame and rage in destructive conflict. New York: Lexington Books].

Men Like Us

Fifty years ago on 28 July 1967, the UK Sexual Offences Act became law. During July, the BBC celebrated 50 years of ‘gay freedom’ by scheduling Gay Britannia, a large range of programmes, documentaries, and dramas, which delineated the progress of gay, primarily male sexual rights in the UK within the modern era. I want to introduce my argument by presenting two representative fictional, yet characteristic, tropes of ‘gay shame’—or more accurately one of homosexual shame, and one of ‘invert’, or lesbian shame (as gender inscription means that these shames are valenced slightly differently). Both are invested in a certain type of twentieth century, upper-class English whiteness, and both illustrate how shame is foundational to the creation of modern gay identity.

As part of the Gay Britannia season, BBC2 screened the drama ‘Against the Law’ (2017), the fictionalized story of Daily Mail journalist Peter Wildeblood, whose love affair with Edward McNally in 1952 led to his prosecution and imprisonment. ‘Against the Law’ is based on the book that Wildeblood wrote after his release. Wildeblood was the only homosexual brave enough to testify at the Wolfenden Inquiry, held in May 1955, which years later, became instrumental in the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality in the eventual 1967 Sexual Offences Act. Wildeblood’s act of witness was admirable; presumably his spell in prison for ‘gross indecency’ (buggery) had sharpened his mind to issues of justice. Nevertheless, in the dramatic re-enactment of his evidence given to the Wolfenden Committee, Wildeblood (played brilliantly by actor Daniel Mays) categorizes three different types of homosexuals: pansies, pederasts, and the ‘discrete homosexual’. Adopting the cultural values of his time and social class he describes:

Wildeblood: ‘ … the men who regard themselves as women through glandular or psychological maladjustment.’

Wolfenden: ‘Group A?’

Wildeblood: ‘Yes. [pause] Group B, pederasts—I cannot speak on their behalf—I regard them the same way a normal man might regard those pederasts who prey on young girls.’

Wolfenden: ‘And Group C, men [shakes his head]—like yourself?’

Wildeblood: ‘Homosexuals in the strictest sense. Adult men who are attracted to other adult men. Men who desire to lead their lives with discretion and decency, neither corrupting others, nor publically flaunting their condition [shakes head]. We are by far the largest group of homosexuals.’

Wolfenden: ‘The discrete homosexual?’

Wildeblood: ‘Yes, my Lord [nods head in deference]. We seek to find another of our own kind and if possible, form a permanent attachment, in private.’

Wildeblood’s plea for tolerance is embedded in shame; he also projects his shame in articulating his intolerance for those who do not conform to his conventions of gender conservatism (in doing so reinforcing the discursive collapse between homosexuality and paedophilia). Wolfenden himself, although motivated to decriminalize homosexuality, still believed homosexuality to be immoral; he expresses his desire to know ‘a little more about Group A’. Wildeblood expounds:

Yes, they’re known as pansies. People of that kind are born like that. To that extent [pause] I suppose they’re not responsible. What they are responsible for is their nuisance value. They cause a lot of bad public feeling toward the other more … [smiles] discrete homosexuals. When I ask for tolerance, it’s for men like us.

At this point, Wildeblood looks around the room in order to visually gather in the other ‘respectable’ middle aged, upper class, gender normative, white men on the committee, ‘men like us’. In order to ‘circle the wagons’, he rouses a fellow feeling of revulsion for the ‘other others’ he abjures:

… Not the corrupters of youth, not the effeminate creatures making an exhibition of themselves. I speak for the men who—despite their tragic disability—try to lead their lives as decent citizens [looks down]. There are many thousands of us, how many we do not know … I believe that we would be better and more useful members of society if we were allowed to live in peace, instead of being condemned to live outside the law.

Wildeblood uses his class, gender, and racial privilege to mitigate his sexual shame, and consolidate his right to belong to an elite group, his identification is with the social elite, not with the rest of the queer community, with whom he strongly disidentifes.

This narrative scene is eerily evocative of the notorious and banned first lesbian novel, The Well of Loneliness (Hall 1928, see further Munt 2001), in which the aristocratic hero, Stephen Gordon, is a depersonalized ‘thing’, an object of abject shame. In the novel, Stephen’s mother writes her daughter a letter, saying:

And this thing that you are is a sin against creation. Above all is this thing a sin against the father who bred you, the father whom you dare to resemble. You dare to look like your father, and your face is a living insult to his memory … I can only thank God that your father died before he was asked to endure this great shame. As for you, I would rather see you dead at my feet than standing before me with this thing upon you—this unspeakable outrage that you call love. (Hall 1928, pp. 233-234)

Stephen d/wells in the place of shame and humiliation; she flees to France to drive an ambulance in the First World War. There, Stephen sinks into the Parisian bar scene, populated with that ‘miserable army’ of foreigners who are ‘covered by shame’ (450), reminding the reader that historically shame is a synonym for homosexuality and moral degradation (Munt 2007). To her ilk, Stephen exhibits a violent antipathy and revulsion; one evening, she too encounters an effeminate homosexual:

He bent forward, this youth, until his face was almost on a level with Stephen’s—a grey, drug-marred face with a mouth that trembled incessantly.

‘Ma sœur,’ he whispered.

For a moment she wanted to strike that face with her naked fist, to obliterate it. (Hall 1928, p. 451)

Sickness, suicide, poverty, and death are the endings promised for such inverts, without the cultural capital of gender conformity, or class distinction, to protect them. Stephen’s inculcation into this new familial bond results in her being cast back into shame loops of shame-humiliation and contempt-disgust (Lewis 1971, Tomkins, 1995), inscribing her violent disidentification. The Well of Loneliness constitutes a plea for absolution for certain types of socially aberrant sexuality, and a vindication, through the use of Christian metaphor, for naturally occurring white aristocratic inverts to maintain privilege through toxic rituals of self-abasement. In a bold, even sacrilegious move, Radclyffe Hall writes Stephen as the Christ, crucified by shame, risen again by the nobility of her victim sentiment. Stephen is a peculiarly white, aristocratic, English figure, whose arrogance and abjection vacillate throughout the novel, her sexual shame offset by her class and racial entitlement. Whiteness is a constant theme in the novel, as a signifier of Stephen’s superiority, her ‘purity’ and noble sacrifice. Embodied in her whiteness, Stephen’s ascendancy is offset against the ‘slowly evolving races’ (p. 362) depicted elsewhere in the novel.

Both of these vignettes illustrate how shame and privilege can collide. Shame provokes a hyper-alertness to one’s place in the world, a world that is usually perceived as hierarchical and preoccupied by status. Shame is a peculiarly relational affect; it can stimulate status anxiety and induce the subject to neurotically re-attach to dominant culture (frequently via rites of humiliation or confession that are followed by forgiveness, absolution, and reinstatement). Unacknowledged shame—often from the grief of unfulfilled entitlements—leads to anger and resentment, in what Scheff and Retzinger (1991) called ‘shame-rage spirals’. Left unchecked, this can mutate into bitter hatred, and isolationism, as alienation intensifies. This is because shame has everything to do with social bonds (attachments). Those living in acute states of shame often display weak social bonds; their psychic contract with the world is fragile. Healthy shame has a short duration and a vital role to play in creating ethical societies. Ideally, shame should establish a transitory and provisional state in the subject, in order that a perpetrator’s guilt is recognized and accepted by himself and by his community, and then that temporary shame becomes promptly resolved as his intention to make amends is affirmed. Shame can be instrumental in preventing further violence by imposing moral values. Shame is creative, and offers potential social transformations—resolved shame may seek new attachments, often to ‘communities of shame’ that in turn, provide viable alternatives for ontological security and safety (Munt 2007). These are the politics of shame.

Shame and Temporality

Gabriel García Márquez explained In Evil Hour (2014) that ‘shame has poor memory’. Shame can warp temporalities, provoking an amnesiacal effect, yet there is a kind of perverse echo embedded within shame behaviours, as we remember from The Little Prince:

‘Why are you drinking?’ the little prince asked.

‘To forget,’ replied the drunkard.

‘To forget what?’ inquired the little prince, who was already feeling sorry for him.

‘To forget that I’m ashamed,’ confessed the drunkard, hanging his head.

‘What are you ashamed of?’ inquired the little prince, who wanted to help.

‘Ashamed of drinking!’ concluded the drunkard, withdrawing into silence for good. (De Saint-Exupéry 2000, p. 32)

Historically, for homosexuals to be classified within the ordering/signifying system, to be allotted a social place, they must be put into place by shame, as we have here seen Wildeblood doing. Shame functions as a kind of originary myth of homosexuality; as Francis Broucek has described it, it is a ‘keystone effect’. Shame and homosexuality are so intrinsically intertwined in the west by society’s Christian roots that any structural analysis of gay life must account for it. In Judith Butler’s project in Bodies That Matter she describes how:

The term ‘queer’ has operated as one linguistic practice whose purpose has been the shaming of the subject it names or, rather, the producing of a subject through that shaming interpellation. ‘Queer’ derives its force precisely through the repeated invocation by which it has become linked to accusation, pathologization, insult. This is an invocation by which a social bond among homophobic communities is formed … . (Butler 1993, p. 226)

There is a queer attachment to shame, through the trope of the ‘sodomite’ (Munt 2007) that has come to underpin modern gay identity. The sodomite, etymologically a traitor, continues to shadow the reinscription of pride that has emerged so triumphantly in western narratives of sexual diversity. Yet, what may remain undeveloped in the idea of shame as the ‘originary myth’ of homosexuality, is that it is also constitutive of homophobia and even facilitates the binding together of homophobic communities. Later, I will suggest that the intra-psychic violence of this effect has consequences for racism, as this shame is projected forth onto the bodies of the ‘other’ as the threat of difference becomes a symptom of the poor social bonds that shame/alienation causes.

In August in 2017, Brighton Pride weekend is named the ‘Summer of Love’, in a direct evocation of 1967, with its partial decriminalisation of sex between men. A staggering 400,000 people participated on the day of the parade, either marching or lining the route, at the ‘Party in the Park’ or in the ad hoc street parties in the gay neighbourhood of Kemptown. The parade is constitutively much more of a mongrel bricolage than it used to be, creating a very intense and transitory ‘structure of feeling’ (Williams 1977) that has quickly instituted civic verve in major western cities. Pride is a ritual that commemorates, back and forth, our histories of shame. Pride in Brighton often takes internationalist themes; it evokes global solidarity with other Pride marches such as the recent ones in 2017 in Russia and Turkey, in which participants were viciously attacked. In 2016, the march was steered by the giant rainbow flag, its carriers holding photos of those murdered in the Orlando shootings, both in commemoration and in a potent public shaming of homophobic violence. As this year’s parade flows past, we feel its jangling impacts: These are ‘street politics’ in an anarchic and carnivalesque sense: uncoordinated, spontaneous, and irruptive. Semiotically, the parade signifies the paradigm and syntagm of gay history. The overall ethos of the procession imbues the crowded streets with a kind of flowing joy. However, the instances, or segments of shame on the march that disrupt the carnival narrative serve, like Barthes’ (1980) punctum, are the wounding, personally touching details that remind the crowds of the shame that underpins the governing ethos of pride. Within the flowing bricolage are cultural practises and social identities that are being discursively constituted by what psychologists identify as shame/pride clusters.

• Nationalist symbols: the parade opens with the British Army Princess of Wales’ (Diana) Parachute Regiment, descending to deliver the rainbow flag to the start of the parade on Hove Lawns; a variety of statutory public services, what may be called qua Althusser as the ‘state apparatuses’, march past in their dress uniforms;
• Minstrelsy: groups of white, English dancers with fake tans, dressed up in Brazilian carnival outfits, enthusiastically perform Latino/a dances, in the ethnic mimicry of brownface;
• Political protest: diverse examples, some faces are hidden by Anonymous masks, and walk in a chained circle containing asylum seeker ‘prisoners’, they carry shaming placards highlighting Gatwick Airport’s collusion in racist immigration practises (Gatwick is Brighton Pride’s main sponsor); long-term gay activist Peter Tatchell marches with a large group of black migrants from Uganda and other African nations protesting state homophobia.

Whilst post-AIDS queer culture has been fascinated by the eroticisation of shame, and the reclamation of shame, there has also been a reluctance to concede shame’s persistently destructive effects upon our communities. It is as though the painful endurance of shame and its legacies of alienation require erasure. We are incited to move on from the trauma of shame before fully appreciating its effects. The longue durée of shame continues to underpin gay identity. Of course, sexuality is more generally linked to shame in the western imagination: Freud (1923) generalized that prohibition and shame are intrinsic to the psychic construction of sexual desires. Freud’s precepts maintained that all western sexualities are inscribed within shame, that shame comes from the ‘outside world’ and is introjected. Shame is foundational to subjectivity and internally lodged in the id, and can result in aggression. Understanding shame’s temporality is key to comprehending how shame becomes toxic, in a nutshell: shame has a pedagogical utility; it is a temporary acknowledgment of wrongdoing in the eyes of others and acknowledged self-reflexively. Shame’s purpose is to instruct in collective morality, it is an epistemology rather than on ontology, and once the instruction has been performed, the perpetrator should be reintegrated and social bonds re-established. If shame becomes too prolonged, the perpetrator enters into a more toxic ‘state of shame’, in which social bonds become unstable. A shamed subject will always look for compensations, for example, a man with shamed masculinity might attach to sentimental nationalisms, in which a fantasy of phallic manhood can be nurtured. Bypassed shame, as Lewis (1971) explains, can also result in infatuation, which does typify the conduct in some far-right groups of members in relation to their leaders and in their supremacist practises. Adler (1956) puts it another way, arguing that a child without love, in a defence against inadequate bonding, will form an ‘inferiority complex’ of chronic shame, and that he will then seek for a ‘drive for power’.

The Defence against Shame

Following the British aristocrat Lord Alfred Douglas’ claim in his 1894 poem ‘In Praise of Shame’ (‘Of all sweet passions/Shame is the loveliest’), queer culture continues to play with shame in order to challenge, revise, and reinvent the discourse of shame. In Brighton from 1989-1996, we had ‘Club Shame’, and the magnificent Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence were perhaps the shame parody par excellence. However, shame’s unironic persistence remains painfully operant in, and pressing upon, our vulnerable members. Statistics on suicide and self-harm disproportionately affect lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer youth, as Cover (2012) and McDermott and Roen’s (2016) excellent and poignant recent studies regrettably continue to demonstrate.

‘Gay Pride’ as a strategic political project has only been partially implemented. Being gay remains shameful for significant numbers of people living in the global north, in spite of widespread legal reforms and assimilation strategies. Gay conversion therapies, for example, remain popular; they perpetuate the idea of a ‘gay cure’ often in the name of religious conformity. Gay conversion therapy is often imposed upon children by homophobic parents, who cannot face the shame of a gay son; indeed, a high proportion of such patients are teenagers. These abused, predominantly Christian young men think they are sick, diseased, and broken because they are gay; in an Orwellian cruelty, the therapy is often described as a ‘reparative therapy’. One of its main pioneers, Nicolosi (2016), claimed that there is no such thing as homosexuality and that everyone has a natural, and universal, heterosexuality. In ‘reparative therapy’ models, a failed heterosexual trajectory is blamed on emotional injury, a fallacious psychotherapeutic model of healing. Despite the American Psychological Association’s assertion in 2007 that attempts to change sexual orientation in this way can cause ‘significant harm’, Christian fundamentalist groups still go as far as performing exorcisms in order to banish the ‘demon’ of homosexuality. But the gay community itself can also be wounding and fail to provide adequate social bonds. One founder of a small gay conversion scheme remarks:

I know that for me if the gay community had offered what I thought it had to offer—a sense of brotherhood and acceptance—I probably would have stayed in it, and gone into [gay life] fully but I didn’t find that. I found that people can change [to the ‘conversion therapy’] community which [by contrast] is very loving and accepting.

The descriptor ‘gay’ (Good as You) was originally a reaction to the predominantly negative stereotyping of gays as the ‘sad young man’ (Dyer 2005), of an inexorable narrative of queer life being a trajectory of loneliness and despair. For men who are sad, whose mental health isn’t great, who are fat, unmasculine, tired, poor, and/or, of course, not ethnically white, gayness is an aspirational pressure that they can easily ‘fail’ at. Gay men are frequently shunned for being deficient. ‘Perfectionist schemas’, so rife in mediated gay culture, are located in shame scripts and reinforce low self-esteem. Shame can also be lived out intersectionally, in which the parts of the social identity that are shameful are disavowed, whereas other parts (the parts that reap the benefit of cultural, social or symbolic capital), are proudly magnified, in a paradoxical over-identification or magnification of entitlement—of whiteness, or bourgeois privilege, or masculine embodiment. This can be a defence against shame; it can be a protective strategy, so that shame fragments the modern gay identity. A common effect of shame entails the practice of constant, comparative monitoring or appraisal of the self in relation to others, through hierarchical assessments of ‘worse than/better than’. Shame also leads to the amplification of these differentiations, so that those considered ‘worse’ are subject to hatred and contempt, and those that are considered ‘better’ are idealized and even venerated.

Contemporary gay rights discourse configures shame, through symbolic and real acts, in social practices typified by acts of racism, Islamophobia, class hatred, and denigration, fear of effeminacy (‘sissyphobia’ Bergling 2001, Richardson 2009), disability, and fixated body perfectionism (Bergling 2007). In the contemporary myth of the ideal ‘gay’ life, it appears mandatory for gay men to have a great life, be amusing, enjoy constant fun, be always partying, display fit/muscly/thin/smooth and sexy masculine bodies, wear beautiful clothes, have perfect skin and haircuts, live well, be healthy, have disposable income and focus relentlessly on the achievement of pleasure and individual happiness. The homophobic spectre of gay narcissism has mutated into this creature, he is the apotheosis of neoliberal consumption.

‘Patriotism is the Virtue of the Vicious’—Oscar Wilde

Nationalisms are on the rise again. Since the Brexit referendum, reported racist and homophobic attacks in the UK have risen up to 400 percent. In the global swing toward the ideological right, there have been multiple examples of state homophobia; for example, Trump removing all LGBT content from the White House website on his first day of office, his ban on transpersons in the military, Putin’s continued harassment of gays, brutal homophobic pogroms in Chechnya, anti-gay public rhetoric by the governments of Poland and Hungary, the UK’s new coalition government with the ultraconservative Ulster Unionist Party (anti-gay, climate change deniers, vehement Protestantism marshalled against abortion, etc.). All such examples contribute to a growing repressive tone for minority rights.

At the same time, one irony of the assimilation of homosexuality into the state imaginaries of Northern Europe (‘Gay Britannia’), is it is now possible for certain kinds of gays and lesbians to feel like they are fully entitled citizens/subjects, who can chant ‘USA! USA!’ or ‘Engerland!!’ with the best of them, sing the national anthem with hand on queer chest, and derive profound pleasure from such ‘deep horizontal comradeship’ (Anderson 1983). Nationalism offers virility as compensation for the symbolic ‘loss of manhood’ that homosexuality incurs. Spectral nationalism is intended for white, normative gays and ‘discrete homosexuals’ only. Harris (1993) argued in her seminal ‘Whiteness as property’ that whiteness is best understood as linked to the ownership of property, which we might extend to the right to own citizenship, or an ‘imagined community’ of nationalism perhaps, in times of migration. Citizenship is the property right of an unstable global economy. Some white gays wish to keep tight hold of the ‘property of citizenship’ privileges they now have, having been denied inclusion for so long. Nationalism can offer westerners a mirage of supra-whiteness, the ‘pseudo-bonds’ of mensch-hood, representing an opportunity to invest heavily in the dominant and approved aspects of the self in order to disavow insufficiencies or weakness. Histories of humiliation play into these narratives, inviting the self to armour itself against further shame-humiliation-disgust scenarios.

In A Taste of Brown Bodies, Hiram Pérez examines how ‘brownness’ circulates within an American cosmopolitan gay male sexual economy; his project being to chip away at the ‘curiously harmonious race discourses of Right and Left, namely, colour blindness and anti-identity’, he explains how:

I use the word cosmopolitan to identify a subject position originating with a white, urban, leisure-class gay male whose desire is cast materially onto the globe at the close of the nineteenth century. A range of mobilities, transformed or generated by industrialization (i.e., class privilege, whiteness, transportation technology, mass media, tourism) and eventually postindustrial society (i.e., communications and information technologies), provide conditions for a cosmopolitan gay male subject. However, that subject need not materially possess the full range of these mobilities. He can occupy an ambivalent position as both exoticizing/exotic and subject/object in relation to a cosmopolitan gay male desire. His experience of this subjectification can be simultaneously resistant and ecstatic. (2015, pp. 104-105)

Pérez argues that gay cosmopolitanism constitutes a major rite of gay male acculturation. For the upper-class British homosexual, historically this had meant an exclusive trip to the Middle East (Morocco, Tangiers, or Egypt), to partake of the orientalist fantasy he sought there, of seductive brown youth. As gay tourism has opened up to those from the global north on relatively modest incomes, packaged expeditions are taken to the ‘gay hotspots’ of Bangkok, Cape Town, Buenos Aires, and Barcelona, in the search for a leisure zone of unbridled sexual primitivism. Notably, the Middle East is not the queer Mecca it used to be and today’s gay tourist is rather less inclined to seek his orientalist fantasies there. Following the events of 9/11, Islamophobia has become a focus for modern state racism; Islamophobia is also inversely related to the aggressive secularism of the modern neoliberal state, and by extension, gay culture in general. Militant secularism in gay culture is explained by a brutal legacy of Christian homophobia, and perhaps the conjunction of Catholicism with paedophilia/child abuse, but simplifications of religion and religious abuse mean that Islam constitutes the chief cultural threat to gay equality in the minds of many white western queers now. The ‘Islamic terrorist’ has mutated into the folk devil of our times, the representation (particularly on social media) of Islamic State as a medieval death cult who decapitate western Aid workers, and throws suspected homosexuals to their deaths from the top of high buildings, has resulted in Islam coming to represent the antithesis of western civilisation in the public mind. This occidental certitude is held in spite of the virulent homophobia of Christian religious fundamentalism in the west, particularly in the USA, Southern and Eastern Europe, and Northern Ireland.

The ‘proud’ homosexual of the west is now paired against the ‘shameful’ homophobia of the east, or the global south, a typecasting resonant with postcolonial clichés of the religious savagery of the global south in contrast with the liberal, secular, civilising progress of the global north, which holds up the end of homophobia as congruent, even synched with, democracy.

The partial success of ‘gay liberation’ over the past 50 years has incurred unforeseen costs. Neoliberalism has embraced and assimilated gay identity, gay markets, gay marriages, and gay/cosmopolitan ‘ghettos’ and synthesized a kind of Frankenstein’s monster: a domesticated homosexual, a version of Wildeblood’s Category C, a man (and sometimes woman), characterized by incorporation via the mechanisms of homonormativity (Duggan 2002), and homonationalism (Puar 2006). This person is keen to capitalize on their fragile inclusion in the national imaginary and sees himself as a person with rights to protect, and an individual selfhood to enhance. But as Scheff & Retzinger say, ‘The idea of the social bond is repressed in modern societies, masked by the ideology of individualism’ (1991, p. 125). Tragically, it is up to this atomized person to manage his own risk, determine his own future, and to ensure his own perpetuity.

The young Euro-American queer is doubly afflicted—ashamed of being ashamed, of not being the ‘proud iconic gay’ of media cultures. This fragile gay westerner is forged from the everyday threat of homophobia and its concomitant humiliation, opprobrium, bullying, and a history of injury, and he carries those wounds within. We have seen in the rise of white victimhood a kind of paranoia that is projected onto the body of the other (Munt 2017). White victimhood has arisen out of both the real and symbolic injuries of neoliberalism, as it has rapidly attenuated the gap between rich and poor, and whites and the rest. The right’s malicious invention of ‘political correctness’, its bogus threat of ‘immigration’, its long-term hatred of multiculturalism, and concomitant cultural nostalgia are deployed cynically in order to neutralize and deflect neoliberalism’s resentments.

White nationalists have been resolutely shamed themselves, of course, for their obnoxious views by the ‘liberal media’ whom they hate so much. The abjection and class shaming of the ‘ignorant racist’ in popular culture may have had consequences too—indeed, we need to investigate further the racial shaming of whiteness, and its legacies. As I write, during the ‘Summer of Love’, neo-Nazis march in Charlottesville, Virginia, chanting ‘Jews will not replace us’. The sentiment is resonant of right-wing French philosopher Renaud Camus’ threat of the ‘Great Replacement’ of white Europeans by Muslims. The day after events in Charlottesville, Virginia, the far-right leader of Netherlands’ Freedom Party, a gay man called Geert Wilders, whose Twitter headline is STOP ISLAM, tweeted ‘our population is being replaced. No more’. (@geertwilderspvv).

Geert Wilders, who has 875,000 followers on Twitter, is not the only out gay person heading up neo-Nazi or far-right political organisations. High profile gay fascists include: Florian Philppot, Marine Le Pen’s Deputy Leader of the Front Nationale in France; in the North American alt.right, there are prominent gay spokesmen such as Jack Donovan and James J. O’Meara; less publically ‘out’ fascist leaders have included Jorg Haider in Austria (Freedom Party), the British National Party fielded a gay candidate to the Euro elections in June 2017, and there have long been rumours about the BNP’s leader, Nick Griffin. There was, of course, the flamboyant Dutch fascist Pim Fortuyn (assassinated) who described Islam as ‘a cancer’; other dead gay fascist leaders included Edouard Pfieffer (France), Michael Kuhnen (Germany), Nicky Crane (UK). There are many others. This year there have been ‘gay pride’ marches through predominantly Muslim neighbourhoods organized by fascist organisations in France, Sweden, and the UK, intent on pushing the alliance between Islam and homophobia. Such marches have historical resonance with white Women’s Liberation racist anti-rape marches to ‘Take Back the Night’ through predominantly black, poor urban areas in the 1980s. Fascism provides a compensation fantasy of inclusion, of belonging to an elite, in a classic reaction formation it proffers the homoeroticism of war (‘blood and soil’), uniforms, hypermasculinity in the style of the Nietzschean Übermensch, and a promise of bro-bonding; such pseudo-bonds must feel irresistible to those who formerly felt themselves to be isolated and estranged. We are reminded that there is a long discursive history (particularly associated with Nazism) that associates homoeroticism and fascism, linking both with a stain that refuses to fade. Blame and suspicion fall easily on gay men because of this historical discursive association between perversion, homosexuality, and authoritarianism, and we must not forget that the gay ‘community’ hails from all sides of the political spectrum, certainly not just the Left.

Although a more nuanced analysis of how the prism of gender compounds the story, lesbians are not immune from this fascist imaginary. High profile lesbian fascists include in Germany, a ‘lesbian mom’ Alice Weidel, an ex-investment banker with a PHD in Economics, who co-directs Alternative für Deutschland. In the UK, one of the leading contenders to top the United Kingdom Independence Party in 2017 was Irish-born Anne Marie Waters, Director of ‘Sharia Watch’ and an out lesbian who describes herself as being an LGBT activist since university. Waters co-launched Pergida UK, the far-right anti-immigration movement and even stood as the Labour Party candidate in my city Brighton as recently as 2013. For both Weidel and Waters, their prime target is Islam and their extreme nationalism is formed out of total revulsion for Muslims. Racist stereotypes of the Muslim rapist and the Arab/refugee who sexually harasses women have, of course, been circulating in popular culture for years (Alsultany 2012). Hate, as I wrote 10 years ago:

… is a vitally intimate force. Hate, like love, is a kind of paradoxical longing dependent upon cycles of connection. It is our own hate that forges a boundary against our fears, its presence in our inner life is so unacceptable that we externalise it as the malevolence of another, binding us to that person. There is pleasure in hatred, as well as torture. Hatred is determined to secure a relationship with someone, even if that aggression is marshalled for their destruction this is actually a false hope, as the hatred doesn’t end there. Destroying one’s object of hate means that one will live in an impoverished world, as the walls of the psyche relinquish a powerful representation of self. Hate is a preferable state to melancholy, in which we cannot identify what we have lost, and decline into depression, rather it is an externalised energy that at least superficially is not directed at the self … Hatred is infinitely preferable to being alone and facing oneself. Hatred is bristling with the energy of connective desires. Hatred is relishly conducted through wilfully maintained ignorance and projection, built upon the partial knowledge the unconscious generates. (Munt 2007, p. 110)

Hate, envy and disgust are all affects allied to shame. Shame, particularly in its unacknowledged form, generates a range of reactions that are ‘violent’ and deliver aggression, as I will now move on to illustrate.

‘For a moment she wanted to strike that face with her naked fist, to obliterate it’—Unacknowledged Shame and Aggression in Homosexual Identity

In Thomas Scheff and Suzanne M. Retzinger’s (1991/2001) text, Emotions and Violence: Shame and Rage in Destructive Conflicts, they argue, following Helen Block Lewis, that unacknowledged shame will result in anger, and even rage. They point out that if shame is not recognized, understood and acknowledged, then aggression will be triggered. Unacknowledged shame causes anger, which has the propensity to spiral into violence. Scheff and Retzinger stress the negative consequences of not recognising shame. My central argument here is that the rubric of pride, which has come to dominate the discourse of western lesbian and gay rights in the last 50 years, has led to some disturbing and unforeseen consequences: in gay life, because of the power of the public discourse of pride, having shame has become shameful (those feeling shame are often ashamed of their shame). The era of pre-Wolfenden ‘queer shame’ is sometimes viewed from the luxurious present as something almost nostalgic, ironic, a lingering barely extant ghost, even an erotic plaything, however homosexual shame remains all too real and inscribed upon queer bodies, in ways that go unacknowledged and unrecognized.

I believe that this has led to what Lewis (1971) described as a ‘feeling trap’, a recursive emotional loop that is bound together with shame. Gay men in particular become ashamed of being ashamed, partly because of the pressure to conform to the stereotype of the out, proud, masculine gay. White masculinity is also predicated on dominance, not subordination, so this conjunction produces significant cognitive and emotional dissonance. Thus, gay white racism can be seen as symptomatic of unacknowledged, unresolved and sometimes bypassed shame (Lewis 1971) that is misdirected/projected onto brown bodies in the form of revenge for their barely acknowledged pain of humiliation. Unacknowledged shame creates physical and symbolic violence. Unacknowledged shame also separates off the self from others, breaking social bonds and creating disidentifications, and an orientation of victimhood (Munt 2017). I also suspect that the extent to which white gay men perceive the ‘Islamic threat’ of homophobic annihilation is due to an over-estimation of that threat, in a compensatory practise of hyper-vigilance (coincidentally, a symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder, as are paranoid thoughts). To reiterate: gay racism is a compensation narrative that is lodged within the cultural politics of shame. The disgusting/desired brown bodies of Islamic fundamentalists are all at once menacingly hyper-masculine and also the despised over-emotional, irrational feminine of the traditional Orient; they are the Orcs or Dothraki, strangers without human reason or soul. Such fantastic nightmares require white superheroes to vanquish them.

Heteronormativity produces compensatory idealisations and denigrations that are specific to gay life. Rare is the lesbian or gay man that has escaped the aetiology of failure in their developing sexual consciousness. We hear this in the tonal injury of far-right extremist Jack Donovan’s offhand comment when speaking about his former gay life:

I think it’s very unstable and very lonely. It’s not something that’s—like—if I met a young man who would say, ‘Hey, you know, I’m questioning,’ I’d say, ‘Don’t.’ I would advise them, unless there is no other way, I would say, ‘If you have the choice between men and women, be straight.’

Shame continues to produce these queer attachments/disattachments. Internalized homophobic shame is certainly an issue within the neo-fascist culture, so much so that Donovan strongly disidentifies with the term ‘gay’ and prefers instead his own invention Androphilia: A Manifesto: Rejecting the Gay Identity, Reclaiming Masculinity (2006). Donovan’s partner of 20 years, O’Connor reports, is a Trump supporter of Mexican descent. The denial and transference of shame onto other minority groups is a characteristic of neo-fascist masculinity. Envy is also embedded in shame, and it’s possible that for some, there is also a special, destructive envy reserved for those who seem to have the ontological security, and certitude, of a ‘terrorist’. The contempt shown toward Islamic fundamentalists—and by extension Muslims in general—is correlated with class hatred, and shame. Those young people absconding to join Islamic State are predominantly from the banlieue, or the industrialized urban ghettos of Europe, they are the poor, and economically excluded, and are frequently belittled as ‘brainwashed’ (stupid). Shame can result in a lack of empathy, and haste to judge those valued as socially ‘inferior’. Shame motivates people to scurry to icons more formidable than themselves, more generally of course, this goes some way to explaining the generic racism and sexism in gay ‘hook up’ apps such as Grindr, Tinder, Scruff, Growlr etc. (‘no fats, no fems, no chocolate, no beans, no rice’). These are simultaneously supremacist compensation strategies for a spoiled/stigmatized identity (Goffman 1963).

The Inverted Discourse: Queer Solidarity and Shaming the Racists

At Glasgow Pride this summer, Police Scotland led the march through the city. This was met with resistance from the left wing and anti-fascist queer activists. Online journalist, Juan Mac, had this to say:

Before the march had even started, two members of the IWW [Industrial Workers of the World] were arrested, apparently for carrying a banner which read ‘These Faggots Fight Fascists.’ This week, Heather Heyer, an IWW member, was murdered in Charlottesville in the US, fighting fascists. For Police Scotland to come to Pride and target members of our community like this is deeply shameful.(19 August 2017)

The activist organisation ‘Free Pride’ was behind the protests, and they made a public statement about the decision to invite the Police Service to lead Glasgow Pride:

Free Pride’s action at this year’s Pride parade was primarily in response to the decision to have the police lead the march. We wish to draw attention to the harmfulness of this decision which shows a disregard for migrant lives and LGBT people of colour.

Pride has its origins in protest against police brutality and anti-LGBT violence, particularly against people of colour and trans folk, and we believe it should remain a protest. In addition to this, the police service is a racist institution which serves to enact violence against LGBT+ people of colour and we condemn the decision to prioritise these institutions over the LGBT+ community. Corporate and police inclusion and centring within pride betrays its roots in protest and serves to uphold state violence against marginalised groups—we reject this pinkwashing and rewriting of history.

Free Pride prioritises community over corporations and sees no reason to accept these revisions of history. We believe it is time to reclaim pride.

Shaming the police is of course an inversion of the police shaming homosexuals in the pre-Pride era. This time, in a similar gesture to those protesting at Brighton Pride about Gatwick Airport’s contract with the Home Office to incarcerate refugees and asylum seekers, gay activists are shaming the racism of the state. There is a long, multifaceted history of anti-racism protest from the queer and feminist Left, indeed it is their commitment to reduce equalities and proselytise social justice that perhaps typifies the alliance politics of modern LGBT liberation movements. So, although I believe shame to be fundamental to the prohibition of same-sex desire, clearly lesbian and gay subjects are able to resolve their shame to the extent that non-exploitative other-oriented identifications and connections can be made, and so that communitarian impulses can be lived out, and social bonds strengthened. As I have previously explained, shame has the propensity to force a Newtonian turn away from dominant plots of individual subjectivity, and toward the creation of new alignments and affections. Resolved shame has this transformative potential:

In casting down one’s eyes in shame one in fact ‘blinds’ oneself, one turns away from the gaze and in doing so, in that fragment of time, s/he is turned into one who is compelled to be ashamed and impotent. But s/he need not be: at that moment-site a claim to seek reprisal ought to be rejected, for the blindness that is inflicted may also augur a break in perspective, a fresh view, and so in that agonizing, burning distress of being turned away, and then turned back, s/he can seek miscellaneous queer, non-phallic attachments that reform social bonds, making space for supplementarity and the ineffable. (Munt 2007, p. 224)

As Emily Dickinson said in 1877, ‘shame is the tint divine’, for it holds the possibility of the sublime:

For Lyotard in Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime this is ethical, what one witnesses in the sublime is the differend—the straining of the mind at the edges of itself. The sodomitical sublime, therefore, is a symbol of desires that cannot be foreclosed, that provoke mystery, that can evoke a musical resonance in oneself for stretching out what is possible to endure, and perhaps, enjoy. (Munt 2007 p. 233)

This ‘sodomitical sublime’ enables an ethic of openness and wonder to arise; this structure is one reason why LGBT communities can hold the potential for a certain kind of loosening of boundaries of the self, and develop an ethic of listening and care (Foucault 1986). Perhaps it is the intimacy and vulnerability of sex that facilitates this, I don’t know.

Cosmopolitanism, following the history of Empire (‘we are over here coz you were over there!’) can also take some credit for this (Smith et al.2016), for whilst gay cosmopolitanism has been rightly criticized for its touristic gaze by Pérez, it has also promoted, in the European context, cultural encounters and hybridity at the local level. The difference between multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism is much debated, but in Europe and especially the UK, multiculturalism has been a top-down, state-level policy, whereas cosmopolitanism has been rather more identified with the ground-up experience of spontaneous cultural exchange in ethnically mixed societies. Strangers who live in your street, have eventually become neighbours. The Anglo-American difference in perspectives on cosmopolitanism can be partly attributed to different national histories—in the USA ethnicity is more of a mobilising force than in the UK, where multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism have been government policy since New Labour took power in 1997. Since the twenty-first century, the descriptor ‘cosmopolitan’ has become somewhat of a synecdoche for ‘gay’, particularly when deployed to describe historically black or brown urban spaces that have been gentrified and marketized by white gays and lesbians, so that the term also resonates with class hierarchies. Nevertheless, it is undoubtedly the case that the ‘diversity agenda’ has led to various ethnic groups and subcultures finding the common political cause within coalition identity politics, which can be described as ‘post-shame’ in terms of a willingness to move beyond direct self-interest. In this, it must be mentioned that a strong history of feminist anti-racist protest and activism since the 1970s has meant that the ‘body-fascism’ of gay culture has not been replicated in lesbian communities to the same degree; there are gender differences in attitudes to body shaming, although the thin, white, feminine woman remains the ‘poster-girl’ lesbian.

Islam is depicted in western media as a ‘religion of the sword’, of violent intolerance and restriction, and Muslims as simultaneously sexually repressed (women) and obsessed (men). Various LGBT Muslim organisations in the UK and abroad, including Imaan, Naz Project, Safra Project, KISS, and Himat exist to provide queer Muslims with fellowship and spiritual support, and our interviews with queer Muslims (Yip and Khalid, in Browne et al. 2010) identified how most respondents drew upon Islamic cultural traditions and rituals to support their identity as lesbian, gay, or trans and spiritual persons. The Islamic spiritual tradition of Sufism was adopted by many as being a religious form that accentuated individual spiritual development over what were perceived to be more rigid, rules-based, and institutionalized Islamic schools (typified by attending the local mosque, which many avoided). Perhaps the assumption of non-Muslim westerners is that queer Muslims are suffused with shame, indeed it seems such a truism of western media stereotyping that Islam is a shame-based religion—but here is one participant from our study, who articulates his non-shame very well:

El-Farouk: I went for jumma one day and I hadn’t planned on going. It was summertime so I was wearing low-slung jeans and a T-shirt. Well the jeans were a bit too low-slung. The Centre that I went to, the women pray on the right and the men on the left. So it was summer and I was wearing a thong. So I went down into sajdah [prostration] and I soon realised that things were not riding in synchronicity! We always have munchies and coffee after the jumma and this 70-something old lady came across to me and said, ‘Dear, thongs are very sexy, but maybe next time you can wear a longer shirt.’ Someone else turned to me and said, ‘What was she doing looking over from the other side?’ Since then I’ve made sure I wear a longer shirt. So the following week when I went and was at the back tucking my shirt in, this other guy who was there, straight, older, Arab man leaned forward and said, ‘Don’t worry, you’re all covered!’ (cited in Browne et al. 2010, p. 129)

In our research on queer spiritualities, those Muslims who struggled the most with shame were young men living on council estates in central London boroughs—in other words, those with the very least economic, symbolic, and cultural capital—so intersectionality continues to inform and shape shame scripts. Mapping shame onto Muslim bodies not only ignores the recent shaming cultures of the Christian west (in Ireland, for example, but also Roman Catholic countries such as Spain, Italy, and Portugal), it also a form of symbolic violence in itself as it flattens, simplifies and caricatures the diversity of Muslim identities, as I try to show by providing El-Farouk’s own words. It also co-opts gay identity as implicitly white, and ignores the multiple histories of same-sex cultures in Islamic countries, the number of ‘out’ gay Imams, and also the established research on queer Muslims that has emerged. Such cultures of queerness within Islam have much to teach western fixations on identity politics, it is … a shame that such knowledge is denied and excluded from the primary narrative of western ‘Pride’.

Conclusion

Whereas shame has a key function and duration in maintaining normal social relationships, when shame is ignored or denied it can become pathological (Lewis 1971). Like the Little Prince, we are in danger of forgetting our shame. We need to better understand how gay shame gets transposed into gay racism, in the new geopolitical reality after the ‘War on Terror’. It is 10 years since Jeffrey Weeks published The World We Have Won (2007) in which he argued that the long revolution of sexual liberalisation has brought global transformations, particularly for gay and lesbian people. Whilst optimism is often a political necessity, what such globalistic claims risk is the creation of a unified narrative that banishes uncomfortable, negative, and indeed shameful feelings that remain intransigently part of the lived experience of homosexuality in the west, which can have dire consequences for the east. Few of us could have predicted the recent geopolitical changes that have resulted in extreme surges of racism toward brown persons, near and far. The western myth of secular, liberal democratic progress has been existentially challenged in the past 12 months as far-right ideologies have taken firm hold, including, and shockingly, with gay subjects, a phenomenon so counter-intuitive it requires explanation.

Thus, it is time for gay western subjects to own our own shame. ‘The world’ is not (to be) ‘won’. The resolution of shame has been a great achievement for many white gay men, but their residual, unacknowledged shame can remain lamentably, regrettably, displaced onto brown bodies. The dominant rubric of pride has unintentionally promoted the public erasure of negative emotions, so that gay shame has been disowned, its suspension creating a kind of cultural sickness, in racism. White gays and lesbians have incorporated Islamic phantoms into our collective imaginary, the larger securitization agenda has fabricated attenuated stereotypes of Muslims, of women victims and men terrorists, to our own shame. Contemporary myths reproduce western subjects purely as victims of Islamic terror, ignoring the original histories of colonial terror in which our forbears were the perpetrators. Shame displacement is, of course, a dynamic of shame itself, so that we need to practice a ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ toward such shameful projections, such violent caricatures. Needless to say, our politics of sexuality were never restricted to isolationist western formations of the gay white subject. We are reminded that reintegrative shaming, the ‘open acknowledgment and expression of shame [that] draws people together’ (Lynd 1958, Braithwaite, 1989, cited in Scheff and Retzinger 1991) can rebuild relationships. We are not yet ‘over the rainbow’, but facing up to shame, and our own participation in it, requires our critical and mindful attention.