Cult 2016 0122 PDF

‘The Party with God’: Michel Foucault,
the Gay Left and the Work of Theory

Steven Maynard, Queen’s University
Toronto. 23 June 1982. Everything was pretty much ready.

‘$11.00 – gin for party’ and other supplies had been procured.
Michael Lynch, English professor and gay activist, taught late that
afternoon and had only some last-minute things to do, including
‘change my Lacoste when I got home (from class) so as not to seem too
preppie’. Guests started to arrive around 8 p.m. As Lynch later noted
in his diary, they included ‘Robin Hardy, Bert Hansen … Bob Wallace,
Alex Wilson, Sue Golding (very butched-up in leather, back from
London) … Rick B, Roger Spalding (leathered up), Robert who
came with joints in a bronze-potted Mum’. ‘Bill Lewis said, “It’s just
the group of star-gazers I’d expect”’. There were a few no-shows:
‘Ken Popert refused to come – “I do not respond to command
performances ”’. Ed Jackson also declined, although later he did ask,
‘How was the party with God?’1
God, aka Michel Foucault, arrived escorted by ‘Bob Gallagher, a
graduate student with a hero’. God was ‘bald … with a rather full grin
of rather perfect teeth and rather handsome, humorous eyes’. He wore
a ‘black leather vest’, and Lynch, not having had time to change out of
his preppy teaching drag, was relieved to see that under Foucault’s
‘black leather vest was a Lacoste’. ‘Foucault’s lover Daniel de Fert
[sic] – was with us – 42ish, jowly, chatty, smiley, likeable: in his leather
jacket too’. Rick Bébout ‘came & babbled in his dear way despite
a long stint putting the paper to bed’.2 The paper was The Body Politic,
the Toronto-based gay liberation newspaper. Nearly all the partygoers
(and abstainers) had some connection to the paper, as collective
members or contributors.
Cultural History 5.2 (2016): 122–152

DOI: 10.3366/cult.2016.0122
f Edinburgh University Press
www.euppublishing.com/loi/cult
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Michel Foucault and the Gay Left
Not all the guests shared Lynch’s favourable impression of Foucault.

Robin Hardy, a gay activist who began writing for The Body Politic in
1977, recalled it this way:
Foucault was an odd and unattractive man, short, completely bald,

dressed always in the black leather garb of an S/M daddy. He wore
an expression as blank and undifferentiated as the label on a can of
generic vichyssoise … Foucault’s eyes, when not entirely affectless, were
sometimes wet and almost beseeching; for all the world he could look
like a motherless child.
Hardy, however, did have a similar appraisal of Defert: ‘His lover,

Daniel, was the opposite, vivacious and gregarious; he acted as the
eccentric writer’s enabler’.3
Foucault and Defert were in Toronto for the month of June to
give courses at the Third International Summer Institute for Semiotic
and Structural Studies, held at Victoria College at the University of
Toronto. But for most gay and lesbian activist-intellectuals in Toronto,
their interest was not in ‘The Discourse of Self-Disclosure (Dire vrai sur
soi-même)’ – the title and topic of Foucault’s course.4 Their interest
was in the introductory volume of The History of Sexuality, the impact
of which, four years after it first appeared in English in November
1978, continued to reverberate.5 As Hardy explained, ‘The publication
of the first volume of Foucault’s History of Sexuality in 1980 [sic] had
created a buzz among activist academics. In the years since its
publication, Foucault has been deified by the academy ’.6
At the party, there were, according to Lynch, three distinct groups:
‘Those bright conversationalists who’d never read Foucault and so
wouldn’t talk about history of sex; those bright conversationalists
who have read Foucault and wouldn’t dare talk w/him about history of
sex; those bright conversationalists who had read Foucault & were
dying to talk w/him about history of sex but were made to promise not
to … Bob was tyrannical that it “not become a seminar ”’.7 Gallagher,
a graduate student and gay activist, who’d met Foucault on a previous
occasion through their mutual friend, Gayle Rubin, and who signed up
for Foucault’s course at the Summer Institute, acted as Foucault’s
guide while he was in Toronto. Gallagher recalls:
I had very high hopes for that party, and pushed to have it happen and
for Michel to attend. Having a strong respect for the people I knew
around The Body Politic, I thought Michel would ultimately love the
interaction. He didn’t seem to connect with anyone and quickly showed
he was bored. Once I spent time with Michel, I realized how very
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uncomfortable he was in social settings. They were not his idea of a good
time.8
If Lynch picked up on Foucault’s boredom, he didn’t let on in his

diary. Rather, in an entry for the end of 1982, in a list of the year’s
highlights, Lynch included ‘meeting Foucault’.9
***
Within Foucault studies, it is often claimed that The History of Sexuality
had its most profound impact on activists. In his ‘Chronology’, Defert
has noted ‘the History of Sexuality, volume 1, was more enthusiastically
received in the feminist and gay movements than it was in intellectual
circles. It is possible that this made Foucault even more attentive to
what was emerging in these movements’.10 David Halperin, demoting
Foucault from God to saint, has suggested that The History of Sexuality
found its ‘most receptive audience among cultural activists, members
of direct-action groups, participants in various social resistance
movements with some connection to universities, and – most of all,
perhaps – lesbian and gay militants’.11 Halperin’s essay remains one
of the best queer readings of Foucault, but the balance in the essay tilts
heavily in favour of the theorists while activists remain a phantasmatic,
if frequently invoked, presence. Much the same can be said of Richard
Lynch, who, relying on Halperin, duly notes that The History of Sexuality
‘constituted an important inspirational source and intellectual toolkit
for the activists who organized ACT-UP’ but includes no actual activists
in his otherwise insightful reading.12 Indeed, despite the fact that
Foucault conceived of The History of Sexuality as a political ‘manifesto’13
rather than solely as a work of intellectual erudition, it is entirely
possible to write a book-length study of Foucault’s introductory volume
and not discuss its reception by political activists.14
In what follows, I offer a case study of the uses to which Foucault was
put by one group of lesbian and gay activists: those who worked on and
wrote for The Body Politic in Toronto from about 1978 to 1984, along
with some of their fellow travellers in England and the United States.
While the liberal, mainstream reception of The History of Sexuality
in Canada emphasized its intellectual, and especially philosophical,
contributions,15 lesbian and gay activists seized on its political and
theoretical implications. Activists appropriated Foucault’s ideas to
fashion a two-pronged critique aimed at the deficiencies of existing
left sexual theory and at the mainstream gay movement’s lack of
radical theory. In doing so, activists forged – ‘I dare not use the word
dialectics, but this comes rather close to it’16 – a dialectical relationship
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between sexual theory and political practice. Using the archival records
of The Body Politic collective, along with the paper itself, I argue that
activists read The History of Sexuality in a way that put theory to work
in the day-to-day efforts to produce a radical political practice, and
that their activist, movement-based practice refined and sometimes
prefigured theory. In this short-lived moment, characterized by a high
degree of intellectual syncretism,17 activists read Foucault through the
intersecting frameworks of social constructionism, socialist feminism
and historical materialism, or what, for short, they sometimes called
the gay left. Along the way, they also found in The History of Sexuality
the resources to undertake a questioning of sexual identity and an
exploration of ‘bodies and pleasures’. All of these concerns are in
evidence in a well-known interview Foucault did with two activists (one
of whom was Gallagher) towards the end of his stay in Toronto, and
I will conclude with it.18 Working from an archival, pre-publication
typescript of the interview, along with my own exchange with one
of Foucault’s Toronto interlocutors, I contend that the significance of
Foucault’s month-long stay in Toronto has yet to be fully appreciated,
and it tends to confirm Defert’s sense that the enthusiastic reception
of The History of Sexuality by feminist and gay activists made Foucault
not only more attentive to what was emerging in these movements
but also intrigued enough to participate in them.
***
A review of The History of Sexuality appeared in The Body Politic in
February 1979, just three months after the book was published in
English.19 The reviewer was Lorna Weir, described in the same issue
of the paper as ‘looking dangerous, like a woman who flies overnight
to LA without baggage’.20 Despite the evocative description, there is
no real mystery as to the choice of Weir as reviewer. Weir, a socialist
feminist, had read La volonté de savoir, along with Foucault’s earlier
work, during her graduate studies in Montreal, where she also saw
Foucault speak on one of his visits to Quebec. Moving to Toronto, Weir
got involved with The Body Politic crew. Weir asked Ed Jackson,
who coordinated ‘Our Image’, The Body Politic’s review section, if he
could get The History of Sexuality as soon as it appeared in English.21
Weir began her review this way: ‘A master dialectician and the
most sophisticated and creative contemporary exponent of historical
materialism, Foucault is a constant embarrassment to his fellow
leftists … Volume 1 of The History of Sexuality … is guaranteed to
make the theoreticians of gay liberation and feminism blush at our
own naiveté’. And that was not all. We also learn that Foucault ‘is the
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first theoretician of everyday life to go significantly beyond Engels’

classic, Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State’.22 Weir’s
assertions will no doubt surprise, but they made sense in the context
of the period. This was, after all, a time and place in which one
could take a course on ‘Marxist Perspectives on Gay Liberation’ at
the Toronto Marxist Institute, the idea of ‘gay socialism’ was being
debated in The Body Politic collective meetings and in the pages of
the paper, and activists were attending conferences for ‘lesbian and
gay male feminist socialists’ to discuss ‘Marxism and lesbian and gay
liberation ’.23 If today we are more familiar with ‘homonationalism ’, in
this earlier period you were more apt to encounter ‘homosocialism ’ –
the ‘re-evaluation of Marxist and Leninist traditions from a feminist,
lesbian, gay perspective’.24
Today, Weir winces when rereading her suggestion that Foucault
was a historical materialist; that was ‘wrong’, she says flatly.25 But if
Weir was wrong, she was not alone. In 1977 Philip Derbyshire wrote
in the pages of the British journal Gay Left that he ‘hoped that the
works of the French Marxists Deleuze and Foucault will soon be
available in English so that we can dispense with reading historically
naı̈ve accounts of sexuality ’, and when The History of Sexuality appeared
in English, Derbyshire reviewed it for Gay Left.26 Fellow gay leftist
Jeffrey Weeks, introducing Foucault’s work, including The History of
Sexuality, to socialist historians underscored that Foucault ‘recognized
the major innovative significance of Marx’ and that ‘he is unwilling to
reject Marxism out of hand, either as a political philosophy, or as a
tradition of historical exploration’.27 Referring to the work of the Gay
Left Collective, The Body Politic collective member Leo Casey noted that
‘those familiar with the finer points of European socialist theory will
discern the influence of Michel Foucault’s writings on sexuality, as well
as the Marxist political and cultural analyses of Antonio Gramsci’.28
Robert Padgug, a member of the collective that produced Radical
History Review and edited the journal’s 1979 issue ‘Sexuality in History ’,
supplied a ‘materialist view of sexuality in historical perspective ’,
and to do so he reached for The History of Sexuality to tease out
the ‘dialectical interplay ’ between sexual ideology and ‘sexuality
as praxis’, moving with ease back and forth between Marx and
Foucault.29
Foucault’s text had struck a chord with activists, and this had a lot to
do with the fact that it appeared at a very particular moment in the
history of the lesbian/gay movement in North America and elsewhere.
After the demise of gay liberation in the early 1970s and with the
subsequent rise of the New Right, the movement had been pushed on
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the defensive, forced to abandon broad visions of liberation in favour

of a narrower human rights strategy. But by the very end of the 1970s,
activists believed they saw in the growing resistance of lesbian and
gay communities to the moral-conservative backlash of the period
the potential for a rebirth of the radical spirit of gay liberation.30 In
Toronto in December 1977, police raided the offices of The Body Politic
and the following month laid criminal charges against the paper for
publishing Gerald Hannon’s now-infamous article ‘Men Loving Boys
Loving Men’. The issue of intergenerational sex created a serious rift
between lesbian feminists and gay liberationists in Toronto, and it also
highlighted divisions within the ranks of politicized lesbians between
radical feminists and socialist feminists.31 The latter represented
a significant current within the Canadian feminist movement during
the late 1970s and 1980s, and it was a crucial site for the elaboration
of a radical sexual politics; The Body Politic Free the Press Fund
included a number of socialist-feminist lesbians, Weir among them.32
In December 1978, twenty police officers busted the Barracks
bathhouse, arresting twenty-eight men. Over 400 people protested
the police assault in a demonstration organized by, among others,
Michael Lynch and Mariana Valverde, a lesbian socialist feminist
and Body Politic collective member. In the wake of the raid, what
would become the Right to Privacy Committee (RTPC) formed to
defend the arrested men. Theorizing and politicizing the notion of
privacy well beyond its liberal formulation, the RTPC would become
one the city’s most radical activist organizations, especially after the
massive police raid of Toronto bathhouses and the arrest of 286 men
in a single night in February 1981. The following night, in a swiftly
organized demonstration, over 3,000 gay men and lesbians took to the
streets in angry protest.33
Key to the resistance to the police attacks on the bathhouses and
The Body Politic was the paper itself, which supplied activist energy
for demonstrations (the paper was instrumental in the response to the
1981 raids) and then reported on those same demonstrations. The Body
Politic, established in 1971, was ‘on the left – radical, analytical, clearly
political, often a bit literary, and, most rare, international in outlook’.
‘We didn’t call ourselves “journalists ”,’ Bébout recalls. ‘We were
activists … Our goal wasn’t to put out a newspaper. It was to change the
world.’34 He should know; Bébout was a long-time collective member,
resident process queen and astute chronicler of the paper’s past. In the
context of the riots in San Francisco after the murder of Harvey Milk
and with demonstrations against the police in Toronto, Michael Lynch
used the pages of The Body Politic to call for ‘the end of the human
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rights decade’. The legalistic human rights approach had lulled

the movement into lethargy and proved incapable of curtailing
police power. ‘We need another strategy now’, Lynch argued.35 As it
turns out, Lynch’s hoped-for end to the human rights strategy was
premature, to say the least, but for a time in the late 1970s and early
1980s the call for a new approach was in the air, and key to this new
activist practice was a new theory. As Casey wrote,
Knowledge is power: the lack of a pioneering, creative gay liberation

theory has become a major impediment to the progress of the gay and
lesbian movement. With each succeeding day, we find ourselves drawn
onto an increasingly complex political terrain … [and] our failure to
develop our theory carries a real price.
But Casey was hopeful: ‘There is now good reason to hope that
gay liberation theory may be on the verge of a significant rebirth ’.36
Enter The History of Sexuality.
If there is one refrain in Weir’s review, it is ‘the importance
of Foucault’s arguments for feminist and gay liberation theory ’.37
Derbyshire also sensed the rebirth in gay politics and the importance
of Foucauldian theory to it. In his review of The History of Sexuality,
Derbyshire pronounced it ‘the most radical attempt to rethink
our understanding of sexuality, and more generally of power and
knowledge, since the rebirth of sexual politics’.38 The view that theory
should be pressed into service to animate politics came naturally for
a socialist feminist like Weir and others who cut their activist teeth on
the traditions of historical materialism. The same held true for
Foucault. In an interview the year before his trip to Toronto, Foucault,
asked if there were ‘things that an intellectual of the left does, in his
capacity as actor in a social movement’, explained that as a student
‘I was struck by the fact that during that period we were in a
profoundly Marxist atmosphere where the problem of the link between
theory and practice was absolutely at the center of all theoretical
discussions ’. Later, Foucault had figured out that ‘there was perhaps
an easier way, or I would say a more immediately practical way, of
posing the question of the relationship between theory and practice
correctly, and that was to carry it out directly in one’s own practice ’.39
Ditto for Weir. If ‘the exact implications of Foucault’s work for
the theory and practice of gay liberation are not self-evident’, they
would have to be worked out collectively in the movement.40 As Weir
summed it up in her conclusion, The History of Sexuality was ‘a text to
be ruminated upon in discussion groups’. This was key. As Casey
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underscored, ‘the gay and lesbian movement as a whole will produce

our theory, and it will be formulated in numerous small journal articles
and discussion pieces’.41
For Weir, Foucault’s critique of Freudo-Marxism and the repressive
hypothesis proved particularly appealing. The notion of repression
was the cornerstone of what passed for a theory of sexuality on the
left, and gay activists had long found it wanting. In May 1972, for
example, Herbert Marcuse gave a public lecture in Toronto and
was grilled by gay liberationists. As reported in The Body Politic, ‘a gay
brother asked Marcuse about the situation of homosexuals after
a socialist revolution – expressing his apprehension when considering
the reactionary macho oppression of Castro’s Cuba’.42 In 1975 Brian
Mossop, a regular contributor to The Body Politic, reviewed Sex-Pol,
a book of Wilhelm Reich’s essays, and critiqued the naturalism and
biologism that underlay Reich’s anti-repression politics, and he did
so explicitly from within historical materialism (Mossop was then a
member of the Communist Party of Canada), viewing sexuality as the
product of a ‘web of social relations ’ and a historically determined
need.43 The timing of Mossop’s critique, a full year before the
appearance of La volonté de savoir, is a reminder that many of Foucault’s
ideas were prefigured in activist thinking. Freudo-Marxism in Canada
found its most elaborate expression in the work of Gad Horowitz,
whose Repression: Basic and Surplus Repression in Psychoanalytic Theory:
Freud, Reich, and Marcuse appeared in 1977.44 Gay activists were quick
to respond. Writing in The Body Politic, George Smith, soon to become
the driving theoretical force in the RTPC, took exception to Horowitz’s
notion of perversion as any ‘sexual activity that is not a genuine
manifestation of love for another person’: ‘This definition, obviously,
does not say much for the recreational sex of steambaths and of one
night stands ’. But the crux of Smith’s critique of Freudo-Marxism
centred on what he viewed as the incompatibility of Freud’s idealism
and Marx’s materialism. Smith concluded his review by suggesting
that an ‘ideal communist society, perhaps, is the only solution to gay
oppression ’.45 In view of gay activists ’ long-running skepticism about
Freudo-Marxism, it is no wonder The History of Sexuality was so eagerly
embraced. ‘We’ve been duped’, Weir maintained, and The History of
Sexuality offered a way out. ‘Foucault’s critique of the concept of
repression as used in leftist political theory in and of itself makes the
book invaluable.’46
Foucault’s book also helped activists recast existing left
conceptualizations of power. Gay liberationist and prisoner-rights
activist Mike Riegle, who kept personal files on Foucault, contributed
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a review of The History of Sexuality to Boston’s Gay Community News,

highlighting ‘Foucault’s radical and penetrating analysis of power’.47
In particular, activists found in The History of Sexuality a more nuanced
theory of the relationship between sexuality and capitalist power.
According to Weir, Foucault directed activists to look at new ‘types
of social power that are independent of, though related to, the
economic laws of capitalism’.48 Weeks relied heavily on The History
of Sexuality in his ‘Capitalism and the Organization of Sex’. What was
true for Weeks was also true of other members of the Gay Left
Collective. Frank Mort made clear that his understanding of sexual
regulation and contestation ‘draws much from the work of the French
theorist Michel Foucault – particularly his recent work on The History
of Sexuality’, while Simon Watney wondered
why gay politics have been so slow in making use of recent theoretical
developments concerning the nature of power in capitalist societies,
developments which, as in the work of Michel Foucault, offer a broader
understanding of the interactions between sexuality, the state, and our
sense of our own identities as individuals.49
Reviewing the 1979 sex issue of Radical History Review for The Body
Politic, John D’Emilio, at the time himself busy thinking through
the relationship between capitalism and gay identity, praised its
perspective, ‘what I would call “soft-core” flexible Marxist: historical
and materialist with an appreciation of the subjective element in
history, rather than economist and determinist ’.50
There was another, perhaps more surprising, use of The History
of Sexuality by activists on the gay left. In his review of The History
of Sexuality, Derbyshire wrote, ‘There is no justification for Leninism
in Foucault, but no coherent political practice either’. Foucault’s
unwillingness to dictate a political program created an open space for
Derbyshire in thinking through the political fallout of gays and the far
left. Despite having left the International Marxist Group, Derbyshire
did not use Foucault to bash Trotskyism but to call for ‘writing its
genealogy ’, to ask ‘why it has been influential, what its appeal is, why it
was capable of organising resistance ’.51 That genealogical questioning
of the far left was a task taken up by a number of writers in The Body
Politic. Mossop, who’d been expelled from the Communist Party of
Canada for his homosexuality in the fall of 1976, wrote the following
spring about the Socialist Workers’ Party, noting that, while the latter
party supported gay rights, it refused to take a stand on a question
of deeper meaning and significance for gay activists: ‘Is gay good?’
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The Socialist Workers’ Party’s failure led to the exodus of gay activists
from the party. For Mossop, the failure of most Marxists to understand
that gay is good meant that ‘much more basic social change will
be needed before gay people are free, and since marxist-inspired
movements are the main force for social change in the world today,
it is vital that marxists understand gay oppression’.52 Making the
difficult decision to leave revolutionary politics, for some after
many years of commitment to the cause, did not necessarily entail a
rejection of Marxist theory and socialist politics. In 1977 gay activist
Stuart Russell left the League for Socialist Action, Canada’s largest
Trotskyist organization, but stated, ‘I … depart remaining a convinced
Revolutionary Marxist and Trotskyist ’.53
If The History of Sexuality allowed activists to address problems with
the left’s sexual politics, it equally allowed them to address what they
regarded as deficiencies in the gay movement, especially its lack
of theory. In 1977, for example, Jeffrey Escoffier, in a review of
Gay American History for The Body Politic, chided Jonathan Katz for
his lack of theory, citing in this instance not Foucault but ‘the
great Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci’ on ‘the absolute necessity of
theory ’.54 That theory came to be known as social constructionism.55
As Bébout explained it,
We were all disciples (some more fervent than others) of philosopher
Michel Foucault: author of (among much else) The History of Sexuality,
guiding light of social construction theory. The idea that sexuality
is ‘ socially constructed ’ came easily to us, resisting with feminists the
notion that biology is destiny … We even accepted (in theory, if not
always in political practice) that ‘ homosexuality ’ and ‘ heterosexuality ’
are not inherent states, but social definitions created by the ‘ dominant
discourses ’ of psychiatry, medicine, and the law.56
Not only did theory appear on the pages of The Body Politic, but
it coursed through the paper’s endless meetings: a ‘controversial/
theoretical/philosophical discussion’ in January 1982; a ‘wide-ranging
discussion on editorial content, especially with regard to sexual theory’
in September 1983.57 Foucauldian social construction theory was so
imbricated in the everyday workings of The Body Politic that writers
didn’t have to cite Foucault to invoke it. In his review of Christianity,
Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, Padgug described John Boswell’s
book as a ‘mixed bag of marvelous insights and unresolved problems’,
and those problems
derived from a fundamental weakness in his sexual theory:
Boswell constantly assumes that human sexuality is, at root, essentially
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Cultural History
fixed … Thus, for him, homosexual acts are performed by ‘ gay people ’
and one can legitimately speak of ‘ gay subcultures ’ … But many of
us would see as anachronistic the very concept of ‘ homosexuals ’ and
‘ heterosexuals ’ (rather than homosexual and heterosexual acts capable
of being performed by anyone).58
It’s a classic Foucauldian position (and, as we’ve already seen, Padgug

was an early subscriber to it). That ‘us’ is telling. Padgug could count
on a degree of familiarity with theory among the readers of The Body
Politic, and it testifies to the relative speed with which those ideas
entered into popular circulation, a process in which the paper played
no small part.
If the paper represented a movement-based site for the production
of theory, this doesn’t mean tensions between theory and practice
were entirely absent. This sometimes expressed itself in debates over
the accessibility of language. For example, in a Body Politic report on
a ‘gay socialist conference’ in London organized by the Gay Left
Collective, the ‘conference was criticized by some participants for
“being too academic” and “separating theory from practice ”’.59 As
Hardy saw it,
the debate that for the early gay liberationists had been framed between
assimilation and difference was now recast by the introduction of French
linguistic theory and its irksome hieratic language … Many gay activists
deeply resented these incursions of French theory into home-grown
North American politics.60
Something of that resentment registered, I think, in the refusal by

some to attend Lynch’s party and kneel down before God.
Questions of language and accessibility inevitably surfaced at
The Body Politic. In the spring of 1981, Alex Wilson, who’d been with
the paper since February 1979, was removed from the collective.
Some felt he was taking the review section in directions that were
too theoretical and not accessible enough. Wilson wasn’t unaware of
such considerations. In August 1979 he approached Varda Burstyn, a
socialist feminist and anti-censorship activist, to review Feminism and
Materialism. As Wilson explained, ‘I read several parts of it at a summer
institute on Marxism and Culture that I went to in June and July. It’s
very good, I think – at least some of the essays are very helpful to
the discourse of Marxist feminism’. In addition to underscoring yet
again the importance for some at The Body Politic of Marxism and
feminism to gay liberation, Wilson’s letter also addressed the issue of
theory and readability: ‘It’s best to keep in mind that The Body Politic is
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a popular journal, and what we do – particularly around theoretical

issues, especially ones so important as feminism – must be made
accessible.’61 The text wasn’t exactly light reading, but, for that matter,
neither was The History of Sexuality. As Weir put it in her review, ‘those
who pick up The History of Sexuality hoping for an easy read will become
unhappy very quickly’. This didn’t stop Weir from placing the text in
the context of Foucault’s earlier work on the internal organization and
‘patterned orderliness ’ of discursive ‘statements ’.62 Throughout these
years at The Body Politic there was a refusal to dumb down.
For months, Wilson’s departure remained a touchstone for
discussions ‘over the best balance of “theoretical ” and “popular ”
coverage’. Bébout – who admitted, ‘I was Alex’s biggest opponent on
the matter of accessible language’ – stated, ‘I think that in the wake
of Alex’s removal (and that’s not too strong a word), we’ve tended
to pull back from the theoretical, the “esoteric”, almost too much’.63
While theory would eventually be purged from the paper as it
turned more decisively towards the popular and commercial, in the
early 1980s theorizing remained a hard habit to break. At a collective
meeting in 1983, ‘Sue Golding suggested a series of articles on ideas of
deconstruction ’ in relation to sexuality. Golding, the one butched-up
in leather at Lynch’s party, had been writing for The Body Politic since
1981 and had been on the collective in 1983–84. Bébout described her
as ‘a feminist S/M dyke, veteran of the Sex Wars’, and ‘our most avid
Foucauldian’. In the November issue of 1983 Golding gave readers
a taste of what she had in mind. Explaining that deconstruction had
been ‘developed by Foucault (in particular in his History of Sexuality)
and elaborated on by Jacques Derrida (Writing and Difference)’,
Golding surveyed the tenets of deconstruction and concluded with
a quintessentially Foucauldian question: Doesn’t it ‘seem logical to
conclude that the fight for our “liberation” lies not in “rediscovering ”
any “innate” sexual desires (how could we? – they don’t exist), but
precisely in constructing all our various erotic pleasures’?64 So much
for accessibility.
If theory was to stick around, it needed to do two things: it had to
be useful, and it had to be grounded in experience. Bébout suggested
that the
trouble with the word ‘ theory ’ is that we’ve all come to think of it as that
heavy, inaccessible, boring stuff … but that shouldn’t keep us from
thinking on paper, as Ken [Popert] says, in a way that is useful to other
people thinking about what it is to be gay in this time and in many
places.
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Bébout continued, ‘We should be thinky … That doesn’t mean we

shouldn’t be concrete, accessible, and rooted in real life. We must be all
those things if people are to pay any attention’.65 Again, this was not
far off from Foucault, whose own theoretical practice was rooted in
‘real life’:
I have always insisted that there take place within me and for me a kind
of back and forth, an interference, an interconnection between practices
and the theoretical or historical work I was doing … In this sense, I could
say that I have always insisted that my books be, in one sense, fragments
of an autobiography. My books have always been my personal problems
with madness, the prison, and sexuality.66
And not just his books. Foucault also forged the link between theory
and practice in his own activist work. Readers of the The Body Politic
were kept informed of some of Foucault’s political activism: his help
in founding Gai Pied in May 1979; his protests against French film
censors; his support of the Greek gay-lib journal Amphi, charged with
offending public morals in the summer of 1980.67 Foucault was careful
to underline that ‘theoretical work not dictate rules with regard to
contemporary practice, and that it pose questions’, questions that
would prove useful ‘for those who currently live in the institution’ one
happened to be theorizing.68 Questioning, theorizing, thinking, doing:
this was what The Body Politic was all about. As usual, Bébout summed
it up best:
At our best, we were thinking. Thinking all the time, thinking hard and
together, talking it out in person and in print. There really was such
a thing as gay and lesbian thought – beyond ‘ identity ’ and way beyond
‘ rights ’. It wasn’t detached theory – it was vital to daily life. If we didn’t
grapple with tough issues, we wouldn’t know not just ‘ who we are ’ – but
what we wanted to do.69
Bébout may have imagined they were thinking beyond identity,

but grounding theory in ‘real life’, in the experiences of lesbians and
gay men, sometimes served, however unwittingly, to reify lesbian/gay
identities. Who was this ‘we’ if not lesbian and gay people? This
manifested itself at the paper in debates ‘over how “gay” something
had to be before we dealt with it ’.70 To take an example, Wilson was, in
addition to a gay liberationist, a horticulturalist and ecologist. He
was never a single-identity kind of a guy, and he brought that sensibility
to his work on the paper. In January 1980, Wilson contributed a
review of the Toronto Film Festival. For the most part, the films that
134
Wilson chose to highlight were not gay or lesbian, or even about sex.
They were, as he stated in his review, ‘concerned with power
and systems of social control ’, and he cited Foucault’s Discipline
and Punish.71 This was likely too theoretical and not gay enough and
hastened Wilson’s departure.
The sense at the paper that they should be speaking to gay people
about gay things sat awkwardly next to activists’ commitment to social
construction theory and its deconstructive pressure on sexual identity.
But essentialist thinking about identity remained a no-no. Sky Gilbert,
founder of Buddies in Bad Times, Toronto’s queer theatre company,
learned this lesson when he decided to share a house with Bob
Gallagher and Sue Golding. ‘Foucault was an obsession for both Sue
and Bob’, Gilbert recalls.
I was frank with [Sue] and told her that I was afraid of lesbians. ‘ Why? ’
she asked. ‘ Because I think they don’t like men. ’ ‘ A lot of them don’t, ’
she said. ‘ They’re called essentialists. I’m not an essentialist. ’ ‘ What’s
that? ’ I asked. What I got next from Sue, though I didn’t know it at the
time, was a crash course in the thinking of Michel Foucault.72
Foucault may have taught the activists about the pitfalls of

essentialism, but the master could also learn a lesson about identity
from the student, and in the unlikeliest of places. Several days
after Lynch’s party, Hardy bumped into Foucault and Defert on Yonge
Street, Toronto’s main drag. They were not far from the St. Charles
Tavern, the city’s oldest gay bar, home to hustlers and rough trade.
Hardy suggested a visit.
When we entered and took a seat, Foucault’s face remained set with
marmoreal indifference … There was a large saltshaker on the table.
I dashed some across the surface of my beer, lifted my glass, and with
a practiced stroke slammed the thick bottom sharply on the table. The
cold draft beer immediately effervesced, forming a thick head of foam.
Foucault’s eyes bulged, and with the kind of disordered panic that the
French reserve for the gastronomically incorrect, he began to sputter
and ask questions, fascinated and perhaps repelled by the notion of salt
in beer.
Salt in beer was a custom in blue-collar beer parlours. As Hardy

explained, ‘in the deconstruction of identity – in my case, a national
and working-class identity – the most picayune details … can give you
away’.73
Whatever the identity, the Foucauldian injunction remained the
same. As Weir put it, ‘the greatest single strategic lesson to be learned
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Cultural History
from Foucault’s book by feminists and gay liberationists is that

our freedom will not be won by naively shouting the truth of our
“repressed” sexuality to the world’. To embrace and cling to an
identity made it available for co-optation. As Weir presciently grasped
in 1979, ‘a celebration of gay and lesbian sex, while it may eventually
lead to our acceptance as a “minority group”, will ultimately serve
the expansionary needs of a cramped bourgeoisie’.74 But even for
convinced constructionists, letting go of identity wasn’t easy. ‘My
response to social construction theory, with which I largely agreed,
came to be: Sure, sexuality is socially constructed, but that doesn’t
make it easy to deconstruct. And hey: what is it constructed from?’75
Bébout’s identification of dilemmas within social construction theory
was another instance of activist thinking preceding the articulation
of those problems at the level of academic discourse. It would be
several years yet before, in 1987, Carole Vance outlined the problems
with social construction theory, and when she did she thanked ‘the
researchers, writers, and activists … whose work in the past twenty years
originated and refined social construction approaches in sexuality ’.76
But if not identity, then what? Weir adumbrated Foucault’s advice:
The first volume of The History of Sexuality explicitly suggests that

resistance to the technologies of sex should not be organized on the
basis of sex, but instead should be shifted over to a different ground, that
of ‘ bodies and pleasures ’.77
Golding in particular whipped her comrades into line. In February

1984, in one his many memos, this one to discuss the place of sex and
‘desire’ in the paper, Bébout noted, ‘Sue Golding says what I really
should be talking about is pleasure, which of course relates, but
I haven’t read enough Foucault to have the distinction clear’.78
In talk about sex around the paper, we were often chided by our most
fervent Foucauldians for using the word ‘ desire ’. It smacked of ‘ innate ’
drives, of ‘ natural ’ forces anathema to good constructionists. The
correct word, we were told, was ‘ pleasure ’. Well, fine. But what about
desires that are not always a pleasure? What about love and pain and loss
and longing and all that?79
As always, Bébout had his questions.

The History of Sexuality appeared right on time for the beginning
of the feminist sex debates in Toronto. The debates at The Body
Politic took a rather unique form – not between sex-positive and
sex-negative feminists but as a debate within the pro-sex camp, between
136
sexual libertarianism and those interested in developing a socialist-

feminist sexual politics. The sexual practices at issue were the
same: paedophilia, porn, public sex (especially prostitution) and
sadomasochism (S/M) – ‘the Big Four,’ as they were known around
the paper. Discussion of paedophilia pivoted on the lightning rod that
was the ‘Men Loving Boys Loving Men’ case. Rubin, for one, followed
The Body Politic trials closely. Rubin contributed an article to a US
lesbian journal defending those on the sexual margins, and, as
she wrote in late 1978 to Body Politic collective member Ed Jackson,
‘much of the thought that went into writing it was instigated by
the political issues raised in [The Body Politic], and it was sort of
an oblique tribute to the paper’. Rubin lamented the way the
issues, including pornography, were cast as ‘“feminists” vs.
“faggots” – it being assumed by most that the feminist position is anti-
pornography. I don’t agree and … I don’t like it’. She admitted to not
having it all sorted out yet,
but I must soon for I’ve agreed to do a presentation on the pornography

debate à la BP for an upcoming marxist feminist conference. The
ultimate irony, I think, is that these days it is almost as if it is marxists
who are upholding the values of ‘ sexual liberation ’ in the face of what is
becoming a rather puritanical and sexually repressive feminism. Will
history never cease to play jokes on us?80
Interestingly, it was the socialist feminists more so than the sexual

libertarians who conscripted Foucault. Weir teamed up with Casey to
argue that the way through the impasse between a ‘superficial sexual-
liberationism’ and sexual moralism involved a tripartite solution: ‘Gay
Liberation, Feminism, and Foucault’, an argument made in the
pages of a socialist journal.81 In 1979–80 The Body Politic collective
launched a series of articles on S/M. In ‘Feminism Meets Fist-fucking:
Getting Lost in Lesbian S/M’, Valverde deployed the critique of
sexual liberation developed by Foucault in The History of Sexuality to
call into question just what was being liberated in S/M practice.82
In an illustration of the kind of complexity of thought fostered
by The Body Politic, Valverde offered another piece in which,
her feminism and Foucauldianism aside, she admitted to her own
masochistic fantasies.83 Having used The Body Politic as a space to try out
her ideas, Valverde would go on to write a book that attempted
to refocus the sex debates beyond sexual ‘libertarian individualism’
towards a ‘community-based ethics’ of sexual pleasure. One of her
main starting points? The History of Sexuality. And, just as predictably,
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Cultural History
The Body Politic provided the space for its critical discussion, one
reviewer suggesting that Valverde ‘knows the popular theorists –
philosopher Michel Foucault, Jeffrey Weeks, and Gayle Rubin – but
ultimately she distorts and dismisses their basic concepts’.84 In all, the
debates over S/M were, like so much else at The Body Politic, an effort
to think and theorize. As Ken Popert put it in his contribution to
the discussion, they were ‘working towards a theory of fistfucking’.85
We should note here how the frequency of fist-fucking in discussions
of sex at the paper fit rather snugly with Foucault’s own thoughts
on fisting as an example of a desexualized and desubjectifying
bodily practice, of the production of ‘pleasure with very odd things,
very strange parts of our bodies ’ – thoughts he shared while in
Toronto.86
***
‘We wanted to talk mostly about sexuality.’ ‘That’s a surprise ’, quipped
Foucault, ‘why not? ’ So began Gallagher and Wilson’s interview with
Foucault in Toronto in June 1982, although that initial exchange, along
with several others, was omitted from the published version.87
Gallagher, a RTPC militant and marshal of mass demos, and Wilson
were both seasoned activists and identified as part of the gay left. The
idea to interview Foucault, Gallagher explains,
seemed like a no-brainer to me, if he would consent … I recognized that

I had an amazing opportunity to hear the connections of sexuality and
identity directly from the mouth of one of the most important thinkers
on the subject. Also, as I spent time with him I realized he was more
open to discussing sexual politics than I had realized.
The interview took place in the home of a faculty member who was
away, where Foucault was staying that June. It was conducted in English
and ‘taped on a cheap recorder and transcribed on crude machinery’.
Wilson did most of the transcription, and ‘after Alex’s first pass, Sue
Golding and myself helped fill in inaudible words … I remember it
being a hassle’.88
David Macey has suggested that Foucault ‘was interviewed by Bob
Gallagher and Alexander Wilson for the Advocate’.89 But the interview’s
publication history is more complicated than that. Defert believed
the interview was ‘destined for the Canadian periodical Body Politic’.90
This would have made perfect sense given Gallagher and Wilson’s close
connections to the paper. As Gallagher suggests, ‘I was quite close to
the BP crowd … We talked about it, and I think they were willing when
I got it transcribed, but [they] weren’t dying for it and weren’t
138
prepared to commit to publishing it intact’. It took a full year before

the transcription was finished, at which point, Gallagher says,
I strongly felt that it should penetrate beyond the gay community. I felt
this was not only very important stuff for gay liberationists … It was
probably even more important for leftist politics in understanding the
role of gay politics and the social construction of identities.91
Here again were the familiar themes in the reception of Foucault by

activists: social construction theory and Foucault as a bridge between
gay liberation and left politics. Gallagher and Wilson submitted the
interview in June 1983 to the US-based journal Socialist Review. The
Socialist Review sat on it for nearly half a year and then declined to
publish. A member of the Socialist Review collective explained,
We very much wanted to publish it but in the end felt that you and Bob
as interviewers did not push him enough. He made many interesting
and tantalizing statements but many remain cryptic and some are quite
controversial but unfortunately not adequately explained.92
Wilson tended to agree – ‘thanks for the comments on the Foucault

interview; I think you’re right’ – but Gallagher was ‘shocked when they
were not interested ’.93 The interview ended up in The Advocate, where
it finally appeared in August 1984. The Advocate spread included an
editor’s note on Foucault’s recent death, an introduction by Gallagher
and Wilson (not included in any of the subsequent reprints of the
interview), a photograph of Foucault, and an evocative drawing of the
naked, strained, muscled backside of a punk by German artist Sibylle
Ruppert, known for her Sade-inspired work.94
The interview is well known in Foucault studies in large measure
because it is one of a small handful in which Foucault agreed to
discuss the practice and politics of S/M. James Miller, perhaps most
notoriously, relied heavily on the interview, along with his own
interview with Gallagher (who ‘informed my whole way of thinking
about this aspect of Foucault’s life’), to work up his profile of Foucault
as a man obsessed with S/M, limit experiences, and death as key to
understanding his life and work.95 Miller’s psychologizing aside,
there were more immediate reasons why Gallagher and Wilson asked
Foucault about the sensualization of ‘neglected parts of the body and
the articulation of new pleasures’, such as ‘porn movies, clubs for S/M
or fistfucking’. In April 1982 The Body Politic, continuing its exploration
of ‘bodies and pleasures ’, reprinted Rubin’s ‘The Leather Menace:
Comments on Politics and S/M’. The issue also contained ‘Lust with a
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Cultural History
Very Proper Stranger ’, a how-to guide on fist-fucking; for their efforts,

the nine members of the editorial collective were charged by police
with obscenity. In the following issue, Golding followed up with a
long, very positive review of Coming to Power, the lesbian-feminist S/M
anthology from which Rubin’s article was drawn.96 All this transpired
in the two months just before Foucault’s arrival in Toronto, and it
helps to make sense of why Gallagher and Wilson asked Foucault not
once but twice to consider the politics and practice of lesbian S/M,
which Foucault did, invoking ‘our good friend Gayle Rubin’. Asked
today how he feels about how Miller used his views on the significance
of S/M for Foucault, Gallagher says:
Foucault’s thoughts on pleasure, transformation of pain and the role of

experiencing limits and ecstatic pleasure are very important, [however,]
I find it ironic and objectionable to believe Foucault’s insights on these
matters are an expression of an essential make-up of his life or thought.97
Gallagher, Wilson and Foucault did not only discuss S/M; like the
name of the June 1982 pride festival and conference Gallagher helped
to organize, they were also ‘Doing It!’98 Gallagher served as Foucault’s
guide on his tours through Toronto’s leather bars, baths and S/M
clubs. ‘Michel did enjoy Toronto’s scene,’ Gallagher reports.
He went out a number of times. I can’t recall everywhere … He was not

interested in going to the main clubs or bars … we did go to Boots, the
Barn, 18 East [a leather bar with a busy basement-cum-backroom, later
called the Toolbox], and the Club Baths.99
Artist-activist Andy Fabo, a veteran of the city’s bathhouse raids,

regularly dines out on the story of having met Foucault at the Barracks,
then Toronto’s leather and S/M bathhouse. There, on the black vinyl
benches in the barnwood-clad lounge area, Fabo claims Foucault
‘asked me a lot of questions, many pertaining to the raids, but revealed
very little about himself ’.100 And then there are those who spied
Foucault purchasing his poppers at Glad Day, the city’s gay bookstore
and porn shop.101 Foucault’s forays in Toronto’s leather bars and
bathhouses extended beyond the sexual to include the political.
The months prior to Foucault’s arrival in Toronto were an especially
dense political moment in the history of the city’s lesbian and gay
communities. Large demonstrations kept alive the mass mobilization
of the community in the wake of the previous year’s bathhouse raids
as cases of ‘found-ins’ continued to wend their way through the courts.
On top of the ‘Lust Bust’ in May, The Body Politic was back in court in
140
the same month for its second trial over ‘Men Loving Boys Loving
Men’. Foucault’s own thoughts on the limitations of gay identity and
gay community, clearly expressed in the interview, did not prevent
him from joining the parade – literally. On June 27, Foucault took part
in Toronto’s gay pride parade. These were still early days, long before
Pride Toronto would turn into a commercial spectacle attracting
upwards of a million people. In 1982 it was held in a small downtown
park and attended by about 2,000 people. Gilbert claims that Gallagher
said Foucault didn’t get gay liberation ‘until he saw the Toronto
Gay Pride Parade. “It all made sense when I saw those asses swaying
in the sun!” is how Bob used to paraphrase what Foucault had told
him’. More likely, Foucault was intrigued to witness a community very
much present at its own making. As Gallagher recalls it,
it was only the second Pride Day Toronto had organized (it grew out of the
bath raids), and the feeling of excitement and resistance was palpable.
I think Michel simply got caught up in the excitement … Afterwards he
mentioned that there was a strong sense in the community of being aware
of creating itself … rather than simply proclaiming a found truth.102
Foucault’s first-hand experience of gay community and politics

in Toronto may also help explain why, despite his own reservations
about identity-based movements, he was not entirely dismissive of
them. Interviewed shortly after the pride march and asked about the
problems with a gay movement that reified identity and ‘remained at
the level of demanding civil or human rights’, Foucault, in a section of
the interview cut (in italics below) from The Advocate, replied:
F:… Human rights regarding sexuality are important and are still not
respected in many places, including here in Canada. Just look at what’s going
on in Ontario. I have been told terrible things about the police raids on the bars,
baths and so on, ridiculous things, and ridiculous trials. What strikes me, first,
is the fact that these kinds of things happen at all, and secondly, that these actions
are not considered ridiculous and shameful. As well, it is unbelievable that
the newspapers and politicians do not consider this harassment ridiculous
and shameful … It’s incredible that these things are happening and that there’s
no campaign in the newspapers against these types of trials. Everyone seems
to accept this.
G/W: People are used to it in Canada. I always think of the situation here as an
anomaly, but of course sexual persecution and the denial of the most basic of
sexual rights happens all over the world – and we are not exempt.
F: Yes, and in a way, all this is proof that we still have to be very careful of such
problems. We shouldn’t consider that they are solved now …103
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This exchange also captures Foucault’s indignation over the sexual

policing and legal harassment he learned about in Toronto. If many
within the mainstream accepted such actions, the same could not be
said of Toronto’s lesbian and gay communities, whose angry defiance
in the face of the police attacks on its social-sexual spaces left a lasting
impression on Foucault. Back home in Paris in December 1982,
in an interview with Gai Pied about the policing of homosexuality,
Foucault invoked Toronto. According to Foucault, after a period
of relative tolerance, municipal authorities had closed a number of gay
spaces – ‘S/M clubs, saunas, etc.’ – with the justification being that the
majority would no longer tolerate the ‘excesses’ of the gay community.
I would suggest Foucault is misremembering slightly, confusing
the police crackdown with complete closure. Bathhouses in Toronto
were never closed, not even at the height of the AIDS epidemic.
Still, Foucault’s position on sexual policing was plain. There could
be no police interference in sexuality, no legal adjudication between
degrees of tolerance. On the issue of the relation between the police
and pleasure, Foucault advocated: ‘Non aux compromis’.104
The Toronto Foucault, immersed in the city’s sexual scene and
joining its gay community to resist the sex police, is one that remained
with local activists after Foucault left Toronto. In his video You Taste
American, activist John Greyson dramatized the 1983 police washroom
busts of thirty-two men in Orilla, Ontario. In a characteristically campy
analysis, Greyson, who didn’t meet Foucault in 1982 but was ‘certainly
regaled by the various sightings/rumours/affairs ’, has a character in
the video by the name of Michel Foucault embody ‘a heroic po-mo
dialectic of revolutionary theory and praxis’. Greyson has ‘Foucault’
write in his journal about the state use of the public-private distinction,
knowledge Greyson absorbed from the RTPC, and, at the end of
the video, faced with the choice of attending a lecture or returning to
the police station to help one of the men caught up in the police
washroom surveillance, Greyson’s Foucault forgoes theory and chooses
action.105
***
David Halperin has suggested that ‘the most obvious impetus for gay
activists to find political inspiration in The History of Sexuality, Volume 1,
has come, of course, from AIDS ’, and he imagined members
of ACT UP New York during the late 1980s and early 1990s carrying
in their leather jackets Foucault’s introductory volume, just as ‘labor
organizers of the 1930s might all be imagined to have carried about
with them in their back pockets a copy of The Communist Manifesto’.
142
Indeed, on behalf of queer activists, Halperin anoints Foucault

‘our Marx’.106 It was an unlikely analogy. After all, the period in
which Halperin was writing is better known for the so-called death of
Marxism and for the rise of Foucault as the progenitor of a
predominantly post-structuralist queer theory, one often indifferent
towards or dismissive of Marxism. But fifteen to twenty years earlier, the
Marxist moniker might be something more than a clever analogy. It
all points to the necessity of historicizing Foucault. Rather than
claim to have discovered the ‘essential’ Foucault (could there be a
less Foucauldian enterprise?), it seems wiser to explore how different
groups in different times and places read and deployed Foucault.
For example, reflecting our own political moment, we are currently
living through the ‘neoliberal Foucault’; this too shall pass. I’ve tried
to suggest that in Toronto in the late 1970s and early 1980s a small but
significant band of activists – in my interview with Gallagher he aptly
named them ‘the organic intellectuals around The Body Politic’ – found
in The History of Sexuality the tools to articulate a distinctive gay-left
politics. What emerged was not just the familiar Foucault of social
constructionist theory but also a Foucault on friendly terms with
historical materialism and socialist feminism.
While it is now fashionable to dismiss the period of social
construction theory as hopelessly naive and outmoded, there is,
I would suggest, much to be gained in the rediscovery of this earlier
moment and this other Foucault.107 Consider theory and practice. The
point is not that theory always found a comfortable home in the activist
milieu; far from it. But in this period, in this gay-left conjuncture,
papers such as The Body Politic became crucial movement-based sites
for the production of theory. Theory was a member of the collective,
and as such it was understood that it had work to do; it aspired to be
something more than the next special issue of the latest academic
journal (present company excluded, of course!). One is also struck by
the absence of anti-intellectualism, the commitment to thinking, and
the belief that movement concerns had a legitimate claim on theory,
indeed, that critiques of theory might emerge in collective meetings
before they did in seminar rooms. This reciprocal relationship between
political practice and theoretical production, so evident in the work of
both Foucault and The Body Politic, would largely be lost with the
emergence of queer theory in the 1990s, when the activist dismissal of
theory as so much ‘jargon’ took the place of a more substantive
engagement with theory, and when some newly professionalized queer
theorists wrapped themselves in theory for theory’s sake – what Bébout
called ‘detached theory’.
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The story of one last Body Politic contributor sums things up nicely.
Alan O’Connor came to the paper in the spring of 1984. He had
attended Foucault’s course at the Summer Institute back in June
1982. At the paper, he corresponded with some of the early gay
leftists. Watney wrote to say he’d like to ‘sound off ’ against an article
published in England. ‘It’s a typical piece of straight “high-theory ”
which, in the name of Foucault of all people, argues against coming
out!’ Watney proposed to counter high theory with ideas generated
out of activism: ‘I could compare it to the Canadian Right to
Privacy position.’ Weeks wrote in October 1984 to say, ‘I am currently
struggling to write a review of Foucault’s last two volumes. Fascinating,
if recondite reading.’108 Foucault had been dead for four months.
It fell to O’Connor to write The Body Politic’s obituary for Foucault.
O’Connor was spare, affecting:
He came to Toronto in 1982 and was not the person we expected.

Instead of the flamboyant super-intellectual, there was a man who,
during breaks in his lectures, lined up for coffee and chatted quietly with
graduate students. He was here to teach, but we heard the reason he
accepted the invitation was to see an old lover. Perhaps this was so. We
heard that he liked The Barn, which is not a genteel bar. We heard that
he liked The Barracks. Foucault at the baths. A man with a quiet smile; it
seemed not to be Foucault. It seems he is no longer. Ask for him. He is
not there.109
Notes
1. For sharing their recollections of and reflections on Foucault’s 1982 visit
to Toronto, I thank Andy Fabo, John Greyson, Gerald Hannon, Ed Jackson
and Bob Wallace. My biggest thanks go to Lorna Weir and Bob Gallagher.
My appreciation to Libby Bouvier of the archives and records department of
The History Project: Documenting GLBT Boston; Katy Rawdon of the Special
Collections Research Center, Temple University Libraries; Colin Deinhardt
and Roma Kail of the E. J. Pratt Library, Victoria University/University of
Toronto; and Alan Miller of the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives. To Henry
Abelove for making connections and good conversation. At Cultural History, I thank
Howard Chiang and the journal’s peer reviewers. Finally, this essay is for
Rick Bébout (1950–2009) – historian, flâneur, liberationist. Michael Lynch,
‘ Appointment Book ’, 23 June 1982, G1-162/12(06), Michael Lynch Fonds,
Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives (hereafter CLGA); Lynch, diary entry,
25 June 1982, Diary #31 (20 June–12 August 1982), Series 2, Diaries, Michael
Lynch Fonds, CLGA. On Michael Lynch (1944–91), see Ann Silversides, AIDS
Activist: Michael Lynch and the Politics of Community (Toronto: Between the Lines,
2003); and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, ‘ White Glasses ’, in Tendencies (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 1993), pp. 252–66.
2. Lynch, diary entry, 25 June 1982, Diary #31.
144
3. Robin Hardy with David Groff, The Crisis of Desire: AIDS and the Fate of Gay Brotherhood
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), pp. 151–2.
4. At the Summer Institute, organized by Professor Paul Bouissac, Foucault led
a number of seminars on ‘ the confession or avowal … the obligation of telling
the truth about oneself ’ and delivered lectures on ‘ The Care of the Self in Ancient
Culture ’. For the title and full course description, see ‘ Program for the Third
International Summer Institute for Semiotic and Structural Studies, May 31–June
26, 1982 ’, File 5, Box 5, Semiotic Circle, 1978–1988, Sub-series 1, General
Files, Series 3, Correspondence/Subject Files, Fonds 2063, Victoria College
Principal’s Office, Victoria University Archives (Toronto). The Institute attracted
180 participants, and ‘ some lectures, such as those by Michel Foucault … were
regularly attended by an average of 150 participants. ’ See ‘ Third International
Summer Institute for Semiotic and Structural Studies – Final Report – 8 March
1983 ’, File 7, Box 20, Semiotic Institute, Series 19, Records Relating to Victoria
College, Fonds 2021, President’s Office, Victoria University Archives. The archival
records of the Institute also include a letter of 17 March 1982 from the Dean of
Graduate Studies to Foucault, confirming his participation in the Institute, and
a letter from the Toronto Semiotic Circle to the International Development
Research Centre in Cairo regarding ‘ the matter of Professor Foucault’s unpaid
telephone bill … $86.14 ’. Bouissac’s personal papers also include some material
related to Foucault’s visit, including a letter of 6 May 1981 to the Dean of Arts and
Science: ‘ Please find enclosed the documents you required regarding Professor
Michel Foucault. I plan to be in Paris around June 15 and I should be glad either to
convey a message to him or to inquire further about his intentions, if you so wish ’.
See File 3, Box 1, Correspondence, 1977–1983, Series 3, Correspondence, Fonds 3,
Paul Bouissac Papers, Special Collections, Victoria University Library. The Bouissac
collection also contains a series of audio reels and cassette tapes titled ‘ Foucault
Seminar ’. The eight cassettes are not labelled in any logical fashion, and the sound
quality is quite poor. See Files 6 and 7, Box 1, ‘ Foucault Seminar ’, Series 1, Records
Relating to Writing and Academic Work, Fonds 3, Paul Bouissac Papers. Typescripts
of some of the Toronto seminars can be found in the Foucault archives at the
Institut mémoires de l ’édition contemporaine (D243*r under the old Bibliothèque
du Saulchoir catalogue) and the Bancroft Library at the University of California,
Berkeley (BANC MSS 90/136z/1:10). On the latter, see Alain Beaulieu, ‘ The
Foucault Archives at Berkeley ’, Foucault Studies, 10 (November 2010), pp. 144–54.
Stuart Elden reports that Foucault’s preparatory notes for the seminars can be
found in the Foucault papers at the Bibliothèque nationale de France. See Elden’s
blog, ‘ Progressive Geographies ’, www.progressivegeographies.com/2015/11/23/
foucault-the-birth-of-power-update-7-working-at-the-bibliotheque-nationale-and-a-
meeting-with-foucaults-nephew (accessed 18 December 2015).
5. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, Robert
Hurley (transl.) (New York: Vintage Books, 1980). For stylisitic ease, I will refer
to Foucault’s introductory volume as The History of Sexuality, unless indicated
otherwise.
6. Hardy, Crisis of Desire, p. 151.
7. Lynch, diary entry, 25 June 1982, Diary #31.
8. Bob Gallagher, interview with author, 22 February 2015. Stephen Riggins,
Bouissac’s partner, spent time with Foucault in Toronto in June 1982 and came
to a similar understanding: Foucault ‘ seemed to be profoundly anti-social ’, the type
145
Cultural History
of person ‘ who’d rather be alone in the library than in a gay bar on Church Street
[Toronto’s gay commercial strip], a fancy mid-town restaurant or a private supper
for middle-aged academics ’, although he did note that ‘ Foucault appreciated the
butch men with tight-fitting T-shirts that read “ Our Lady of the Sorrows Swim
Team ” ’. Stephen Harold Riggins, The Pleasures of Time: Two Men, A Life (Toronto:
Insomniac Press, 2003), pp. 253 and 162.
9. Lynch, diary entry, 31 December 1982, Diary #35.
10. Daniel Defert, ‘ Chronology ’, Timothy O’Leary (transl.), in Christopher Falzon,
Timothy O’Leary and Jana Sawicki (eds), A Companion to Foucault (Hoboken, NJ:
Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), pp. 11–83 (63).
11. David Halperin, Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1995), p. 27.
12. Richard A. Lynch, ‘ Reading The History of Sexuality, Volume 1 ’, in Falzon et al.,
Companion to Foucault, pp. 154–71 (163).
13. Defert writes that Foucault ‘ conceived of this book as a manifesto in which it was
a matter of taking a stand ’. Defert, ‘ Chronology ’, p. 62.
14. See Mark G. E. Kelly, Foucault’s History of Sexuality Volume 1, The Will to Knowledge
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013).
15. See, for example, T. H. Adamowski, ‘ Sex in the Head ’, Canadian Forum, 59
(June/July 1979), pp. 40–2; and Michel Lavoie, ‘ Foucault, Michel, Histoire de la
sexualité. Tome I. La volonté de savoir ’, Laval théologique et philosophique, 33:3 (1977),
pp. 321–6. The Lavoie review is reprinted in Jean-Francois Bert (ed.), La volonté de
savoir de Michel Foucault: Regards critiques, 1976–1979 (Caen: Presses universitaires
de Caen, 2013), pp. 217–28.
16. ‘ Michel Foucault: An Interview – Sex, Power, and the Politics of Identity ’, interview
by Bob Gallagher and Alexander Wilson, The Advocate, 7 August 1984, pp. 26–30,
58 (28).
17. My thanks to one of the peer reviewers for this formulation.
18. I’m referring to the interview from The Advocate, cited above. Foucault in fact
gave two interviews while in Toronto. The day before Lynch’s party, Riggins
interviewed Foucault. The contrast with The Body Politic crowd – as far as I know,
Riggins did not count himself among the city’s activists – was sharp. The interview
took place in Riggins and Bouissac’s apartment in the Colonnade on Bloor Street,
overlooking the campus of the University of Toronto. The interview mostly
eschewed politics and lingered instead on the aesthetic, ethical, and biographical,
and it turned out to be one of the more personal interviews Foucault gave.
See ‘ Michel Foucault: An Interview by Stephen Riggins ’, Ethos, 1:2 (Autumn 1983),
pp. 4–9.
19. Lorna Weir, ‘ Foucault: Exposing the Secret ’, The Body Politic, 50 (February
1979), pp. 33–4. Even prior to the English translation of the History of Sexuality
in November 1978 Foucault could be found in The Body Politic and in a way that
foreshadowed his conscription by gay-left activists. Mariana Valverde filed a report
in October 1978 on the emergence of gay liberation in Spain in which she discussed
the Frente de Liberación Homosexual de Castilla and, in particular, an article
written by a militant from the Frente de Liberación who was a member of
a Trotskyist group. Valverde noted that the ‘ argument, borrowed in part from
the French philosopher Michel Foucault, is based on a view of bourgeois society
defining itself by excluding everything which it considers “ weird ”. The
establishment defines itself as “ normal ” by creating the very distinctions between
146
normal and abnormal, sane and insane, hetero and homo ’. Clara and Mariana
Valverde, ‘ Viva Gay ’, The Body Politic, 47 (October 1978), pp. 31–3 (33).
20. Gordon Montador, ‘ Media: Getting Some of the Picture ’, The Body Politic,
50 (February 1979), p. 8.
21. Lorna Weir, interview with author, 17 February 2015.
22. Weir, ‘ Exposing the Secret ’, p. 33.
23. ‘ Marxist Institute Offers Gay Course ’, The Body Politic, 20 (October 1975), p. 7;
Hardy, Crisis of Desire, 140; Gary Kinsman et al., ‘ Movement in Lavender ’, The Body
Politic, 65 (August 1980), pp. 23–4. See also Scott Tucker, ‘ A Many-headed
Movement: Lavender and Left ’, The Body Politic, 68 (November 1980), p. 28.
24. Scott Tucker, ‘ Homosocialism ’, The Body Politic, 73 (May 1981), p. 28.
25. Weir, interview.
26. Philip Derbyshire, ‘ Another Patriarchal Irrelevance ’, Gay Left, 5 (Winter 1977),
p. 14; and Derbyshire, ‘ The Regime of Sex ’, Gay Left, 8 (Summer 1979), pp. 29–30.
27. Jeffrey Weeks, ‘ Foucault for Historians ’, History Workshop Journal, 14 (Autumn
1982), pp. 106–19 (108).
28. Leo Casey, review of Gay Left Collective, ed., Homosexuality: Power and Politics, The
Body Politic, 75 (July/August 1981), p. 30.
29. Robert Padgug, ‘ Sexual Matters: On Conceptualizing Sexuality in History ’,
Radical History Review, 20 (Spring/Summer 1979), pp. 3–23. Years later, recalling
that groundbreaking issue, Padgug observed, ‘ Everyone who I talk to these days
sees that issue as one of the first of the social-construction world … I’m always
screaming, “ No, no, we were Marxists ”. When we said that things were
“ constructed ”, we were thinking of Marx, not Foucault. [Laughter.] ’. Padgug
quoted in Andor Skotnes, ‘ A Conversation about the Radical History Review: Former
and Current Collective Members Reminisce ’, Radical History Review, 79 (Winter
2001), pp. 15–47 (32).
30. See Tom Warner, Never Going Back: A History of Queer Activism in Canada (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 2002); and Miriam Smith, Lesbian and Gay Rights in
Canada: Social Movements and Equality-Seeking, 1971–1995 (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 1999).
31. See Becki Ross, The House That Jill Built: A Lesbian Nation in Formation (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1995), especially chap. 7, ‘ Coalition Politics: Lesbian
Feminists Meet Gay Liberationists ’, pp. 157–75.
32. See Lorna Weir, ‘ Socialist Feminism and the Politics of Sexuality ’, in Heather
Jon Maroney and Meg Luxton (eds), Feminism and Political Economy: Women’s Work,
Women’s Struggles (Toronto: Methuen, 1987), pp. 69–84.
33. See Gary Kinsman, The Regulation of Desire: Homo and Hetero Sexualities, 2nd edition
(Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1996).
34. Rick Bébout, ‘ Media: Beepers as “ Journalists ” – Not ’, a chapter in Bébout’s
unpublished memoir, ‘ Promiscuous Affections: A Life in the Bar, 1969–2000 ’
(Reference Materials, Reading Room, CLGA); and Bébout, ‘ Gay Journalism:
What For? ’, http://www.rbebout.com/docs/nlgja.htm (accessed 8 June 2016). On
The Body Politic, see also Ed Jackson and Stan Persky (eds), Flaunting It! A Decade of
Gay Journalism from ‘ The Body Politic ’ (Vancouver: New Star Books; Toronto: Pink
Triangle, 1982). It is easy to wax nostalgic about the radicalness of The Body Politic.
However, some issues, such as those of race, seriously tested the paper’s political
commitments. See David S. Churchill, ‘ Personal Ad Politics: Race, Sexuality and
Power at The Body Politic ’, Left History 8, 2 (2004), pp. 114–34.
147
Cultural History
35. Michael Lynch, ‘ The End of the “ Human Rights ” Decade ’, The Body Politic, 54 (July
1979), pp. 25–6 (26).
36. Leo Casey, ‘ New Signposts: The Rebirth of Gay Liberation Theory ’, The Body Politic,
74 (June 1981), pp. 27–8 (28).
38. Derbyshire, ‘ Regime of Sex ’, p. 29.
39. Foucault, ‘ Interview with Christian Panier and Pierre Watté, May 14, 1981 ’, in
Foucault, Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling: The Function of Avowal in Justice, Fabienne Brion
and Bernard E. Harcourt (eds), Stephen W. Sawyer (transl.) (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2014), pp. 247–69 (247–8).
40. This sentence was omitted from the final review, one of the only changes made
by the editorial collective and done no doubt simply to weed out repetition. For
the manuscript, see ‘ Review Manuscripts, Correspondence, and Administration,
1971–1979 ’, Box 83-010/08, Records of The Body Politic, CLGA. Looking back at
the piece today, Weir’s only misgiving about the editorial process was the title –
‘ Exposing the Secret ’ – which was not her choice. Foucault’s point, of course, was
that the notion of sexuality as a secret to be exposed was a ruse of history and
power.
41. Weir, ‘ Exposing the Secret ’, p. 34; and Leo Casey, ‘ Producing our Own Theory ’,
The Body Politic, 65 (August 1980), p. 33.
42. Anon., ‘ Marcuse’s Visit ’, The Body Politic, 5 (July/August 1972), p. 18.
43. Brian Mossop, review of Wilhelm Reich, Sex-Pol: Essays, 1929–1934, The Body Politic,
19 (July/August 1975), pp. 22–3 (22).
44. Gad Horowitz, Repression: Basic and Surplus Repression in Psychoanalytic Theory: Freud,
Reich, and Marcuse (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977). The text doesn’t
mention Foucault, but ten years later Horowitz responded to Foucault’s critique
of the Freudian left. See Horowitz, ‘ The Foucaultian Impasse: No Sex, No Self,
No Revolution ’, Political Theory, 15:1 (1987), pp. 61–80. In her eroto-hagiographic
discussion of Horowitz, Shannon Bell, who explains that she was ‘ seduced ’ by
Repression – ‘ the text I have always wanted to fuck (with) ’ – and later by its author,
puts it this way: ‘ Gad deploys Marcuse to bugger Foucault ’. Bell, ‘ Gad ben Rachel
ve Aharon ’, in Shannon Bell and Peter Kulchyski (eds), Subversive Itinerary: The
Thought of Gad Horowitz (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), pp. 133–55
(134 and 139).
45. George Smith, review of Gad Horowitz, Repression: Basic and Surplus Repression in
Psychoanalytic Theory, The Body Politic, 41 (March 1978), p. 15.
46. Weir, ‘ Exposing the Secret ’, pp. 34 and 33.
47. Mike Riegle, ‘ Sex à la Foucault ’, Gay Community News, no. 33 (17 March 1979), pp. 4
and 6 (4). I consulted the manuscript of Riegle’s review, part of his Foucault
files: Folders 1–3, Subseries Michel Foucault, Series 1, People, Box 1, Mike
Riegle Collection, Collection 1, Archives and Records Department, The History
Project: Documenting GLBT Boston. See: www.historyproject.org/Downloads/
Coll01MikeRiegle.pdf (accessed 18 December 2015).
49. Jeffrey Weeks, ‘ Capitalism and the Organisation of Sex ’, pp. 11–20; Frank Mort,
‘ Sexuality: Regulation and Contestation ’, pp. 38–51 (42); and Simon Watney, ‘ The
Ideology of GLF ’, pp. 64–76 (73), all in Gay Left Collective (ed.), Homosexuality:
Power and Politics (London: Allison and Busby, 1980).
50. John D’Emilio, ‘ Sex in History ’, The Body Politic, 63 (May 1980), p. 34.
148
51. Derbyshire, ‘ Regime of Sex ’, p. 30; and Derbyshire, ‘ Sects and Sexuality:
Trotskyism and the Politics of Homosexuality ’, in Gay Left Collective,
Homosexuality, pp. 104–15 (115).
52. Brian Mossop, ‘ Gay Liberation and Socialism ’, The Body Politic, 32 (April 1977),
p. 21. On Mossop and the Communist Party of Canada, see David Gibson,
‘ Communist Party Expels Gay Activist ’, The Body Politic, 28 (November 1976), p. 5.
53. Quoted in Merv Walker, ‘ LSA Line “ Inadequate ”, Gay Activist Resigns ’, The Body
Politic, 31 (March 1977), pp. 6–7 (6).
54. Jeffrey Escoffier, review of Jonathan Katz, Gay American History, The Body Politic,
31 (March 1977), pp. 3–4 (4). Over the next several decades, Escoffier would go on
to offer sustained reflection on the role of activist intellectuals and the community-
based production of theory. See Escoffier, American Homo: Community and Perversity
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), especially pt. 2, ‘ Intellectuals and
Cultural Politics ’.
55. In his account of the reception of Foucault’s ideas, Weeks is at pains to point
out that social construction theory did not originate with Foucault: ‘ what became
known as social constructionism was in all essentials already there before the first
volume of The History of Sexuality appeared … What we found in Foucault was
resonance rather than revelation. ’ See Weeks, ‘ Remembering Foucault ’, Journal of
the History of Sexuality, 14:1–2 (January–April 2005), pp. 186–201 (189).
56. Bébout, ‘ Promiscuous Affections ’.
57. ‘ Memo to Mid Maggies ’, 15 January 1982; and ‘ Midmag meeting minutes ’,
15 September 1983. Both files are found in Box 84-026/01B, Midmag Group,
Administrative Files and General Correspondence, 1982–1983, Records of The Body
Politic, CLGA.
58. Robert Padgug, ‘ Casting Light on the Dark Ages ’, The Body Politic, 70 (February
1981), p. 29.
59. Anon., ‘ Leftist Gays Meet ’, The Body Politic, 50 (February 1979), p. 17.
60. Hardy, Crisis of Desire, pp. 151 and 153.
61. Alex Wilson to Varda Burstyn, 18 August 1979, ‘ Our Image Correspondence, 1979 ’,
Box 83-010/09, Records of The Body Politic, CLGA.
63. Rick Bébout, ‘ Discussion Paper for the Midmag Group ’, 7 January 1982,
Midmag Administration, 1982, Box 84-026/01B, Records of The Body Politic,
CLGA.
64. ‘ Midmag meeting minutes ’, 15 September 1983, Box 84-026/01B, Midmag Group,
Administrative Files and General Correspondence, 1982–1983, Records of The Body
Politic, CLGA; Bébout, ‘ Media ’; and Sue Golding, ‘ Sex Play: The Focus of a Less
Oppressive Gaze ’, The Body Politic, 98 (November 1983), pp. 39–40.
65. Rick Bébout, ‘ Discussion Paper ’, 7 January 1982.
66. Foucault, Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling, p. 248.
67. ‘ French Get Gay Paper ’, The Body Politic, 52 (May 1979), p. 16; ‘ Aesthetera ’, The
Body Politic (December 1979–January 1980), p. 33; and ‘ Journal to Face Morals
Charge ’, The Body Politic (June/July 1980), p. 19.
68. Foucault, Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling, p. 248.
69. Bébout, ‘ Gay Journalism – What For? ’
70. Bébout, ‘ Discussion Paper ’, 7 January 1982.
71. Alex Wilson, ‘ Body, State and Criminal ’, The Body Politic (December 1979/January
1980), pp. 30–1 (30).
149
Cultural History
72. Sky Gilbert, Ejaculations from the Charm Factory: A Memoir (Toronto: ECW Press,
2000), p. 125.
73. Hardy, Crisis of Desire, p. 154.
75. Bébout, ‘ Promiscuous Affections ’.
76. Carole S. Vance, ‘ Social Construction Theory: Problems in the History of Sexuality ’,
in Dennis Altman et al., Which Homosexuality? Essays from the International Scientific
Conference on Lesbian and Gay Studies (London: Gay Men’s Press, 1989), pp. 13–34.
78. ‘ Memo from Rick Bébout to Midmag Group re: Desire ’, 23 February 1984, Midmag
Group, Minutes of Editorial Meetings, 1984, Box 86-001/03, Records of The Body
Politic, CLGA.
79. Bébout, ‘ Promiscuous Affections ’, (October to December 1983).
80. Gayle Rubin to Ed Jackson, 27 October 1979, ‘ Our Image Correspondence, 1979 ’,
Box 83-010/09, Records of The Body Politic, CLGA.
81. Lorna Weir and Leo Casey, ‘ Subverting Power in Sexuality ’, Socialist Review 75–76
(May–August 1984), pp. 139–57.
82. Mariana Valverde, ‘ Feminism Meets Fist-fucking: Getting Lost in Lesbian S/M ’, The
Body Politic, 60 (February 1980), p. 43. See also Peg McCuaig, ‘ Power Trip or Fun
and Games: Lesbian S&M, Part 2 ’, The Body Politic, 61 (March 1980), p. 43.
83. Mariana Valverde, ‘ Confessions of a Lesbian Ex-masochist ’, The Body Politic, 56
(September 1979), p. 18.
84. Mariana Valverde, Sex, Power and Pleasure (Toronto: The Women’s Press, 1985),
pp. 16 and 24. Anna Marie Smith, ‘ I’m Okay, You’re Socially Constructed ’, The Body
Politic, 135 (February 1987), p. 35.
85. Ken Popert, ‘ Towards a Theory of Fistfucking ’, The Body Politic, 61 (March 1980),
p. 22.
86. ‘ Michel Foucault: An Interview – Sex, Power, and the Politics of Identity ’, pp. 27–8.
87. I found the original typescript of the interview in the archival records of the Socialist
Review. Folder 30, ‘ Foucault, Michel, 1981–1983 ’, Box 25, Socialist Review Records,
Special Collections Research Center, Temple University Libraries. In addition to
several exchanges between Foucault and Gallagher and Wilson that did not appear
in the published version, the typescript also contains a number of questions put to
Foucault by Mark Blasius which are omitted from the published version. Blasius was
visiting with Foucault when the interview took place and joined in but was not
part of the process when the interview was later transcribed and published.
Bob Gallagher, email message to author, 17 December 2015. After Foucault’s death,
Blasius assembled several samplers of Foucault’s writing for the gay press. See,
for example, Blasius, ‘ The Aesthetics of Existence: Listening to Michel Foucault ’,
New York Native, 30 July 1984, pp. 12–13.
88. Gallagher, interview.
89. David Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault (New York: Pantheon, 1993), p. 367.
90. Defert, ‘ Chronology ’, p. 77.
92. Letter from Socialist Review to Alex Wilson, n.d., Folder 30, ‘ Foucault, Michel,
1981–1983 ’, Box 25, Socialist Review Records.
93. Postcard from Alex Wilson to Socialist Review, 7 December 1983, Folder 30,
‘ Foucault, Michel, 1981–1983 ’, Box 25, Socialist Review Records; and Gallagher,
interview.
150
94. ‘ Michel Foucault: An Interview – Sex, Power, and the Politics of Identity ’,
pp. 26–30, 58.
95. James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993),
pp. 441, 262–3 and 280. Miller also makes a number of minor mistakes. He suggests
the interview, conducted by Gallagher and ‘ Andrew Wilson ’, was rejected as
‘ uninteresting ’ by the ‘ radical quarterly Social Review ’ when presumably he means
Alex Wilson and the Socialist Review (263). As the Socialist Review document cited
above makes clear, the journal’s rejection was, if short-sighted, based on something
more than it simply being ‘ uninteresting ’.
96. Gayle Rubin, ‘ The Leather Menace: Comments on Politics and S/M ’, The Body
Politic, 82 (April 1982), pp. 33–5; Angus MacKenzie, ‘ Lust with a Very Proper
Stranger ’, The Body Politic, 82 (April 1982), pp. 50–1; and Sue Golding, ‘ Coming to
Terms with Power ’, The Body Politic, 83 (May 1982), pp. 32–33.
98. ‘ Doing It! Lesbian/Gay Liberation in the ’80s: Festival, June 26–July 4;
the Conference, June 30–July 4, 1982 ’, conference programme, M1986-001,
CLGA. Foucault left Toronto after the festival and had to miss the conference,
which included one of the first international lesbian and gay history gatherings,
‘ Wilde ’82 ’.
100. Andy Fabo, email message to author, 23 March 2015. Fabo was working at and was
arrested in the Barracks when police raided the bathhouse in December 1978. The
verdict in the Barracks trial was rendered in June 1981. Fabo was found guilty of
being a keeper of a common bawdy house. Despite no longer being able to work at
the Barracks, Fabo frequently returned to the bathhouse in subsequent years as a
visitor. For a mini-documentary account of the 1978 raid, narrated by Fabo, see
‘ The Barracks: 1978 ’, Queerstory, www.queerstory.ca/project/the-barracks-1978/
(accessed 16 February 2016).
101. Gallagher confirms the Glad Day poppers story. Gallagher, email message to
author, 17 December 2015.
102. Gilbert, Ejaculations, pp. 104–5; and Gallagher, interview.
103. Original typescript, Folder 30, ‘ Foucault, Michel, 1981–1983 ’, Box 25, Socialist
Review Records.
104. ‘ Foucault: non aux compromis – entretien avec R. Surzur ’, Gai Pied, 43 (October
1982), reprinted as text 318 in Foucault, Dits et écrits, vol. 2: 1976–1988, Daniel
Defert and Francois Ewald (eds), with the collaboration of Jacques Lagrange
(Paris: Gallimard, 2001), pp. 1155–6. Unfortunately, David Macey takes Foucault
at his word and turns Foucault’s memory about Toronto into historical fact.
Macey, Lives of Michel Foucault, p. 449.
105. You Taste American, video, directed by John Greyson (Toronto: Vtape, 1986).
Greyson, email message to author, 3 July 2013. See Brenda Longfellow, Scott
MacKenzie and Thomas Waugh (eds), The Perils of Pedagogy: The Works of John
Greyson (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013).
106. Halperin, Saint Foucault, pp. 15–16 and 121. Nancy Stoller makes a similar claim in
‘ Foucault in the Streets: New York City Act(s) UP, ’ a chapter in her Lessons from the
Damned: Queers, Whores, and Junkies Respond to AIDS (New York: Routledge, 1998),
pp. 113–34.
107. Halperin writes that the ‘ very phrase “ social construction ” has come to seem a
hopelessly out-of-date formula in queer studies, and the mere invocation of it
151
Cultural History
makes a writer appear backward and unsophisticated ’. Halperin, How to Do the

History of Homosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), p. 11.
108. Simon Watney to Alan O’Connor, 10 April 1984, and Jeffrey Weeks to
Alan O’Connor, 5 October 1984, both in ‘ Midmag Group, Manuscripts and
Correspondence filed by author, 1984 (P–Z) ’, Box 86-002/02A, Records of The
Body Politic, CLGA. See Weeks, ‘ Michel Foucault: New Ground on the Sexual
Battlefield ’, The Advocate, 419 (30 April 1985), pp. 7–9.
109. Alan O’Connor, ‘ Michel Foucault: 1926–1984 ’, The Body Politic, 106 (September
1984), p. 39.
152

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‘The Party with God’: Michel Foucault,

the Gay Left and the Work of Theory

Toronto. 23 June 1982. Everything was pretty much ready.

Cultural History 5.2 (2016): 122–152

Not all the guests shared Lynch’s favourable impression of Foucault.

Foucault was an odd and unattractive man, short, completely bald,

Hardy, however, did have a similar appraisal of Defert: ‘His lover,

If Lynch picked up on Foucault’s boredom, he didn’t let on in his

first theoretician of everyday life to go significantly beyond Engels’

the defensive, forced to abandon broad visions of liberation in favour

rights decade’. The legalistic human rights approach had lulled

Knowledge is power: the lack of a pioneering, creative gay liberation

underscored, ‘the gay and lesbian movement as a whole will produce

a review of The History of Sexuality to Boston’s Gay Community News,

It’s a classic Foucauldian position (and, as we’ve already seen, Padgug

Something of that resentment registered, I think, in the refusal by

a popular journal, and what we do – particularly around theoretical

Bébout continued, ‘We should be thinky … That doesn’t mean we

Bébout may have imagined they were thinking beyond identity,

Foucault may have taught the activists about the pitfalls of

Salt in beer was a custom in blue-collar beer parlours. As Hardy

from Foucault’s book by feminists and gay liberationists is that

The first volume of The History of Sexuality explicitly suggests that

Golding in particular whipped her comrades into line. In February

As always, Bébout had his questions.

sexual libertarianism and those interested in developing a socialist-

but I must soon for I’ve agreed to do a presentation on the pornography

Interestingly, it was the socialist feminists more so than the sexual

seemed like a no-brainer to me, if he would consent … I recognized that

prepared to commit to publishing it intact’. It took a full year before

Here again were the familiar themes in the reception of Foucault by

Wilson tended to agree – ‘thanks for the comments on the Foucault

Very Proper Stranger ’, a how-to guide on fist-fucking; for their efforts,

Foucault’s thoughts on pleasure, transformation of pain and the role of

He went out a number of times. I can’t recall everywhere … He was not

Artist-activist Andy Fabo, a veteran of the city’s bathhouse raids,

Foucault’s first-hand experience of gay community and politics

This exchange also captures Foucault’s indignation over the sexual

Indeed, on behalf of queer activists, Halperin anoints Foucault

He came to Toronto in 1982 and was not the person we expected.

makes a writer appear backward and unsophisticated ’. Halperin, How to Do the

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