But Is Paris Really Burning?*

... lost in Time, lost in Space and Meaning ...
... I’m going home ...

(The Rocky Horror Picture Show)

Many consider that since Freud's time not only the psychoanalytic conception of sexuality and of its role in mental life has changed (Mitchell, 1988) but also that sexuality itself is in the throes of rapid transformation in western metropolitan cultures (Giddens, 1992).

This transformation, which is often portrayed with some exaggeration as an epochmaking change, is in fact a contradictory phenomenon, which, while having distinct strata dating from different periods—in some cases quite out of phase with superficial changes in customs—has its foundations in the bedrock of ‘human nature’, which can be ‘deconstructed’ only up to a point: after all, a man will never be able to give birth or a woman to fecundate. However, change there is, and it gives rise to widespread turbulence.

This turbulence is perhaps encapsulated in the following extract from an analytic session with a young male patient, F, who always has at least two sexual relationships at a time, either with men and women or with men only. One relationship is of a ‘totalising’ nature, whereas the lateral ones offer a safety net to prevent him from being swallowed up.

I dreamt of the girls in my work team: I was putting my penis on the genitals of one of them, but then my previous partner [the main one] arrived in fury and caught me in the act. Maybe he helped me to tell the girls I was gay. I don't want to say it. Why should I? But am I gay?

The fact is that when I go with a man, I open his legs and I am with a woman. Likewise, if a man opens my legs, I feel like a woman. Perhaps we are actually all bisexual. But how can a woman manage to feel like a man? Maybe I should ask a lesbian. What a business. For