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It is a pleasure to have the opportunity to respond to Paton’s paper. He succinctly addresses what growing up queer might entail for young people, articulating how experiences of homophobia and the encompassing pressures of heteronormativity impact psychic life for adolescent queer or proto-queer children, as well as how psychoanalysis has a particular relation to the pathologisation of queer life and the perpetuation of homophobia. While I appreciate his project of drawing attention to the internal and external difficulties queer people face, with the paper functioning as a corrective to the history of publications on LGBTQ+ people in our profession, there are a number of things I wish to respond to in order to offer another perspective.
Firstly, I will consider how the absence of thought about the possibilities being queer might afford is limiting and reductive, or to put it another way: if being queer results in such a catalogue of traumatic experiences, why has it so tenaciously persisted despite the many societal, legal, cultural and social efforts to prevent this from happening? Which is to say, is there something important to say about the power and creativity of queer desire and pleasure?
Secondly, I critique the way Paton theorises anal sex by relating it to a psychoanalytic prototype of sex that is heterosexual, penetrative and creative. I will suggest other ways of imagining queer sexual experiences.
Thirdly, I will briefly think about his decision to separate out sexuality and gender identity, and the ramifications this might have for thinking about sexual identity.
Paton powerfully delineates the difficulty of growing up queer, however I am interested in whether there might be a way of thinking not only about the vicissitudes of growing up LGBTQ+ but also the pleasures and discoveries it might afford. Important questions might be: what can be engendered by the intersections of identity, the body, and the fundamental relationality of desire? What mig