“Je n’aime pas les femmes”. The critique of love arises, as it so often has, from within a homosexual milieu. A scene in the television adaptation of his memoir The Naked Civil Servant shows a young Quentin Crisp answering an enquiry by one of his mother’s friends as to whether he is “one of those”; that is, “one of those who don’t love women”. His baffled, ingenuous response, beautifully voiced by John Hurt: “I don’t think anybody really does”.

For Crisp the question of whether anybody really loves women is linked to the question of his own lovability: as the “effeminate” homosexual forever awaiting an ultra-masculine “great dark man”, he remains convinced that no such person could ever find him desirable. Effeminacy, identification with the feminine, is a curse: true love is essentially virile, and seeks a virile object (a “real” women is a woman authenticated against a virile standard, whereas the effeminate male is irreparably non-conformant in his femininity). But the desire for virility, for a virile lover who only loves that which is virile (or intelligible from a virile point of view), nevertheless issues from an “effeminate” position. Something here has got to give.

Crisp expresses the impossibility (under this schema) of sexual fulfilment in a simple formula, a thundering negation: “There. Is. No. Great. Dark. Man”. He means, in the first instance, that there is no “great dark man” for him: he knows that his desire will never be reciprocated. Hence his conviction that “effeminate” homosexuality is a tragic, accursed way of being (albeit with some potential for saintliness, since desire that has no hope of fulfilment can more easily be rescinded in favour of unselfish good works). But the statement has a much stronger import if it is understood as a global existential negation: the great dark man does not (and cannot) exist anywhere, for anyone. Virility as imagined from an “effeminate” position, as the filling-out of all of the attributes that the effeminate homosexual is supposed to lack, is an impossible chimera and can be recognised as such.

Nobody really loves women, because there is no way for anybody to occupy the impossible position of “virile lover of women” for which the fantasy of the “great dark man” is a kind of advertisement. And yet it’s plain that all kinds of people, men and women, love each other in all kinds of ways, including the kind of saintly consideration for others that Hurt’s portrayal of Crisp himself personifies. I would like to propose Crisp’s declaration, “there is no great dark man” as an axiom forbidding the idealisation of virility, or the universalisation of a virile standard. One must try to know what it is to “really” love somebody without reference to a universal sexual norm; and this in turn requires a conception of the real of love that is intrinsic to its own procedure.