From Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (1978; English translation, 1987); Book III, Chapter 3, “Mimesis and Sexuality” (Pages 337 – 338)
“If we recognize that the sexual appetite can be affected by the interplay of mimetic interferences, we have no reason to stop at ‘sadism’ and ‘masochism’ in our critique of false psychiatric labels. Let us grant that the subject can no longer obtain sexual satisfaction without involving the violence of the model or a simulation of that violence – and that the instinctual structures we have inherited from the animals, in the sexual domain, can allow themselves to be inflected by the mimetic game. We then have to ask ourselves [whether] these cases of interference are not likely to have a still more decisive effect and give rise to at least some of the forms of homosexuality.
“We have already come a large part of the way. In effect, we have already talked about homosexuality, at least indirectly since the [model-rival], in the sexual domain, is an individual of the same sex, for the very reason that the object is heterosexual. All sexual rivalry is thus homosexual. What we call homosexuality is, in this case, the total subordination of the sexual appetite to the effects of a mimetic game that concentrates the subject’s powers of attention or absorption upon the individual who is responsible for the double bind – the model as rival, the rival as model.
“To make this genesis even more apparent, we must mention a curious fact that has been noticed by the ethologists. It happens that, among certain types of monkey, a male who recognizes himself to have been beaten by a rival and so renounces the female disputed between them, puts himself in a position (so we are told) of ‘homosexual availability’ towards his victor. This is a gesture of submission, of course, but, in the context of a mimetism that intensifies in the transition from animal to man it seems to mean something more. It does suggest to me the genesis I have just put forward. If there is no ‘genuine’ homosexuality among animals, that is because, with them, mimetism is not intense enough to have a lasting effect on the sexual appetite of the defeated rival. Yet it is already sufficiently intense, when the mimetic rivalries reach paroxysm, to produce something like an adumbration to this effect.
“If I am right, we ought to be able to find, in forms of ritual, the missing link between the vague sketch given by the animal world and homosexuality in the proper sense of the term. In fact, ritualized homosexuality is a fairly frequent phenomenon. It takes place in the paroxysm of the mimetic crisis and can be found in cultures that apparently allot no place to homosexuality outside the context of these religious rites. A comparison between the animal phenomenon, ritualized homosexuality and modern homosexuality cannot fail to signal that mimetism brings in the sexuality and not the other way around!
“Ritualized homosexuality must be compared with a certain form of ritualized cannibalism practised in various cultures where (as with homosexuality) cannibalism does not exist at ordinary times. In both cases, so it seems to me, the instinctual appetite, whether it be for food or sex, becomes fixated on the person or persons who are quarreling. As always, desire tends to be inflected toward the mimetic model. In cannibalism, the rivalry must originally be over food. Within the alimentary context, the growing obsession that the model creates can be translated into an irresistible tendency to see him as something good to eat. Within the sexual context, the same obsession can be translated into an irresistible tendency to see him as a possible object for sexual intercourse.”
“Homosexuality corresponds to an ‘advanced’ stage of mimetic desire, but this stage can also correspond to a form of heterosexuality in which the partners play the roles of model and rival, as well as that of object, for one another. The metamorphosis of the heterosexual object into a rival brings about effects very similar to the metamorphosis of the rival into an object. This is the parallelism that Proust recognizes when he states that you can transcribe a homosexual experience into heterosexual terms without in any way betraying the truth of one desire or the other. Quite clearly, Proust is more correct than those people who for reasons of attraction or repulsion wish to make homosexuality into a kind of essence, and thereby fetishize it.”