Map and Territory

In her seminal book Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), philosopher Judith Butler claimed that gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original. Her position mirrored that of the Polish-American philosopher Alfred Korzybski’s about the endless mapping of maps which all seem to point to some unknowable territory, and also to Gregory Bateson’s, in his book Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972), regarding the confusion between the map and the territory, and the essential impossibility of ever really knowing what the territory is:

We say the map is different from the territory. But what is the territory? Operationally, somebody went out . . . and made representations which were then put on paper. What is on the paper map is a representation of what was in the retinal representation of the man who made the map; and as you push the question back, what you find is an infinite regress, an infinite series of maps. The territory never gets in at all. […] Always the process of representation will filter it out so that the mental world is only maps of maps, ad infinitum (pp. 454-455).

In the case of Butler’s theory on “performativity” the question was of gender, the fact that there is no original to the representation of it today. If we push the question of “homosexuality” back, what we find is a similar “infinite regress” for the mental world of the social construction of homosexuality as identity is but a series of maps without territory. We can never really know the “Ding-an-Sich” (the “thing itself”) cautioned Immanuel Kante two centuries ago, yet this is precisely what we have said in self-identifying as homosexual: not only that we have found in the word, which is but a map, the thing itself, but that we are that thing, we are the word. “[T]o describe something as seamless as lived experience, one needs categories,” David Valentine once wrote. “Yet a danger arises when those categories come to be seen as valid descriptions of experience rather than as tools used to apprehend that experience” (2004, p. 217).

The problem, Korzybski explained, was in our patterns of thought, or orientation, which was based on an Aristotelian dualism, what Monique Wittig called the “categories of opposition” (1990, p. 5): light/dark, even/odd, new/old, straight/curved, good/bad, woman/man, white/black. As pointed out by Bateson, when presented with the question of the map/territory confusion in the question, “‘Do you ask what it’s made of—earth, fire, water, etc?’” or the question, “‘What is its pattern?’” (1972, p. 449), Aristotle chose a system of patterns (maps) over essentiality (territory). The word “homosexuality” answers a question about a person’s patterns (map), not about what they are made of (territory).

Korzybski, through his theory of general semantics and “the denial of the ‘is’ of identity” (1933/1958, p. 11), sought to re-orient the individual to a non-Aristotelian way of thinking in order to avoid such map/territory confusions. According to Korzybski, in the Aristotelian orientation words are understood primarily through their “intensional” definitions, whereas in a non-Aristotelian orientation they are understood through their “extensional” definitions. Logicians use the terms “intension” to describe the assumed intrinsic meaning of words, and “extension” to describe the objects that those words refer to in the material world. Different philosophers or mathematicians have distinguished intension and extension from one another in different ways, for example, through the words “sense” (for intension) and “meaning” (for extension), or semantic and pragmatic, respectively, or even a priori and a posteriori types of knowledge. 

While an intensional definition of homosexual might be a person who has sex with or is sexually attracted to members of the same sex, an extensionally defined homosexual, conversely, would need to point to every single person in the material world (past, present, future) who has or might ever have sex with, or erotically desire, members of the same sex—an impossibility, considering that some, perhaps many, of these people might never admit to such a thing, or even recognize, within themselves, said desire since it would likely fall outside the map of what they believe to be “a homosexual.” In fact, the material world contains no such “thing” as a homosexual because by its very definition the word, having been imbued with meaning, is solely intensional.

We live in a map-oriented, intensionally-defined culture. People conflate words with the objects that those words point to. The surrealist painter Rene Magritte understood this when he painted a picture of a pipe with the captioned phrase, “This is not a pipe.” George W. Bush, former President of the United States, would never have been able to induce much fear by projecting images of an Iraqi mother coddling her infant child, but he could and often did talk about “The Axis of Evil.” Likewise, right-wing fundamentalists, while debating the “issue” of homosexuality, do not speak about one’s next door neighbours named John or Frank or Sally and Heather, but they can and often do talk about an intensional definition of homosexuality, “The Homosexual,” to great effect.

When 2012 United States Presidential candidate Michelle Bachmann, an Evangelical Christian, referenced homosexuality as “personal bondage, personal despair and personal enslavement” (Stolberg, NY Times, 2011a), her intensional use of the word “homosexuality” was not a dialectical rendering of meaning based in history, reason, fact, or “proper evaluation,” or else she might have more accurately said that oppression causes personal bondage, personal despair and personal enslavement. To paraphrase Wittig from “The Category of Sex” (1982), it is oppression that created homosexuality, not the contrary. Bachmann reversed cause and effect so that instead of oppression it was now homosexuality itself that had caused victimhood. Bachmann’s words capitalized on a “similarity of structure in the map-territory relationship” through a “deliberate, professionally planned distortion” of the intensionally-defined word, homosexuality, which “results only in breeding fears, anxieties, hates, etc., which disorganize individuals and even nations” (Korzybski, 1933/1958, p. ix).

As maps, Bachmann’s words carried no meaning outside of their insular ideology: they did not point to any territory in the material world but became their own referent, “the thing in itself.” It should come as no surprise that her husband, Marcus Bachmann, PhD., has long operated Christian counselling centres that advocate conversion (“pray away the gay”) therapy, since conversion therapy, simply stated, operates in maps, not territories. That millions worldwide believe what the Bachmanns and others just like them still to this day have to say about homosexuality speaks to the power of the intensionally-defined word. As Wittig noted: “Meaning is not visible, and as such appears to be outside of language” (1983, p. 68). Always one must look beyond words, or trans-linguistically, to find meaning. For advocates of conversion therapy, however, the intensional word is now “the thing.”

Book Pitches, or Beyond Gay Politics

One of the many interesting but perplexing things that happens when publishing a book is the actual story of the book gets reduced, out of necessity, to its barest elements, known as a “hook” or “pitch” while the writer is still marketing the manuscript to publishers, and then while the distributor, after the book’s publication, continues marketing it to book sellers, even as the publisher tries to garner interest from media. “What, in the least possible words, is this book about”? If an author can’t summarize his story in a few words or a sentence—say, if he was suddenly standing next to a publisher or an agent at a party and he wanted to pitch his book—then he’s definitely not ready to market the manuscript. Of course, reducing any book to a catchy “be-all-and-end-all” can often mean figuring out which parts of the story are topical, or newsworthy. In a literary marketplace overwhelmed with evermore books each week, why would a reader pick up this particular new book (in a bookstore or online), invest their hard earned money and then days if not weeks reading it to the end? What makes a media outlet choose to cover one book over another?

While pitches no doubt start out being helpful, they can also have the unwieldy effect of backfiring on the author in that he starts to believe that this savvy summary is really what his book is all about. In the case of true-life memoirs, the memoirist runs the risk of starting to view his own life—at least those parts of his life he has traversed in the memoir—through the rather narrow lens of that pitch. Not only does his book get reduced to a newsworthy hook, his own life, it seems, now becomes reduced to the banal.

“Conversion therapy”—the practice of attempting to “change” sexuality from gay to straight—was not a term that I used, or even heard very often, when I started writing my book in 1997. The truth is, for the longest time I had great difficulty figuring out what the pitch of my book could be, in the same way that I’ve often had trouble summarizing the trajectory of my own life—was my book a “coming out” story complicated by “psychiatric abuse,” “generational trauma,” “childhood sexual abuse,” “religious dogmatism,” or “cultic manipulation”? Obviously, my book was about the trauma of one man who falls victim to a sociopathic psychiatrist hell bent on trying to “change” his sexuality. All of these “hooks” seemed accurate enough, though not particularly topical, but it wasn’t until working with an agent in 2007 that the label of “conversion therapy” took hold. In 2007, however, “conversion therapy” was still rarely, if ever, covered in the media, and so my agent’s letter to potential publishers, which mentioned my years in “conversion therapy,” was met with horror and bewilderment, as if I was writing about a fiction that most of these big wig publishers could not even fathom still existed. Hadn’t gay politics “eliminated” such “barbaric therapies”? Wasn’t this all part of a bygone era—together with the lobotomies of the 1950’s? Did this topic have any relevance at all anymore, to anyone? In their eyes, my book was not at all topical (translation: unsellable).

With a surge of new laws, beginning in 2013, banning “conversion therapy” in the U.S. and even in Canada and other countries, the subject seems to have now formed part of a cultural vernacular, appearing regularly in the media and even in several television documentaries. At the same time, as helpful as the pitch of “conversion therapy” has been in the marketing of my book, continuing to talk about my story (i.e., my life) as being primarily about this one topic does run the risk of adding an expiration date to its relevance, not to mention continuing to reduce my life to the banal. If and when “conversion therapy” becomes universally outlawed (as it’s already been universally discredited), will the book (and my life) retain any lasting merit? Will my life (and the book) still sound “topical”? In the elusive conveyer belt that today’s social media has become, what happens when the apparent topicality of a book becomes culturally passé? Does a life end up in the $1.99 bin?

“Conversion therapy” is, after all, not a wholly encompassing description of the story that I have documented in my book; “conversion therapy” itself is a label that describes a whole spectrum of “therapies” or practices, and so in theory, depending on their life circumstance, each and every person who ends up in one of these “treatments” would have a very different story to tell. Relying on the label of “conversion therapy” to describe my book is actually not so unlike relying on the label of “gay man” to describe who I am as a person. The label of “gay man,” I really do believe, is part of the collective gay identity politics that has flourished in the post-Stonewall era (to escape the “closet,” create just laws, combat homophobia, etc.), but has done so often at the expense of the individual, the subjective. Telling people that I am a “gay man” says little to nothing about my inner struggles, my feelings and sensibilities, my lingering “bad” affects, like shame, that the gay movement claims to have liberated me from; and telling people that my book is about “conversion therapy” says even less about its underlying narrative.

Over the last several decades, “gay people” on the whole have made great strides in not remaining invisible; but I’m not so sure that this collective “gay person” that advanced our visibility has done all that much in furthering the subjective or inner lives of people who call themselves “gay.” I tell the world (usually starting with my family and friends) that I’m “gay,” and for a short time I am elated because I think the whole world now “sees” me—I am “free.” But am I, really? So, the world now knows my sexual-object attraction is not for the opposite sex—but is that enough? On some primal level, a large part of me still feels unseen, remains unexplored or concealed—“closeted,” under a different guise.

In his 2012 book, How to be Gay, author David M. Halperin clarifies further:

…the transformation of homosexuality from sexual perversion into a social identity, and the political requirements of gay pride, have tended to militate against any serious gay inquiry into the inner life of homosexuality—especially those non-sexual dimensions of it that gay people are still unsure or nervous about. Gay subjectivity, and the distinctive cultural practices that manifest it, may now have become just as disreputable, just as taboo, as queer sex. One name for this strategic avoidance of gay subjectivity, for this refusal to explore it, is, quite simply, “gay identity.”

Existentially, summing myself up as “gay” says little about who I am—I call myself “gay” so that I am not subsumed into the heteronormativity that pervades the world around me; but then I look at myself through the lens of that narrow label, “gay,” and still I don’t see my whole being—or if I think I do, then really all I’m seeing is a projection of the collective. I see a cliché, a life reduced to the banal, a pitch. I am trapped once again.

Years ago, one of my brothers, a businessman, told me that he didn’t have “much use for gays.” Considering that my brother already knew, at this point, I was “gay”—his comment left me flattened. How could I even respond to such a remark? What did he even mean? And why would he say this to my face? I never asked, and I never found out (“don’t ask, don’t tell”); instead, in the moment, I just stared at him, confused, dejected. Now years later, I can see that what my brother did with me was similar, on some level, with these literary pitches—he’d reduced all “gay” people (and me, by extension) to their barest elements, so that in his eyes we had no other story, hidden narrative or sensibility, than the universal “gay.” This is the risk of identity politics: in increasing visibility, we run the risk of being reduced to the banal and remaining invisible on some other level. Our identities are now public, but our hearts get stuck in limbo, still closeted.

As in life, the trajectory of any memoir is often messy and non-linear, rarely neat, and hopefully never shallow, and reducing it all in the form of a pitch, useful as it may be for marketing, does little in explaining what a book is really all about. A book is about so much more than its pitch; and a life is about so much more than any identity. My own mother lived through and escaped from three years in a communist concentration camp in Europe, and so the one thing about “liberation” that I’m certain about is that it does not exist, not really. Our bodies may escape the tyranny, but our souls carry on with scars. The walking wounded need to talk, even as they go about their newfound freedom.

Today, I am far more interested in talking about the kind of shame that’s governed my life, instead of avoiding the topic entirely because “gay identity politics” tells me I’m not supposed to have felt it anymore. I am more interested in taking about what it was like to experience sexual abuse as a child, a male child, and then to live through the disorientation of discovering that I was sexually attracted to other males, the same gender as my abuser—I want to talk about this issue, even though my sense is “gay identity politics” would rather I keep quiet. I am more interested in talking about what it was like to grow up as a survivor of trauma survivors, or about being Catholic and fearful that there was causality between the sexual abuse and my emerging sexual desires, and then to fall into the erroneous belief system, as promulgated by the then culture and even my own family, of thinking that if I healed from the trauma of abuse, I might also revert to some kind of a priori attraction toward females. Where do such twisted lies, born from trauma and fed by cultural misinformation, lead a person in their life? “Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive.” 

These (and more) are the kinds of issues that walked me straight into the barrel of a loaded gun—otherwise known as “conversion therapy”—and so these are just some of the issues, which step far beyond the boundaries of gay identity politics, that I need to talk about today. As important a topic of “conversion therapy” is, both politically and sociologically, on a personal level I have so much more to say. “Coming out,” in fact, demands so much more than telling people I’m gay, and discussing my book’s underlying issues necessitates so much more than repeating the potentially banal pitch of “conversion therapy.”

Difference Matters

One of my siblings and I recently “ended up” talking about issues of sexuality—and I do use that term “ended up” purposefully, because sexuality is a subject I have vehemently tried to avoid with my siblings over the years, considering our highly acrimonious history. But on this recent occasion, my sibling mentioned that they preferred not to talk about someone as being “homosexual or even heterosexual,” because, as they continued,  “We’re all just the same anyway. After all, I don’t need to know what goes on in the bedroom of a heterosexual person either. I don't need to know that someone is gay.”

I suppose my sibling’s comment was meant to be a (very loose) sign of solidarity (although I am likely deluding myself on this account), but I interrupted the flow of our conversation just the same and said that, “No, homosexuals are not the same as heterosexuals; gay people have lived a completely different life trajectory than the average straight person, if for no other reason than our culture is highly heterosexist, and there is still very good reason to ‘come out’ and declare oneself gay. Visibility matters; you do need to know that someone is gay. Besides, you can’t make me the same as you no matter how much you try. We’re not the same, and the difference is not just a matter of who I sleep with.”

My sibling said nothing—as I pretty much figured—and then we moved on. Hopefully, though, my point was taken.

Again, I’d like to think that my sibling meant well, but I couldn’t help think that their belief system—which is, I’m sure, shared by a good many straight, and even gay, people—is yet another form of shielded homophobia. “I accept you, so can you please just stop talking about it already?”

No, I can’t stop talking about it. And neither should anyone else. 

Moreover, I honestly don’t think gay people and straight people are the same—and why should they be? What’s wrong with being different, in recognizing our differences, and in not wanting to assimilate? I often worry that some people think that legislating same-sex rights means that gays and straights will therefore all be “the same”—that the end goal should be some sort of homogeneousness.

“Equal” under the rule of law does not make us all the same. And neither should it. We are not the same. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms speaks about “equality” under the law, The Constitution of the United States about “equal protection”—not about being “the same.” 

I also worry sometimes because as laws change and gays are granted equal status under the law, some people may think that means the fight is over; that once “the political” has been achieved, there is nothing left to fight for, to even talk about. 

The political will never be the personal, and on a very individual, personal level, there will always be endless stories of sexuality. Gay people wrestle with all sorts of issues—as do straight people—not only about whether or not to “come out,” if they can legally marry, adopt children, serve openly in the military. All people share the same humanity, but we are also not all “the same.” We are all different, and our differences must be voiced, and celebrated, seen, and never assimilated.

Difference matters.