The notion of true love is central within Western culture. It's a concept founded upon the four values identified by Foucault as belonging to aletheia:
“True love is first, love which does not conceal ... because it has nothing to hide ... it is always willing to show itself in front of witnesses ... Second, true love is an unalloyed love ... in which sensual pleasure and the friendship of souls do not intermingle. Third, true love is love in line with what is right, with what is correct ... It has nothing contrary to the rule or custom. And finally, true love is love which is never subject to change or becoming. It is an incorruptible love which remains always the same.” [220-21]
You can find this ideal model of love developed in both Plato and what Nietzsche derided as Platonism for the people (Christianity). It’s a straight and straightforward form of love without subterfuge, disguise, or even curiosity; love that prides itself on its sincerity and its naturalness, rather than a sense of playfulness or sophistication. There’s simply nothing queer about it. It’s what normal, healthy, men and women share and upon which the sanctity of marriage is based.
Homosexuality, on the other hand, is, at its best - that is to say, at its most defiantly queer - the love that refuses to speak its name; the love that likes to stick to the shadows and hide in closets; the love that finds pride in its perverse, plural, and promiscuous character; an ironic, gender-bending, form of love that delights in artifice and in camp; a love that doesn’t conform to the heteronormative rule, or give a fig either about the judgement of God or what Nature dictates.
One might describe this queer radical style of homosexuality, as separatist. It certainly doesn’t want to fit into straight society and doesn’t keep banging on about equal rights; doesn’t long for a lifestyle involving monogamous marriage and the prospect of breeding. It isn't even particularly gay ...
In fact, we might best characterize it as Cynical in the ancient philosophical sense. That is to say, a type of practice which has a very militant idea of what constitutes the truth (of love and of life) and which has been “stamped by a scandal which has constantly accompanied it, a disapproval which surrounds it, a mixture of mockery, repulsion, and apprehension in reaction to its presence and manifestations” [231].
If Cynicism was the disgrace of ancient philosophy, then queer-cynical homosexuality is the travesty of true love; holding up a funfair mirror before Eros so that the latter can recognise himself, whilst, crucially, at the same time see himself outrageously distorted and made multiple.
See: Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth, ed. Frédéric Gros, trans. Graham Burchell, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). Page numbers given refer to this paperback edition.
