Così Fan Tutte

I've been having frustrating computer problems, still not completely solved, or I'd have written here sooner.

A regular reader sent me a mail message recently, saying that he's "a LITTLE more in favor of [the] 'some people have always been gay' argument" than I am.  I found this baffling.

"Some people have pretty much always been gay" isn't an argument, it's a claim.  Depending on what it's supposed to mean, I agree with it.  That is, I think it's as certain as any historical claim can be that there have always been some people who were interested erotically only in their own sex.  There's documentation of that from many cultures over a couple thousand years, and I see no reason to suppose that it's not true at almost all times and almost all places.  I think it's also pretty clear that same-sex eroticism isn't limited to such people, that many people have had sexual experience with partners of both sexes in varying proportions.

What I don't agree with is the other claims some people make around this one.  It's not surprising, because most people bring cultural and personal baggage with them, myself not excluded.  There's no agreement what being gay, or being homosexual, or being bisexual, means.  I didn't exaggerate too much in my Gay Christians Say the Darnedest Things post, when I wrote sarcastically that because Leonardo had no Madonna CDs and (shame!) didn't go to Judy's Carnegie Hall concert, many scholars doubt that he was really gay.  In the first place, not all gay people are alike nowadays in the US, and I see no reason to suppose that that's a new development limited to the US.  Nor, of course, does it follow that because there have always been people who were interested erotically in their own sex, that exclusive interest is therefore inborn, or genetic, or biological, or whatever.

Related to these notions, I believe, is the excuse often made for stereotyping, that "stereotypes have some truth in them" because some people do fit the stereotypes.  This line came up at the discussion group I attended last week in San Francisco, and I wish I'd thought to ask what now seems to me the obvious question: So what? What follows from it?  It certainly doesn't follow that everyone is obliged to conform to the stereotypes just because some people do.  That seems to be what is meant, however: that inside every gay man, however butch he may pretend to be, is a screaming queen trying to claw her way out, and that every self-styled bisexual is just a closet case who, if he were honest with himself, would have sex only with other males.  In his book on male prostitutes in the Dominican Republic, for example, Mark Padilla reports that local gay men told him:

“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 [33].

There are numerous ironies here, aside from Padilla's own frequent cluelessness.  One is that these Dominican gay men subscribe to a trade/queer model of male homosexuality, though (as always seems to be the case) with plenty of slippage.  If all the bugarrones dropped their pretensions and came out as flaming travestís, there'd be no tops to supply the all-important dick to Dominican gays.  As Padilla also pointed out of a Dominican bar's quixotic attempt to exclude bugarrones,

The policy was doomed to fail from the beginning. First, it seemed entirely incongruous with the erotic integration – and in many ways, the economic interdependence – of bugarrónes and gay-identified men. Local bugarrón-gay or bugarrón-travestí relationships frequently entail an economic arrangement in which the gay/travestí mantiene a su bugarrón (supports his bugarrón), an inversion of the typical gender division of labor in heterosexual relationships.  Further, despite the occasional tensions between them, bugarrónes still represent the erotic ideal for a significant proportion of gay-identified [Dominican] men, reflecting what [Stephen O.] Murray ... has described as the sexual system of “homosexual exogamy” in Latin American homoeroticism. Thus, in their attempts to “clean up” the bar, the owners of Tropicalia were planning to purge a primary source of gay men’s attraction to the business: bugarrónes. As many local gay men commented to me, “So, if they keep bugarrónes out, why would we go there?” [32-3]

In much the same way that many heterosexual men will try to get "nice" girls to have sex with them, in order to prove that all women are essentially whores, the Dominican gays, like the norteamericano tourists, will try to get bugarrones to dar culo, or give ass: if they succeed, they can scorn them, their stereotypes have been vindicated.  The aim is probably not to move toward a more "egalitarian" mode of homosexuality, where either partner may penetrate or be penetrated, but simply to validate their erotic cosmology.  So, as Annick Prieur observed in her study of Mexican vestidas, they despise those mayates (equivalent to bugarrones -- men who penetrate other men) who let themselves be penetrated, even when it is the vestidas who penetrate them. This connects to a fantasy entertained by some gay men, who insist that there are no straight men, that every man can be had if you go about it correctly.  Taken to its logical conclusion, this would mean that every man is, at bottom, a bottom.) If these gays really succeeded, though, and exposed all bugarrones as closet cases who really, deep down, want only to be penetrated, who would penetrate them?

This is only a problem if you insist on eliminating the middle ground, but that is what people are doing when they stereotype: there are no differences, there is no variation, everyone is alike, even if they pretend otherwise.  It's not an empirical description but a principle that overrides observation and evidence, and can't be refuted because any observation that seems to contradict the principle can be dismissed as false consciousness, misunderstanding, or failure to grasp the essence that underlies mere appearances.  (So it's related to belief in biblical inerrancy: any seeming error is due to the interpreter's misunderstanding or lack of sufficient faith -- the Bible's lack of error is the first principle of interpreting it.)  It's true that some people can be found who fit any stereotype you like, and that's not problematic.  The trouble arises when the stereotype is postulated as the underlying truth about all individuals.

*The Caribbean Pleasure Industry (Chicago, 2007.)

The Social Construction of Social Construction; or, This Is Just Dumb Critical Theory

I actually meant to write about something else on Saturday, namely "social constructions."  I got into an interesting exchange in comments under the link my friend posted.  One of her friends, presumably an academic also, commented on the story, first:

who cares because this is just dumb science. these people need to put down their microscopes and study critical theory

and then:

i mean even neurobiology shows there's no good reason to believe in two sexes only; so how the hell is some gene going to tell you who to go out and fuck?

You don't even need neurobiology: gross external anatomy is enough to cast doubt on a simplistic two-sexes model, though that is a relatively recent development even in 'The West."  A one-sex model is older and persists in folk psychology to this day.  The newer social construction of "intersex" is built on mostly visible differences between bodies that have been known for millennia.  Since sex in this sense (as opposed to copulation) is a social construction, science (dumb or otherwise) can't settle the question of how many sexes there are, any more than critical theory can settle how many genders there are.  What anatomical differences constitute a sex?  Among the more chilling examples of medical malfeasance that I know of is the treatment of infant males born with a "micropenis" by cutting off the inadequate appendage and trying to raise them as girls, or the corresponding removal of supposedly oversized clitorises from females.  At what point does a relative difference became an absolute one?

And if science is "dumb", what is the relevance of neurobiology here in the first place?  (In fairness, I don't know whether the other commenter meant that all science is dumb, or just the kind of science that seeks to explain sexual orientation.)

Going from here, it makes no sense to ask "how the hell is some gene going to tell you who to go out and fuck?"  For one thing, as the article under discussion admitted, the scientists involved do not claim to have found a single gene for homosexuality, nor do they believe there is such a thing.  But that doesn't mean that sexual desire and preferences in sexual partners have no relation to the body.  What that relation is, or if there is one, no one has any idea.

The same person added:

and there's that pesky problem of "homosexuality" being a historically constructed category...

At this point I indulged in an intervention.

but then, "neurobiology" [and, I might have added, critical theory] is a historically constructed category too; so how can it, really, "show" us anything? So is just about everything that human beings interact with, think about, talk about. I'm really beginning to think that there should be a moratorium on the use of terms like "social construction" and "historical construction." For one thing, they imply another bogus binary, namely that there is a clear dividing line between social constructions and 'real' things (FSVO of 'real'). They also tend to be used, as you seem to be doing, to imply that social constructions are unreal, trivial, illusory, etc. None of this follows, and it just adds to the general confusion.

The constructions of critical theory would have to be viewed with as jaundiced an eye as those of "dumb science", but that doesn't seem to be the table here.  The other commenter replied:

to suggest that the idea of historical construction implies a distinction from "the real" would be a very serious misunderstanding of the concept

I intervened:

Yes it is, but many people who deploy the term misunderstand it in just that way. But "social constructions" like sex and race certainly have biological aspects: social constructions are constructed of/with bodies.

To which the other commenter answered:

lol so in other words you want a moratorium on one of the most powerful, foundational concepts of twentieth-century thought because some straw men might possibly misunderstand it? hahaha good luck with that

Appeal to authority and to what everybody else is doing; she loses.  Of course, biological determinism is one of the other most powerful, foundational concepts of twentieth-century thought, most often tied to Darwinian evolution misunderstood as a linear progression from primitive to advanced organisms.    So I wrote:

Oh, I don't expect any luck at all; but it's not "straw men" who "possibly misunderstand it" -- the misunderstandings are endemic among the academics who use it, to say nothing of non-academics who've picked it up and used it without understanding it. (The use of Foucault as Scripture is also a real problem in the US academic queer theory I've read, and I've read a lot of it.) It's this confusion that makes me wonder whether something wouldn't be gained by not using the term for awhile, so that people would have to say more explicitly what they mean, rather than merely gesturing at it.

It's not clear to me that this person doesn't "possibly misunderstand" social construction herself.  She did, after all, offer up "a historical construction" as a better explanation of "homosexuality" than the biological determinism of Dean Hamer and Michael Bailey. "Social/historical construction" is not an alternative to "born that way," any more than the Big Bang Theory or Natural Selection are alternative Creation Myths.  When the gay neuroscientist Simon LeVay said that his friends dismissed his interest in finding a biological cause for homosexuality by asserting that 'we know it's socially constructed', I wondered if it was he or they who had misunderstood the concept.  Both, probably.  "Born this way" and "socially constructed" are answers to (at least) two different questions.

A third commenter criticized me, rather more cogently, but still (I think) missing the point:

Social constructions are patently not made from bodies. They are made from -perceptions- of bodies. Race, for example, has no biological aspects that can be used to meaningfully understand morphological and genetic differences between humans. The reason for that is simple -- the genetic diversity expressed by people currently living on the continent of Africa actually subsumes the rest of the genetic diversity in the world. An African will be more different genetically from another African than a European will be from an aboriginal Australian. Humans are radically homogeneous as a primate species anyway...and any differences we want to see as racial are uniformly better explained because of clinal variation, or historical, social and cultural context.

Without bodies there are neither perceptions in general nor perceptions of bodies.  "Race, for example, has no biological aspects that can be used to meaningfully understand morphological and genetic differences between humans."  This is probably true, but that begs the question of what race 'is.'  It's not as if it was ever a well-defined concept, and its history mainly shows people who are convinced that it must mean something, and try tirelessly to get the evidence to justify that conviction.  The number of races increases, and then decreases.  (Rather like genders.)  A century ago, there were numerous "races" in Europe: the Celt, the Teuton, the Mediterranean, the Slav, and so on.  No one takes these seriously anymore.  Past classifications are dismissed as self-evidently misconceived but their replacements are no better.  And these classifications -- much like gender and erotic ones -- are the successors to older categories that are just as essentialist.

"... and any differences we want to see as racial..." Who's "we"?  I don't particularly want to see any differences as racial; I don't see it as a useful concept.  I feel the same way about "gender," though I don't get the impression that most social constructionist theorists of gender would agree. "... are uniformly better explained because of clinal variation, or historical, social and cultural context."  Again, I'd agree.  But that doesn't really affect my point.  She was quite right about the differences within groups opposed to differences between groups, but the tendency to turn average differences into absolute ones is not confined to essentialists -- social-constructionist scholars of gender can't seem to shake it, for example.  Whether biological, cultural or historical differences are significant, or how much or in what way, is also open to dispute. That people think they're significant is a datum in itself, of course.  And "better explained" according to whom?  The kind of academic, systematic approach this person invokes, which I also find valuable and useful, is still a social and historical construct, a product of a very specific and limited social and cultural context.  There is no approach that isn't.

None of this means I reject social constructionism, least of all in favor of essentialism.  I've argued before that essentialism is how social construction happens, and I still think that's true.  Perhaps more attention needs to be paid to the border that tenuously and porously divides them.

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.

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.

Pray for Us, St. Foucault

I've begun reading a book called Gay Travels in the Muslim World, edited by Michael T. Luongo and published by Harrington Park Press in 2007.  Band of Thebes mentioned it when commemorating Luongo's birthday, and my curiosity was piqued.  Right now I'm in the first selection, "It All Began with Mamadou," by Jay Davidson, based on his experiences as a Peace Corps volunteer in Mauritania in 2002 and 2003.  Davidson must be my age or a little older, since he was in his early fifties when he joined.  He apparently spent most of his adult life in San Francisco, which may explain why he has so little understanding of the complexity of eroticism between males.  For example:

I have heard people say, "We don't have homosexuals in Mauritania."  Most Americans laugh at what they perceive to be such a naive and absurd statement.  After all, we know about the distribution of gay people in our own culture, and we conclude that there is a worldwide population of a given percentage of "homosexuals" in every society.  But I have come to understand that the statement "We don't have homosexuals in Mauritania" means something else altogether to the people who say it.  Western television and movies are widely available in and watched here.  Via these media, Mauritanians see American and European gay people demonstrating in the streets for their equality, petitioning their government for the right to marry, leaving their extended families, and setting up house together so they can live independently as a couple.  That is what "being gay" looks like to people there.  When homosexuality is portrayed in those terms, the Mauritanians are right -- they don't have (those kind of) gay people here!  By contrast, men having sex with men -- a critical part of the Western definition of being gay -- well, that is something totally different! ...

It is instructive to understand the translation from the Arabic of the first question people ask when they meet: "Who are you from?"  Note that they are not asking where, which would be just the name of a village or town, but who.  People's identity and sense of solidarity stems from the tribe, the family, the home.  They take great pride in these connections.  It would be antithetical to demonstrate in the streets in order to shine a light on the fact that they belong to a different class of people.  Doing so would alienate them from the people on whom they are most dependent [8].

Le sigh.  Where to begin?  Well, first, the claim that "We don't have homosexuals in X" long predates a gay movement that turned up in media for export: Samuel R. Delany wrote, I think in his autobiography, about a sexual affair he had in the mid-1960s with an African man who assured him that there were no homosexuals in his country, though he also claimed to have had sex with many men there.  Whatever this man meant, he didn't mean "We don't have gay pride parades and gay rights demonstrations back home," because we didn't have them in the US either in those days.  Similar declarations were made about the People's Republic of China and the Soviet Union, as I recall.

Davidson's remarks imply a sophisticated and very American social constructionist consciousness about sexuality among his Mauritanian acquaintances, which isn't evident from his report in any other area.  (Not that Davidson has a very sophisticated understanding of social construction either.  Like so many Westerners, he's probably just projecting.)  I imagine that there are local terms for men who copulate with other men, but Davidson doesn't seem to have spent enough time in Mauritania to pick them up.  His linguistic competence was in French, not Arabic or indigenous languages. Compare this passage from gay anthropologist Rudolf Pell Gaudio's account of gayish life in Nigeria:

Though it has become commonplace among anthropologists of sexuality to refrain from using terms from a colonial language (English, French, Dutch, etc.) to describe the identities and practices of people who speak other (usually non-European) languages, scholars have paid little attention to translation that operates in the other direction. 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.

For that matter, it's a serious mistake to suppose that most American gay people protest or demonstrate for their rights.  It wouldn't be surprising if foreigners watching American TV got a skewed picture of American gay life, but Davidson should know better.

As for family, that too is a distortion.  Americans may not ask "Who are you from?" but we're just as interested in people's families, though this has faded somewhat as we became more urbanized and mobile.  I expect it will fade elsewhere in the world as urbanization takes over other countries.  But when new workers from the area immediately around Bloomington came to work as Indiana University staff during my years there, they'd be asked who their relations were, and the questioning was persistent and detailed.

American gay people formed ghetto communities because our families rejected us, not because we rejected them.  But the attempt to rebuild the burned bridges between ourselves and our families began right after Stonewall.  Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays began when Jeanne Manford, the mother of gay militant Morty Manford, marched with her son in the third New York Pride March in 1972; the first meetings of the new organization were held the following year.  Nowadays it's up to the parents of LGBT people whether they want to be part of their children's lives or not, and many do.  Marriage and setting up a household don't necessarily entail separating from one's family, either.  Usually it's only one spouse who leaves their family to live with the family of the other spouse, a separation that can be quite painful.  But even in the US it's common for married children to live near their parents, despite our tradition of mobility; I see no reason to suppose that gay couples intend to be any different if they can manage it.  Again, it's likely that through exported media presentations and antigay propaganda from within other countries, many foreigners will form an inaccurate picture of this aspect of American gay life, but Davidson should know better.

He also talks about what he sees as the greater "fluidity" of gay life in Mauritania, because he found that so many of the men he met still expected to marry and sire children.  I suppose that's "fluidity" of a sort, but it doesn't seem so different from the US.  It occurs in a social context where, as Davidson says, everyone is expected to marry and reproduce, and a gay man of Davidson's age should be able to remember when conditions were very similar in the US.  It may be that the size of this country and our traditions of mobility and land theft gave people more leeway to resist family pressure to marry -- you could always light out for the territory -- but even now, when people (especially straight women) around the world are voting with their feet against marriage, its romance and prestige are still very powerful.

The number of people who were exclusively homosexual was a small minority when Kinsey did his research in the 1930s and 1940s, while a far greater number had varying degrees of homosexual and heterosexual experience.  It may be that the development of gay communities and reification of gay identity since then has increased the proportion of gay people with no heterosexual experience or aspirations, but there still seem to be plenty of people who copulate with their own sex without thinking of themselves as homosexual.  Davidson mentions one Mauritanian who introduced himself in French as bisexuel, which reminds me that despite all the lip service to Kinsey, many gay people quite fiercely resist admitting the possibility of bisexuality: if a man has sex with another man and enjoys it, that means he's gay, and if he persists in enjoying sex with women also, he's a self-deceiving closet case.  (This is suspiciously close to the antigay concept of homosexuality-as-contagion: taste of the forbidden fruit only once, and you'll be enslaved to it for life, unless Jesus intervenes.  Which he never does.)

Davidson tells how, after watching a European gay-marriage demonstration on television, one of his students said, "If I had a gay brother, I would have to accept him.  He is my family.  And I could not let anyone say anything against him because he is my brother and I would have to protect him" (10).  That's good to hear, and it might be true as well as sincere, but would he accept a gay brother's partner as part of the family?

As I write this I'm slightly past the halfway point of Gay Travels in the Muslim World, and I've noticed that most of the Euro-American writers get all worked up and giggly over the fact that men in many countries can be very physically affectionate. Seeing two men holding hands especially excites them.  Davidson sets the tone: "We learned that this, of course, does not necessarily signal their sexuality.  One of my favorite sights remains that of two soldiers, uniformed, walking down the street holding hands.  An army of lovers cannot fail!" (3).  But they aren't lovers, that's just it.  Despite these (and other) writers' lip service to the idea that two men holding hands aren't necessarily gay, they don't seem to believe it.  I also enjoy seeing men holding hands with each other, and I like interacting with men from cultures where such touching is acceptable, because I don't see all affection as erotic.  Holding hands or cuddling with another man can be an end in itself, not just foreplay.

I get the impression that many Americans like to believe that people from other cultures are radically different from us.  It distances and exoticizes them; it's the flip side of believing that everybody is essentially the same, deep down.  But the differences that Davidson considers so radically extensive don't seem to be, since many of them constituted American culture until fairly recently.  And what annoys me most is that this exoticizing of Muslim cultures gets in the way of telling the stories these writers ostensibly set out to write.

Rejoice, and Believe in the Gospel!

... The gospel (which means "good news") of True Science, that is. I just finished reading James Robert Brown's Who Rules in Science?: An Opinionated Guide to the Wars (Harvard, 2001). Brown, a professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto and an admitted heterosexual, tries to provide a nice middle-of-the-road take on the science wars of the 1990s. He concedes that scientists aren't perfect, but insists that they are awfully good. He opposes scientific orthodoxy to "social constructivists," who are usually postmodernists, and we know about them, with their silly jargon and all.

I admit I'm out of my depth in some of Brown's discussion, because I have little formal training in science and haven't read nearly enough of the "constructivist" works he cites. (I need to read more Bruno Latour, for example.) But in those instances where I have read the writers he discusses, like Paul Feyerabend and Stephen Jay Gould, I found problems. To sum up while oversimplifying a bit, Brown seems to think that every critic of scientific orthodoxy is a "social constructivist," even Gould it appears, and he really should know better than that. This can be seen in his discussion, about halfway through the book, of science and homosexuality.

Research on homosexuality involves an inextricable mix of science and politics. “Pro-gay” and “anti-gay” represent the respective political stances of being in favor or out of favor with improving the social situation of gays and lesbians. Debate tends to flare between the “essentialists” and “constructivists.” (For better or worse, these are the standard terms.)

In fact, "constructivist" is not a standard term in this debate; "constructionist" is. I couldn't say for certain, but I have the impression that "constructivist" is used in this context only by critics of constructionism, and not even all of them. According to Wikipedia, "constructivist" and "constructionist" refer to different theories anyway, which means that Brown's consistent and insistent use of the former term undermines his entire book. (And to nit-pick, "out of favor with" is not the opposite of "in favor of".) It's also an enduring and much-noticed irony of the debate that almost no one actually claims to be an essentialist.

The former [the "essentialists"] claim that one’s sexual orientation is a condition that is either biologically determined or imprinted at an early age and remains more or less immutable through life. On this view, one is objectively gay or lesbian, whether one knows and accepts it or not. For a constructivist, on the other hand, one’s sexual orientation is fundamentally a choice, no doubt a choice conditioned by one’s history and upbringing, but a choice nonetheless.

This is wrong too. Brown describes the "essentialist" position somewhat more accurately, though as he must know, being a philosopher and all, the key is not biology or imprinting but essence, being, nature. As Foucault famously described the concept, "Nothing that went into [the homosexual's] total composition was unaffected by his sexuality. It was everywhere present in him: at the root of all his actions because it was their insidious and indefinitively active principle; written immodestly on his face and body because it was a secret that always gave itself away. It was consubstantial with him, less as a habitual sin than as a singular nature." This isn't an especially scientific notion, by the way; it's almost mystical. Many people, including scientists, simply beg the question by assuming that biology equals essence; and we know what happens when you assume.

It's in his account of the "constructivist" that Brown falls flat on his face. I can't claim that I've read the constructionist literature on homosexuality exhaustively, but I've read a representative sample, probably more than Brown has, and I can't recall ever seeing a social constructionist claim that sexual orientation is a choice. The first few times someone accused me of thinking that homosexuality is a "choice" because I reject biological theories of its cause, I was taken aback because the accusation seemed wilfully irrelevant. The first person who did this was a political operative for a state-level gay-rights organization, and it was less an accusation than a lackwitted stereotype; the second was a graduate student in psychology with a vested interest in biological determinist theories, who should have known better. Brown, as a philosopher, definitely should know better, but apparently his professional education didn't extend to basic issues in philosophy like the free will vs. determinism debate.

So, let me repeat what I've said before: the point (I could mischievously call it the essence, but Diana Fuss beat me to it) of social construction theory is that many traits or behaviors or customs that people consider "natural" -- built into our human nature / blood / genes / DNA by God, Nature, Evolution -- are in fact, products of culture, learned, acquired. Not "chosen", except perhaps in some obscure technical sense of the word, because, again, the interest of social constructionism is to highlight features of human life that we take for granted, things we didn't choose because they are Natural. "That's just the way things are, that's all," though some wicked and perverse souls might decide to rebel against Nature, God's Will, Common Decency, and the American Way.

The key point that gives away Brown's misunderstanding / ignorance is his remark that for "a constructivist, on the other hand, one’s sexual orientation is fundamentally a choice, no doubt a choice conditioned by one’s history and upbringing, but a choice nonetheless." The best I can say in mitigation is that, as far as I know, social constructionists have not been able to come up with scientific-sounding explanations of how social construction works; that is, how people come to be convinced that what they have learned is something they were born with. But then, essentialists have never managed to explain how, say, a smaller INAH3 manifests itself in a talent for interior design and an obsession with ABBA.

Essentialism is compatible with that view of science I have called scientific orthodoxy: sexual orientation is a biological or psychological fact whose nature and causes can be discovered by orthodox science. (This includes both the ontological and epistemological senses of objective, but the emphasis here is on the ontological side.) On a constructivist account, by contrast, such facts simply don’t exist, at least not objectively. Instead, one’s sexuality is constructed – self-constructed at that.

This is more of the same; one' s sexuality is not "self-constructed at that" -- it is socially constructed, shaped from outside as well as inside.

Notice too how casually Brown minimizes the yawning gap between "biological" and "psychological fact." Language, for example, is probably both a biological (in the sense of being rooted physically in our brains and other body parts) and psychological fact, but there is no biological difference between an English speaker and a Chinese speaker. I once angered a gay advocate of biological determinism by pointing out that there probably is a correlation between speaking Chinese and certain physical traits (black hair, dark eyes, etc.), so that by her logic Chinese, like homosexuality, must be inborn.

Brown seems unaware that according to social constructionists, "race" is socially constructed. Even "orthodox" scientists have conceded that race is not, after all, a natural category in human beings, but here, as with "sexual orientation", the debate is as much about the status of the scientific evidence, and many white scientists at least find it difficult to rid themselves of the traditional racial categories. I was startled, a couple of years ago, to find some white liberal bloggers blithely declaring that "race is as real as nappy hair." The motif circulated for a month or two, then faded. It's worth remembering that social construction works with human bodies; the existence of a biological trait like skin color or hair texture does not prove the validity of essentialism. No social constructionist doubts that skin color, for example, is biologically determined; the question is whether skin color constitutes a "racial" trait, how it relates to culture, and so on.

Social constructionism is also compatible with what Brown calls scientific orthodoxy. Before we can really discuss the status of essentialism with regard to sexual orientation, we must first have some solid scientific results to work with, and so far there are none. The scientists involved, especially but not only Simon LeVay, have been explicit all along that they had decided in advance what they were looking for. LeVay told reporters that if he hadn't found evidence to support his beliefs, he'd have given up science. (I doubt the truth of that boast, by the way. True believers can always bend reality to fit their preconceptions, and one could ask whether by demanding that reality conform to his beliefs, LeVay hadn't abandoned science at the outset.)

To be fair, Brown concedes some of these points on page 111:

Now to the interesting philosophical point. The crucial thing about these [scientific] criticisms of essentialism that come from constructivists is that they are wholly within the framework that I have called scientific orthodoxy. Every objection would be recognized – at least in principle – as perfectly legitimate from the point of view of standard scientific method: Don’t use crude tests when better ones are available, don’t beg the question when setting up a classification, don’t take people’s judgments of others at face value, don’t ignore obvious alternative possible explanations, don’t confuse correlation with causation. The list could go on. These are principles that any champion of orthodoxy happily embraces.

Perhaps so, but they don't apply those principles. Brown himself frames the whole discussion in terms of "constructivism" vs. essentialism, but the scientific discussion, such as it is, has little to with this philosophical debate. The question is the validity, within the terms of scientific orthodoxy, of the research on sexual orientation. It's even debatable whether such critics of biological determinism as Anne Fausto-Sterling, Stephen Jay Gould, Hilary and Stephen Rose, or Richard Lewontin are social constructionists, given that their criticisms are primarily of the quality of the research on its own terms, not whether it conforms to constructionist theory. Brown simply takes for granted than anyone who doubts that every psychological fact is biologically determined must be a social "constructivist," and that doesn't follow.

The essentialist/constructivist debate cuts right across the pro-gay/anti-gay debate. The pro-gay essentialist claims that sexual orientation has a biological character and is perfectly natural, and so completely unobjectionable. It is an immutable characteristic, so it should enjoy the protection of anti-discrimination laws, just as race and gender typically do. The anti-gay essentialist is likely to see it as a nasty disease that ought to be appropriately treated. By contrast, the pro-gay constructivist sees sexual orientation as a choice, one that should certainly be tolerated, if not celebrated. The anti-gay constructivist agrees it is a choice – a wicked one that must be morally condemned.

The trouble here is that the people Brown calls anti-gay constructivists are really essentialists: they believe that human nature is heterosexual, and that sodomites are merely rebels against Nature/God. (This passage makes me suspect that Brown's only source for his discussion is Andrew Sullivan's 1993 tract Virtually Normal; the above paragraph is virtually a paraphrase of Sullivan's, um, argument.) The same claim was made for years by gay Christian essentialists arguing about the interpretation of Romans 1:26-28, who declared that their nature was homosexual, and so for them to try to be heterosexual would be "unnatural," "going against their nature."

Further, Brown oversimplifies (to put it kindly) with his assumption that "an immutable characteristic [as he assumes sexual orientation to be] ... should enjoy the protection of anti-discrimination laws, just as race and gender typically do." It isn't only immutable characteristics that are protected by antidiscrimination laws: religious affiliation, which is neither inborn nor immutable, is also protected under US and Canadian law. This is a common mistake, also made routinely by gay-rights advocates, including scientists trying to justify their sloppy research by touting its supposed political usefulness:

A typical essentialist is Simon LeVay, who claimed as a result of post-mortem studies that a cluster of brain cells in the third interstitial nucleus of the anterior hypothalamus is larger in heterosexuals than in homosexuals. This, he said, shows that “sexual orientation has a biological substrate” ... Another famous work is that of Baily [sic] and Pillard on twins. They found that identical twins were more likely to be consonant for homosexuality than were fraternal twins. Given that identicals are closer genetically than fraternals, Baily [sic] and Pillard drew the conclusion that “genetic factors are important individual differences in sexual orientation” ... In a more public piece they stated that “science is rapidly converging on the conclusion that sexual orientation is innate,” and they concluded that this is “good news for homosexuals” [“Are Some People Born Gay?” NYT, Dec. 17, A21].

Added to his general intellectual slovenliness, this shows that James Robert Brown is not competent to discuss these issues. Can these people really have forgotten that biologically-rooted difference has generally been used to justify discrimination, based on race and sex? No one doubts that women and blacks are "born that way"; that "biological fact" is used to argue that they are incapable of full citizenship. Whether homosexuality is "innate" is not an important question, and mainstream gay-rights advocates have wasted a lot of time and energy letting bigots set the terms of the debate by claiming that it is. At the same time, I've winced when some half-informed gay people have lobbed the term "socially constructed" at essentialist opponents, whether pro-gay or anti-gay. It just isn't pertinent to the controversy until you've cleared away a lot of deadwood first -- and by the time you've done that, you don't really need the label.

I'm Not a Queer, But My Buddy Is

It occurred to me today that in many cases it might be better to substitute the term "common sense" for "essentialism" in many discussions of gender and sexuality. That's partly because I don't much respect common sense, of course, and much of what Everybody Knows about men and women, queers and normal folks, doesn't deserve much respect. It seems to me that if you pay attention you must very soon start to notice all the gaping holes in what Everybody Knows, and I've found that most people, if you get them alone, will admit this. But it's also Common Sense that you don't point out those gaping holes in public. I have to remember what happened to the kid who pointed out that the Emperor didn't really have anything on: she was dragged away by Security, who tortured her for days until she named her communist terrorist accomplices, and then she and her whole family were executed, publicly and slowly.

Common sense is very powerful stuff. The common-sense notion of the Queer as wrongly sexed -- the she-male, the girlyman, the he-she, the diesel dyke -- was taken over by nineteenth-century doctors and christened the Invert, the Third Sex, the Homosexual, and this notion still underlies most "scientific" discourse today. It leads to hopeless contradictions, but these are ignored.

Social construction theories have their own contradictions, but the reason they inspire so much fury among such a wide range of people is that they go against Common Sense. What everyone can plainly see is not always true; often people see plainly what isn't there at all. This bothers those people who, in Clifford Geertz's words, are "afraid reality is going to go away unless we believe really hard in it" -- if I don't believe everything you believe, then obviously I don't believe in anything. That's just common sense.

Anyway. One of the more revelatory examples of the trouble with Common Sense was Brokeback Mountain, whose success inspired a great deal of fussing over the story, Universality, whether the characters were gay, whether the characters were cowboys, and so on. The best writing on I saw on the subject at the time was Larry Gross's piece "Year of the Queer: Hollywood and Homosexuality", especially page 3 and after, though Alan Vanneman's snark-laden piece for Bright Lights Film Journal also sticks in my mind, notably for its takedown of the film's tagline "Love Is a Force of Nature": "We humans stopped doing 'Nature' 50,000 years ago, when we learned to talk good and paint pretty pictures on a wall."

Myself, being an anti-platonist, a social constructionist, a relativist, virtually a nihilist, I saw the movie twice without wondering whether Jack and Ennis were gay. If you'd asked me at the time I'd probably have said it was because I am gay and had no investment in denying that two men who had passionate sex with each other over a twenty-year period were gay; but also that if two men could have passionate sex with each other for twenty-years without being gay, that would be a fine poke in the eye of Common Sense too, so it was a win-win situation.

So imagine my surprise when I found Stephen O. Murray's review of the film at Epinions.com. I have a lot of respect for Murray, who's a controversial figure in the field of whatever-you-want-to-call-it: he was working before Queer Theory and kept on going throughout Queer Theory's hegemony; he's as cranky, crusty and curmudgeonly as I aspire to be; he's ferociously learned, with a merciless Bullshit Detector. I've read most of his books, at least those published since 1990 or so. But on Brokeback Mountain he bogged down in the question of whether Jack and Ennis were gay, and (In My Hubristic Opinion) he came down wrong on just about every point. After reading his review I wrote a rejoinder, which I then sat on for a year or so before I got an Epinions account and finally posted it there. I'm now posting it here, with a few very minor changes, as a sort of prologue or overture to the big Social Constructionist question.
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Are they gay? Who knows? It's amazing how much doublethink turns up even in gay reviewers, though. Sociologist Stephen O. Murray, for instance, agrees with Heath Ledger that Ennis is "not gay", as if Heath Ledger were an expert in such matters. Ennis says, "I ain't no queer" -- that's a noun, not an adjective -- and Jack says, "Me neither." Murray of all people should know better. He's the guy who's famous for writing that he has "been told by young Latinos with semen inside their rectums that they `never get fucked.'" Denials of this kind are not always false; but they can't be taken as always true either. Why sure, if they say they aren't queers, they must not be! Neither was Rock Hudson, or Kevin Spacey, or Nathan Lane until he changed his mind and said he was! And Richard Nixon wasn't a crook -- he said so!

Ennis refers to "this thing, it grabs hold of us". Does this prove that they have been possessed by a spirit that forces them to have sex together? In other writings Murray jeers at Foucauldians who indulge in what he calls "discourse creationism," but that is what he's doing here. What a (fictional!) character says is always true, to be taken at face value. If you don't say you're gay or think of yourself as gay, you're not -- until you say you are, and then, presto change-O!

Murray overlooks the scene late in the film where Ennis asks Jack if he ever gets the feeling that everybody is looking at him, and they know? Fit that question together with Ennis's childhood memory of being forced by his father (his hand firm on the back of the boy's neck) to look at the mutilated corpse of a queerbashed gay man, and it's significant that the word "fear" or its synonyms never appear in Murray's descriptions of Ennis's feelings. I thought it was obvious, for example, that among the emotions Ennis felt when his ex-wife confronted him about his relationship with Jack, was abject screaming terror. ""Panic" (as in "homosexual panic") also comes to mind. Maybe less obvious, but also explained by the memory, is Ennis's crawling into an alley to weep and retch and punch a wall as their first separation begins.

As Murray points out, the idea that he might be killed for loving another man was not at all paranoid or unrealistic. His unwillingness to leave Wyoming for somewhat safer climes -- there is, after all, plenty of horrific antigay violence in cities like New York and San Francisco, it is not limited to rural areas -- is interesting: Ennis is terrified, but (like a horse in a burning barn?) he won't leave. Murray writes, "Ennis believes that men cannot mate for life", but I don't see how the film supports this claim. I think Ennis knows men can mate for life -- the two "old guys" did just that -- but he's obsessed with the fear that their lives will be cut short by violence. His murderous jealousy also is evidence that he knows he is mated to Jack for life.

Murray takes for granted that Jack is the queer one, because he makes "the first (and second and various later) move"; Ennis is a straight guy who happens to fall in love with another man. (Why is "gay" an illicit descriptor, but "straight" isn't?) Yes, Jack makes the first move, but what he offers is not his ass but his cock. Ennis responds by penetrating him. Tradition has it, of course, that Penetrator equals Real Man equals Not Queer. But Ennis apparently didn't need any time to become erect himself; was he lying there hard the whole time? I wouldn't be surprised. In the original story, Proulx endowed Ennis with a mystic knowledge of what to do. Perhaps because he'd been thinking about doing it even before he met Jack? A straight guy isn't supposed to respond to another man's sexual offer by turning him over. Ennis's reluctance to share the tent in the first place is not proof that he hadn't noticed Jack erotically -- rather the opposite. As for the later moves, I'm not sure how Murray is counting them, but it is Ennis who comes to Jack in the tent to initiate their second night together. I think that's crucial, for it shows that Ennis is not just a guy who can't say no.

Murray says that "they are not cowboys. They ride horses in their line of work, but they are responsible for sheep, and anyone who has seen very many westerns knows that the cattle barons and the would-be sheep-raisers are recurrent foes. Jack, for a time, is a 'rodeo cowboy,' riding bulls." After Ennis's summer tending sheep with Jack, he works on ranches with cattle. I think that Murray is defining "cowboy" far too strictly here, and I really don't understand why some people work themselves into such a lather over whether this is a "gay cowboy" movie or not; is it because cowboys aren't universal enough, or their feelings don't matter? Or is it because cowboys are too universal, and they can't be gay or America will fall? I really don't get it.

As Murray also complains, "The word 'gay' is bandied about very loosely in regard to the movie"; but then, "gay" does not have a strict meaning. "Ennis and Jack have homosexual sex, but neither has a self-identification as gay (and, as I have explained at considerable length in American Gay, self-identification, at least intrapsychically, is the criterion of gay)." American Gay is a fine book, but while Murray can define "gay" strictly for his own writing purposes, he can't require other people to hew to his definition, and most don't.

He goes on say that Brokeback is not a "gay movie" because "The story was written by a straight woman, adapted for the screen by a straight couple, directed by a straight man, and stars straight movie stars". So, Of Human Bondage is a homosexual novel because, though it has no gay content, it was written by a homosexual? What constitutes a "gay novel" or "gay play" or "gay movie" has been much debated over the years. Gay playwright Robert Patrick playfully defined a gay play as a play that sleeps with other plays of the same sex. Murray's definition might work for him, but I think that for most people, a movie with central same-sex content is a "gay movie" regardless of the sexual orientation of the writers, directors, or stars, or second assistant grip.

Murray continues:

In rural Wyoming it seems plausible for someone who spends his waking hours outdoors not to know of the emergence of gay communities during the 1970s. It, however, seems more difficult to imagine that by the early 1980s Jack would not have learned that somewhere (in Texas, even) there were gay bars and gay circles and gay neighborhoods. Jack is less isolated (both in general and from media) than Ennis. Instead of crossing the Rio Grande at Ciudad Juarez, he could have tooled over to Houston... but he didn't, and continued to dream of splendid isolation a deux on a ranch with Ennis (who never left Wyoming). I'm definitely not saying that Jack wanted an urban gay lifestyle. What he did want was more conceivable and obtainable after "almost twenty years" (a specification that crops up at one of their brief reunions in the wilds).

That reminds me: how does Ennis know "what they got for boys like you in Mexico", if he's so ignorant and isolated and all? I suspect that Jack's self-limitation is best explained as a result of Proulx's naivete (in interviews she's made much of her personal ignorance, as an old straight woman), and perhaps her own wish to keep her characters uncontaminated by urban gay lifestyles. But I've also known gay men who, even though they lived in cities with gay resources, refused to use them, or even to admit that they were there, while dreaming that Jack Armstrong the All-American Boy would come knocking on their doors one night and take them away from all this. Murray should know that "gay" is still a stigmatized identity, and that closet cases often have intricate strategies to avoid applying it to themselves even "intrapsychically." There's a widespread tendency to treat them as sophisticated thinkers so soaked with integrity that they won't apply a label to themselves unless it truly fits, no matter how much they want to, when it really is the other way around. Think, by analogy, of the difficulty of the strategies people have for identifying themselves as alcoholics. Just because Jack is less paralyzed than Ennis, it doesn't mean he's ready to move to the Montrose in Houston. (Where he might also be queer-bashed.) But then, he was only 39 when he died. Murray must know, as I do, men who came out later in life than that.

Brokeback Mountain, Murray declares ex cathedra, "is a story of the tragic internalization of homo-hatred, not a movie about `gay cowboys.'" False antithesis. The movie is both, and more.

Essentially Yours

In an endnote to an article* co-written with her partner of 20 years Nicola Griffith, Kelley Eskridge wrote:

For the record, I don't call myself a lesbian writer. I don't even call myself a lesbian. I live in a committed relationship of nearly twenty years with Nicola, and would crawl on my belly like a reptile to beg her forgiveness for having mad sex with Johnny Depp if I ever got the chance. And yet what's the point of correcting people? No, no, I'm not a lesbian! is defensive at best, and offensive at worst, and I don't feel either way about this part of me.

This sent me back to an interview** with Marge Piercy, conducted by her husband Ira Wood, where Piercy said:

Frequently when I go into a place, because I’m a feminist, people assume I’m a lesbian. I never question that silent assumption. There’s no reason why I shouldn’t be a lesbian if I fell in love with a woman again.

There are interesting similarities in these remarks: the refusal to correct others' misimpressions, for one. But there are differences too: for Piercy, loving a woman makes one a lesbian, at least for the duration, whether or not one has loved or will again love men. For Eskridge, it seems that loving a woman for twenty years doesn't make her a lesbian, because she has loved men before and has never loved another woman.

Well, fine. People should label themselves as they see fit. And it's good to see how different people mean different things by the same word, so one should be alert to that possibility. (Recall, for example, that Thai toms and dees "explicitly reject the English term 'lesbian' largely due to its explicitly sexual associations. 'Lesbian' is understood to refer to two feminine women who are engaging in sex with each other ... [as] a performance for a lascivious male audience.") But I was surprised by Eskridge's note, because in the body of the essay she had written that she's "never cottoned to essentialism. ... I find such things stupid and reductive, and I'm not partial to being reduced" (page 41). And insisting, for example, that one is not a lesbian because one isn't really a lesbian, despite a twenty-year relationship with another woman, is essentialism: she is saying that her nature, her essence, her being, isn't lesbian. There are evidently "real" lesbians in Eskridge's universe, but she's not one of them.

Eskridge's remark caught my attention because not long before, I'd overheard a gay kid complaining about something he saw in his Gender Studies class that "essentialized" all gay men as effeminate. I think he meant "stereotyped," though of course there's some overlap in the concepts. But as he kept repeating "essentialized," I felt a powerful urge to walk over to him and say, "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

"Essentialism" is a tricky word, for all that it's bandied about so much. Some people have talked about coming up with a social constructionist understanding of sexual identity, but I think that project is doomed, because identity, saying "I am a ...", is essentialist. Most attempts I've seen to get around that problem mistake social constructionism for social determinism, the belief that we are molded and shaped by our environments (including the cultures/societies into which we're born), with the corollary that our real selves are something other than whatever our upbringing did to us. Sometimes social determinists seem to think that human beings have no nature, we are totally malleable in the hands of our parents and our societies. That's a much-disputed issue, and I'm glad I don't have to try to settle it here. Those who'd like to begin exploring it might start by reading Noam Chomsky's critique of B. F. Skinner in For Reasons of State (Pantheon, 1973), though much of it is available online, and / or Clifford Geertz's essay "Anti-Anti-Relativism", originally published in 1984 and reprinted in Available Light (Princeton, 2000).

But I want to try to stay with social construction / essentialism. It's popular to accuse social constructionists of believing that, for example, being gay is a "choice" rather than something we're born with. Aside from the fact that "born this way" and "choice" are not opposite concepts, social constructionism investigates the ways people try to avoid or deny choice, to believe that their customs are natural, in the blood, in the genes. Even if it could be shown (and so far, it hasn't been) that genes can drive men to engage in sex with other men, or women with other women, we have a complex system of understandings about the meanings of that sexual behavior. For example, is a man who only penetrates other men a "homosexual"? Many cultures would say No, only a man who is penetrated is a "homosexual." In a butch-femme lesbian couple, are they both lesbians or is only the butch the lesbian? The lesbianism of femmes has often been denied, including by lesbians themselves, including butches.

Although identity is essentialist, it isn't always believed to be inborn / genetic / biological. That I'm an American is part of my identity, because by historical accident I was born here. I'm not biologically different from people who aren't Americans. The same can be said for religious identity, political identity, and many other kinds. At the same time, people seem to find it difficult not to essentialize. Even academics, trying to avoid essentializing terms like "homosexual," "gay," or "lesbian" in favor of "same-sex," soon start loading terms like "same-sex" with all the essentializing baggage they're trying to leave behind. They write about "same-sex desires", for example, as though such desires were always erotic, or same-sex relationships or communities, forgetting that monastic orders and the military are same-sex communities. And just recently I read someone referring to "same-sex parents."

I believe all this is mainly a problem when we're trying to communicate with other people about such things. (Which means, a lot of the time.) Go back to Kelley Eskridge. Since she hasn't defined her term, I speculate that for her a lesbian is a woman who never has sex with men, or never wants to. The trouble is that by this definition a good many self-defined lesbians are not lesbians after all, and the same would be true for gay/homosexual men. Take the (in)famous figure of 10% for the proportion of gay people in the population, ascribed to Alfred Kinsey. Kinsey didn't use the word "gay," and 10% is the proportion of men in his research who were more or less exclusively homosexual in their erotic experience for at least three years of their lives. (Only 4% were exclusively homosexual in their erotic experience throughout their lives.) That leaves a lot of wiggle room, and it would seem that according to Kinsey, most "gay" people are significantly bisexual in their actual behavior. The poet Adrienne Rich calls herself lesbian, though she was married to a man in her youth, and has three sons. The poet W. H. Auden, though most of his erotic experience was with males and the central relationship of his adult life was with a male, had numerous sexual relationships with women. Not only are labels like "gay" and "lesbian" not determined by a person's erotic experience, they seem to be largely independent of it. I've often noticed that people deliberately seem to define problematic terms very narrowly so as to exclude themselves, and then they complain that the term is too narrow and excludes them. So now I'm wondering why Eskridge, who is a very intelligent and well-informed person, can be unaware that the term "lesbian", as it's commonly used, does not necessarily exclude her and her experience.

Besides, essentialism isn't a bad thing in itself: it's a tool we use to socially construct. It can't be eliminated, because then social construction would come to a halt. That's the other trouble (besides misunderstanding the concept) with the kid who was upset about essentializing. "Essentializing" isn't, or shouldn't be, a pejorative; it just refers to one way of looking at human society, as incomplete as social construction is. There's a funny bit in one of Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City novels where Michael, an older gay man, is shocked that a young lesbian friend doesn't know who Sappho was. "How can you call yourself a dyke?" he asks her. "I don't call myself one," she replies, "I am one. I didn't have to take a course in it, you know." Both have essentializing views of what a lesbian is -- which is another way of saying that they rely on different social constructions. Two sides of the same coin, two poles of the same magnet.

And then Mrs. Madrigal, the series' resident oracle, reminds Michael that, eons before, she'd had to explain to him who Ronald Firbank was.

* "War Machine, Time Machine", in Queer Universes: Sexuality in Science Fiction, ed. Wendy Gay Pearson, Veronica Hollinger, and Joan Gordon. Liverpool University Press, 2008, page 49

** Marge Piercy, Parti-colored Blocks for a Quilt. (Poets on Poetry) University of Michigan Press, 1982, page 313