I wish that were what Adorno had intended and managed to say, but I'm afraid that's not the case.
>Considering that Adorno was Thomas Mann's collaborator or at least
>acquaintance during the writing of Dr. Faustus, and Mann was not in the
>least homophobic--since many of his works are at some level an
>exploration of homosexuality--it is a little hard to believe Adorno
>was an outright queer bashing asshole--even at a theoretical level.
No, I don't think the Adorno passage in question would sound crudely gay-bashing to most readers (even now), and that's perhaps the problem (Adorno wasn't Reich, after all). The same can be said about, for instance, Mann's _Death in Venice_. It is not crude, it is in fact 'beautiful,' it is 'well written.' Do you ever notice, for instance, that post-psychoanalytic, pre-Stonewall homosexuality & homoeroticism were often coded as leading to death or degradation within cultural representations, even when written by homosexuals themselves (e.g. Tennessee Williams, _Suddenly Last Summer_)? Unless they were represented by Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, etc. or sissies in comedies, that is (for more on this, read Vito Russo). That's not to say that death and degradation necessarily had a simply repressive effect; as Foucault said, repression was productive, and some gay artists such as Genet transfigured 'degradation' into a sublime tool of literary seduction, besides the fact that representations of death, when coded as 'tragic,' can motivate us to act in service of liberation. Still and all, this -- sometimes crudely put, sometimes subtly & 'beautifully' expressed -- association of deviant sexuality with death and degradation was a problem, which we only got over after Stonewall (though it sadly re-emerged with AIDS -- but we have become at least better prepared to fight back).
Another problematic association that has often accompanied representations of homosexuality is, of all things, fascism and violence in general, even in many 'left-wing' cultural products (probably due to the continuing popularity of indictments of the ruling class as 'sexually decadent'). Have you seen Luchino Visconti's _The Damned_ (1969), for instance? (And remember that Visconti was an anti-fascist gay man). On this issue of the cultural association of Nazis and homosexuals (and the problem of 'psychosocial explanations' of fascism), read, for instance, Joan Mellen's "Fascism in the Contemporary Film," _Film Quarterly_ 24 (1971), pp. 2-19; and Linda Mizejewski's _Divine Decadence: Fascism, Female Spectacle, and the Making of Sally Bowles_, esp. Chapter 1.
Now, back to Adorno. Let me quote another statement from the same section of _Minima Moralia_:
***** He-men are thus, in their own constitution, what film-plots usually present them to be, masochists. At the root of their sadism is a lie, and only as liars do they truly become sadists, agents of repression. This lie, however, is nothing other than repressed homosexuality presenting itself as the only approved form of heterosexuality. In the end the tough guys are the truly effeminate ones.... (46) *****
Adorno's writing, alas, does not express what we wish to find there. As I mentioned earlier, that is in part because he did not possess the analytical distinciton between homosexuality and ('repressed eros' in) homosociality. If one cannot resist employing a left-Hegelian, psychoanalytic approach to questions of 'sexuality,' this is the conceptual distinction that _cannot_ be neglected without sounding homophobic even in a condemnation of 'he-men.'
For this reason, I renew my recommendation of Eve Sedgwick's _Epistemology of the Closet_. If you and other listers do not have the time to read the entire book (which is, alas, not elegantly written), I suggest that you at least take a look at pp. 36-7 and pp. 154-5. There, Sedgwick is gently criticizing not Adorno but certain feminist criticisms of patriarchy that do not make a (politically and analytically) clear distinction between homosexuality and homosociality; the same lack operates in _Minima Moralia_, as you will see.
***** The axis of sexuality, in this view [expressed by certain modes of feminist analysis], was not only exactly coextensive with the axis of gender but expressive of its most heightened essence: "Feminism is the theory, lesbianism is the practice." By analogy, male homosexuality could be, and often was, seen as the practice for which male supremacy was the theory.*
This [= becoming caught up in a momentum of essentially scapegoating attribution in the discourse on 'sentimentality,' be it 'sentimental' or 'anti-sentimental'] would be congruent with a certain difficult-to-avoid trajectory of universalizing understandings of homo/heterosexual definition -- Irigaray's writing about the "hom(m)osexual" is the locus classicus of this trajectory, although feminist thought has no monopoly on it -- according to which authoritarian regimes or homophobic masculinist culture may be damned on the grounds of being _even more homosexual_ than gay male culture.** And each of these trajectories of argument leads straight to terrible commonplaces about fascism....Why should it be so hard to think about these issues without following an argumentative path that must lead to the exposure of a supposed fascist precursor as the _true_ homosexual...?
* See, among others, Marilyn Frye, _The Politics of Reality: Essays in Feminist Theory_ (Trumansburg, NY: The Crossing Press, 1983), and Luce Irigaray, _This Sex Which Is Not One_, trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), pp. 170-91.
** Craig Owens discusses this argument in "Outlaws: Gay Men in Feminism," in Alice Jardine and Paul Smith, eds., _Men in Feminism_ (NY: Methuen, 1987), pp. 219-32. *****
This will have to be my last post today, so I hope to respond to John Mage's wonderful post tomorrow. Meanwhile, I thank everyone for compelling me to state my questions more precisely.
Yoshie