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Ever since the discipline’s inception, queer theory has been preoccupied with the notion of queer as a verb. To queer, as in to disrupt or subvert the norms of society. This is an act of creativity and imagination, pushing beyond the limits of prescriptive practices. 

Michel Foucault, one of the most influential scholars of the 20th century, has a lot to say about the inner workings of power. Much of his scholarship explores the relationship between power, knowledge, and control. For queer theorists, his most foundational work is 1976’s The History of Sexuality, in which he lays out a new theory of how sexuality was folded into the mechanisms of power. 

The book can be difficult to decipher for the uninitiated, and it’s not the bulk of what we’ll be focusing on today, but a brief summary will be advantageous. In The History of Sexuality, Foucault argues against the Repressive Hypothesis, ie. the idea that sexuality was primarily repressed during the Victorian era. If the hypothesis were true, the answer to such a problem would be to talk about sexuality ad nauseam as a sort of liberatory practice. Instead, Foucault suggests that there was actually a proliferation of discourse about sexuality during this period, and that this discourse – assembled through an incitement to confess – allowed those in power to control their subjects with scientific knowledge. Within this system, sexuality and sexual discourse are no longer synonymous with liberation.

By labeling every form of sexuality – including, of course, homosexuality – powerful institutions were able to exert their control over them. To escape from this trap, Foucault proposes a turn toward "a different economy of bodies and pleasures,” one that cannot be defined by the knowledge and truth-based system of scientia sexualis (the science of sexuality).

There’s much to unpack here, and countless scholars have worked to expand the theories Foucault proposed in this book. But there’s one Foucault text that’s useful as much for its brevity as it is for how it answers some of these questions. In 1981, a French gay magazine called Gai Pied published an interview with the great scholar that explores a heretofore under-theorized subject: friendship. Titled “Friendship as a Way of Life,” the interview sees Foucault expounding on the possibilities of friendship as a transgressive relational form – a potential solution to the problem of discursive power explored in The History of Sexuality. 

Foucault describes homosexuality not as a predefined state of being, but as a jumping-off point for new ones. In his words: “Instead of asking “Who Am I” and “What is the secret of my desire” – “Perhaps it would be better to to ask oneself, “What relations, through homosexuality, can be established, invented, multiplied, and modulated?” The problem is not to discover in oneself the truth of one’s sex, but rather, to use one’s sexuality henceforth to arrive at a multiplicity of relationships.”

Foucault argues that it’s not gay sexual practices that scare people, “But that individuals are beginning to love another – there’s the problem.” The knowledge gleaned from sexual confession has allowed Power (the state, corporations, etc.) to define and constrict the boundaries of personal relationships. “To be “gay,” I think, is not to identify with the psychological traits and the visible masks of the homosexual but to try to define and develop a way of life,” Foucault says. This way of life includes relations that are outside the normative architecture of marriage and sex, a kind of invention that explores pleasure in all its boundless and undefined forms. 

“Homosexuality is a historic occasion to reopen affective and relational virtualities: not so much through the intrinsic qualities of the homosexual but because the “slantwise” position of the latter, as it were, the diagonal lines he can lay out in the social fabric allow these virtualities to come to light,” Foucault explains. Being gay in the world is an uneasy situation, but this “slantwise” position, as Foucault puts it, provides an opportunity for creation. He imagines this as sort of a spiritual practice – “homosexual ascesis,” he calls it – that requires one to invent the self. 

Notably, Foucault describes the profundity of this project as it relates to men, who have not been allowed to enjoy intimacy with one another despite the pervasiveness of homosocial environments – like the military, or sporting teams. Women, he says, have been permitted to enjoy such closeness, though what this also means is that instances of lesbian intimacy go unrecorded. Though the ‘lesbian issue’ here is mostly an afterthought, this theory of friendship can certainly be taken up by queers of all genders. 

Foucault’s interview was published the same year as the CDC’s first announcement about the discovery of AIDS, the disease that took his life just three years later. Queer art historian Ksenia M. Soboleva seizes on this connection, writing that “The AIDS crisis gave rise to an unprecedented multiplicity of queer relationships, broader and more complex than those that formed around the gay liberation movement of the 1960s.” The types of relationships formed during the AIDS crisis exemplified Foucault’s vision of a new way of life, even as they formed around an unprecedented wave of death. 

In his book Friendship as a Way of Life, which takes its title from Foucault’s interview, Tom Roach defines friendship as “shared estrangement.” It is “a communal invention [...] dead set against the privatization of its constituent excess.” Friendship is a shared estrangement because it is not aligned with the forces of power or the institutions that define social relations – it’s “a formless relation without telos.” Friendship is not possessive, unlike the institution of marriage, which privatizes relationships. Nor is it aligned with capitalism, which has a vested interest in these relational forms and influences the structure (and ideology) of the nuclear family. 

Of course, there is danger in this shared estrangement, as it is, by definition, a precarious arrangement. Roach writes of Hervé Guibert, who betrayed his friend Foucault after his death by revealing his AIDS diagnosis to the world. In his 1997 book The Politics of Friendship, deconstructive theorist Jacques Derrida declares: “No friend without the possibility of wound.” In Precarious Life, which explores war and mourning, Judith Butler reminds us: “Let’s face it. We’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something.”

Despite their directive to control, there is a sense of safety within these institutions of power that prescribe ways of being. Friendships are a set of relations without any institutional safety nets, but that is precisely what makes them subversive and powerful, especially today. In his piece about Derrida in The New Yorker, Hua Hsu writes, “In an era of social media and fluid, proliferating channels of communication and exchange, the idea of friendship seems almost quaint, and possibly imperiled. In the face of abundant, tenuous connections, the instinct to sort people according to a more rigid logic than that of mere friendship seems greater than ever.”

Transposing Foucault’s premise to the modern era, to be queer is to invest in the pleasure of friendship, trusting not in the stories we’ve always been told but in our ability to create new ones.