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Oh, there are plenty of people … who never misbehave save when passion spurs them to ill; later, the fire gone out of them, their now calm spirit peacefully returns to the path of virtue and, thus passing their life going from strife to error and from error to remorse, they end their days in such a way there is no telling just what roles they have enacted on earth. Such persons … must surely be miserable: forever drifting, continually undecided, their entire life is spent detesting in the morning what they did in the evening before. Certain to repent of the pleasures they taste, they take their delight in quaking, in such sort they become at once virtuous in crime and criminal in virtue. (Sade 1966, 198)
Nothing must be as holy as pleasure. (Sade 1965, 204)
It's good to be charitable. But with whom? That's the point. (Lacan 1989, 66)
How can psychoanalysis engage with the controversy now surrounding gay and lesbian desire? Given the Christian Right's hatred of this desire, it is time to advance a psychoanalytic account of aversion: The present “war” against gay and lesbian desire engages complex psychic issues, though it is not entirely reducible to them.
Considering its contemporary importance, aversion has not received the sustained theoretical attention it deserves. Like the concept of sublimation, aversion is generally noted as an after effect in ways that gloss its psychic importance and constituents. In different ways, Freud and Klein represented aversion as one aspect in a constellation of related affects— including anxiety and hatred—or such mechanisms as defense-formation and conversion-hysteria, to which I will claim it is