Histories of Sexualities

Abstract

Foucault and (homo)sexuality. At the beginning of the 1980s, Foucault gave a number of interviews in which he was asked about conditions for homosexuals.¹ These conversations were partly motivated by Foucault. Despite being an academic celebrity at the time, he was not hiding his own homosexuality and was considered a kind of expert in the field in extension of his 1976 Histoire de sexualité. In this context, Foucault emphasized that modern man seems to be in need of creating new experiences as to sexuality and gender — in relation to which he pointed out how the homosexual environment could serve as a template for experiential practices of this kind, especially through its desire to experiment with new modalities of life and community. Foucault sums this argument up in a conversation from 1982, in which he points out that the gay environment, instead of a “science of ... or a scientific conscience about ... what sexuality really is,” is in need of a gay form of life: A gay-future can take the shape of “the creation of new forms of life, of relations, of friendships, of art and culture in society, of new forms of ethics and politics to be established across our sexual choices.”²