Assimilation and Its Discontents

I've been dithering around writing about gay people and assimilation for years. People are still talking about it, and every year or so I get a request from a student journalist to ask if any Speakers Bureau volunteers are willing to talk about the assimilation question. I think my position has more or less stabilized (though you never know), so here goes.

I think GLBT assimiliation is a non-issue -- I'm not sure the idea even makes sense. First, we are born assimilated into straight society: our parents and families are overwhelmingly heterosexual. There's no analogy between our situation and that of people who come into a new culture from another one, speaking another language, having other customs, used to other political systems. (Even this ethnic model of assimilation has been questioned, though in many respects it seems a moot point: most immigrants' children and virtually all of their grandchildren learn English and acculturate. This article, for example, mentions a study which found that "after four years of American high school the children of Mexican and Filipino immigrants were fifty percent more likely to self‑identify themselves as Mexicans and Filipinos than as Mexican‑Americans, Filipino‑Americans, or unhyphenated Americans." It's not clear what the "decrease" was measured against historically, compared to previous generations of Irish or Germans or Italians, and I wonder what effect anti-immigrant sentiment and propaganda had on the self-perception of the kids in the study. But anyway...) If queers want to refuse assimilation, we have to secede, though often enough we're expelled. Still, I'm not sure how well either withdrawal or expulsion fits with the notion of assimilation or its rejection.

Nor am I sure what constitutes assimilation. Many of us take for granted that same-sex marriage is assimilationist, and I agree that the motives of many if not of its advocates are precisely to blend into mainstream society. But will they succeed? How well do same-sex couples blend in? I'm not the only person who's noticed that same-sex and especially same-gender couples undermine the gendered, separate-spheres structure of "traditional" marriage. That is certainly among the reasons why religious bigots oppose it: they want marriage to be hierarchical, with one person in charge and the other subordinate. Heterosexual marriage was already becoming homosexualized in this sense before the same-sex marriage movement got into gear; the controversy lies in whether or not you consider that a good thing.

On the other hand, I've also noticed that many straight male liberals who are vocal in supporting same-sex marriage and an end to Don't Ask Don't Tell are still homophobic, often intensely so. They reflexively fall back on homophobic imagery to describe conflict and unfairness -- bending over, having something rammed down their throats, castration and the lack of "balls", and so on -- and fag jokes are still part of their repertoire. Assimilation is never as easy as the assimilees think it will be, and resistance runs deep. German Jewry was Europe's most assimilated, and they were very proud of the extent to which they'd Germanized themselves, right down to assimilating hatred of "stereotypical" Jews. In the end their assimilation was used against them, just as gay invisibility has been used against us (we're a fifth column, trying to undermine society, pretending to be normal when we're not, etc.)

Sure, the craving of so many Homo-Americans to be recognized as a regular, normal part of our glorious country makes me gag. Which isn't to say it doesn't make a kind of sense, since as I just said, we are born and grow up as part of American culture. It's not surprising (to me, anyway), that many people would react to attempts to expel them by refusing to be expelled, to insist that they do so belong. And who's to say they don't? As I've said before, my own experience has been that being openly gay enabled me to mix (not to assimilate) among straights, while gay community / culture seemed to me like a product of the closet.

I just finished reading Smash the Church, Smash the State!: The Early Years of Gay Liberation (City Lights Books, 2009), edited by longtime activist Tommi Avicolli Mecca. It's mostly a collection of short memoirs by people who were involved in the radical gay movement that exploded in 1969 and petered out sometime in the mid-1970s, with some contemporary documents, some of them published in full for the first time. For those of us who lived through that period and were inspired by that movement, the book is an important jog to the memory; for those who were born long afterwards, it will be probably be something of a revelation. The writers don't minimize the downside of those years -- the government repression from outside, the ego trips and burnout that sent Gay Liberation into a downward spiral, though it never quite died out. Gay Liberation still should be an inspiration, simply because it asked deep questions and proposed radical answers and tried to live them. This was true not only of Gay Liberation but of other movements for social justice and radical change that flourished in the 1960s and were crushed in little over a decade, and that are commonly derogated now as utopian foolishness by a society that was nevertheless affected by them. People who didn't grow up in the 1950s and 1960s can't feel in their bones how much things changed. If those movements didn't directly cause the change, at least they were the vehicles, the channels through which the change flowed.

One thing that struck me as I read Smash the Church, Smash the State! was how many of the writers, men and women alike, have become therapists. That looks like assimilation to me. Given the historical role of psychotherapy as an enforcer of conformity (and worse -- remember the major role therapists and counselors played in the Satanic Ritual Abuse witch hunt of the 1990s), I find this fact disquieting. Did we take over the profession, or did it co-opt us? I think it's more the latter. So I had probably my most mixed feelings about Don Kilhefner's contribution, "The Gay Community in Crisis." Kilhefner was involved in GLF, helped found what is now called the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center (later to be taken over by professional diversity managers -- see Jane Ward's Respectably Queer: Diversity Culture in GLBT Activist Organizations [Vanderbilt, 2008]) , and was a co-founder of the Radical Faeries. He's now "a Jungian psychologist and shamanic practitioner" in Los Angeles.

I agree with a lot of Kilhefner's diagnosis of the current gay malaise, though I think it applies no less to other minorities. He writes (275), "It saddens me tremendously today when energized young gay men want to know where they can go to become actively and constructively involved in the community. For the first time since the 1980s I have no place toward which to point them. It tears me apart when intelligent young gay men tell me they have to 'dumb it down' to be part of the gay community. I have a hunch this is true in your community as well." But then I remember having to struggle against dumbing-down in the early 1970s too. There was great resistance to gay politics of any kind among most gay men I met in those days. It wasn't just heterosexuals who laughed at the idea of homosexuals organizing, making demands, changing the way we saw ourselves and expecting straights to do the same. I had unrealistic expectations of the thoughtfulness of other gay men when I first came out, and remember that I did so in a college town.

Of the genesis of Faery, Kilhefner writes (273),

I had gathered together all the gay visionary literature I could get my faggoty hands on, beginning with Walt Whitman and including Edward Carpenter, Gerald Heard (writing under the pseudonym D. B. Vest in homophile publications), Harry Hay et al.; culled the evolutionary biology and sociobiology literature about us at the time; and also rounded up the other usual suspects.

The reference to "evolutionary biology and sociobiology" put me on the alert. I remember seeing Harry Hay refer to sociobiology in interviews during the 1980s, and I'd wonder what he could be thinking. In the 1970s some sociobiologists were suggesting that (male) homosexuality could be explained in terms of "kin selection" -- that our cultural contributions in emergent human societies balanced our nonreproductive tendencies. When I first encountered this speculation (which was all it was), I thought it was plausible until I began reading the critiques of sociobiology that began appearing at around the same time. I also wondered what counted as "homosexuals" in this scheme, since most gay men and lesbians are capable of reproduction; the assumption (which is all it is) that we are somehow totally uninvolved in making or raising children is false. This theory is also at odds with the rejection of assimilation, since it assumes that homosexuals have always played an important role in their societies, rather than being outsiders with a society of our own.

But Kilhefner takes sociobiology very seriously (275f):

Evolutionary biologists inform us that the basic function of heterosexuals is the reproductive survival of the species. The most essential question for us at present is: What is the evolutionary function of gay people? What are gay people for? To mimic heterosexuals? I don’t think so. Otherwise, evolutionarily speaking, we would have gone down the drainpipe of history long ago.

This assumes, first, that gay people are biologically distinct from heterosexuals, which we aren't. If we were, we would indeed "have gone down the drainpipe of history"; the sociobiological fables were concocted to explain in Darwinian terms how a non-reproducing adaptation could have arisen in the first place. Second, it assumes that you have to have an "evolutionary function," and you have to know what it is, and if you know what it is you have to conform to it because it gives your life meaning. Or something. I certainly don't see why it's an "essential question," let alone the most essential "at present" -- if it matters, it always did, though it could hardly have arisen before Darwin. (Two centuries ago, I suppose a Don Kilhefner would have been saying that the most essential question before Mollies, Sodomites and Sapphists was to know our role in God's plan; the two ideas are functionally equivalent, and equally unimportant.)

Assimilationists will say we are basically just like heterosexuals except for our choice of sex partners. (Harry [Hay] would say to me: “We’re just like hets when it comes to sex, and in most other ways we are different.”) Assimilationists act as if we already have an identity (homosexual), and with cybersex and hookups who needs a community or even an intellectual life?

Harry Hay's quip has often been quoted, and while it's a cute, Wilde-wannabe paradox, I don't agree, or even get his point. What are those "most other ways" we're different? (I'd rather point out that the assimilationists' claim contradicts their rage at those who'd reduce gayness to mere -- you know -- sex.) I think that, given sexism and male supremacy, the sex of one's sexual partner has some serious consequences; it's not exactly trivial. But most of all, I reject the idea that there are heterosexuals, who are all pretty much alike, and then there are homosexuals, who are all pretty much alike. I've never wanted to assimilate to gay men's culture, any more than I wanted to sit around with a bunch of guys chugging brewskies, slobbering over the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit issue, or screaming at a big-screen TV on Superbowl Sunday.

One thing that bothered me about Michael Warner's The Trouble with Normal (The Free Press, 1999), which I mostly liked, was Warner's apparent acceptance of 'mainstream' society's self-presentation at face value: if respectable men pretended to be monogamous family guys who'd never think of sneaking off to a strip club or an adult bookstore, let alone a gay cruising area, then that was what they were. The underside of the "normal" is part of society, and can't be separated from it. Similarly, as I've suggested before, "assimilationist" gay people will most likely end up being as hypocritical as their straight counterparts, because hypocrisy is part of respectability.

It doesn't seem to me that gay enspiritment, as Kilhefner calls it, offers much of an intellectual life, which is one reason why I've always given it a wide berth. Especially the Jungians, who are especially pernicious. (Kilhefner also refers in his essay to "father hunger", which indicates his ties to the Mythopoetic Men's Movement, another hotbed of creepy pseudospirituality and anti-intellectualism.) A lot of very fine books have come from GLBTQ scholars, but the most resounding turkeys -- Judy Grahn's Another Mother Tongue, Jamake Highwater's The Mythology of Transgression, Mark Thompson's Gay Body, Arthur Evans's Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture, Mab Segrest's Born to Belonging come to mind off the top of my head -- all come from the therapeutic/spiritual, and especially Jungian wing of the community. (Well, them and the New Agers, but then the latter are part of the therapeutic/spiritual wing anyway.)

Which doesn't mean I'm complacent about gay politics and community today, as anyone who reads this blog should know. But I think that pursuing "enspiritment" and the culture of therapy has been the road too many of us have taken to become lost in the wilderness.

What Is "Community"?

I just got out of an interesting gay chat room discussion, which is something of an event in itself. The availability of cheap Internet access that doesn’t tie up your phone line makes it possible for many gay men to log in to a chat site, then leave the program running in the background while they work on other things, hoping that Ryan Philippe or Hugh Jackman will send them a private message. In chat rooms where, a few years ago, something like actual conversation sometimes could be found, there is now mainly the drone of log-in announcements:

hotstudt6969 has entered.
hotstud6969 has exited.
stuffmewithUrbig1 has entered: masc/musc only, stay away creeps!
hotstud6969 has entered.

And so on. As a relative newcomer to these things, compared to men who used IRC and America Online in the 1980s, I can only describe changes I’ve observed since 1998 or so. But it does seem to me that there’s been a decline in main-room conversation, as opposed to “private” conversations primarily consisting of sex talk or arranging personal encounters. There has always been a certain amount of social pressure against main-room chat, which for various reasons won out over time. Which doesn’t mean that main-room conversation doesn’t still sometimes happen, and I’m pleased when I find it.

Tonight’s discussion, which was already in progress when I logged in to my local room, was about a popular topic: “community,” and specifically whether there is a gay “community” in our mid-sized college town. My first question was how the others were using the word “community.” Many people think of “community” as requiring a high degree of homogeneity and lockstep consensus, with little internal conflict – a definition that would rule out the existence of communities of any kind.

One of the chatters, a graduate student, insisted on “physical community,” ruling out “virtual” communities. He saw the Internet as having damaged, if not destroyed, “physical” gay communities, by which he apparently mainly meant bars. It is true that two local gay bars have closed in the past year, but we still have two remaining. Both the graduate student and another participant, both of them in their mid-30s, seemed to think that there had been gay communities before, but now that guys could interact online, they had no interest in meeting real people face to face.

This was funny to someone like me, who remembers the Gay Liberation movement's hostility to bar culture; gay bars have been under attack by various gay community members ever since, for various reasons, but bars remain important “community” institutions for better or worse. I welcomed chat rooms for the opportunity they sometimes gave, to have conversations that weren’t drowned out by loud dance music, without cigarette smoke that clung to clothing the next day, and no need to buy drinks (alcoholic or otherwise). For many men, I realize, those were positive factors: the loud music meant that they didn’t have to converse beyond “Do you come here often?” and “Do you have a place to go?” The alcohol made it easier to pretend that they weren’t in a room full of homosexuals, and that if they did go home with someone to commit deviant acts, it was the booze that did it, not them.

The graduate student insisted that if you didn’t have more than two people present, there was no “physical community.” (Would an orgy count, I wonder?) He was careful to make it clear that he didn’t blame the Internet (apparently because it’s not a person), but he didn’t like my suggestion that the Internet had supplied what many gay men had always wanted – the ability to find sexual partners without having to be in a physical space with other gay men. Such facilities have always been with us: adult bookstores, tearooms, highway rest stops, and the like. The Internet is probably preferable to such sites, being free from physical harassment – even verbal harassment by homophobes has been rare in the chat site I’ve used, though apparently it does happen.

One person claimed that the Internet made it possible for men to delay their self-identification as gay. I’m not so sure of that either, and I don’t know how anyone could tell, let alone whether a shorter delay is necessarily desirable. I suggested, in fact, that maybe public spaces like bars were better off if men who didn’t want community stayed away. The graduate student claimed that the Internet somehow distorted public gay space; as someone who’s spent a lot of time in such spaces, I have always felt that they were distorted by the closeted. The other thirtysomething declared that public gay spaces shouldn’t cater to the wishes of the closeted, but though I’m sympathetic to that idea, I don’t see how you’d make it work. Commercial sites like bars, reasonably enough by their standards, consider the money of a closet case to be as good as that of an openly gay person. Non-commercial sites like discussion groups or student associations have a commitment, also quite reasonable, to try to make people feel welcome. Most gay people (including those of us who later become openly gay) feel frightened on their first visit to a gay space, and so gay organizations try to make themselves as non-threatening as they can. Uncloseted gay people are a minority within a minority, needed to keep public gay sites in operation, but also seen by the closeted as dangerous – we might “out” them, simply by the fact that we exist. And admittedly, we are often impatient with the fears of the closeted, much as we try to draw them into our institutions. This ambivalence creates a tension that has always been with us, and which isn’t going to go away in the foreseeable future.

But back to “community.” Despite the graduate student’s dislike of “virtual” communities, all communities are virtual to some extent. In all but the smallest towns, members of communities don’t know everyone else, or want to. The “physical” nature of their communities lies in the accident of living in an extended physical space, not in face-to-face contact for extended periods of time, let alone in the absence of conflict over values and goals. Much of their “community” comes from reading a local newspaper, listening to a radio station; when they vote for local politicians, they are not all in the polling places at the same time, and most debate over issues does not happen face-to-face. This is even more true in larger cities, let alone at the state or national level.  (Since my interlocutor was a graduate student, I should have asked him if he'd read Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities, a standard work on the topic of how communities construct themselves.)

The graduate student asked me accusingly if I thought face-to-face interaction was unimportant. Of course I think it is important, but not because you can’t have “community” without it. And in fact, much of tonight’s complaint about the Internet glossed over the fact that in practice it’s a stepping stone (or gateway, if you want a different metaphor) to face-to-face interaction, if only the sexual. The graduate student’s insistence on the presence of more than two people was meant to address this, but he never quite clarified it. In our city, there are plenty of gay friendship circles, cliques, and the like. Some of them use the local chat room to touch base with each other on weekend mornings, comparing notes on the bars or parties where they saw each other the night before. I’ve also seen invitations to parties and other gatherings issued in the main room.

So I’m not sure that the Internet’s effects, even in the “aggregate” (a word the graduate student used frequently) are at odds with face-to-face interaction and contact. The problem I see is that many if not most gay men don’t really want “community,” even virtual, with each other. And who knows? Maybe they’re right. Another contradiction we’ve never begun to resolve is that on one hand, we want to find others “like us”, so we can feel at home and safe, without being judged; on the other, we want to be accepted by straight people, and to fit into our families and larger communities as ourselves, not seen as fundamentally and essentially “different.” (Even though we notoriously knew we were “different” from a very early age.) Until we sort out questions like this, we aren’t going to be able to figure out what role gay communities should play, whether they are “virtual” or “physical.”

I Enjoy Being a Girl!

Tomorrow (June 28) will be Gay Pride Day, the 38^th anniversary of the Stonewall riots, so it’s as good a time as any to reflect on how far we’ve come since then. And it’s true, the possibilities for gay people in the US and in many other parts of the world have increased a great deal since 1969.

People have a tendency, however, to see change as monolithic, evenly and instantly distributed throughout society, and usually on the basis of very small developments. For example, because Civil Rights laws were passed in the US in the 1960s, and because lip service is widely (but not universally) paid to equality, you’ll see claims that “society now refuses to discriminate on grounds of religion and race” by people who really do know better. (Martha Nussbaum, in this case.) Just because a law has been passed doesn’t mean it has successfully eradicated the offenses it addresses, even if it has been vigorously enforced. (Which, of course, the Civil Rights laws were not.) Nor does a law against certain carefully delineated forms of discrimination begin to take on the brute fact of racism itself, any more than laws against theft attempt to extirpate greed (let alone need) from human beings.

So, gay people have made important gains in American society, of which legal ones are possibly less important, though the legal gains have been greatly exaggerated. (Our civil rights still aren’t legally guaranteed in most of the US, for example.) But those gains are still being resisted, not just by the Religious Right but by ordinary citizens who distance themselves indignantly from such bogeymen as Fred Phelps (the Kansan who preaches that God Hates Fags). Not just by ignorant rednecks but by educated folks with good manners. And probably the most fiercely resisted change is the mere fact of our casual, unapologetic, open presence in the world.

I just finished reading Joan Acocella’s Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism, published by the University of Nebraska Press in 2000. The book is an expansion of a 1995 New Yorker article in which Acocella counted “the various ways in which Cather … had been manhandled by contemporary academic critics.” Womanhandled might be more accurate here, since most of Acocella’s targets were female, indeed feminist writers, and their thoughtcrime had something to do with seeing Cather as “a homosexual”, Acocella’s preferred if dated term. Terry Castle grants that Acocella’s “insights into Cather’s own artistic personality are stunningly clear-sighted and judiciously expressed” (Boss Ladies Watch Out! [London: Routledge, 2002], xx). I disagree. Acocella did find plenty of stupidity in the writings of contemporary academics, as who hasn’t? I too am disturbed when I see how badly many academic critics read, since it’s at least part of their job to teach reading to their students. But Acocella has stupidity of her own to spare, and much of it appears to express unresolved (at the critical level) conflicts about homosexuality in American society and art.

Begin at the end of the book, where Acocella reports on a 1997 conference in Cather’s home town of Red Cloud, Nebraska (93):

And some of the locals I talked to still don’t care for the word [‘lesbian’]. “She loved Isabelle – does that make her perverted?” said Bev Cooper. “These professors, they have to write things in order to get tenure. So they come up with these theories.” Actually, most of the Cather fans seemed inured to the issue. Sexual scandal is in fashion, said Carolyn Smith, the woman from Missouri: “They’re doing the same thing to Clinton.”

What most people objected to was not so much the idea of homosexuality, as the invasion of privacy. … But these people value their privacy, and not just about sex. Antonette Turner said that when My Ántonia was published, the Pavelkas were not proud that a novel had been written about their family. They were ashamed, because the book told how poor they had been. If Cather failed to dig the dirt on her characters’ sex lives, and her own, that was due in part to local training. In Red Cloud, you don’t have to be a lesbian to keep certain things to yourself.

No one knows whether Cather had some kind of sex with Isabelle McClung or Edith Lewis, the two women with whom she lived for long periods of her life. If she did, however, that would not “make her perverted.” Nor are the lesbian critics who believe that Cather was lesbian interested in stirring up “sexual scandal” – they don’t see lesbianism as either perverted or scandalous. It might not surprise worldly cosmopolitans that backward Midwesterners should hold such views, but Acocella (dance critic for The New Yorker, mind you) obviously shares them. For her, it’s very important that Cather never did the nasty with a woman, and anyone who thinks otherwise is just ‘digging the dirt.’

It’s so important that she lies about Cather’s own practice, for Cather certainly did “dig the dirt” on the folks in Red Cloud, including their sex lives. As Acocella observes, Cather used the lives of the people she knew for her fiction, including Ántonia’s out-of-wedlock pregnancy and the various drunken piano teachers whom she based on her own teacher and friend Herr Schindelmeisser. Acocella stresses “how minutely autobiographical Cather’s work was, just like Proust’s. Whatever names she gave to the little towns she described in her novels, they were all Red Cloud, and filled with Red Cloud people” (32). And as Acocella points out, this invasion of their privacy made them “ashamed.” Given her “local training,” Cather must have known what she was doing. But at least she didn’t call anybody a homosexual.

Acocella is aware that professional and literary critics before second-wave feminism had read Cather badly, in the service of their own agendas: she devotes two chapters to Marxist, masculist, and right-wing (especially Catholic) attempts to appropriate her, or to revile her for failure to toe various party lines. Some of these remind me of what someone (Robert K. Martin, I think) said about Whitman: some critics held that Whitman could not be a homosexual, because he was a great poet, while others held that he couldn’t be a great poet, because he was a homosexual. Many people would argue that an artist’s sex or sexuality should not be a factor in how we read his or her work; but what about cases like Whitman’s where it’s part of the work? Whitman wrote many poems celebrating what he called “the love of comrades” or “adhesiveness”, poems so ripely erotic in their imagery that they upset many male readers (while thrilling many others). You can argue about Whitman’s sexuality, but the sexuality of his poetry is intrinsic to its art.

But even those who want to keep artists’ sex lives out of criticism often can’t resist dragging in the topic themselves. Acocella quotes a famous early essay by Cather, in which Cather contrasted the actresses Sarah Bernhardt and Eleonora Duse. Bernhardt “has a much-advertised love life, but Duse seems to have no husband, no friends” (14). Cather sees Bernhardt’s florid, emotive acting style and Duse’s reserved containment as somehow connected to their styles in love, and Acocella goes along with her. “Cather was only twenty-two when she wrote this, but she seems to have seen her life before her: strait is the gate. Like Duse, she will not marry, not dissipate. And her art will be like Duse’s. She will not express things, but contain them.” (As it happens, though, Duse was married, divorced, and had numerous affairs, including a long, well-known one with Gabriele D’Annunzio, which ended when D’Annunzio gave the lead in one of his plays to Bernhardt instead of Duse. Oops.)

But it’s “the feminists” who really get Acocella’s goat, especially Jane Rule, the (American-born) “Canadian novelist and critic, [who] had matter-of-factly declared that Cather was homosexual” (43) in her 1975 book Lesbian Images. This Acocella regards as such a bombshell that she uses it to close a chapter, though she returns on 53 to “Rule, the woman – herself a declared lesbian – who first said in print that Cather was homosexual”, and again in an endnote. Acocella is also honked off at Sharon O’Brien, whose biography of Cather first set Acocella on her hobbyhorse. But Rule is the serpent in Eden: “The thought [that Cather might have been lesbian] clearly crossed many minds, but since it was not voiced in print, it did not become a subject” (101n5).

Acocella should have read Rule’s discussion of Cather with more care. Rule pointed out that earlier (male) critics had hinted at Cather’s sexuality, but only through innuendo and solely to discredit her. Rule also showed how those critics maliciously misread her. Cather, in their minds, couldn’t be a great writer because she was a dyke; Acocella holds that she couldn’t have been a dyke because she was a great writer. That she could have been both is evidently unthinkable.

Acocella can even forgive Joanna Russ for treating Cather as a dyke, because Russ sees Cather as “innocent” (73), which Acocella misreads as a declaration of Cather’s personal sexlessness. Which is the core of Acocella’s argument, stunningly enough: “What the evidence suggests is that Cather was homosexual in her feelings and celibate in her actions” (48; compare 79, where Cather is “presumably homosexual”). How quaint. This ploy has often been used before – by Justin Kaplan in his 1980 biography of Walt Whitman, for instance. It’s also, no doubt coincidentally, the position of the Roman Catholic Church: homosexuality is not in itself sinful, but homosexual acts are, especially if you get caught.

Since it’s virtually impossible to prove that long-dead people had sex of any kind, this claim is inarguable on its face, but it embodies some interesting assumptions. It’s less important whether Cather did or didn’t have a genitally-expressed sex life than why people like Acocella think it’s scandalous to suppose that she did, and praiseworthy to suppose that she didn’t – always without any material evidence either way. She cites Lillian Faderman’s 1981 tome Surpassing the Love of Men as one of the works which “gave me hope for a sane feminist criticism”, no doubt for its insistence that women who formed romantic friendships never Did It. But she misunderstands Faderman (another “declared lesbian”) too: Acocella shares the medical hostility to eroticism between women which Faderman decried.

Acocella also minimizes Cather’s youthful “William Cather” period, when she wore her hair cut short in a flattop (as Terry Castle says, she looked like the lesbian folksinger Phranc) and affected jacket, suspenders, a derby. “But what Cather did is not that remarkable. The William Cather period began and ended with adolescence. Around eighteen she got rid of the derby and grew her hair out. It seems late in the day to have to say that for certain girls, adolescence, with its enforcement of sex roles, is a disaster …Those were the days before such behavior placed one under suspicion of being a lesbian.” But they didn’t spare one’s being thought “eccentric”, let alone a “hermaphrodite,” as Cather was remembered in Red Cloud civic legend into the 1970s. Not so unremarkable. While many girls do indeed rebel against femininity in adolescence (more power to ‘em!), only the more “remarkable” resist heterosexual marriage altogether in favor of lifelong relationships with women. (Acocella says hopefully that “Cynthia Griffin Wolff is at work on a biography of Cather. To judge from her recent essay ‘New Cather Biographical Data,’ she has new evidence for heterosexuality and is interested in it.” And she’s not afraid to use it! To date, however, her biography has not been published. And how revealing that Acocella doesn't regard evidence of an active heterosexual life to be discrediting to Cather; only a homosexual one.)

She ought to have paid more attention to Faderman’s quotation from Cather’s role model Sarah Orne Jewett, who gently chided Cather for giving My Ántonia a male narrator: “The lover is as well done as he could be when a woman writes in the man’s character – it must always, I believe, be something of a masquerade … and you could almost have done it as yourself – a woman could love her in the same protecting way – a woman could even care enough to wish to take her away from such a life, by some means or other.” Faderman comments, “The letter must have made Cather blush – but Jewett probably would not have known what she was blushing about” (202). Jewett recognized, as later queer theorists would, that Jim Burden was a stand-in for Cather herself; and Faderman assumes that Cather was aware enough of the medical attack on lesbianism that she’d have blushed to acknowledge her love for Ántonia.

So. Nearly forty years after Stonewall, and even a sophisticated New York dance critic still regards homosexuality as a scandalous accusation, and an active homosexual love life as incompatible with artistic or other achievement. (She has to know of great artists in dance, at least, who aren’t celibate.) To repeat: I don’t know whether Cather had a sex life or not, but neither does Acocella. What’s revealing is that she thinks such a sex life would be discrediting to Cather, and must be denied with all the vehemence and bad arguments she can muster. Nor is Acocella alone in her proud heterosexual vigilance ... but of that, more another day.

By Their Fruits Shall Ye Know Them

When Brokeback Mountain became a middling hit a couple of years ago,there was speculation that its success might inspire Hollywood to dust off some long-stalled gay projects. Patricia Nell Warren's 1974 novel The Front Runner, about the love between an Olympic runner and his coach, or Peter Lefcourt's The Dreyfus Affair, about the coming out of a gay pro baseball player, were titles I saw mentioned. According to IMDB, both of those are scheduled for 2007 release, but only Dreyfus is listed as in production, meaning a script is being written. The Front Runner, like Jesus, has been on the verge of coming for a long time now. We'll see.

But now we're seeing the first fruits, so to speak, of Hollywood's new gay-friendliness: I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, starring Adam Sandler and Kevin James as two straight firefighters who pose as gay in order to get domestic partner benefits. Though it isn't scheduled for release until July, there's already a thriving controversy about Chuck and Larry in the IMDB message boards, based on the trailer. (One user reported having seen and enjoyed a preview screening.)

Based on the trailer, I see no reason whatsoever to see this film. (If someone else wants to pay for my ticket, I'll consider it, just so I can write about it from a better-informed perspective.) Not because it makes gays look bad, but because it makes straights look bad. Haw haw haw, at their wedding (a wedding? I guess a mere domestic partnership wasn´t funny enough) Sandler slugs James when he starts to obey the rabbi's (Chinese [though played by a gwailo in the true Hollywood tradition], with a thick accent and thicker glasses) instruction to kiss his new husband. The wedding is an expensive affair, but apparently there was no rehearsal, so the instruction apparently came as a complete surprise. Recovering his balance, Sandler explains that that's how they get it on in their household, and the rabbi leers approvingly. Haw haw haw, what fresh, inventive humor! Could I ever get tired of seeing a straight guy prove his manhood by violence at the threat of a man's lips on his, erm, lips? (And I'm just as annoyed when queens express disgust at the thought of kissing a woman. I've kissed a few women in my time, and a few straight guys have kissed me, without any detectable nausea. Bigotry is disgusting; kissing is not.)

But as I said, this all makes straights look bad, not gays. Not that Sandler's going to relax and give James a smooch later on, I daresay. The hot city attorney (Jessica Biel, looking a bit leathery, but I'm not a straight boy) who investigates the pair to see if they're really gay, decides to seduce Sandler (whose boyish charms, such as they are, are fading). So there are numerous shots of Biel undressing in front of Sandler, assuring him that her breasts are real, etc., while Sandler drools like a bloodhound over a bowl of fresh chopped liver. Haw haw haw, what creativity! Who's ever seen anything like this before, a straight guy going cross-eyed over a pair of female breasts? Just in case you might suspect that Adam Sandler might be turning queer, even in a movie; don't worry, boys and girls, they checked his pulse and other vital signs after the daily breast exposures, and he's still All Man.

It's really daring of Paramount to blaze this trail. Of course, this trail is already as well travelled as, erm, well, you know, I don't think I'll go there. Anyway, Chuck and Larry appears to be a cross between Some Like It Hot (which was a lot more daring, even for the early 21st century let alone the 1950s), the Hope-Crosby Road movies that featured a lot of fag jokes, and a green-card comedy like Green Card or Ang Lee's The Wedding Banquet. (Mark Rappaport´s documentary The Silver Screen: Color Me Lavender contains a good look at the male-anxiety fag jokes in the Road movies, by the way.)

In The Wedding Banquet, a gay Chinese pretends to be straight to provide a young Chinese woman with a green card, and incidentally trick his parents into stop nagging him to get married. It has plenty of humor, plus some pathos, and its relatively weak production values don't get in the way. The Wedding Banquet did quite well, both in the US and in Lee's native Taiwan, and stayed popular enough to be remade as a stage musical. Fourteen years later, emboldened by the breakthroughs of GLBT independent cinema, Hollywood is still giving us shite like Chuck and Larry.

But hey, I'm the very model of a modern post-modernist -- I know there's no such thing as progress. I don't think Chuck and Larry will do any real harm; it's just a symptom, not a cause, of the homophobia that still saturates American society. If it confuses marriage with civil union with domestic partnership, well, most Americans (including gay ones) are confused. I don´t object to gay humor itself; I was very entertained, for example, by The Naked Gun movies, which portrayed Lt. Frank Drebin (Leslie Neilsen) as a pious homophobe with a weakness for men. ("Sex, Frank?" "Uh, no, not right now, Ed.") If Adam Sandler's character were to turn out to have been a regular in the Ramble (the infamous cruising area of Central Park) in between scouring the singles bars for babes, that might be funny. Or funnier, at least. And of course there have been plenty of gay comedies, where gay men and lesbians made fun of our own foibles, often to hilarious effect. Straight people are welcome to laugh at us with us, as far as I'm concerned. But, even if Chuck and Larry contains a few liberal platitudes about the importance of tolerance and acceptance for Them (i.e., Us), this kind of comedy is concerned with keeping the boundaries sharply and clearly defined. It's been done, you know? On the basis of the trailer and the excuses that are already being made for Chuck and Larry, I'm not even slightly tempted to spend my money to see it.

Hiding From Their Own Shadows

What's wrong with this picture? In 1972, a gay twenty-year-old visiting Manhattan has only one night to "find others like myself":

Yet in an era before gay community centers and programs, or gay bookstores and the right kind of titles to line their shelves, where was a young queer person to go? All I knew -- all I had ever heard about -- were the seedy gay movie houses near Times Square. With trembling fingers, I paid for a ticket and entered one. Within minutes, I was back out on the streets in heart-pounding escape from a brigade in raincoats who had descended on me the moment I sat down. In fear and panic, I ran uptown and into Central Park. Hadn't I read somewhere that queers met there too? My foray into the greenery didn't last much longer than my interlude at the movies: it, too, was a dark and scary place. A brief encounter with a kindred soul? Hell, one could get killed here! I returned to my hotel room, dejected and hopeless. Instead of finding others like me, all I had discovered were shadows -- predatory and frightening.

There's a great deal wrong with this passage from Mark Thompson's Gay Body (viii-ix), starting with the shoddy writing and proceeding through the Jungian demonization of the "shadows" he encountered. (Remember, Mark, those "shadows" are your shadow.) What I'd like you to notice now is Thompson's claim that in New York in 1972 there were no "gay community centers and programs, or gay bookstores and the right kind of titles to line their shelves." In fact, Craig Rodwell's Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookstore opened in Greenwich Village in 1967, five years before Thompson's night of the Long Raincoats. By 1972, New York Gay Activists Alliance had a community center in a converted firehouse. San Francisco's gay community center was founded in 1966. Chicago Gay Alliance had a center in the middle of the city. (At the age of twenty, with just one night to find others like myself, I visited it in April 1971.) The early 1970s were a time of explosive growth for such resources nationwide. Young Mark Thompson may not have known about these resources, but they did exist, and old Mark Thompson should know it by now.

But facts do get in the way of a good story.

Now let's move ahead a few years. Fenton Johnson's Geography of the Heart is a moving account of the death from AIDS of his lover Larry Rose. It also tells of his own earlier life in "San Francisco in the late 1970s, those innocent and exhilarating years when it first seemed possible for gay men and lesbians to live and love openly" (79). Notice how the "years when it first seemed possible for gay men and lesbians to live and love openly" creep forward in time. For Mark Thompson, 1972 was still the Dark Ages; for Johnson, the late 1970s -- in San Francisco, mind you -- were just the beginning of the Enlightenment.

Or not: In 1979 ("my second year in San Francisco" [81]), Johnson found a new place to live, out of the fast lane. One acquaintance at the time, "a painfully young man," had "just been discharged from the navy because he was gay, a nice instance of discrimination that at the time we accepted as simply the way life worked and would always work."

Apparently "we" had never heard of Leonard Matlovich, a gay man who received national straight media coverage and was featured on the cover of Time magazine in 1975, for fighting to remain in the US military. Rapid growth of gay organizations and visibility had continued through the Seventies, all over the US and elsewhere. Since young Mark Thompson went cruising in Times Square and Central Park and ran shrieking from the reflections of himself he found there, gay activists had confronted the psychiatric establishment, and won: the APA de-pathologized homosexuality in 1973. Aside from Matlovich and other gay military personnel, there were openly gay politicians, from Elaine Noble to Allen Spears. And need I mention that 1979 was the year after the assassination of Harvey Milk? Evidently I need.

These events weren't entirely invisible in the straight media, and certainly could have been known by people who read even the Advocate, let alone other gay media. Johnson writes about the period without the intrusion of these current, local events into his portrait; and even today too many gay people accept discrimination "as simply the way life worked and would always work."

But maybe even 1979 is still too long ago. So let's move ahead to the 1980s, and a young lesbian attending a tiny liberal-arts college in Indiana. Although there was no gay organization there at the time,

To DePauw's credit, with the college's support I was able to attend a number of national women's studies conferences in the Midwest as well as a large antinuclear weapons conference at Riverside Church in New York City. These conferences literally [?] saved my life. They allowed me to meet not only other feminist women but students like myself who were struggling with their sexual identities. The women and men I met gave me the reassurance I needed that being a lesbian was not "abnormal." At the time, it felt like just being lesbian, gay, or bisexual was extremely radical and in itself a political statement (Stiers, xiii).

When I first read this, I immediately wondered: How does "extremely radical" connect to "abnormal"? Or does Stiers approve of "political statements"? She's so incoherent I can't be sure. Let's consider the historical context again: by the 1980s, what might be called the professionalization of the gay movement was well underway, with frequent calls to put the radicalism of the 70s behind us. More gay military, more gay politicians, more gay pastors and priests and rabbis, more laws forbidding discrimination based on sexual orientation, even in towns in Indiana. Businessman David Goodstein had bought the Advocate, no radical publication to begin with, and used it to further an avowedly conservative agenda. Gay religious groups were the fastest-growing segment of the gay movement. And by the mid-1980s, AIDS had put a wholly different face on the gay male community. If being gay seemed "radical" at that time to Gretchen Stiers, it was despite all these developments.

But leave all that aside. Consider the impression this author gives that there were no gay resources in Indiana colleges in the 1980s, that it was necessary to go to New York to meet "students like myself who were struggling with their sexual identities." You'd think that Gretchen Stiers was the only gay person at DePauw in those days, which just isn't true. Even DePauw was not quite as bad as Stiers implies: there have been several attempts to get a gay organization going there since the 1970s. I was one of several gay men who visited DePauw from Indiana University in Bloomington (whose first student gay organization -- that I know of! -- was founded in 1970) in the mid-1970s to speak to the whole campus about being gay. Gretchen Stiers may not have known about such things at the time she was "struggling with her sexual identity", but how can it be that 15 years of gay organizing in Indiana (!) colleges and universities have still never intruded on her awareness?

And since we're now talking about women as well as men, how about the Michigan Women's Music Festival -- or if Michigan was too far out ("radical"?) for young Gretchen Stiers, the National Women's Music Festival took place every summer in Bloomington, an hour's drive from DePauw. There were women's bookstores in Bloomington and Indianapolis, also close to DePauw. By the time Stiers was coming out, Olivia Records was moving towards luppification, such as expensive ocean cruises.

But surely, the reader may protest, things changed in the 1990s? I wish I could say so (and don't call me Shirley!). Let's leave the coming-out genre for a moment, and listen to a gay man of 40, writing about gay life in New York City today:

I have, of course, like most of the gay men I know, spent a good deal of time complaining about the bar scene. The complaining -- that if you're a single gay man the only way to meet other single gay men, the only way to find someone to play with, is to stray into that familiar space, probably ugly, most likely badly lighted, filled with strangers and music you wouldn't choose yourself, and wait against a wall with the drink in your hand until you finally slide into a conversation with someone whom you can't see quite well enough and who is probably only looking for a one-night stand anyway, unlike you who, you tell yourself, are looking for a Relationship -- this complaint is a necessary lie. A lie, because I am pretty sure by now that we go to these places in order not to connect, but rather to exist in the exquisite moment when our desirability is still perfect, unspoiled by contact; necessary, because who could acknowledge that this was what he really wanted -- to be a flawless image rather than a living person, to have a narrative rather than a life, to be tragic rather than to live -- and not go mad? [Mendelsohn, 195f]

Ahem. Andrew Holleran said the same thing 20 years ago in Dancer from the Dance, and better: with humor, for one thing, to balance the self-pity. But I don't believe that a) all bars in New York City, even in Chelsea, are like this; or b) there are no other ways in New York to meet eligible men (discussion groups? amateur sports? Spinoza and other gay Jewish groups?). The author of this passage cruises certain streets and bars in Chelsea, and Internet chat rooms, and simply ignores the existence of other possibilities -- as well as the existence of gay men who use those alternatives. At least the author admits that he isn't really interested in "connecting", or in environments where he might do so.

The convenient amnesia continues. The director of one segment of If These Walls Could Talk 2, three short films about lesbians made for HBO in 2000, told the Advocate that they didn't even have a word for such relationships in 1930, when the couple in the segment would have met. Nonsense. Of course there was a word -- in fact there were several -- even if the women involved didn't want to use it. Even now, there isn't a word that's acceptable to all same-sex couples.

The writers I've quoted here are not by any means the only ones who express the perspective I'm criticizing -- if only they were! Unfortunately they seem to speak for many others, and even more important, they bespeak a willed amnesia that is too common among gay people. I'm not surprised to find such attitudes in gay people, like Andrew Sullivan, who have been appointed interpreters of gay life by the straight media, who mirror and reinforce the ignorance of straight editors, reporters, and readers; but to find them in people who are writing for a gay readership is dispiriting.

It's a ritual part of the standard coming-out narrative to claim that in those dark days, one was totally alone and isolated, and there was none to help, nay not anywhere. One was the only sensitive (or "normal") gay person in New York City (or San Franciso, or America) in 1972 or 1979 or 1984, all the rest were predatory shadows. This may make for an archetypically mythic story, but like so many archetypically mythic stories it is a lie. Would it really ruin the tale to admit that yes, there were resources, even if the storyteller didn't know about them -- perhaps still doesn't want to know about them? After all, if all other gay people in Those Days were just extreme radicals and there were no alternatives to the clammy embraces of raincoated hordes in sticky-floored porn movie houses, then it seems sane and reasonable to have remained in the closet for so long. To admit that one ignored alternatives, that one was lagging behind history instead of its prisoner, sounds so much less heroic.

Erasing our history doesn't just encourage gay people to stay closeted: it encourages complacency among the antigay. How often I've heard apologists for bigotry say that you can't bring about change overnight, apparently because their awareness of gay activism has been edited down to the 1993 March on Washington at most. (The Millennium March of 2000 will now probably replace the 1993 March as the beginning of gay activism in this mythology.) The thirty-plus years since the Stonewall riots, the fifty-odd years since the founding of Mattachine, the full century since Magnus Hirschfeld came from Germany to the US to lecture on sex "intermediates" -- all down the memory hole. And worst of all, it is gay people, the very ones who lived through it and who should know better, who are erasing our history.

"How would I know I was gay if I didn't know what gay was," a young gay man asked rhetorically on the Internet, referring to his high school days in Iowa during the 1990s. No wonder so many people swallow the nonsense that there were no homosexuals before the word "homosexual" was coined -- they really believe that without a printed instruction manual, professionally-run training seminars, rainbow healing crystals, and the all-important Abercrombie & Fitch apparel, you don't even exist.

Ever since I can remember (and I came out in 1971), there have been people in US gay communities who've claimed that the war has been won, that no gay person suffers stigma, guilt, or shame anymore, or that (as a graduate student at a large midwestern state university put it in the late 1980s) most people have figured out their sexuality by the time they get to college, so they need no further education about gay history, politics, or culture. Even in large cities with large gay communities, this is clearly not true.

In Emma Donoghue's Passions Between Women, she notes how often 18th and 19th century women writers who referred to lesbianism in their work would hasten to add that they couldn't imagine what two women could do together. This forestalled the question that would follow if they admitted knowing: how did they know, hm? I detect a similar disclaimer in these tales of gay and lesbian isolation from the past 30 years: yes, I was That Way, but I didn't want to be, I didn't choose it, I couldn't imagine where to find others like myself, and when I did, they were predators and shadows, not like me at all, not what I meant at all. What gay interests are served by this erasure of history and of the present? What stigma are these openly gay writers trying to fend off?

BOOKS MENTIONED ABOVE:
Thompson, Mark. Gay Body: a journey through shadow to self. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999.
Johnson, Fenton. Geography of the heart: a memoir. New York: Scribner, 1996.
Stiers, Gretchen A. From this day forward: commitment, marriage, and family in lesbian and gay relationships. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999.
Mendelsohn, Daniel. The elusive embrace: desire and the riddle of identity. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999.
Donoghue, Emma. Passions between women: British Lesbian culture 1668-1801. London: Scarlet Press, 1993. New York: HarperCollins, 1994.

The Blind Man and the Elephant

Love in a different climate: men who have sex with men in India
Jeremy Seabrook
London and New York: Verso, 1999.

In a major city there's a park where men go to look for sex with other men. These men vary in their motives, and the kind of sex they're looking for. Some are apparently masculine, others apparently effeminate. Some are here because they aren't married, or aren't living with their wives, and they want a quick and easy sexual release that costs them no money. Others prefer to pay for sex, and they can find men here who will accept payment: some of these latter are full-time sex workers who insist that they don't feel desire for men,but hustling is a relatively easy way for them to make money. Some of the married men who cruise here live with their wives, but they married only to satisfy family or social pressure, and have no sexual interest in women: many of them claim that they fantasize about their experiences with men to be able to perform sexually with their wives. Some speak wistfully of finding a man who will stay with them for longer than it takes to reach orgasm, a friend who will love them and be loved in return. Some men come here as much to socialize as to cruise, and spend hours chatting and gossiping with other habitués.

I'm referring to the park in Delhi where Jeremy Seabrook found interview subjects for this book, but I think most people knowledgeable about human sexuality will recognize that the park could be almost anywhere in the world, including the United States. It might be a highway rest stop, an adult bookstore, or a public bathhouse, but the range of behavior and rationales of the men who gather there is much the same, regardless of their language or color. The stories they told Seabrook differ only superficially from the stories men would have told him in New York City, Taipei, Berlin, Mexico City. Love in a Different Climate is most valuable when Seabrook lets his subjects tell their stories, bearing witness to their lives in a culture that ignores and even denies their existence.

Seabrook, however, seems to think that these men live on another planet, their experiences absolutely alien to those of men in other countries and cultures. As I will show, this bizarre notion undermines all his contrasts of India with "the West." But the trouble goes beyond that. Like too many writers on homosexuality nowadays, Seabrook has a lot of bad things to say about the word "gay": that it is "Western," "reductive," and so on. But, like his fellows, he never explains what he means by "gay." He never explains how it differs from "non-Western" conceptions of same-sex love and desire. And that, it seems to me, is where he should begin.

Perhaps I can reconstruct Seabrook's definition of this Western concept by looking at what he thinks it is not, the behavior and attitudes he opposes to it, which he found among these Indian men. But as I just noted, the stories he was told in Delhi could just as easily be told by American men. This is not an endorsement of "essentialism." While remarkably similar patterns appear across cultures, there is no single pattern in any one culture: a similar variety of types and patterns appears within each culture. That variety includes people who want to form lasting partnerships with others of their own sex, whether or not they call themselves "gay."

"Shivananda Khan, Calcutta-born founder of NAZ in London and a tireless researcher into sexual identities in South Asia, points out that a compelling reason now exists for not projecting onto India Western concepts of straight, gay and bisexual: the spread of AIDS cannot be prevented by having recourse to these stereotyped and rigid categories. Men who have sex with men do not recognize themselves in these classifications, and any attempt to reach them and to create consciousness of the need for safer sex will not reach them" (140f). Evidently Khan is unaware that the same problem has arisen in the "West," including New York and San Francisco -- even London.

Khan and Seabrook may be using the same term differently, however. Seabrook includes some men who think of themselves as gay among the wide range he describes of Indian "men who have sex with men." Khan seems to mean only those men who have sex with men but don't identify themselves as gay or bisexual. As I understand it, "men who have sex with men" originated as a hopefully non-threatening term intended to cover all men who have sex with other men, including gay and bisexual-identified men. Now it seems to have split off, referring only to men who resist such identities, but in either sense it is certainly one more Western concept, coined in the West to enable AIDS services to reach Western men who resisted gay or bisexual identity. As Khan uses it, it's as rigid as the identities he denounces -- after all, its boundaries are delimited by those identities.

Those identities are not a product of the gay liberation movement. They are grass-roots constructions by people -- not only college-educated middle-class whites by any means -- who loved their own sex. Such people are generally hostile to the notion of fluidity in sexuality, and to the Queer theorists (often denounced for supposed elitism) who question the popular rigidity. "Rigid" better describes those men who indignantly reject labels such as "gay" or "bisexual," despite extensive erotic experience with other men.

Seabrook says that a gay consciousness "is itself a response of the powerful, those who have had access to Western liberal education,who know global English-language culture. To the powerless it can appear crushing, dominant and oppressive. Another man, less dogmatic, said, 'Indians do this thing, but they don't talk about it. They don't give it a name, and then it is OK. It is integrated into life not in theory, but as it is lived and experienced. Once you start to rationalize and explain, it becomes something else, and that something else falsifies the Indian form of integration. In this way, even your liberation can become another form of colonialism. That is what you have to avoid'" (137).

Seabrook considers this condescending diatribe less dogmatic? On his own showing it is not "OK" for Indian men to have sex with each other as long as they don't talk about it: if that were so, they would not be so furtive about it, they would not have to keep it secret,they would not feel that it is shameful and a sickness and an addiction. (What this informant calls an "Indian form of integration"is all too familiar to American gay men, lesbians, and bisexuals. We call it "the closet.") Sex between men is not "integrated into life"in India. On Seabrook's own showing, it is marginalized and shoved into silence and obscurity.

Seabrook's painter informant is even more dogmatic. Gay liberation "is a kind of cultural terrorism and we must resist it. In India, to be a friend may have erotic overtones or it may not. If a male friend comes to visit a married couple, the wife will leave the marriage bed to the friend. There may be sex or there may not. That is not the point. ... The wife will sleep with the children or her mother. It will not necessarily matter to her if sex takes place between the men -- even if she knows it -- because this does nothing to undermine her place at the heart of the family." Cute, but this ignores the experiences of Indian men, some of them quoted by Seabrook, who do not want to marry a woman, who do not want to put a woman at the heart of the family, who marry because it is demanded of them, and who then must imagine men in order to have sex with their wives.

Karim, "a historian from Lucknow", declares: "Love between members of the same sex was portrayed as a higher form of attraction and was even considered divine by some. [...] Historically, at least as far as men were concerned, as long as you continued the lineage, no one really cared what else you did. ... It is a perfectly effective and civilized way of managing human sexuality" -- except for women, and for those men who do not wish to marry a woman.

The (false) idea that same-sex eroticism is "a higher form of attraction" is known in the West, of course; it can be comforting to think of oneself as a member of a divine elite despised by the ignorant many. Toleration of sex between males "as long as you continued the lineage" (and avoided scandal) is familiar too. Think of England's King James I, who was allowed his male favorites as long as he dutifully married and sired heirs. "Effective" this approach may be, but it's as Western as it is Indian, and "civilized" it is not. (To paraphrase Gandhi, a civilized approach to sex would be a good idea.)

Some of Seabrook's informants aver that to be gay is to be gratuitously hostile to the "family." This sort of talk is also familiar in the West, which implies either that these informants have been corrupted by Western influence, or that the Christian Right in America has been drinking from the bountiful well of Eastern wisdom. This tendency appeared in India decades before "gay liberation"existed, and it attacked any and all erotic connections between people of the same sex. As Ruth Vanita and Saleem Kidwai point out wryly in their anthology Same-sex Love in India (New York: St Martin's Press, 2000, p 250f), these denunciations "associate homosexuality with the West. ... On the other hand, they draw on Western sources to legitimize their homophobia." (It's interesting to compare Love in a Different Climate to John Howard's similarly antigay Men Like That:a Southern Queer History [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999]. For Howard it's Mississippi instead of India that trembles helplessly in the grip of gay cultural terrorists, whom he denounces in almost identically vitriolic terms: evil outside agitators bringing in their Communist ideas to stir up and confuse the natives, who were perfectly content before.)

It's true that radical gays have often been hostile to the patriarchal family, but not without reason, as Seabrook himself shows. Since Love in a Different Climate deals solely with the experiences of men, with only passing references to women, I won't say much about the price women pay for living in an extremely sexist society like India. For now it should be enough to point out how destructive the Indian family is just to men, using information from Seabrook's subjects.

The Western Jungian "men's movement" holds that in traditional societies, fathers are closer to their sons than in the deracinated West, teaching them what they need to know to be men in their cultures. Seabrook unwittingly demolishes this romantic fantasy. Both his park informants and his Indian apologists represent Indian fathers as distant, authoritarian, and unsupportive. When young Indian men need information about sex, they turn to their peers, who are as ignorant as they are, sharing such disinformation as that sexual release is either necessary or weakening, or that you can't get diseases by having sex with men.

Many gay people in the West are heartbreakingly eager to prop up the patriarchal family, to keep their place in it despite their families' equally determined efforts to expel them. Not all Western parents reject their gay children, of course; neither will all Indian parents. If American experience is any guide, and I believe it is, Indian gay men won't want to cut themselves off from their parents. Given what one of Seabrook's spokesmen says about the material support that children provide to parents in a traditional society without Social Security, it is downright self-defeating for Indian parents to disown gay children. Compare Mina Shum's 1994 film Double Happiness, in which a Chinese-Canadian father disowns first his only son, then his elder daughter, for defying his authority. In the degenerate West we might call this "cutting off your nose to spite your face."

At least two gay-identified Indian men reject Seabrook's assertion "that there is a powerful undertow of eroticism in relationships between Indian men: they see this as a form of cultural projection by Westerners upon what they perceive as crude and rudimentary sexual encounters." I couldn't have put it better myself. "On the other hand, they themselves are impressed by what they perceive as the subtlety, richness and sense of equal status between gay men in the West. 'In India, there is no equality between people in such encounters. It is at best a patron-client relationship if you pick up some young man, and at worst a brief and unsatisfactory meeting.'"

Seabrook is briefly taken aback: his uppity native informants have presumed to point out his Western bias, his imposing of his Western conception of eroticism on relations between Indian men! He quickly puts them in their place. "Perhaps we are all doomed to see things, or imagine that we see things, in that which is exotic, foreign, and other; and to set little value on what is close at hand, local and familiar. ... I was referring rather to the observable loyalties and affections between men in India of all ages -- the physical closeness and holding of hands which causes so many Western visitors to believe, mistakenly, that being gay is a common and open experience in India; while they were speaking of the pick-ups which they, as privileged men, might make by chance. [Not only 'privileged men' make such pick-ups, nor do they make them by chance, as Seabrook's informants in the parks make clear to him. What about those encounters, which he himself labels "abusive," between older men and young boys who must share a bed during a wedding festival? This has nothing to do with class privilege.] They were speaking of the possibilities that certainly do exist in the West for gay men to make long-term stable relationships and live together. [And which Seabrook's informants long for, if only in fantasy, as they have told him again and again -- because these possibilities hardly exist in India.] They were looking at the situation from their own Westernised and socially advantaged position. In that sense, they are bearers of precisely those values which Karim and other Indians whose lives are anchored in India deplore. Yet there is truth in both testimonies" (145f).

That isn't the only time Seabrook's Western bias misleads him: "There is an even more fundamental problem, and that is in defining precisely what constitutes sex. For some time, I was puzzled by the assertions of men whom I had seen regularly in the Park that they never had sex. This seemed at first to be only a more flagrant form of denial. But for many, 'sex' means vaginal intercourse with a woman. Whatever they did with men did not count; indeed, it did not even constitute sexual activity at all. It became clear that 'play' or 'fun' belonged to a quite separate order of experience; this suggested a degree of dissociation which I had not believed possible." Then he's pretty damned ignorant. This "degree of dissociation" was far from unknown in the West, even before the Clinton sex scandal reminded us about it.

Notice how willing Seabrook is to impose Western concepts of sex on his informants. By "sex" and "eroticism" they must mean what he means; if they don't, it is due to "dissociation". His very label "men who have sex with men" relies on Western conceptions of "sex" (and "men"). Notice too that safe-sex outreach to "men who have sex with men" will fail if these men don't think of what they're doing as "sex." Since such education involves talking about things ("giving them a name") that in India (as in America) are not supposed to be talked about at all, it is impossible to do AIDS education without destroying the sweet "naiveté" that Seabrook and his accomplices find so quintessentially Indian.

Contrast "Karim, thirty-four, who says, 'Before I went to Canada, I had had a limited number of relationships with men in India. But the shortage of numbers was balanced by the intensity of the relationships. We built friendships that lasted and have continued until today. In Canada, I was shocked by the casualness of it all: the ease and abundance of partners, but also the readiness with which people discard and forget each other.

"'It is now getting like this in India'" (152). Seabrook doesn't dismiss Karim's testimony as tainted by "privilege," though by his standards that label certainly applies to Indians who can travel overseas for study and sexual tourism, but Seabrook is so eager to demonize the West that such details escape his notice. In any case, unless The Park in Delhi has only recently become a place for quick, forgettable and forgotten discharge between men, it has probably always been "like this in India" too.

But it has also always been like "that." Men who have sex with other men are no more all alike in India than they are anywhere else. This is not to say that gay life in the West is free of problems: of course it isn't, because it is life. The Indian men Seabrook romanticizes, who dream of finding a friend, have almost never had the chance to try a relationship with another man. If they do, they will find that in the end it is a relationship, with rewards and difficulties not really so different from a relationship with a woman.

Seabrook and his privileged Indian informants talk as though hostility to homosexuality did not exist in the West. Gay liberation is at least as much a rebellion against "Western values" -- which look a lot like Eastern ones, as Seabrook and his subjects define them -- as it is an expression of them. As even Seabrook admits, there is no "harmony" in the lives his informants live in India. Listen to "Kamal, thirty-four.... 'I learned of the secret circles of men looking for sex with men. ... But it doesn't get you relationships,friendship, love, respect or comfort. It gets you sex. It is only by discovering the existence of yet another world -- the openly gay world where you are not bound by pretence or false machismo or the demands of family -- that you come out into the free air of making real choices, deeper relationships, more satisfactory friendships with other men'" (148).

Gay liberation in the West strives towards openness, towards recognition of gay people as part of their society-- towards "harmony" and "integration", one might say. And this, it appears, is the "gayness" Seabrook objects to, so vehemently that he wrote a book to attack the idea. At the same time, Seabrook is appalled by Hindu fundamentalists who want to suppress gay identity in India, such as those who attacked Deepa Mehta's lesbian-themed film Fire. Why doesn't he deride Mehta as a privileged, Western-educated traitor to her race, trying to impose foreign categories on Indian culture? Why doesn't he defend Mehta's critics as honest folk "anchored in India," seeking to resist the neocolonial cultural terrorism of feminism and gay liberation? For that matter, Seabrook's antigay Indian informants are themselves mostly privileged Western-educated men with access to global English-language culture. But since they say what he wants to hear, he overlooks what is, by his criteria, their contaminated status. The only mitigation is that thanks to its author's overwrought ambivalence, Love in a Different Climate wears its contradictions on its sleeve.

Part of the trouble lies in Seabrook's provincial conception of "gay." I suspect he associates the word with celebrity queers such as W. H. Auden, E. M. Forster, and Christopher Isherwood (men who often rejected "gay" as a label anyhow), not with the pansies and bulldaggers, the window dressers and factory workers, documented by historians like Allan Bérubé, Rictor Norton, Jonathan Ned Katz, George Chauncey, Lillian Faderman, Elizabeth Lipovsky Kennedy and Madelyn D. Davis.

Seabrook's assertion that gay consciousness is "a response of the powerful, those who have had access to Western liberal education, who know global English-language culture" would, I believe, have surprised the people who formed proto-gay communities in North America and Europe from the 1700s on. Many of them were marginal to begin with -- poor, sparsely educated, non-white, gender-nonconformist -- and finding kindred spirits in the cities did not make them less marginalized. These areas were visited by elite men, however, who didn't want to be marginalized but were willing to use those who were. (Resisting and rejecting a stigmatizing label is one of the privileges of the "powerful," especially while they're slumming.) On top of this, the depiction of gays as a bunch of predatory rich people is a familiar homophobic trope in the West -- to say nothing of its resemblance to anti-Jewish propaganda. It doesn't occur to Seabrook or his elite Indians that a non-elite Indian (or for that matter, American or British) man might find gay liberation liberating. Many have.

Like his privileged Indian informants, Seabrook mistakes commercial gay male culture for gay liberation. "This has significant implications for the debate about same-sex relations: people can scarcely be expected to wait for the liberating potential of Western-style affluence to sanction their sexual behavior. This version of lesbian and gay emancipation is simply not going to occur. Other forms of repressed or denied sexualities have already arisen; people will always create some space for themselves in however hostile an environment, as the testimony of the men here make [sic] clear"(182).

Gandhi was influenced by the Sermon on the Mount, Eastern teachings transmitted through Western institutions and missionaries; Martin Luther King Jr. was influenced by Gandhi; people around the world have been influenced by King. The Gay and Women's Liberation movements took their names and some ideas from non-Western national liberation fronts that took much from the Westerner Karl Marx. Cultural purity is a mirage: impossible to achieve, and destructive to attempt.

The Gay Liberation movement was sharply critical of contemporary patterns of urban gay life in the West, and gay radicals continue that critique to this day. Gay Indians will surely criticize the institutions, commercial or not, that will be developed by and for men who have sex with men in India. But their criticisms should not be based on whether those institutions are "indigenous" (unless they're prepared to agitate against telephones, automobiles, radios, televisions, air travel, VCRs, and other non-indigenous colonial-terrorist devices). Indians have created plenty of oppressive institutions around sex and gender, without any help from the West; they can also create new ones, for better or worse.

Seabrook and his Indian informants view Indian culture as monolithic, ignoring its history of diversity, conflict, and dissent. Of course, Western gays can't escape their Westernness, any more than Indians can escape their Indianness. Why should they? But if Indians can appropriate Western homophobia for their own uses, as they have from Gandhi to Shivananda Khan, why shouldn't they appropriate Western gay liberation as well?