"It Is Curious How Thoughtlessly We Use Words"

While I was in Boston recently, someone recommended Patricia Bell-Scott's book The Firebrand and the First Lady,* about the friendship between Eleanor Roosevelt and Pauli Murray (1910-1985).  Roosevelt, I hope, needs no introduction; Murray was an important activist and writer about African-American civil rights -- and, my informant added, a lesbian.  I'd never heard of her, but my interest was piqued.  The ebook was too expensive for me, but the physical book was on the shelves at the public library when I got back to Bloomington, so I checked it out immediately and am now about 180 pages (out of 360) into it.

It has turned out to be a fascinating read.  I'm surprised that I hadn't heard of Murray before.  Her achievements are too numerous to go into here, and her struggle against poverty and ill health (leaving aside racism and sexism) makes them all the more remarkable.  But here's a taste:

In the fall of 1945, Pauli Murray finished requirements for the master of laws and passed the California bar exam.  The publication of her thesis, "The Right to Equal Opportunity in Employment," in the California Law Review marked several milestones.  It was her first publication in a law review journal; it was the first essays ever published in a law review by an African American woman; and it was the first law review essay on the subject of sex discrimination and employment [177].

Unable to enroll at Harvard (her first choice) to get a doctorate in law, because the Law School refused to accept women of any color, or to find suitable employment despite her many connections, Murray felt obliged to move back east to care for her elderly aunt.

Her belongings were packed and her train ticket booked when she met Robert W. Kenny at her swearing-in ceremony to the California bar, on December 8, 1945.  Kenny was a liberal Democrat, an advocate for fair employment legislation, and California state attorney general.  Having just read Murray's groundbreaking law review article, he offered her a temporary post as deputy attorney general on the spot.  Until she passed the civil service examination, her appointment would be subject to the return of employees on military service leave.  Murray accepted Kenny's offer in spite of the shaky terms.  In doing so, she became the first black deputy attorney general for the state of California [178].

There were many such firsts in Murray's life; eventually, for another example, in 1977 she became the first African American woman to be ordained an Episcopal priest.  She seems to have lived more in one lifetime than most people could live in several.  I look forward to reading the rest of her story.

Right now, though, I'm chafing a bit at the book's scanting of Murray's lesbianism.  I don't assume that this is necessarily due to authorial homophobia; Bell-Scott is more concerned with Murray's public career, which was eventful enough. (Also with Roosevelt's: The Firebrand the First Lady is really a dual biography, following both women's lives even when they weren't interacting with each other.  And Bell-Scott buries Roosevelt's lesbian connections: ER's beloved friend, the journalist Lorena Hickok, has been mentioned in passing but her lesbianism has not, nor her relationship with Roosevelt.  A look at the index shows that Hickok's "intimate friendship" with ER is referred to briefly once, and her lesbianism acknowledged, once, a hundred pages later.

In Murray's case, she evidently grappled with her love of women from her teen years onward, and it's not always clear which of her women friends were actually girlfriends.  That may be because Bell-Scott doesn't know, but Murray was a compulsive writer and documented her anxieties and conflicts pretty fully.  Maybe more information has been published elsewhere, and more may come later in this book.  But I found this passage, about her state of mind in her late twenties, very interesting.

Since Murray's hospitalization [for an apparent mental breakdown] at the Long Island Home three years earlier, she had been consulting with doctors and scouring the scientific literature in search of an "answer to true homosexuality."  That Murray asked one psychiatrist if she had "a mother fixation" demonstrated her familiarity with psychoanalysis.  Having rebuffed psychiatric treatment and the theory that her attraction to women was a manifestation of homosexuality, Murray constructed an alternative explanation.  She convinced herself that she was a pseudohermpaphrodite with secreted testes (and she would hold this belief until X-rays of her uterus, fallopian tubes, and the surrounding area proved her wrong).  Such a condition pointed to biology -- specifically, the presence of male gonads and hormones -- rather than mental illness as the source of her attraction to women, her tomboyishness and her lack of interest in feminine pursuits, such as housekeeping [57].

I'm fascinated by this glimpse into conceptions of sex, gender, and sexual orientation in the 1930s.  How odd that, though she rejected a medical diagnosis of "homosexuality," Murray invented and embraced a no less medicalized theory of herself as a "pseudohermaphrodite."  And, of course, "biology" and "mental illness" have always been intertwined, whether for sex or for other conditions.  Professionals never quite made up their minds, in this period or later, whether homosexuality was purely mental or the expression of a physical abnormality.  ("Homosexuality" was originally conceived of as a social and quasi-legal concept when Karl-Maria Kertbeny invented it in 1868; it was only appropriated by the medical profession later on.)

The reference to Murray's "tomboyishness" understates the case too.  "Just a few years earlier, Murray had proudly asked Nancy Cunard to publish a photograph of Pete, her 'boy-self.'"  I wonder if Murray ever read Radclyffe Hall?  Murray also liked to wear "men's" clothing, and it wouldn't be off the mark to think of her as a "passing woman."  Bell-Scott also recounts a trip to North Carolina that Murray made in 1940 with her friend (nudge, nudge?) and roommate (wink, wink?) Adelene McBean (aka "Mac").  They were arrested in Virginia for refusing to stay in the back of the bus they were riding.  Only a couple of pages into the story, with the two women in custody, does Bell-Scott mention that Murray "was apparently dressed in male clothing and had told officers, according to one passenger, that her name was Oliver Fleming" (63).  Murray "gave her name and clarified her sex status as they were booked" (64).  There's no indication that Murray's cross-dressing or her adoption of a male persona added to their legal problems, though I'd have expected it to.  As I read all this, I began wondering just what Murray's "boy-self" meant to her.  Bell-Scott doesn't say, but it appears that Murray's life is very well-documented, as indicated by the detailed witness accounts of her and Mac's arrest and her custom of thinking through personal issues at the typewriter.

I'm not interested in deciding what Pauli Murray "really was."  Invert, homosexual, Urning, gay, lesbian, transman, bulldagger -- such terms, as I've written before, are "the fossils of ideologies of what men and women and sex are."  Many people nowadays would jump to identify her as transgender, for example, but I don't think our categories today are any more correct than those of a century ago.  I just want to know more about how Murray saw herself, especially since she clearly thought and wrote about these questions, and left a large archive behind her.  Since she lived into the 80s, she must have come into contact with later constructions of sex and gender, and thought about them.  Well, maybe another book by someone else will address these questions.  Right now, at this stage in Bell-Scott's book, I am dazzled by Murray's gutsiness, energy, doggedness, and intelligence -- brilliance, really.

* Patricia Bell-Scott, The Firebrand and the First Lady: Portrait of a Friendship -- Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Social Justice (Knopf, 2016).

Toward a Recognition of Evidence

A slight digression here.  I just reread At Eighty-two (Norton, 1996), the final volume of May Sarton's journals, and as usual it was a fascinating view into old age and ill health.  It also pointed me to a few writers I might explore, such as the poet Deborah Pease, and reminded me of Sarton's friend, the academic and novelist Carolyn G. Heilbrun, who championed Sarton's work when few academics were willing to consider it.  The cold shoulder she got from academic critics was something that bothered Sarton a great deal, a theme she harped on throughout the journals, including this one, and I admit I was surprised to be reminded that Florence Howe didn't include Sarton in her anthology of women's poetry No More Masks, not even the expanded 1993 edition.

Anyway, now that I've finished re-reading all of Sarton's journals it might be time to return to Carolyn Heilbrun's feminist critical writings.  Her book Toward a Recognition of Androgyny, first published in 1973, is probably still her best-known work.  I've read it two or three times, most recently last year, and it's one of those frustrating books that I remember positively but can't recall any of what it says.  The only notes I took from my last reading have little to do with androgyny, but they may explain why the book hasn't stayed with me better.

In the face of the evidence of Jewish life at the time of Jesus, or, indeed, at any time, more blatantly still in the face of the evidence of the Gospels, the Church was determined to deny sexuality its place in the religious world, to idealize celibacy, which the Jews and probably Jesus considered sinful, and to enshrine virginity, which the tradition had heretofore never seen as anything but a perversion.  Not only may Jesus not have been a virgin, but there is little beyond the patristic tradition to suggest that he was not born from an ordinary sex act.  The pagan tradition in which the father is a god (one need only recall Zeus’s many sexual affairs with mortal ladies) and the Jewish tradition which saw God as, in one sense, the father of all children were no doubt distorted for the uses of a Church which feared sexuality almost as much as it feared the feminine principle, perhaps for many of the same reasons [17-18].

On the whole, the factual errors in this passage are hard to excuse, though it reflects common views of Jesus and Christianity at the time, and down to the present.  I think that historical scholarship on Judaism since the 1970s has enriched our knowledge and understanding of rabbinical attitudes toward sexuality in Jesus' day, and I don't hold Heilbrun responsible for not taking into account work that hadn't been done yet.  But most of what she gets wrong was avoidable.  It boggles my mind when she says that the Church idealized celibacy and virginity "in the face of the evidence of the Gospels" and blames the doctrine of Jesus' birth to a virgin mainly on "the patristic tradition."  In fact the virgin birth is reported in two canonical gospels, one of which (Matthew) has traditionally been touted as the most "Jewish" of the four.  Jesus' harshly repressive teachings on sex in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew again) are hardly obscure, and then there is his commendation of those who make themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of Heaven.  (That link will show you numerous translations of the verse, which are evidence of how uncomfortable it makes many modern Christians.)

There's a tendency, due I think to influence from 20th-century village-atheist polemic, to talk as though the gospels were written much later than most scholars today think they were, as if they were written in the second or third centuries rather than the first.  But the same downgrading of marriage and the body is found in Paul's letters, which were certainly written before the gospels, within twenty-five years of Jesus' death, though Paul was not merely Jewish but a Pharisee.  Paul is ambiguous on the point, but it's generally accepted that he was celibate, and he argued in 1 Corinthians 7 that marriage was a second-best relation, a concession to human weakness for those unable to control their lusts and give their full devotion to the Lord.  These passages were not discovered in a clay jar after 1973; they'd been there all along, and were not obscure.

Heilbrun goes on to cite William E. Phipps's Was Jesus Married? (Harper & Row, 1970), a popular controversial book at the time she was writing Toward a Recognition of Androgyny.  I've only read Phipps's later book The Sexuality of Jesus (Harper & Row, 1973), and it has been a while, but as I recall his main argument was to point to the universality of marriage in Judaism, which is a slight oversimplification anyway. Whether Jesus himself was married, let alone a lifelong virgin, we'll never know, but it can't be settled by appeal to mainstream Judaism of his time, because Jesus was not a mainstream Jew of his time, even on the evidence of the gospels, which show him at odds and in mortal combat with the mainstream Judaism(s) of his time.  This wasn't (or wasn't solely) a fabrication in the service of patristic propaganda; the hostility between the early Jesus cult and their fellow Jews was intense, and no less so if it was over issues that seem trivial to 20th century Americans.  Again, the apostle Paul, who on his own account had been a mainstream Jew, a Pharisee no less, was also hostile to marriage and sexuality before the gospels were even written; and even though we have some of Paul's own words about himself (unlike Jesus), it's not certain whether he was or had been married himself.

I don't know of any evidence that Jesus "probably considered [celibacy] sinful," and I've just pointed to evidence to the contrary.  As for the claim that "the tradition had heretofore never seen [virginity] as ... a perversion," that's absurd: virginity was mandatory for women before marriage in Judaism, as in other traditions.  It's also absurd to claim that the idealization of celibacy and virginity denied "sexuality its place in the religious world"; marriage and sexuality always had their place in Christianity, even if it was a second-best place.  If women and men were not to remain virgin or unmarried throughout their lives, that hardly indicates a respect for their freedom or well-being.  Compulsory marriage was as much a distortion of human potential as compulsory celibacy, but then individual freedom was not a Christian, Jewish, or pagan ideal.

I wish that Heilbrun were still alive; I'd like to ask her how she could have overlooked the evidence that celibacy had a place in Christianity from its earliest days.  If she cites the gospels, I presume she'd read them at some point.  Was no one who read the book in manuscript, or helped prepare it for publication, knowledgeable enough about the Bible to notice this strange mis-characterization of New Testament teachings?  It now seems to me that much of Toward a Recognition of Androgyny involved generalizations about culture and literature that I can't accept, even if I like Heilbrun's rejection of sexual polarization.

We Are the Joburg Girls; or, This Year's Model

There's a famous moment from the Stonewall Riots of June 1969, described by Martin Duberman in his Stonewall (1993):

When the police whirled around to reverse direction at one point, they found themselves face-to-face with their worst nightmare: a chorus line of mocking queens, their arms clasped around each other, kicking their heels in the air Rockettes-style and singing at the tops of their sardonic voices:

We are the Stonewall girls
We wear our hair in curls
We wear no underwear
We show our pubic hair...
We wear our dungarees
Above our nelly knees!

It was a deliciously witty, contemptuous counterpoint to the TPF's brute force.

The climax of Graeme Reid's How to Be a Real Gay is the workshop (or rather, series of workshops) from which Reid took his title.  Despite his good intentions, I must say that Reid treats the workshop, its organizers, and its participants with modern, Western, global (to use his favorite words) condescension.

The political project seemed doomed from the start: how could anyone, I thought, try to impose a standard norm on the myriad processes, performances, desires and identities that constituted gay life in the area of my fieldwork? At the heart of the workshops were two competing yet intersecting ideas about gender, sexuality and identity that circulated in Ermelo. On the one hand, a particular set of gender ideals was promoted and reinforced by my informants (what it means to be a lady or a gent) and, on the other hand, sexual orientation and gay rights that suggested a modern gay identity, based on object choice, were the primary discourse of the workshops … This was a context in which what I will call traditional understandings of sexuality and gender, coexisted with a modern gay identity, which underpinned the provision for freedom of sexual orientation in the Constitution [154]...

The workshops showed that ‘being gay’ was a contested terrain. If there was a real way to be gay there must then be other, presumably less real or even fake ways of being gay [155]

Le duh.  Everything is "a contested terrain."  Reid works hard here to assimilate the workshops into his modern, global, Western bogeyman, without success.  He claims that the "stated intention of the workshops [was] to encourage the emergence of a 'real gay' identity" (192), but that intention doesn't emerge from his report of the workshop: it's in the Western academic authorities he cites in his discussion, Not having attended the workshops myself, I can only go by Reid's report, and he makes it reasonably clear that although the organizer, a local gay named Bhuti, was in touch with activists and organizations in Johannesburg, he addressed his audience in terms of the lady/gent model, with an eye toward refining ladies to comport themselves like ladies.

Bhuti stands in front of a sheet of newsprint clipped with pegs to the pelmet, wearing a jersey against the cold and a hat for style. He is explaining the meaning of terms that appear on the newsprint: ‘homosexuality; heterosexuality; transvestite; transsexual; hermaphrodite; bisexual; gay; lesbian; butch; femme; dragging queen’ ... Tsepo, as one of the group leaders, reports back that in his group they felt that ‘gays should not make themselves a joke’, they should not arrive for a job interview ‘wearing twenty earrings on each side, a lady’s two-piece suit and long nails’. And gays at school should behave like normal students; lesbians should not insist on wearing trousers and gays should not insist on wearing skirts. Bhuti jokes that for some it was easy to come out to family and friends, ‘because your families always called you intombazone’ [157].

Throughout the book Reid shows that the Ermano ladies had their own very firm ideas about how to be a real gay, and weren't shy about expressing their dislike for people who didn't conform.  It isn't only "activists" who try to impose a standard norm on the myriad processes, performances, desires and identities that constitute gay life in the area of his fieldwork  This isn't a standoff between a freely-chosen local model and one imposed from without.  For example, Reid quotes his informant Nathi, who

regarded himself as a real gay. He was born this way and had no time for ‘fake gays’: ‘Me, I was born like this, Graeme, so I see the others they are changing, you see? They are no longer gays. They are fake. To be a real gay you are born like this and you don’t have a feeling for ladies [women].’ He spoke with contempt and disapproval of Sipho, originally from Driefontein and now based in Johannesburg: ‘He wants to fuck the guys and then he wants others to fuck him? Uh-uh.’ Nathi is not sure, but he thinks this has something to do with ‘white gays’. Sipho, Nathi says, is attracted to white gays and he has evidence: ‘You remember at Andrew’s engagement party? Sipho had a cell phone and he was phoning a white gay' [164-5]

Nathi's reaction to gays who don't fit his model is basically the same as that of  the African "traditionalists" Reid quotes on 225-6, who denounce homosexuality as un-African, something brought in from outside; Nathi agrees, but only about constructions of sex between men that he doesn't share.  Reid also quotes a gent, Samuel, who told him, "It is a style. In fact, it is a new style, a new style that is a fashion" (144). Reid admits that the "idea of homosexuality as fashionable is not a new one" (145), but his heart isn't in it.  The thing is, sex between males may be "a new style" to Samuel, but it isn't new in Africa.  Neither is the gendered gent/lady model that Samuel calls a "fashion."  The ladies want to be fashionable and modern, but this only applies to their clothes, makeup, and hairstyle: they not only have no interest in Reid's modern global international gay model, they condemn it.

What may be new is the language of rights and sexual orientation as identity that Bhuti used in the workshop.  But he also multiplied identities: look at the list of words on his sheet of newsprint: "homosexuality; heterosexuality; transvestite; transsexual; hermaphrodite; bisexual; gay; lesbian; butch; femme; dragging queen."  They're a mixture of sexual-orientation language and language about gender.  The audience, Reid says, paid close attention to these words, and some told him they found them useful.  By contrast, the 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 same problem arises in the US, as I know from experience, and I doubt it's a "modern" one.  (I don't think such professionals should be designated the owners of modernity or Westernness; at most they are only a small part of either one.  This is one of the problems with orthodox Foucauldians: partly because they are generally professionals themselves, they are too willing to let the 19th-century European medical professional model of homosexuality be homosexuality.  It isn't.  It's a limited, inaccurate, and unrepresentative conception of homosexuality, and that's leaving aside the fact that it's basically a rebranding of older prescientific models anyway.)  Insofar as the Johannesburg professionals assumed a "modern" concept of sexual object-choice, it doesn't seem to have been apparent or a stumbling block for their audience, who were quite ready to embrace a modern discourse of laws and rights and assimilate it to their own styles of being gay.

Reid also seems rather confused about what "activism" entails.  He tries to tie it to the Western internationalists, but he has to acknowledge that gay activism in South Africa "was at home in the anti-apartheid movement, affiliated to the United Democratic Front and participating in political protest" (260) with an eye to the world outside.  Activism covers a wide range of behavior from fighting cops in the streets, like the Stonewall girls, anti-apartheid activists, and students in Chile today, to wearing suits and talking to bureaucrats.

One early instance of gay activism in South Africa involved three teenaged gay boys who 1994 went to their (Western, Christian) school "wearing make-up and their own versions of the girls’ red and black uniform. Dumisani recalled that Ayanda wore a particularly tight skirt, while he and Siyanda opted to wear trousers and high-heel shoes" (142).  They weren't harassed or criticized, and reported that even the teachers encouraged them.  Activism as such doesn't have a dress code, no matter that some factions try to impose one.

One reason the "modern" construction of "the homosexual" was developed was because the traditional ones were inadequate.  There were many people the gendered model didn't fit; maybe most people. Judging from Reid's account, ladies aren't all that interested in what gents think about their involvement with feminine but male-bodied partners.  The lady/gent model relies, in fact, on neither partner thinking about it very much.  This is performance (though not performativity).  The model works all right for some of them, though there are a number of acknowledged problems with it: miners may have provided for their boy-wives, but the township gents don't provide for their ladies -- usually it's the other way around, and ladies complain a lot about "gold diggers" who are only interested in them for their money.  It wouldn't do, of course, for anyone to point out that in this respect the gents are playing a "woman's" role, but that's one of the contradictions in the lady/gent model.

What happens if a gent starts to realize that he likes, even prefers, a male-bodied partner?  That's the beginnings of a "modern" gay identity.  It really has nothing to do with modernity per se, nor with the West.  It seems to me that many modern, even post-modern, Western queer theorists want to privilege heterosexuality: it annoys them as much as it does a Christian traditionalist that some people have rebelled against the assumption that sexuality inherently and inevitably must involve a male and a female partner, whether anatomical or fictive, against the evidence that many people discover and reinvent a nongendered pattern all by themselves.  Instead these postmodern Westerners agree with the traditionalists by blaming homosexuality on foreign influence and contamination: no one would have done this if "modern" "Western" "international" outside agitators hadn't corrupted their innocent minds.

Many people claim that "gay" is too narrow a category to work as an identity, though the adoption and redefinition of the word around the world indicates the opposite.  But the lady/gent model of male/male sexuality is too narrow a category even in the townships of South Africa.  It excludes people who practice homosexuality in a less-gendered or non-gendered way, and not by accident.

I recognize that many people react to the discovery of a non-gendered homosexuality by rejecting and denigrating gendered homosexuality, claiming authenticity only for their preferred pattern.  I don't want to claim that either model has more authenticity or should be privileged.  Both models are real and authentic. I think we need to recognize that there is not only one way to feel, act on, and construct "homosexuality" -- no one model represents "real gays"; real gays come in a variety of models -- but can we?  Many people's brains shut down in the face of the problem.  I don't believe it's inevitable, but clearly a more accurate picture of sexuality, which recognizes its complexity and contradictions, is more difficult to hold onto and use, even in academic work, than I thought.  What I think is needed is an "identity" that can cover a variety of styles of same-sex eroticism.  We already have one, "gay", which doesn't have a pejorative history as "queer" does, and it has caught on around the world.  It might be that it has done so because it's not indigenous in other cultures; on the other hand, it is usually assimilated to local models, as it was in South Africa.

Why Don't We Do It in the Road?

If only gay people would keep their sexuality to themselves, and be like heterosexuals, who keep it private. But no, we just have to do it everywhere!

(I admit that at first I thought this wedding took place during an actual game, but that would probably cost a lot more.)

The Intelligent White Person's Guide to First Nations Sexuality

I've begun reading Me Sexy: An Exploration of Native Sex and Sexuality (Douglas & McIntyre, 2008), edited by Drew Hayden Taylor, and I have a question about the opening paragraph of the Introduction:

When I told people I was thinking about putting together a book about the world of Native sexuality, the two comments I got back most often were: (1) "That will be a short book" and (2) "Isn't that a contradiction in terms?"  Usually these comments were said with a knowing smile, but I knew there was a grain of social belief buried deep within.  And I thought, "If only they knew..." [1]

Okay, two questions, actually.  One: who are the "people" who made these comments?  Were they "Natives", or were they "whites"?  I think it makes a difference in how to take their comments, since they could be taken as self-mocking humor in the former case.  Two: I'm going to assume that they were white (or "Last Nations," as they're known in Canada), since the book as a whole is directed at a non-Indian audience, a sort of guided tour whose point is that we whites are the ones who are hung up about sex because of our Western binaries and our Christian culture, while Natives are closer to nature and in touch with their bodies and not uptight about sex, but also their sexuality is infused with the spiritual and the Sacred.  This stance puts the book into a double bind, since such stereotypes are also a standard part of white propaganda about non-whites... But I digress.  My second question is: Are people really that clueless, to think that any group of people doesn't have a lot to say about sexuality?  Oh hell, I know they are.

So Me Sexy, which I'm about two-thirds of the way through as I write this, is probably marginally more self-aware than a live sex show for tourists in 1950s Trujillo-era Havana, since the discussion of sexuality in arty and academic sectors of North American Anglophone society has come some little distance in the past sixty years.  The writers included come mostly from those arty and academic sectors, after all, so their discourse is mostly ironic and knowing, and it's also self-conscious and didactic, to let the reader know that the sexy talk is just a come-on for the chalk talk that is to follow, which is for our own good.  But then it's also reminiscent of the medical/social framework that pornography used to use as a defense against prosecution: this is not just a dirty book but a serious educational exploration of problems of sexual adjustment in our society today.  (As I recall, even as late as the early 70s, Deep Throat began with a disclaimer to advise the audience that it was really about an ordinary woman's quest to achieve a healthy sexual adjustment.)  The subtitle of the book underscores the ambiguity, which I'd like to think is intentionally ironic: An Exploration of Native Sex and Sexuality -- so our handsome, hawk-eyed (or proud, beautiful, raven-haired) Native guide and interpreter will lead us into an uncharted wilderness of the human heart and naughty bits.

I checked out Me Sexy after seeing it cited and recommended in several recent books I've read lately by Native American scholars, and I have to say that what bothers me most about it is how Western it is.  I'm not really surprised, since as I say it's clearly written and compiled with a white readership in mind.  The editor remarks that after "a vice-chief from the Assembly of First Nations" asked him, "Have you ever thought about writing about something important, like self-government?" (1) instead of "the dominant culture's perception of Native sexuality", he asked ten people at a powwow "which they would be more interested in reading or thought was more relevant to their lives: an essay on self-government or an essay on Native sexuality.  I don't think I have to tell you which answer I got" (2).  I think that if I were Indian, I'd be interested but disappointed in the writings gathered here, since they were written for the education and titillation of whites, rather than mine.  I dare to say so, though I'm not Indian, because I've seen analogous works "about" gay life but made for a straight audience, such as Philadelphia.  The trouble with such works is that even the intended audience shouldn't trust them, because they're produced with an eye on public relations and Our Image, which is bound to distort the content and the message, so that the target audience believes it has learned more, and come closer to the subject people, than in fact it has.  Does that correct the dominant culture's perception, or reinforce it?

Now, I don't mean that Indians are required to educate, let alone titillate me with the inside dish on their sex lives.  But I do think that any PR exercise such as this has a corrupting effect on the producers as well as on the intended audience, and I speak as one who has been observing and debating this question for decades in my own community.  PR productions by gay people for straight audiences certainly corrupt: the producers and spokespeople may even begin to believe that real Homo-Americans are monogamous, clean and sober, responsible adults -- just like heterosexuals are!  Then they begin to lie, even to themselves, about the less-PR-compliant aspects of their lives -- just as heterosexuals do!  Such PR material lacks a subconscious: it shows selfless, truth-seeking scientists who care only about decoding the secrets of nature and not about Nobel Prizes or fudging data; it shows honest leaders of the Free World intervening humanitarianly to protect human rights in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya (or honest leaders of the Soviet bloc protecting Czechoslovakia and Hungary against the depredations of American imperialism); it shows decent Homo-Americans living in ranch homes with white picket fences, saying the Pledge of Allegiance and clamoring at the recruiting offices to serve and defend their country; it shows spiritual but refreshingly raunchy Natives celebrating their sexuality as an embodiment of the Sacred.  Ambivalence and ambiguity, let alone an underside, are neither depicted nor admitted.

So, what to do?  One dilemma any outsider faces is that his or her good intentions will also be suspect: am I really interested in Native sexuality out of human fellow-feeling and acceptable curiosity, or am I a voyeur in search of exotica and an Other on whom I can project the parts of myself I don't wish to own?  I think such questions can only be dealt with face-to-face, not in print.  The editor tells the reader, "Think of [Me Sexy] as a 'How to make love to a First Nations person without sexually appropriating them' type of book" (3), which I think overreaches just a tad.  One of the contributors promises, "Being an Ally Is Sexy!" and offers "five things you can do" (48).  If only it were so easy, so simple.  But I suppose it's nice to be reassured, even if the promises are still for the tourist, sexual or otherwise, who will soon finish the book and be back at home.

Which returns me to my opening question.  Should I assume that American Indian sexuality is Other?  Me Sexy seems to take for granted that I do, and even that I should.  But I don't think I do, except that every other human being is Other to me (as I am to them), and when I read or listen to their words, or come together with them sexually, I'm being invited into their world to learn about them, not just as an individual but as a member of some larger group.  I don't blame Drew Hayden Taylor and his contributors for wanting to keep me at a distance -- there are very good reasons for them to do so, and no one owes anybody else their soul -- but Me Sexy feels less like an exploration than a theme park, a good-natured and professional 21st-century sideshow performance that promises knowledge but delivers something less.  I've been around the block enough to know that there's a lot more to be learned, not just by me but by these writers.