Bersani’s prescient and long unavailable polemic against gay assimilation, a plea for “antimonogamous promiscuity,” illustrated with artistic interventions.
In 1997, during a symposium at Centre Pompidou, pioneering queer theorist Leo Bersani presented a prescient critique of the assimilative tendencies that made “gays melt into the very culture they like to think of themselves as undermining.” For Bersani, queer activism, mired in micropolitics, had relinquished the radical task of reconfiguring the horizon of the possible. Later published as “Gay Betrayals” in the pioneering (and now unavailable) collection Is the Rectum a Grave?, Bersani’s intervention champions a truly disruptive vision of homosexuality, one that betrays the relational, identitarian and communitarian foundations of bourgeois heterosexual respectability through “antimonogamous promiscuity.”