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.

Hey, I Just Met You and I Know This Is Crazy, But Let Me Beat You Up

Early in my gay career I noticed that some people (gay or straight) were more comfortable around gay people who were gender-compliant -- that is, they behaved as men and women were officially supposed to behave.  Others were more comfortable around gay people who weren't gender-compliant, or "stereotypical" -- that is, they behaved the way people of the other sex were supposed to behave.  Each comfort pattern made sense in its own terms.  The former group liked men to 'act like men,' and women to 'act like women.'  I suspect that this made it easier for them not to think about what gay men did sexually with each other, but that's only a guess.  The latter group liked men who desired men to 'act like women.'  Perhaps it made it easier for them to think of sex between men as something a man would never do; if a man who coupled with other men 'acted like a woman,' they could distance the activity from something they, as manly men, would ever do.  Perhaps they were just more comfortable knowing who was gay, based on appearance and mannerism, and who wasn't.  I repeat that in both cases, I'm speculating.  The different expectations of how gay people should gender themselves, however, were clearly there.

Only a few years before I came out, homophile organizations like Mattachine and the Daughters of Bilitis were instructing gay men and lesbians to behave like 'normal' men and women (out of bed, at least).  Ironically, gender prescriptions for women at least were changing, broadening heterosexual women's options.  Lesbians were pressuring each other to be more femme just as straight women were becoming more butch.  I think it was DOB honchos Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon who observed, in their 1972 book Lesbian / Woman, that if you see a stomping butch in jeans, hiking boots, and backpack on the Appalachian trail, she'll probably have a husband and children with her; the lesbians will be tottering along in capri pants and flimsy shoes, trying to look feminine and fit into society.  But then, as they implied, PR-conscious strategies generally imposed more restrictive norms on gay people than heterosexuals imposed on themselves.  If it's not forbidden, it's mandatory; if it's not mandatory, it's forbidden.

To a great extent, the call for gender compliance hid behind the excuse of What the Heterosexuals Will Think.  Often it reflected gender-compliant gays and lesbians' wish to impose their styles of gender and respectability on all gay men and lesbians.  (As I've argued before, PR-conscious gays don't really care that much about what upsets straights: when most heterosexuals were offended by the idea of same-sex marriage or gays in the military, these activists brushed their objections aside with derision. Only the standards they shared with bigots had to be respected.)  But then, gender-noncompliant gays and lesbians were just as willing to universalize their styles as the way to be gay.  The idea that different people express gender and sexuality differently, and that these differences should be allowed and respected, is still too radical for many of us.

This realization led me to conclude that no single gendered style was going to win us acceptance.  If we worked at passing for normal gendered citizens, that would make us acceptable as gay people to many heterosexuals -- but not to all of them.  Many other heterosexuals would prefer that we conform to the gender norms governing the "opposite" sex.  No matter which course we chose, we would win over some heterosexuals and alienate others.  That's not to say that we should ignore what heterosexuals think, only that we shouldn't let it determine how we live our lives.  Whether we try a public-relations approach of marketing ourselves to straights, insisting that we are just like them, or work at education, teaching them about diversity and how to live with it, will depend on what issues we're working on.

There are also different levels of stereotype-breaking.  One, call it first-order, is to defend and protect people who "fit the stereotype."  There's nothing wrong with a boy's being a sissy, a grown man being a drag queen, a girl being a tomboy, a grown woman being a butch truck driver.  But while being allowed to fit the stereotype can be liberating, it can also close off many options.  For Graeme Reid, hairstyling is the quintessential black gay South African occupation, and many ladies exhibit talent with hair and ask for nothing more than their own salon and roster of adoring clients.  But here's where second-order stereotype-breaking comes in.  One of Reid's informants, however, Nathi,

did not see hairstyling as his chosen career ... When he was 23 years old, he said that 'since he has schooling', he would rather be doing something else.  However, two years later he was still in the same job and appeared to have settled into the life of a hairstylist [120-1].

This doesn't mean that hairstyling is in Nathi's genes, however.  It probably has something to do with the widespread poverty that still pervades South African life, especially for blacks.  Most wealth in South Africa is still concentrated in white hands.  As Reid shows, hairstylists work long hours and don't make all that much money, so attending night school, let alone college, requires more determination than most people have.  But it also suggests that while gays may be accepted, even celebrated, as long as they behave as gays are stereotypically expected to behave, they are under considerable pressure, both from straight society and from gay society, not to stray outside the bounds that have been set for them.  Another of Reid's informants, working as an informal apprentice in a hair salon, said that "he would rather do catering or fashion design" (118), both of which are comfortably gendered for feminine gay men.  But what if he wanted to play soccer, or become a doctor or lawyer or astronomer?  Those occupations would be largely closed off to him for class reasons, but I wonder how much encouragement he'd get from his gay friends.  (You can't play football!  You'd muss your hair.  You might break a nail!)  Letting people occupy a gender- (or race- or class- ) defined box is all very well, but those boxes need to be expanded to give them more options.

Reid writes:

Local gender norms are fundamental to the ways in which same-sex sexual identities are expressed and performed in public. Gender norms also provide the framework for acceptable and transgressive forms of gay identity. Yet the deployment of an overtly feminine identity by gay men cannot only be understood in terms of imitating a heterosexual norm or unwittingly perpetuated gender stereotypes. In other words, a feminine gender identity is not simply imposed or adopted in the face of patriarchal pressure, the unrelenting logic of which would render gays effeminate and thus unthreatening to heterosexual masculinity [122].

What I wrote earlier indicates why I think this won't do.  Reid does recognize that there are both "acceptable and transgressive forms of gay identity."  In the South African townships, an "acceptable" form means that a man embraces a feminine style in varying degrees, which determines (while also enabling) his role in sexual expression no less than his social role.  A "transgressive" form in the same locale severs gender from sexual role, so that a man can be normatively masculine but still enjoy being penetrated, or take sexual pleasure in other ways.  But as I indicated, for a man to be a lady is both "acceptable" and "transgressive," in that he abandons normative expectations for males while adopting normative female styles; for a man to embrace what Reid considers an urban, male, activist, Western gay identity is also both "acceptable" and "transgressive," since such a man is normatively masculine except in his sexual activity.  Both styles appease some people while outraging others.  It's not possible to please everyone, so it becomes necessary to think about what one wants personally and how to get it in the face of opposition, which one will encounter no matter what one does.

It seems to me, by the way, that Reid is generalizing the gender norms of poor black people in the South African townships to all of South African society.  I imagine there are gay black men in South Africa who express gender differently; it won't do to accuse them, as Reid does, of conforming to "Western" concepts.  He assumes a much greater degree of uniformity than you'll find in any society -- including the townships, as his own examples show.

As for Reid's assertion that "the deployment of an overtly feminine identity by gay men cannot only be understood in terms of perpetuating a heterosexual norm" and so on (emphasis mine), those terms can't be completely dismissed either.  No one grows up in a vacuum.  A child learns her first language not by freely inventing one, but by observing and imitating the language used by the people around her; she also learns, at roughly the same age as she learns language, that gender matters, and can't simply go her own way in that arena either.  To reject one restrictive gender norm generally results in adopting another restrictive gender norm -- if I'm not going to be a Daddy, then I'll be a Mommy -- and yet no one conforms totally to those norms.  And in any case, there is considerable pressure to conform; if we all resist that pressure to some degree, we also surrender to it in some degree.  The penalties for nonconformity range from reproving, nagging, shunning, and harassment to exclusion, violence, and even death.

As Reid recognizes, adopting an overtly feminine style frees some gay men from the restrictions of masculinity, but it also exposes them to the restrictions and vulnerability of femininity.  Ladies, like heterosexual women, are menaced and victimized by theft, robbery, harassment, rape, and other violence.  Reid tells how, soon after his arrival in Ermano, he had to contend with the attentions of gents who said things like

I love you.  I love you so much.  Let us go and talk where no one can see us.  I know I am a black man and you are white, but just give me a chance to show you how much I love you.  I want you to be my girlfriend [52].

Such come-ons could shift from "flirtatious" to "openly aggressive" in a heartbeat.  Nor was this behavior comfortable for the black ladies: "Tsepo, who was with me in the car at the time, said, 'I hate it when people say "I love you" when they don't even know you" (53).  Some of this is directly tied to their being gay; some of it follows from being feminine, and even adopting the most respectable feminine image, that of the church lady and matron, doesn't immunize women or gay men against these dangers.

It appears that gents don't necessarily require their male paramours to be ladies who embody "a feminine gender identity."  The guys above could pursue Reid although he (whatever his personal style) was not a lady.  His lady informants, when he moved to Ermano, had trouble reading him: was he a gent or a lady?  Despite his failure to meet full feminine standards, they quickly classified and adopted him as one of them.

Reid continues to reify "performance" and confuse it with performativity, though he does finally recognize that "After all, women, like ladies, also engage in the daily performances that constitute femininity" (137).  As with all role theory, there are serious problems with seeing daily behavior as a role or performance, but confusing it with performativity just distorts Reid's intellectual framework.

I concede that this confusion has become normative in gender studies, but I'm not a big fan of normativity.  (Normativity is a pervasive social fact, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be criticized.)  When I pointed out this problem to one gay academic, he dismissed it by acknowledging that although it began as a misunderstanding of performative speech, the scholars involved were entitled to redefine the term to mean whatever they wanted it to mean.  Well, no they aren't: not if they continue to cite J. L. Austin as authority for the concept, and besides, in serious discourse, you are not entitled to play Humpty Dumpty -- especially if you're unaware you're doing it.  I found this example in an academic book on "making schools and communities welcoming to LGBT youth" by three concerned teachers.

Language is a tool. As such, we believe that speech is performative – it does things. Words invite or exclude, recognize or erases, empower or intimidate. Far from what the children’s chant would have us believe, words are sticks and stones.*

As authority for these assertions, they cite J. L. Austin's How to Do Things With Words, which introduced and popularized the concept of performative speech acts.  But Austin didn't, as far as I can tell, say that all speech is performative, as the authors above claim.  He argued that certain types of speech are performative, as distinct from other ways in which language can be used.  Saying flatly that "we believe that speech is performative" and citing Austin is like saying that "everything is relative" and citing Einstein's paper on Special Relativity.

*Vaccaro, Annemarie; August, Gerri; Kennedy, Megan S.. Safe Spaces: Making Schools and Communities Welcoming to LGBT Youth (Santa Barbara CA: Praeger, 2012), p. 95.

Another Binary Bites the Dust

I've begun reading Graeme Reid's How to Be a Real Gay: Gay Identities in Small-Town South-Africa (University of KwaZulu Natal Press, 2013), based on fieldwork among gay men who outside South Africa's big cities, and it looks interesting so far.  But as usual, I'm having problems with his theoretical apparatus.  He wastes a lot of time discussing identity issues, and getting them wrong.

But let me begin by quoting a passage where Reid almost gets it right.  (In all quotations I've silently removed references to other authors, which Reid gives in the form of [Author Date: Page Number], so as to avoid unnecessary ellipses [...].)

Alan Sinfield provides a succinct review of various cultural and historical accounts of homosexual identities. His book On Sexuality and Power refers to the two general modes of conceptualizing homosexuality in different historical and cultural contexts. The first is in terms of gender, focusing on signs of ‘inversion’: femininity in men and masculinity in women. The second is the Western model in which sexual object choice defines identity, or ‘sexual orientation’. According to Gayle Rubin: ‘Since the mid-nineteenth century there has been a slowly evolving distinction between homosexual object choice and cross-gender or trans-gender behaviour’ – which suggests a gradual shift towards a more homogeneous model of sexual identity [37].

I like Alan Sinfield; I've learned a lot from him, and I often agree with him.  I'm not sure he's really to blame for Reid's "the two general modes of conceptualizing homosexuality in different historical and cultural contexts."  Whoever is at fault, it's wrong. Even in the "Western" tradition, inversion hasn't been the only mode: the pederastic mode, involving older and younger men, without any feminizing of the junior partner, has always co-existed with the gendered (inversion) mode.  "Sodomy," the dominant Western-European concept from the Middle Ages to the nineteen century, doesn't seem to have involved inversion, at least not necessarily, nor did Kertbeny's original notion of "homosexuality."  Kinsey tried to decouple inversion from homosexuality, but encountered intense resistance not only from the public but from other sex researchers, who complacently believe that they've moved "beyond Kinsey."

In South Africa, the pederastic and gendered modes have also co-existed, as Reid knows: he recounts the practice of "mine wives," in which miners took younger men as "wives."  It didn't really involve inversion, though the couples were gendered, because inversion as nineteenth-century medicine defined it is a congenital, lifelong condition.  By contrast the mine "wives" saved the money they were given by their "husbands," then went home, became men, and married women.  Eventually they went to work in the mines and got boy-wives of their own.  (Reid also cites evidence that the mine-marriage custom wasn't, as some thought, purely situational: as with prison homosexuality, men who took mine wives often had sexual experience with boys back at home, before they took up mining.  (The same pattern was typical of classical Greek pederasty, though the Greek eromenos didn't become the fictive wife of his erastes; the eromenos was expected to grow up, marry a woman, and become an erastes himself.)  Inversion is actually a "modern," "Western" concept itself; we're talking about models of sex between males that always co-existed, rather than succeeded one another.

Which is why Rubin is also wrong: the inversion model persists to this day in Western scientific concepts of homosexuality.  Research into the nature and origins of "sexual orientation" almost always looks for the woman's hypothalamus in a man's brain, or the man's ring finger on a woman's hand.  At the grassroots level, even those American gays who decry inverted stereotypes fall back on them like someone whose belly pops back out after he's sucked it in for a long tiring period. This probably says more about the limitations of scientists than it does about the validity of the model, of course.

Reid starts off well in his next paragraph, but quickly wanders off:

The imagined homogeneity of a ‘Western model’ is a powerful idiom for imagining ‘own’ and ‘other’ in relation to sexual identity. In the classic contemporary Western model of homosexuality both partners in a same-sex relationship would automatically be classified as homosexual, based on sexual object choice. Sinfield, echoing Anthony Giddens, shows how the transformation of heterosexual intimacy – of gender roles, norms and ideals exemplified in the culturally sanctioned ideal of ‘companionate marriage’ – is reflected in the ‘egalitarian model’ as the ideal of same-sex relationships in the West. But the same author traces also a genealogy of difference – showing how differences in age, race, gender and class have historically been eroticized in gay male relationships. One can wonder, indeed, whether the supposed generalization of the equality model as the modern form of being gay does not undermine the continuing importance of difference for desire, even in the ‘modern’ West [37-38].

He begins well by pointing out that the "homogeneity" of a "Western model" is "imagined," but he can't seem to hold onto that thought.  I don't see how the "contemporary model" can be called "classic" when it is so recent, even on the account of its proponents.  The word "gay" often referred to a campy, effeminate style of homosexual male, which is one reason many older gay men objected to its adoption after Stonewall.  (If you read the early Gay Liberation literature -- see Karla Jay and Allen Young's anthology Out of the Closets for example -- you'll find that gender transgression played a prominent role.)  The "modern" homosexual that Foucault wrote about was the invert, not the gender-compliant gay man or lesbian of contemporary American PR.  When scientists (and those who buy into their theories) talk about "sexual orientation" they aren't talking about "sexual object choice" but about inversion, since they assume that males who desire other males sexually are really biological women internally even if they don't show it externally by gesture and dress.

The official ungendered mode of contemporary Homo-Americanism is more often honored in the breach than in the observance.  I don't believe it should necessarily be called "egalitarian"; I think Reid is confusing "equality" with sameness here, as so many people do.  He continues:

This is evident in Hugh McLean and Linda Ncgobo’s investigation into gay life in South African townships, where the term ‘gay’ is incorporated into an existing lexicon of skesana, injonga and imbube – all of which are gendered terms that refer to a division between active and passive roles.  In this scenario, it is quite possible for a man to have ongoing sexual relations with a member of the same sex and yet still retain an unquestionably masculine gender identity and, most importantly, a heterosexual orientation [38-39].

Reid has read Annick Prieur's Mema's House (Chicago, 1998), about effeminate gay men in contemporary Mexico City – in fact he cites her earlier in the same paragraph. Prieur wasn’t the first to notice that ‘effeminate’ gay men are anything but passive, but she commented:

Some added that they enjoyed being reserved during the initial flirt, letting the man take the initiative. As far as I can judge, however, this is far from true; they are about as coy as starving ravens. Flaca is one of those who claimed to be coy. But when I asked her how she expresses this, it all boiled down to her not actually grabbing the sexual organs of the men she accosts [174].

Prieur has other appropriately skeptical observations about her informants' "selective" claims to normative femininity near the above passage; see 172-176.  Maybe Reid's smalltown South African informants are different; I'll see as I read on.  But the active/passive dichotomy is always tricky, which is why I prefer Martin Hoffman's substitution of insertor/receptor in his 1968 study The Gay World (Basic Books).

Whether masculine men who play only the insertor role with feminine men on an ongoing basis can claim "an unquestionably masculine gender identity and ... a heterosexual orientation", as Reid declares, has often been hotly debated. At the very least, Reid is confusing "orientation" with "identity" here, and he seems to be imposing "Western" vocabulary on his subjects.  How much can it matter, especially in an orthodox Foucauldian framework, whether a man is classified as "homosexual" in a society where "homosexual" and "homosexuality" are not the standard terms?  Reid has not, that I've noticed so far, talked about the languages of his informants, but since he thanks those who interpreted and translated for him, it appears that they mostly didn't speak English except for a few loan words: "gay" (not used in the "egalitarian," "Western" sense), "ladies" and "gents."  Probably they spoke only a little more Afrikaans.  Whether a man who penetrated another man was considered "homosexual" is not relevant in such a context.  It sounds as if maintaining one's identity as a man (in the local languages) is what counts, and that can be settled by definition.

Though not always.  In his account of the trade/queer subculture, mostly in New York City seventy years ago, Barry Reay reported that one young man ("trade" according to the rules) enjoyed being penetrated by his queer friends, but began to worry about it until his friends casuistically stretched the category to reassure him that he was still a man.  According to the trade/queer classification, however, a guy who enjoys being penetrated is a queer.  It's in the eye of the beholder, I guess.

It's also questionable how universal those classifications are, even in societies where (Western anthropologists and queer theorists assure us) they are dominant.  In Caribbean Pleasure Industry (Chicago, 2007), Mark Padilla's study of Dominican hustlers, he tells how one of his informants was being kept by a local maricón until his novia found out.

But she saw the guy, and – on top of everything the guy was a real maricón -- and I told her, “No! He’s a maricón! I’m not a maricón, I’m a bugarrón!” … And she said “What do you mean you’re not a maricón, if you live with a man?!” And I said they weren’t the same thing. “What do you mean?” And I said, “No, because he’s the one who receives, and I’m the one who gives.”

Evidently the informant's girlfriend hadn't been properly, carefully taught about her own culture's norms.  (Incidentally, though Dominicans presumably know the activo/pasivo binary, it's significant this guy speaks of "giving" and "receiving," closer to Hoffman's terminology.)  Despite the certainty with which defenders of the trade/queer binary assert that a guy who screws another guy obviously isn't queer himself, not everybody agrees -- and the dissidents aren't all Western-trained gay activists in thrall to the modern concept of The Homosexual.  I think Reid realizes this, a little, but he too is in caught in the Modern Homosexual's toils.

The clear distinction between a heterosexual ‘outside’ and a homosexual ‘inside’ is blurred. And, in an Ermelo lexicon, amongst gays themselves the presence of an at least nominally heterosexual man seemed to be essential to erotic desire and sexual congress. For gays, heterosexuality was intimately bound up with their experiences as homosexuals. Such sexual norms and values, gender roles and sexual practices serve to blur the borders of the homo/heterosexual binary in fundamental ways. The inside/outside model along the lines suggested by Fuss and Rubin can only be sustained in a cultural context in which the boundaries of the homo/hetero binary remain intact [40]. 

Which means: nowhere. There is no such cultural context anywhere, that I know of.  All distinctions, however ‘clear’ in theory, are blurred in practice, because the boundaries are always permeable.  But on Reid's own account, there are no "nominally heterosexual" men in this community; that label doesn't appear to be in the Ermelo lexicon.  The hetero/homo binary isn't a significant concept among his informants: the gent/lady binary is, and that's not the same thing.

The Question Is, Which Is To Be Master -- That's All

As I continue to read Graeme Reid's How to Be a Real Gay, I sympathize with his difficulties in trying to make sense of the styles of sex between males that he encountered in small-town South Africa.  I'm struggling with the same problem myself, and I don't pretend to have solutions.  Still, I think other writers have done a better job of describing the complexities of the subject -- Annick Prieur, for example, writing about cross-dressing feminine homosexuales in Mema's House.  Where Reid writes about a South African lady changing from his respectable church-lady outfit ("a bottle-green dress and a white shirt, headscarf and a matching belt", 98) into informal hair-salon wear ("tight-fitting white pants, stylish boots, earrings that were long enough to brush his shoulders and a delicate pink blouse that cascaded down his left thigh, offset with an orange jacket"):

There would be nothing remarkable about women church members changing from formal to informal wear, but because Nathi was not a woman, but a lady, his clothing was part of an ongoing and self-conscious performance of femininity.  In both churches and hair salons, gays frequently presented themselves as feminine, but in these two different spaces there were, of course, completely different styles [98].

Like many writers who refer to performativity, Reid seems to think that only drag queens and fairies are performing femininity.  As I understand it, though, that approach recognizes that even the born-female, XX-chromosome born-female church lady is "performing" femininity just as self-consciously.  She, or her daughter, may well dress in "completely different styles" in other spaces.  (Note to self: read Gender Trouble before the summer is quite over!)  Femininity and masculinity are not single, monolithic constructs.  But even so, changing outfits for different environments is part of the normative femininity that ladies aspire to.

Prieur, by contrast, writes:

So the jotas have considerable scientific support when they claim to have been born both feminine and homosexual. Still it seems a paradox that these persons who so actively go about forming their femininity, through makeup, dressing, and bodily transformations, at the same time insist that they are born feminine and are merely undertaking the necessary adjustments. Even if I am open to the belief that there are some innate or early founded differences that orient some more toward a heterosexual and other more toward a homosexual preference, some toward a rather masculine and other towards a rather feminine personality, I also believe that the actors' own essentialist interpretation of these differences accentuates them, polarizes them, and creates binary oppositions out of a continuum. A theory of innate factors cannot offer an exhaustive explanation of homosexuality [115].

Again, she is skeptical of the vaunted femininity of her informants:

Others, like Lupita, told me they liked housework. ... Having lived with some of them, however, I have good reason to doubt that they really like housework that much. Confronted with a stack of dirty dishes their femininity evaporates, and they start to resemble lazy teenagers. Not that this is any proof that their femininity is superficial - I suspect their sisters are not always fond of doing the dishes either. But their sisters can refrain from liking without much ado. (That they lack the same possibilities to escape it is another question) [176].

Prieur and Reid are writing about analogous milieux, though her vestidas live in Mexico City, not a small town (the country/city binary plays a major role in Reid's analysis).  The odd thing, though, is that Reid has so far been claiming that ladies are social women,  just as their gents are socially men, because in their culture gender trumps bodies and sexual orientation is determined by gender rather than sexual object choice.  (As I've argued before, if gender really did trump body configuration in this construction, effeminate men would pair up at least sometimes with butch women. but it doesn't work that way.)  On this logic, there should be no cultural difference between a lady with a penis and a woman with a vagina.  But there definitely is.

So, for instance, Reid writes about

a context where transgression of moral and social norms appeared to be determined not so much by sexual acts, but rather through the respect or transgression of gender boundaries. In other words, a heterosexual man could have sex with an effeminate gay without ruffling many feathers in the ambit of social decorum or jeopardizing his status as heterosexual. What does this way about the boundaries between (in Fuss’s formulation) the heterosexual ‘inside’ and the homosexual ‘outside’? Homosexual acts, per se, do not constitute homosexuality and same-sex practices can and do form part of heterosexual experience [39-40].

This is congruent with the common picture of Latin American activo/pasivo sex between males, where a man's manliness supposedly isn't compromised by penetrating another male, especially an effeminate one.  (However, "heterosexual" is as foreign a term and concept in this context as "homosexual.")  In practice, it's a bit more complicated than that:

The most pervasive [generalization] is that being gay in these environs is almost invariably synonymous with being effeminate or, in local parlance, a lady or sisButi. According to jolly-talk, ‘straight’ men can be ‘somehow bended’. Bhuti explained to me that in ‘location language’, the phrase ‘somehow bended’ refers to ‘straight’ men known or suspected of being available as sexual partners to gays. Those who are ‘somehow bended’ are also referred to as gents.

So it seems that there is a difference, or a distinction, between being a man and being a gent. And that distinction indicates sexual object choice as distinct from gender. Which is not quite what Reid has been saying.

These are important categories, as ‘straight’ men remain the primary object of desire for gays. Injonga also refers to a ‘gay butch’, someone who is attracted to and involved with gays, but who maintains a male social and sexual role in a same-sex relationship.

Sexual object choice again.

This term is almost the same as a gent, but the subtle distinction is that the term suggests a primary, albeit not exclusive, attraction or sexual involvement with gays [who are males, even if they are ladies - DM], whereas a gent is primarily heterosexual, in orientation, if not in practice.

Wait a minute. I thought the idea of ‘orientation’ (meaning ‘sexual object choice’) was utterly foreign to these kids. What I see here is a blurring of those clear boundaries, and it indicates an imagined distinction that may not really be a difference. It indicates that the ladies, at any rate, know the difference between a man who’ll have sex with feminine males on the side, because he's been "somehow bended," and a man who prefers to have sex with feminine males out of desire.

A lady is a femme, who ideally maintains a female social and sexual role in relation to a gent, a ‘somehow bended’ or a butch. This gender binary is respected and adhered to by both ladies and gents. It is an orthodoxy that was constantly confirmed and reinforced [or simply enforced] on daily practice and through gossip, banter and rumour. People were characterized and allocated a gender role according to this gender binary and usually the allocation seemed so self-evident that it was not worthy of comment: a lady was obviously a lady; a gent clearly a gent [60].

It also appears that non-gays in South Africa can tell the difference between gender and object-choice.  (Compare the Dominican girlfriend of the Dominican hustler I mentioned in my previous post, who wasn't convinced by her boyfriend's insistence that only the maricón he was living with was queer.)

Brian’s girlfriend discovered that he was seeing someone else when she found condoms in his room in Richard’s Bay on the KwaZulu-Natal coast. She confronted him about it. At first he told her it was another woman, but she was already suspicious. She took their child and left him, telling his mother that her son was gay. His mother denied this, saying, ‘No, I know Brian is a boy.’

But by local terms, he isn’t gay, he’s a man. So that much may be true.

But later she told Brian that he would have to ‘pack his things and go’ if he did not change his ways. Brian said that with the exception of his younger sister (whose husband also had sex with gays) his family did not accept him and spoke badly about gay people.

Hey, no problem, because Brian’s not gay. Right? Right?

However, after a short separation, Brian’s girlfriend returned. Brian said, ‘The mother of my child said no, she wants to go on with me because she loves me. So we are back together and we are still lovers. And now she is pregnant with our second child.’ He remained involved with his girlfriend, but he moved to Ermelo to put some distance between himself and his family. In Ermelo he had a primary gay partner, known amongst others as his ‘senior wife’, as well as various other gay partners. While his girlfriend knew that he had male lovers, she did not want to see them. His gay partners knew about each other. The protocol involved was that the ‘senior wife,’ Zithembe, would grant Brian permission before he took another gay lover. Zithembe was deferential to Brian, declining to be interviewed, for example, until he had received permission from his ‘husband’, Brian [64-65].

Nevertheless, "Family members can play an important role in domestic disputes.  When Wandile's boyfriend assaulted him, his family intervened and his boyfriend vowed never to beat him again" (90).

It sounds to me as though the idea that gent/lady sex is culturally indistinguishable from man/woman sex doesn't hold true for the whole culture; it holds sway mainly in gay circles, and it takes a lot of work to keep shoring it up, even there.  I'd say it's more wishful thinking than a real cultural norm; I think that distinction holds up because writers like Reid talk as though South African gay social constructions are determined by overall South African gender norms.  And just as one finds in Mexican vestida circles or among twentieth century inverts, "It is accepted as a truism that 'straight' men inevitably end up with women" (90): the invert's quest for true love, which requires a 'normal' partner, is doomed because a 'normal' partner can never really be satisfied with a partner of the same sex, even if he (or she) is of a different gender.

I also suspect that Reid may be overstating the dominance of the lady/gent model in South African homosexual practice.  Ladies are easy to study because they are visible and have a social presence in their communities; insofar as they are small-business entrepreneurs, they aim to stay in one place, unlike their often unemployed boyfriends.  As many researchers have found around the world, getting their gent partners to talk about themselves is a lot harder.  Since they insist, and their lady partners insist, that they are just regular men, they have no basis for building a community.  Reid brushes up against other models, also down-low, of sexual interaction between males.  His informant Clive, for example, also a country boy, "was first introduced to gay life in KwaThema, although he was no stranger to having sex with men. Since he was twelve he had had thigh sex with older male farm workers who brought him gifts or small amounts of cash. ‘We never kissed,’ he told me and they never spoke about it. Sometimes Clive dressed up a bit, in ‘ladies things’ (80).  No one has any idea how many such men there are, because they retreat into the shadows as soon as the sex is over.  If you're looking for "identities", as Reid is, such men may not be of much interest.

Reid also comes across evidence that the penetrator/receptor binary isn't absolute, but he relegates it to an endnote and an informant's remark that "There are things that happen behind closed doors" (96 note 22).  HIV transmission, a very serious matter in South Africa, would indicate that gents aren't as impenetrable as they or the ladies want to claim.  Some men are gents in one locale, ladies (in bed, at least) in another.  The cross-cultural evidence indicates that getting gents to talk about being penetrated is going be very difficult.

South Africans who don't fit comfortably into the lady/gent model don't have an easy time of it.  There's no indication, and probably no way to find out, how common they are, but Reid talked to several of them.  Things weren't very different in the pre-Stonewall (but still "modern" and "Western") United States, where people were pressured to fit into existing community categories.  One famous rebel was Audre Lorde, who resisted defining herself as either butch or femme, and so was regarded with distrust by other New York City lesbians.  This is why I've always been wary of "community": I quickly learned that, far from being an environment where I could Be Myself, it was a place where a different group of people would tell me who to be.  Some of Reid's informants come up against the same constraints, and they don't like them any more than I did.  What Reid calls the 'gay activist' model of homosexuality, tainted by association with the City, Modernity, and the West, can be a useful tool for carving out space in a gay community that is not much more tolerant of difference than the straight world is.

Let Me Not to the Marriage of True Academic Disciplines Admit Impediments

The marriage between Queer Theory and Post-Colonial Studies has not always been a happy one.  I've joined a Facebook group, Against Equality, affiliated with a website of the same name that is

focused on critiquing mainstream gay and lesbian politics. As queer thinkers, writers and artists, we are committed to dislodging the centrality of equality rhetoric and challenging the demand for inclusion in the institution of marriage, the US military, and the prison industrial complex via hate crimes legislation.

We want to reinvigorate the queer political imagination with fantastic possibility!

Anyone who reads this blog will recognize that, as a queer thinker, I'm a priori sympathetic to Against Equality's agenda.  I've written often on their first two concerns, and admittedly rather less on the third.  But so far I'm wary of their work.  They're too prone to throw around the word "privilege," even though as far as I can tell they're fairly privileged themselves.  (And that second paragraph is complacent bullshit.)

Privilege is always relative.  Recently on another site I saw someone, presumably white, argue that poor whites in a particularly disadvantaged county in West Virginia don't have white privilege, but he didn't provide any information about the condition of black people, if there are any, in that county.  (If there aren't any, well... )  It's not exactly a major revelation that white racism in the Jim Crow era functioned (and may even have been deliberately intended) to let poor whites have someone they could feel superior to, and to redirect anger at blacks that might otherwise have been directed at wealthy, powerful whites.  Less well-off racist whites today often complain that blacks have it better than they do: there's a lot of thwarted entitlement in that complaint.  Analogously, graduate students in the US often have it rough, but they are still privileged in terms of status and access to knowledge.  That doesn't mean they have it easy, but it does mean they need to be careful about throwing accusations of privilege at other people.  Against Equality explicitly views the current US gay movement's focus on marriage, gays in the military, and hate-crime laws as dictated by the white privilege of the current leadership.  There's truth in that, but it's an incomplete picture.

So, someone posted a link on the Against Equality page on Facebook about Benjamin Medrano Quezada, the newly-elected gay mayor of Freznillo, Zacatecas in Mexico.  "The fans at Queerty aren't too pleased about this one," commented the person who shared the link, because Medrano told the AP he isn't concerned about gay marriage.

“I’m not in favor of gay marriage, I don’t share that view, because we are still very small town … in short, we’re not prepared, in my view,” the 47-year-old gay bar owner told the AP. “Not yet, anyway, because we have strong roots in our religion, and in our customs.”

Ha ha, take that, you heteroimitative privileged gays at Queerty!  But another member of Against Equality commented mournfully, "(But *sigh* that is exactly how *not* to be critical of gay marriage.)"

Oh, really?  What is the right way to be critical of gay marriage, and who gets to decide it, especially if you're not talking about an American fundamentalist but the singing Third-World mayor of a Mexican town, a status that should confer unquestionable authenticity on Medrano?  He looks güero (that is, "fair"), which confers skin-color privilege on him in Mexico as in the US; and owning a gay bar marks him as petit bourgeois, therefore also of suspect authenticity.  But his reasons for rejecting same-sex marriage are typical of rhetoric from around the world, including queer-theoretical Third World academics: we're traditional here, we're a small town, we're devout, it's not our custom, we don't need your foreign ideas and your atheistic NGOs.  You'd think that devout, conservative small-town people would want their homosexuals married instead of tomcatting around, but there you are.

I recently read a book of academic papers on passing.  Unfortunately, most were quite poor work.  The best, and to my mind the only really good one, was about the drag ball scene documented in Jennie Livingston's 1990 documentary Paris Is Burning. The paper, "Mimesis in the Face of Fear" by Karen McCarthy Brown, traced the complexities and contradictions in the ball scene, which goes back to at least the 1920s, and originated as an outlet for urban gayish people of color.  Some theorists, including theorists of color, have imposed their understandings on these performances, and were displeased when the poor black and brown queens turned out to have their own understandings and agenda.  McCarthy wrote that "bell hooks, for example, approached the Ballroom Scene in this mood and then found herself disappointed, even angry, about the quality of resistance manifest there."*

This doesn't mean it's improper to criticize traditional, devout, indigenous ways of being and resisting.  It's just to say that neither I nor the folks at Against Equality should presume to lecture South African township ladies, Dominican bugarrones, beauty-contest-competing Filipino bakla, singing gay Mexican small-town mayors, Thai toms and dees, or black and Latino urban Ball queens on how they can most authentically manifest resistance or construct their identities.  We can argue with them, sure; but we must also listen to them if we expect them to listen to us.

It works both ways, of course.  Graeme Reid quoted the Dutch-Surinamese anthropologist Gloria Wekker's stricture "emic constructions and explanations of same-gender sexual behaviour need to be taken seriously. There is no reason to assume that the Western folk knowledge about sex, which has been elevated to academic knowledge, should have any more validity than folk knowledge anywhere else"**.  Western folk knowledge, even when it has been elevated to academic knowledge, also has no less validity than folk knowledge anywhere else.  Both can and should be argued with, but that's what people like Wekker, Reid, the people from Against Equality, and I are for: to argue about them.

*In María C. Sánchez and Linda Schlossberg, eds., Passing: Identity and Interpretation in Sexuality, Race, and Religion (NYU Press, 2001), p. 219.
** In Graeme Reid, How to Be a Real Gay: Gay Identities in Small-town South-Africa (University of Kwa-Zulu Natal Press, 2013), p. 184.

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.

Everything You Know Is Wrong

I'm currently reading Long Before Stonewall: Histories of Same-Sex Sexuality in Early America, edited by Thomas A. Foster, published in 2007 by NYU Press.  Can't remember what led me to pick it up, but I did.  So far I'm having trouble.

Of course there's the ongoing refrain of "homosexuality" as a "modern" category.  For example, in Tracy Brown's "'Abominable Sin' in Colonial New Mexico: Spanish and Pueblo Perceptions of Same-Sex Sexuality":

In this chapter, I have been careful to use the terms "same-sex sex," "same-sex sexuality," and sodomy [no quotes for some reason] to discuss anal sex between men, however awkward or wordy these terms may be, rather than "homosexuality."  The term "homosexuality" denotes, as Richard Trexler and others have argued, a distinctly contemporary phenomenon: "the notion of a 'gay' lifestyle shared by everyone participating in homosexual behavior."  Serge Gruzinski argues that such a community may have existed in colonial Mexico City, but there is no evidence of the existence of such a community in New Mexico [53].

First off, I think Brown has confused "denotes" and "connotes."  The term "homosexuality" denotes eroticism, whether overtly expressed or not, between persons of the same biological sex.  As an umbrella term it includes not only "sodomy" but oral copulation, genital apposition or rubbing, mutual masturbation, erotic kissing, and a range of other erotic activity.  (I'm using "erotic" where most people would use "sexual," for reasons that I hope will soon be clear.)  It includes gendered, age-stratified, and "egalitarian" patterns of partnering, and it includes a wide variety of communities as well as isolated individuals with no access to communities of like-minded and -lusted people.  It includes conceptions of same-sex eroticism ranging from the innate to the situational to the commercial.  It has been used to refer to persons and patterns all around the world, and throughout history -- as well as to copulatory behavior and bonding in other animal species. To claim, as Brown and so many other scholars do, that it refers to only one twentieth-century pattern of behavior and feeling is to show that one has no idea what one is talking about.  Even in academic writing like the work assembled in Long Before Stonewall, those who define "homosexuality" that narrowly are usually unable to stick to their own definition -- see here, for example -- so I cannot see why this attempted distinction persists.  If it has any use at all even for this narrow band of scholars and writers, let alone their audience -- which it must, judging by its ubiquity among them -- that use must be something other than intellectual; I suspect it is mainly a genuflection to the discipline, to establish professional bonding.

True, in the US and Europe "homosexuality" has come to connote a specific mode of eroticism between people of the same sex, but that's a different issue.  It's not surprising that contemporary Americans would think of "homosexuality" in terms of stereotypes they have of homosexuals in their own time and place; most people probably do.  Look at this example from contemporary Nigeria, by Rudolf Pell Gaudio, a gay anthropologist who spent time among the yan daudu there:

The Hausa-language newspaper Kakaki, for example, had no trouble reporting on President Clinton’s ill-fated proposal in 1993 to permit gay men and lesbians to serve openly in the US armed forces, though the term the newspaper used for “gay men,” `yan ludu [literally, “sons of Lot”] conveys a negative moral judgment akin to English “sodomites.” `Yan madigo, the term used for “lesbians,” has more neutral connotations. Such translations occur in day-to-day conversations as well. In talking with Hausa friends I frequently found myself using terms like harka and dan daudu to describe gay life in the USA. I also heard such terms applied to me [Allah Made Us: Sexual Outlaws in an Islamic African City [Wiley-Blackwell, 2009], 281].

Or consider Graeme Reid, a white human rights professional who was promptly classified (and sometimes propositioned by black gents) in small-town South African terms as a lady even though he didn't wear women's clothes and makeup or style hair for a living as the classification lady requires.  So when Western academics think of "homosexuality" in terms of Lady Gaga CDs and U-Haul trailers, they are simply acting like traditional non-Western folk.  But as scholars it's their job to be aware of the wider world outside their personal experience, and to acquaint themselves with the history of the concepts they work with.

Second, "sex" and "sexuality" (let alone "same-sex") are also "distinctly contemporary" Western concepts, though even in academic use they're thoroughly confused and incoherent.  Usually they're left undefined, which doesn't help matters a whit.  As Wikipedia reports, many contemporary Americans don't consider oral stimulation of the genitals to be "sex."  Other surveys have found that many people don't consider anal penetration to be "sex." Brown, however, treats "sodomy" as uncomplicatedly "sex." The same goes for "man" and "woman," both of which are social constructions, but are commonly treated as uncomplicated commonsense realities.  These terms need to be defined in scholarly writing but rarely are.  To pick on one term and dwell on its modernity and cultural specificity, while ignoring the same dimensions of other crucial concepts in one's discussion, is poor practice, however widespread it is.  (As I recall, the Foucauldian independent scholar Jonathan Ned Katz admitted in his book Love Stories: Sex Between Men Before Homosexuality [Chicago, 2001] that he was leaving "sex" and "men" essentialized, but brushed the problem aside.)

Another contribution to Long Before Stonewall had more serious problems.  Ramon A. Gutierrez' "Warfare, Homosexuality, and Gender Status Among American Indian Men in the Southwest" immediately betrays some misconceptions about terminology, attributing "two-spirited persons" to "American scholars" (19), though that term was invented by American Indian laypeople and activists.  He seems to have no such reservations about the term berdache, which he seems to regard as unproblematic.  Then he writes,

When Spanish soldiers and missionaries first saw Native American men pressed into impersonating females, forced to perform women's work, dressing as women, and offering sexual service only to men, they asserted that these individuals were living in bradaje. Bradaje as a word was derived from the Arabic bradaj, which means male prostitute; hence the English word berdache.  Bradaje was something Europeans were quite familiar with in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, having inherited it themselves from East Asia and Islamic Africa where it was extensive. When they found men so employed in Florida and New Mexico, in central Mexico and in the highlands of Peru, they were not particularly surprised and described in a rather matter of fact fashion what they saw [20-21].

This is weird: I'm beginning to have more doubts about all the explanations I've encountered so far of the origins of the term berdache.  For what it's worth, I haven't seen (and can't find) any references to an Arabic word bradaj as an ancestor of berdache; there is some uncertainty as to whether the original was Persian or Arabic, but every source I've seen up till now agrees that the word was bardaj.  Gutierrez has evidently transposed some of the letters, and neither the editor nor any other reader seems to have noticed this.  Neither an online Spanish dictionary nor a big print dictionary I own includes the word bradaje -- or bardaje for that matter -- but I'll keep looking. 

The Arabic bardaj means "slave," according to most sources I've consulted, though Wikipedia says it means "captive" or "captured."  Okay, so slaves were often war booty, and they were often used sexually by their masters or prostituted.  It's easy to see how you could get from A to B, but Gutierrez seems to have garbled the itinerary.  His claim that the Spanish "inherited" the prostitution of boys from "East Asia and North Africa where it was extensive" is way off base, since boys (and girls) were prostituted in Europe as well; there was a long history of the prostitution of both sexes in classical Rome and Greece, for example. Gutierrez might have mentioned the direct influence of Arabic on Spanish language and culture during centuries of Moorish occupation, ending in 1492; but that's not what he wrote, and I see no reason to give him the benefit of the doubt.  I also have doubts about some of Gutierrez' translations from the Spanish, and about his use of Richard C. Trexler's controversial book Sex and Conquest: Gendered Violence, Political Order, and the European Conquest of the Americas (Cornell, 1995), so his garbling of berdache makes me unwilling to trust anything he says about the institution.

Well, I've just begun Long Before Stonewall.  Maybe it'll improve.

Once, a Philosopher -- Twice, a Secondary Virgin

Right after I finished Sunday's post, I realized I'd missed something.  Well, I usually do, and it's always good to have an idea for the next one.

I realized that something else was rubbing me the wrong way about Serena Nanda's remark that the inversion model of homosexuality "in the last three decades has been challenged by a (postmodern) gay ideology, in which both partners in a same-sex sexual relationship are viewed equally in terms of their sexual orientation."  Similar claims turn up often in academic writing about the history of homosexuality, and I suddenly realized that, apart from the other objections I could raise about it ("gay" is not "postmodern", for example), Nanda mischaracterizes what the "gay ideology" implies.

Nanda is starting from the idea that in non-Euroamerican cultures, homosexuality is construed as the interaction of a 'normally' gendered person and a gender-variant person.  Of course, that construction is also traditional in Euro-(North-)America (though it co-exists with others, as it does elsewhere), and hasn't disappeared yet.  According to this model, the gender-variant person (who may be gender-variant only in the role he or she plays in sexual intercourse) is "the homosexual", the gender-normal conformist person is normal, or "unmarked" as the jargon has has it.  As I pointed out, there is reasons to consider this claim an exaggeration at best.

From one end, there's the story I've quoted before from Mark Padilla's Caribbean Pleasure Industry (Chicago, 2007), about a bugarrón (a male prostitute, in this context) in the Dominican Republic whose girlfriend learned he was being kept by a Dominican maricón (faggot):

But she saw the guy, and – on top of everything the guy was a real maricón -- and I told her, “No! He’s a maricón! I’m not a maricón, I’m a bugarrón!” … And she said “What do you mean you’re not a maricón, if you live with a man?!” And I said they weren’t the same thing. “What do you mean?” And I said, “No, because he’s the one who receives, and I’m the one who gives” [131].

It seems to me that this story, along with the rest of Padilla's ethnography, is evidence that the Dominican male who "gives" is not unmarked, or he'd be simply an hombre instead of a bugarrón.  Padilla claims that "the majority of the sex workers with whom I spoke did not seem to feel that being a bugarrón or sanky panky expressed a basic aspect of their identity or personhood" (92); as this story suggests, I'd bet that the situation determines how basic being a bugarrón was to his informants.  The same is true of the other cultures I've written about here: in rural South Africa, Graeme Reid wrote that "in ‘location language’, the phrase ‘somehow bended’ refers to ‘straight’ men known or suspected of being available as sexual partners to gays. Those who are ‘somehow bended’ are also referred to as gents" (How to Be a Real Gay [University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2013, 60].  In Mexico City, the men who penetrate homosexuales are mayates.  In traditional US queer culture, the penetrators of fags, fairies, and queers were trade or jam, and so on.

In many if not all of these cases, the boundaries are not as solid as they're supposed to be, and the inverts are ambivalent about it.  As Annick Prieur wrote in Mema's House, Mexico City (Chicago, 1998, 166), "bisexual men who are apparently manly but who secretly let themselves be penetrated as if they were homosexuales are often criticized by the vestidas, even when the vestidas are the ones who penetrate them."  Barry Reay, in New York Hustlers (Manchester, 2010) tells of "Eddie, who was being pedicated [that is, fucked anally] by both Painter and Melcarth and had begun to worry about enjoying it – ‘Eddie … fucks girls avidly’ – was easily convinced that it merely enlarged his sphere of enjoyment and did not make him ‘queer’" (124).  And Mark Padilla reported that "The men in this study often mentioned to me that one or another of their peers was known to 'dar el culo' (give their ass) on occasion, which often produced much hilarity on the part of the storyteller" (96).  Though Padilla didn't draw the connection, he also learned that the same men who insisted at first that only other bugarrónes stole from their clients, would eventually admit that they themselves did so; I suspect the same pattern applied at least sometimes to giving ass.

At the same time, Padilla reports that the owner of a local (Dominican) gay bar catering to local gay-identified men told Padilla's research associate:

“I hope you’re going to prove what we already know: they’re all closet cases [son unos tapa’os].”  This implies the existence of a deeper, more authentic sexual identity that is being actively repressed by the bugarrón, who fails to recognize his own fundamental sexuality and public mark himself in terms of his presumed same-sex erotic preference.  Such discourses of authenticity are prominent features of North American constructions of gay identity [33]...

But "discourses of authenticity" are prominent features in Latin American constructions of masculine identity, as Padilla knows: they involve authentic men (hombre-hombre, muy hombre, mucho hombre, etc.)  and women (good women -- mothers, virtuous wives, virgins), and gender variants are not considered authentic.  Penetrated males are inauthentic in this discourse by definition.  It is interesting, though, that the same gay men who prize muy hombre males like the bugarrón nevertheless want to believe that deep down, they aren't really muy hombre after all.  I'm not sure what this means -- it sounds like the misogynist belief that every woman, no matter how good she seems, is really at heart a puta -- but Padilla was too busy fussing about the pollution of authentic Dominican sexual culture by inauthentic North American constructions to notice it, let alone question it. (I see I haven't really addressed the elephant in the room, namely stigma.  The penetrated male, like the polluted female, is a stigmatized figure, so rejection of a gender variant identity tends to involve the rejection of stigma -- "I'm not like that" -- rather than a scrupulous concern with accuracy.  Maybe I'm overstressing that aspect, but most scholars ignore it altogether.)

So it appears that often (not always -- almost nothing is "always" in human societies), the supposedly sharp boundary between penetrator and penetrated turns out to be more permeable than it's supposed to be.  That's hardly surprising; as Prieur argues, "when two persons with the same male sexual organs are naked, the construction of one of the partners as a not-homosexual man and of the other one as a not-male person is difficult to upkeep" (274).  And: "If it were the whole truth that a man enhanced his masculinity by penetrating other men, they would brag about their exploits with jotos, and one could imagine that the less effeminate the joto were, the more masculinity would the mayate gain from penetrating him, from showing himself as 'more man' than the other.  One objection might be that it would create doubt about who penetrated whom.  But if we take the group rapes in prison as an example, where other men witness who penetrates whom so there should be no doubt about who gained masculinity, it is still striking that systematically the most effeminate, those who are already jotos, are picked out to be raped. It is their femininity that 'justifies' the abuse [263-4]."

The point I'm arguing is that even where this 'traditional' gendered model of homosexuality predominates, it takes a fair amount of cultural work to maintain the boundaries.  It isn't only a supposedly postmodern "gay ideology" that wonders about the normality of the gender-normal partners of gender variants: so do people who live in those pre-modern societies.

This should establish the background I'm working from.  So what about this "gay ideology, in which both partners in a same-sex sexual relationship are viewed equally in terms of their sexual orientation"?  I think Nanda -- like everybody else, really -- is confused about what "sexual orientation" means, and you really have to sort that out before you can talk about this.  According to the American Psychological Association,

Sexual orientation is an enduring emotional, romantic, sexual, or affectional attraction toward others. It is easily distinguished from other components of sexuality including biological sex, gender identity (the psychological sense of being male or female), and the social gender role (adherence to cultural norms for feminine and masculine behavior).

On one hand, going by this definition, it doesn't matter whether you're a top or a bottom, a butch or a femme: if you have an enduring emotional, etc. attraction toward persons of your own sex, your sexual orientation is homosexual or perhaps bisexual.  Whether you are "a homosexual" is another question; this definition doesn't answer it.  The APA's definition founders a bit on "enduring" -- how "enduring" must it be?  Must it be exclusive to one sex, or can it extend to both sexes?  It doesn't follow from this that "both partners in a homosexual relationship" are homosexual by orientation, however: they might both be bisexual, they might even both be heterosexual -- though the latter seems unlikely if the "relationship" lasts for long.  How many "homosexual relationships" can you have before you qualify as "a homosexual"?  If by "homosexual relationship" Nanda means a relationship between two people of the same sex, the term implies nothing about their respective sexual orientations; if she means "a relationship between two homosexuals," where "homosexuals" means two people of homosexual orientation, then it does imply something about their orientations -- but it's also tautological.  "Homosexual relationship" refers to the sex(es) of the people involved, not to their identities, subjectivities, or sexual orientations; the same goes for "heterosexual relationship."  But Nanda, like most writers on this subject, seems not to have thought her definition through.

I've pointed out before that the prevailing scientific model of homosexuality is that of inversion, not sexual orientation: researchers investigating the causes of sexual orientation assume that a homosexual male is biologically feminized, and a homosexual female is biologically masculinized.  Since these researchers are evidently unaware they're making this assumption, they never justify it.  They begin by assuming that "a homosexual" is a gender variant, and look for evidence to support that assumption.  They don't explain who a homosexual's partner would be, probably because they haven't thought that far.  As Nanda acknowledges, and cross-cultural evidence shows, inverts (gender variants) commonly reject the idea of copulating with each other, and they reject it very strenuously, as "lesbianism," "incest," "cannibalism," and the like. There are mileux in which gender variants copulate and form relationships with each other, and contemporary American GLB culture is one of them, some of the time, though there's still widespread fetishizing here of "straight-acting" and even "straight" men as ideal partners -- but if they're really straight (that is, they have a heterosexual orientation by the APA's definition), why would they be having sex with other males?  If they are always the penetrator when copulating with other males, then they may not be gender variants, but they don't have an exclusively heterosexual orientation either.

There's also a long tradition of homogender or monogender homosexuality which rejects inversion (effeminacy for men, mannishness for women), though it often involves differences of age or class instead, and it doesn't fit the assumptions of the current research on homosexuality. The monogender model of homosexuality coexists (uneasily) with the inversion model, yet most gay men I've known who reject effeminacy still embrace scientific claims about the innateness of homosexuality that are based on the inversion model.  What matters to them, it appears, is being able to assert with scientific support that they are Born That Way, no matter how incoherent and invalid the science is.

It appears to me that this common formulation of the bad "gay ideology" is largely a straw man -- not because contemporary American GLBT culture has a coherent self-understanding, but because the academics studying it are just as confused as their subjects are.  I'm not sure I've quite gotten at what is wrong with Nanda's assertion about "(postmodern) gay ideology" and its implications about the orientations of partners in homosexual relationships; but I hope I've exposed some of the confusion in it.