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34 THE POLITICS AND POETICS OF CAMP
(bourgeois) sensibility, incapable of either sensing deeply or expressing fully
normative human experiences. As Hogarth had done, Lavater assumed that the
fribble’s “lack” was obvious, as he demonstrated by comparing the “Contrasted
attitudes [of] a man and a fribble” (viii) (Plate 8):
Which of these two attitudes would you prefer? …The answer to this
question is obvious, and there is no room for hesitation. If I ask farther,
which of these figures announces a harebrained coxcomb, a petit maitre—a
man whose conversation is equally insipid, tiresome, and teasing—a mind
incapable of feeling either the great and beautiful, or the simple and
natural…? The question, in truth, may still be easily answered, and there will
be only one opinion of the matter. 11
(3:213)
The passage is unusually vituperative, even for Lavater, and therefore highlights
the hostile representational tactics whereby increasingly “visible” homosexuals
were “recognized” by their excessivity, while simultaneously “seen” critically as
lacking psychic substance. In other words, the fribble had come to stand in for,
or enclose, the absence of subjectivity (conscience, sincerity, identity, utility,
sensibility) once assigned by the bourgeoisie to the aristocrats as a class. It is
interesting to note, then, that “fribble” itself meant lacking or incapacitated: “to
fribble” was to falter verbally (to stammer) or physically (to totter) (“fribble”
1989).
In creating homosexuality as a nonidentity (as unspeakable, as fribblish, as
offstage), the bourgeoisie were casting off onto the concept of homosexuality all
the traits associated with the obsolete aristocrats—not only sodomy, but also
arbitrariness, excessiveness, and, most emphatically, social impotency. For this
reason, what was most bothersome about newly visible sodomites like the
mollies was that they occupied this no-place, this lack, mimetically, as the basis
of improvisations within an increasingly normative society.
AKIMBO EXPROPRIATED: QUEER PRIDE AND (UN)
IDENTIFICATION
If the bourgeois critics had attempted to transfer already existing registers of
effeminacy from courtiers to lower-class sodomites, or mollies, in doing so they
had helped to create homosexuality as a new content. In other words, where the
aristocrats had once been criticized as sodomitical, the hermeneutics of
homosexuality had in turn aristocratized sodomy. As bourgeois ideology of the
self spread through all segments of society, it became increasingly viable to
possess oneself as a homosexual. By 1726, as Alan Bray has shown, it was
possible for an Englishman named William Brown to assert under arrest, “I did it
because… I think there is no crime in making what use I please of my own
body” (qtd in Bray 114).