In 1970, Robin Morgan, one of the founders of New York Radical Women, wrote that women in the Gay Liberation Front had to “struggle continuously against the male chauvinism of their gay brothers.” Feminist groups had often had to step outside of the left to cultivate spaces without, or at least less shaped by, misogyny; the queer left was not proving exceptional. With the Gay Liberation Front and with other movements dominated by gay men, a familiar combination — offloaded work, stolen credit — was at play. The twentieth century offers instance after instance of a queer women’s group splintering from its respective gay rights movement, from France’s Gouines Rouges to New York City’s Lavender Menace and Lesbian Avengers. In the present century, the pattern has become so recognizable that lesbian and trans organizing often occurs separately from umbrella queer groups.
Occasionally, gay rights movements have attempted to speak out against the misogyny in their midst. Their gestures at allyship can be crooked: Take the Effeminists of the 1970s, an offshoot of the Gay Liberation Front whose embrace of feminism also included their own brand of proto-TERFism in their critique of transvestism. But not all anti-gay gay guys are alike. In 1973, the same year that the Effeminists were collaging feminism and transphobia in their Double-F magazine, a lone minet tried to take on the question of gay misogyny in his own manifesto. The result was The Screwball Asses, a punchy, twinky text that for years has borne the wrong author’s name on the cover — misattributed to a better-known gay guy who, ironically, is in the crosshairs for much of the book.
Structured as a series of mini-polemics, The Screwball Asses takes prickly aim at the gay men of the French left, whose theory-centric and phallocentric strain of activism drove many lesbians away and neutered the organization’s revolutionary potential. It appeared first in the “Three Billion Perverts” issue of Félix Guattari’s journal Recherches, which contains all the elements one would expect from a queer French rag of the time. The listed contributors include Genet, Foucault, and Sartre. Drawings of dicks adorn pages containing ruminations on Arabs, racist quips about Arabs, a women’s roundtable on seduction, and drag memoir. Toward the end of these pages lies the treatise, with no name attached to it.
Though composed of the same pulp and ink as the rest of the issue, the text of The Screwball Asses intends to rise above its glossy surroundings. The first fistful of paragraphs announces a clear subject — “homosexuality that considers itself revolutionary, that in turn loses sight of the revolution, or falls prey to its pure theory, and that I will call screwball homosexuality (for fun)” — and audience — “What follows is exclusively addressed to those individuals with whom I cannot make love.” If there is any doubt about who is practicing this screwball homosexuality, the author provides three different anecdotes of gay comrades he knew personally, including a blow-by-blow takedown of another article from the “Three Billion Perverts” issue. The first chapter ends on the fatalist note that screwball homosexuals are caught between acting out either “the comedy of the bourgeoisie or the comedy of the revolution.”
The addressees of The Screwball Asses were the members of the Front Homosexuel d’Action Révolutionnaire (FHAR). A family tree of FHAR would take the shape of Penrose stairs, a triangle of nodes that descend from and give life to, cannibalize, and spit out each other. The eye would first be drawn to the Mouvement de Libération des Femmes (MLF), a post-1968 collective of French women whose memorable “Manifesto of the 343,” penned by Simone de Beauvoir, called for legal abortions and free contraception. But in 1971, the more militant MLF partisans, along with lesbians discontented by the assimilationist strategy of the queer group Arcadie, coalesced into a new leg of the MLF starfish. They became FHAR.
FHAR formed as a response to the irreconcilability of France’s leftist and queer movements — the homophobia of France’s Communist Party (PCF) on one hand and Arcadie’s love of the closet on the other. While FHAR’s disruptions and garish newspapers had less impact than the strikes and mass protests of 1968, the organization offered at least a symbolic respite for those who didn’t want to choose between their sexual identities and political commitments. FHAR member Guy Hocquenghem, who was expelled from the PCF for his homosexuality, recalled FHAR meetings with fondness in an interview he gave the Nouvel Observateur. “Everyone told their life story, their dreams, their desires, with whom, how, and why they’d slept with the people they’d slept with,” he said. “Some of them had been to the States and had seen what had become the Gay Liberation Front there. They dreamed of doing something like it in France.”
Screwball homosexuals are caught between acting out either “the comedy of the bourgeoisie or the comedy of the revolution.”
FHAR’s position at the center of the queer-leftist Venn diagram could not hold for long. When he joined FHAR, Hocquenghem was simultaneously a member of Vive la Révolution, which published the newspaper Tout! Hocquenghem helped coordinate and edit a special queer issue of Tout! with contributions from FHAR members, which led to seized copies and raids by French police, as well as the indictment of the paper’s nominal editorial director, Jean-Paul Sartre. But this special issue had yet another inadvertent effect: a deluge of gay men into FHAR’s ranks. The dynamics of the group, which had been founded and mostly led by women, were suddenly distorted. “We [women] felt ourselves dispossessed of FHAR, of our speech, of our visibility, and perhaps above all, of our sexual liberation,” Marie-Jo Bonnet recounted of her time in the group. “The men wanted to choose between top and bottom roles, and we wanted to destroy them…We talked, and they didn’t listen anymore” (my translation).
“In France, it’s even clearer: the lead comes from women,” Hocquenghem wrote in a 1972 essay. “From the MLF, first: since its beginning, it set the stage for a new understanding of what we call the struggles.” Following the Tout! debacle, many women left FHAR to retread a familiar path back to the no-man’s-land of MLF. But they had splintered once and did not reattach themselves wholly, instead settling into MLF as part of a new group, the Gouines Rouges. Even self-awareness and recognition like Hocquenghem’s could not counter the sentiment that propelled so many women of FHAR to leave the group they had established. From MLF to FHAR and back to MLF as the Gouines Rouges — the trajectory of these women was representative of a latent misogyny in leftist and queer organizing spaces.
As well as a key figure in FHAR, Hocquenghem was a writer of screeds, proto-queer theory, at least two horny essays about motorcycles, and counterhistorical AIDS memoir/fiction; a precocious teen who read Genet and struck up an affair with his high school teacher, with whom he later cowrote two books; the thrower, self-allegedly, of the first brick at France’s Stonewall; a mostly armchair militant; a figure of elven beauty; and, up until recently, the purported author of The Screwball Asses.
The attribution of The Screwball Asses to Hocquenghem was not just wrong but, it turns out, quite screwy. According to his biographer Antoine Idier, Hocquenghem actually opposed the publication of The Screwball Asses, and the text only found its way into Recherches at the insistence of Guattari himself; many of the arguments made across the 12 chapters, Idier shows, are cloaked, pointed responses to passages from Hocquenghem’s seminal Homosexual Desire. If Hocquenghem thought that “to reinvest the anus collectively and libidinally would involve a proportional weakening of the great phallic signifier,” the author of The Screwball Asses made sure to write that “it isn’t so certain that the reinvestment of the anus will weaken the great phallic signifier.” This was not a dialectical exercise on Hocquenghem’s part. This was the embittered manifesto of another writer altogether, a salvo after silence, an inside job.
As Idier reveals by way of inner-circle figures like Anne Querrien and Élisabeth Salvaresi, The Screwball Asses was written by Christian Maurel, a FHAR member and writer whose work has, for the most part, disappeared from print. Semiotext(e)’s 2009 English publication of the text bore Hocquenghem’s name on the cover, and after years of posthumous misattribution, a 2025 reissue discharges the work into Maurel’s hands.
The Screwball Asses is, in part, a tour through FHAR’s brief history, which, by Maurel’s account, was clogged with cruiser-activists who came together for shadowy orgies and overly intellectual discussions about sexual liberation. Maurel’s definitions and descriptions of the men of FHAR are full of scorn. They “can be considered quasi-professionals in the liberation of homosexual desire” who “start talking to escape desire”; their orgies are like “banking transactions,” their conversation “a situation of prohibited desire, in the midst of what we might call militants of desire.”
“The men wanted to choose between top and bottom roles, and we wanted to destroy them.”
In addition to his invisibly inked digs at Homosexual Desire, Maurel uses The Screwball Asses to pan another piece of FHAR literature, an article called “Arabs and Us,” also published in the “Three Billion Perverts” issue of Recherches. Maurel points out the warped logic that the authors use to portray their sexual escapades as political acts, describing how the “Arab chaser queer” fantasizes Arab men into “a collection of dildos” — the article may be well-intended, he says, but “demands racism as a particular form of exogamy.” Still, at least the authors of “Arabs and Us” are honest about their gauche desires; better that than the “liars or actors, who play either the comedy of the bourgeoisie or the comedy of the revolution.” When Maurel gets into the pricky tale of FHAR’s infighting, he notes that “FHAR sank beneath the weight of the phallus,” and the phallic queers defined revolution as “thousands of tearooms and millions of gigolos reimbursed by social security.”
These are accusations from which Maurel does not exempt himself. His invectives seem like pointed arrows but are, more accurately, boomerangs: “Whom am I speaking to here? To all those who speak of revolution without doing it, that is to say, also to myself. My discourse is, of course, phallic, and even more so as it relies on clear and ancient grammar.” As much as he criticizes abstract theorizing, The Screwball Asses is a text given to contradictory, beyond-logic philosophy of the Deleuzian tradition. Some of the ideas are outdated, others bizarre — such as his mini-polemic about why gay guys and lesbians should make love — and still others thoughtful and prescient in, for instance, their questioning of gender. In one star-studded sequence of sentences that brings together all these traits, Maurel writes, “Oh! Wanting to be woman, to be fertile, to be cunt-ile, rather than feeling the capitalist desire to impregnate! I know I am ranting. Long live snails! What luck they have to be both male and female without ever copying the other gender.”
Placing desire under the microscope is not just a laboratorial experiment for Maurel. If desire is transmitted with an inbuilt coding of all the usual power dynamics, then disorientation of desire is the first step on the path to toppling what Maurel calls the phallocracy. Though that path may lack a concrete destination, for Maurel, “getting there is not what matters. What matters is getting closer. If certain groups continue to believe they are stronger than sexual institutions, if they continue to announce that and to be in fact stronger, they will tear those institutions apart in themselves.”
Not even one year into his second reign, Trump had sent a phalanx of executive orders, policies, and messaging to slash at the rights of queer and trans people. All tactics are put to use, from policing the bodies of youths to kneecapping funding and possibilities for gender-affirming care and HIV prevention. In this landscape, overlain with storm clouds the same two-tone color scheme as Scott Bessent’s hair, one catches glimpses of gay guys striving and slinking: Matt Bomer in a Harvey Milk shirt; Andrew Sullivan, a frontline gay marriage advocate-cum-conservative, croaking out TERF talking points in the New York Times; the Polari Prize paused because the longlist included a trans-exclusionist, John Boyne.
In Maurel’s writing, everyone is culpable, though perhaps some more than others. One article he wrote for Tout! distributes blame Oprah-style: “I am a petit bourgeois, you are a petit bourgeois, he is a petit bourgeois!” Masochism and self-flagellation didn’t bother him; he wrote another article about that for Libération. Reading or rereading Maurel isn’t the most practical affair, and certain chapters leave one with the hollow sensation of having consumed pure, screwball (for fun) theory. But his ability to enter nauseating undergrounds and take stock of himself and others — to observe, question, scoff, self-implicate, shrink — has been overlooked for too long. For gay men, who sit out of harm’s way relative to other queer and trans people, those faculties are not to be understated; they are key to solidarity and overcoming fracture.
Aditya Gandhi is a writer based in New York. His work has also appeared in Public Books.
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