Zines: The Screwball Asses

by Guy Hocquenghem

Hocquenghem discusses queer culture as a ghetto created by capitalism and imperialism in this zine reprinting of the essay, originally seized and repressed by the French government as a "libidinous exhibition of a minority of perverts." That seizure, and the language used to carry it out, only illustrates Guy Hocquenghem's point: Capitalism has divided desire, creating a "minority" of sexual deviants who must be destroyed, tolerated, ghettoized, or marketed to, but in no case should their desires be allowed to comingle with those of the society at large. Hocquenghem also throws out the lonely union of the flesh only, such as in cruising and anonymous encounter, that in its present form "functions exclusively around sex, and not the totality of the body."

59 p/half size/B&W

$3.50

*One of these copies has some drops of something on it. If you get this one, it means you are more special than other people, and blessings will follow you wherever you go.

Guy Hocquenghem

Guy Hocquenghem was born in the suburbs of Paris and was educated at the Ecole Normale Supérieure. At the age of fifteen he began an affair with his high school philosophy teacher, René Scherer. They remained lifelong friends. His participation in the May 1968 student rebellion in France formed his allegiance to the Communist Party, which later expelled him because of his homosexuality. He taught philosophy at the University of Vincennes-Saint Denis, Paris and wrote numerous novels and works of theory. He was the staff writer for the French publication Libération.

Hocquenghem was the first gay man to be a member of the Front Homosexuel d'Action Révolutionnaire (FHAR), originally formed by lesbian separatists who split from the Mouvement Homophile de France in 1971. With filmmaker Lionel Soukaz (b. 1953), Hocquenghem wrote and produced a documentary film about gay history, Race d'Ep! (1979) the last word of the title being a play on the word pédé, a French slur for gay men. Hocquenghem died of an AIDS-related illness in 1988. from Wikipedia