Some patients are almost always miserable, perpetually interpreting everything that happens to them through a notion of complete failure. Everything they think about is a failure. This is a way of beating oneself up. In order to sustain this attack, one has continually to repeat this vicious circle of self-inflicted pain, experienced as psychic trauma in the present. One has to establish that the injury lives. This is how one turns the survival of homophobic oppression into an identity in itself. In the production of political identities, the injury from which they sprang informs the production of ourselves as ‘queer’, as ‘black’ or as ‘a woman’.
In this era of identity politics there is another standard that is set (a little Big Other if you like). It goes like this: you can be a complete homosexual if you identify yourself as one (hence books with titles like How to be a Happy Homosexual). I am a gay man if I say, ‘I am a gay man’. However this statement implies that you are supposed to meet a certain set of criteria that constitute being ‘a gay man’. This is of course another ideal, another myth that is, in fact, impossible to attain.
On the one hand, we grow up in a culture which deems homosexuals to be ‘failed’ men; on the other hand we also grow up in a world where a different group of people disagree–homosexuals are as ‘complete’ as heterosexuals. Can one simply impose one set of rules, which install one as a heterosexual man, and another set of rules, which say, ‘I am a complete man, but gay’? Or is the influence of the past much more powerful than we realise, so that the questions for modern life are whether or not we can choose our rules at all. This, it seems to me is what psychoanalysis is really asking, ‘Can we choose our rules or not’? Swapping one set of rules for another doesn’t resolve the problem, which is, ‘I’m still miserable’.
Identity politics is a failed attempt at providing the conceptual frame for the creation of idealised life. What identity politics suggests, is that you don’t have to believe all the myths, you don’t have to take on in a self-hating way, all the oppression; you can say, ‘I am a gay man and I am proud of it and I am still just as much a man as anybody else’. This is the identity I want to wear, but unfortunately, this ends up just like another commodity. We have lots of kinds of soap powder; we have all sorts of identities.