This Crazy Little Thing Called Gay Love

I finished reading Queer Wars last night, and I don't want to leave readers with the impression that Altman and Symons accept (let alone approve) the arrogance of Western-trained professional activists.  Their last chapter, "What Is To Be Done?" discusses the problem at length, and quite well.  In general it's a good book, especially for those who want an introduction to international LGBT politics.

There are, however, numerous bits in it that rub me the wrong way, and one of the most annoying was this quotation, on page 62, from another writer about Bangladesh:

Homosexuality is not shunned because of its criminal tag; it simply does not exist in the common mind as a variant of human behavior. This is a highly social culture with large and extended families, friends coming and going, eating and sleeping together at different times—all encased in strong social traditions. So what is this strange thing called gay love? Few have an answer.

The passage comes from a website, so I could go to the source.  It's not much better in its original context, an article called "Gay Life in Bangladesh" by one Richard Ammon.  Ammon has actually spent time in Bangladesh, but the tone of the article is normal Anglo travel writing about colorful natives and their exotic folkways, with a zest of sex-tourist prurience and sentimentality for subtext. 

So why do I object to this passage?  The fantasy of guys so culturally deprived that they have never even heard of Lady Gaga is of course a popular one, especially for those with a missionary temperament; also for urbanites who mistake their boredom with commercial gay culture (usually after spending a few decades immersed in it) for some kind of spiritual fastidiousness, and dream of finding a place untouched by Modern Life -- as long as they can get a good cell-phone signal there, of course.  The promise of untouched, unspoiled destinations is a common sell to tourists generally.  But eventually those other tourists start pouring in, and nobody goes there anymore because it's too crowded.

If you identify homosexuality or "gay love" with its twenty-first century urban First-World manifestations (the Foucauldian fallacy), then you can persuade yourself and others that there's no
homosexuality where there are no mod cons -- no discos, no Internet porn, no (gasp!) Grindr.  While there is arguably a valid distinction to be drawn between "homosexuality" as an isolated practice and "homosexuality" as a specific cultural structure with a "scene" and institutions and ideology, most writers who draw that distinction can't sustain it consistently.  But the distinction is never hard and fast.  I can't fathom why Ammon assumes that "a highly social culture with large and extended families, friends coming and going, eating and sleeping together at different times—all encased in strong social traditions" somehow excludes same-sex eroticism and love.  If you put a bunch of males together, eventually some of them will start exploring each other's bodies, and some will realize that they prefer male bodies for this purpose.  (Muslim cultures are certainly aware of this "variant of human behavior.")  Even in cultures so benighted that they have never heard of RuPaul's Drag Race (oh, the humanity!), there are traditions of passionate same-sex friendship and sworn brotherhood.  It doesn't matter if those traditions didn't originally refer to copulation, because they will eventually be interpreted as erotic by people who need a precedent. (The ancient Greek reinterpretation of Achilles and Patroclus as erastes and eromenos is a classical -- pardon the pun -- example of this tendency.)

The capper is that closing rhetorical question.  Who are the happy "few" who "have an answer" to it?  Millions want to know.

You've Been Served: First World Problems, LGBT Activism Dept.

A couple of interesting and symptomatic passages from Dennis Altman's latest book Queer Wars: The New Global Polarization over Gay Rights (written with Jonathan Symons; Polity Press, 2016).

AIDS activism has often seemed inseparable from gay activism, and has contributed to the development of an emerging group of professional and skilled 'LGBT' activists, who have played crucial roles as brokers between communities and international institutions.  Moreover, the priorities of HIV activists, often well connected to an international movement such as the Global Future on MSM and HIV, have sometimes clashed with the needs of those for whom immediate survival is the major priority.  This is a not uncommon problem when well-intentioned activists seek to apply models developed elsewhere [46].

It's depressing that this is still a problem, decades after it was first identified.  I've been reading essentially the same diagnosis of cultural incomprehension by foreign activists since at least the 1980s, exemplified by the Mexican-born (but professionalized in the US) activist Hector Carrillo, who after only a few years away returned to Mexico totally clueless about the needs and hangups of the people he'd come to "help."  Outside of specifically gay or AIDS work the syndrome is far older.  In her 1901 novel Work: A Story of Experience, for example, Louisa May Alcott wrote about clueless "ladies" trying to organize "anxious seamstresses, type-setters, and shop-girls" in a manner that suggests that what she was describing was already a cliche -- and that was within American society, not on foreign shores.  Yet the "professional and skilled" activists are always taken by surprise, which indicates that something is badly wrong with their training.

The consequences can be worse than the embarrassment produced by patronizing ignorance, since as Altman and Symonds point out, there are countries where LGBT activism is highly dangerous for the locals, notably African countries whose governments reject "foreign" influence in the form of the gay movement, but not the equally foreign influence of Islamist and American Evangelical missionaries, let alone the weaponry and training of death squads that the American government has shared so generously around the world.

Writing of Namibia, Robert Lorway argues that the foreign-supported Rainbow Project 'not only inhibited important political possibilities, but sometimes also reinforced social inequalities'.  The emphasis of the project on law reform often seemed irrelevant to young and poor Namibians struggling to survive, while fascinated by a particular identity politics that threatened to alienate them from family and community [ibid.].

Don't these well-intentioned activists ever begin by educating themselves, by asking local workers what they need, and under what cultural and political constraints they must live and work?  For that matter, these American professionals tend to be ignorant of gay people's lives on the ground in their own country.   Professional and skilled they may be, but people skills seem to have been forgotten somewhere along the way, and that's a failure of basic competence.

I'm a bit suspicious about that passage on Namibia, though.  It treats the "young and poor Namibians" as if they were innocent, ignorant savages, just as those foreign activists thought they were: blank slates who need to be carefully taught.  It reminded me of the account of a South African workshop on "real gay" identity, described in the anthropologist Graeme Reid's How to Be a Real Gay, led by a local organizer (tainted, alas, by contact with activists in Johannesburg).  Reid was distressed that this workshop tried "to impose a standard norm on the myriad processes, performances, desires and identities that constituted gay life in the area of my fieldwork?" (Reid, page 154), but on his own account the participants, though not uncritical of the presentation, were fascinated by it.  A second workshop, on gays and the law in South Africa, was run not by a local but by professionals from Johannesburg, bored the queens and drove most of them outside.  That didn't mean they weren't interested in their legal status -- according to Reid, they brought questions with them -- only that the workshop was badly designed by people who didn't bother to learn how to communicate with non-professionals.  The conflict appears to me to be less about "East vs. West" culture clash and more about class, and to repeat, the problem lies in a basic failure of professional competence.

Still, in the West we've come to expect professionals to meet their clients at least halfway: to ask them what they need, and to listen to the answers; to try to explain without condescension what the professional has to offer.  This expectation too is a product of American activism in the 1960s and 1970s, specifically the Women's Health movement, and it's rooted not in professionals (though some professionals participated early on) but in grass-roots organizing by people who were tired of being pushed around and talked down to.  It's also a product of AIDS activism before the movement became professionalized.  That's a model that should be exported to the Third World, though it's probably already there; the Western-trained activists should respect and cooperate with it.

One more bit:

As one activist remarked of South Korea: 'Oppression is real and ubiquitous, yet invisible enough to make calls for advocating homosexuals' rights look "excessive" or "privileging"' [47].

I hope I don't need to point out that resisting oppression is always considered excessive by the oppressors, who regard any diminution or rearrangement of their status and power as an attempt to hang them all up from the lampposts, or at least to shoot a third of them.  Leaving aside the possible merits of such an approach, I've pointed out before that there's no reason South Korean or other Asian LGBT activists must model their movements on American precedents: they should take what they find useful, and leave the rest.  If a rights-based ideology and discourse aren't appropriate in a given country, that doesn't mean that gay people there have no recourse.  Every culture has its own traditions of justice and, yes, activism.  We in the West have often learned from them.  Yet even learned and experienced observers like Altman seem to have trouble recognizing that the influence has always gone both ways.