Sorting It Out

I think I've finally figured out how to express a point I've been fussing about for some time, namely the definition of "homosexuality."  For example, the anthropologist Sabine Lang wrote that "In Western culture, a homosexual relationship is defined as being between ... two individuals who are of the same sex and the same gender."  There are many things wrong with that definition, which I've spelled out before, but I think I've now pinned down my key objection.

Similarly, Serena Nanda wrote of "a (postmodern) gay ideology, in which both partners in a same-sex sexual relationship are viewed equally in terms of their sexual orientation."  I've spelled out some of the many things wrong with this formulation too, but I don't think I quite got at the core of it until now.

Likewise, Graeme Reid wrote: "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."  Would they really?  Wouldn't it be necessary to make at least a dutiful nod to sexual fluidity and the Kinsey continuum before automatically classifying both partners as homosexual?

So: A more accurate account of a Western definition of "a homosexual relationship" (or more likely, "a homosexual act") is that it involves two individuals of the same sex, whether or not they are of the same gender or sexual orientation.  The difficulty here, I think, is the risk Lang, Nanda, and I all run of ignoring who is doing the defining.  I recognize that many or most people who use these terms assume an inversion / gender variant model of homosexuality, which is also "Western" but assumes that any sexual act or relationship must be gendered: you have your queer and your real man, or your bulldyke and your femme, and only the gender variant in the pair is "the homosexual."

I'm skeptical, in fact, about claims that this or that researcher said that both partners in a homosexual act are homosexual, because most researchers in the twentieth century have used the inversion model.  I suspect that in most if not all cases, they referred to "homosexual activity" and some piece of trade's delicate sense of manhood was outraged, even though the researcher had not said or meant that both men in the encounter were inverts.

Sorting this out is complicated by the fact that even Alfred Kinsey and others who tried to avoid thinking in essentialist terms found it difficult not to speak of homosexual persons.  But even a homosexual person can be viewed (as Kinsey would have done) as someone who interacts erotically with persons of his or her own sex, without assuming that he or she is an invert.  Analogously, the language one speaks doesn't tell us anything about one's nature, though historically people have often believed otherwise: I speak English because I grew up in an English-speaking environment, and learned other languages by choice, not because I was a Spanish-speaking or French-speaking soul trapped in the body of an Anglophone.  It has often occurred to me, when I looked at statements about homosexuality from the Kinsey team, that they were overlooking questions of gender, copulatory role, and the like -- but that was exactly the idea; the trouble was that when Kinsey reported (say) that 37 percent of his male sample had at least one experience with another male to orgasm between the ages of 16 and 55, most readers jumped to the assumption that they were all inverts, homosexuals, etc.  This is interesting when I consider that many if not most Americans in those days surely subscribed to a version of the queer/trade model, in which the penetrator ("trade") officially was Not Homosexual.  But that might explain it: given that assumption, what else could they think when they heard that 37 percent of males had "homosexual" experience, but that all those men were queers?

Remember the young Dominican woman I've quoted before, who, when she learned that her boyfriend was being kept by a maricón, accused him of being a maricón himself, to his great indignation.  "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.'"  Even in a society where the trade/queer model is dominant, not everyone goes along with it, and with reason.  As Annick Prieur (one of the few writers who is able to think about these matters with some clarity) put it in Mema's House (Chicago, 1998), "Gender is a question of discourses, of signs, of presentations and representations, of gestures, speech, garments and clothes, but it is also a question of naked bodies.  And 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).  It takes a lot of sociocultural work to maintain the trade/queer distinction.

What I propose, then, is that in discussing a homosexual act or relationship, there is no need to make assumptions about the gender or the sexual orientation of either partner.  A homosexual act involves two people with the same genitalia, regardless of their sexual identity or orientation or gender -- or their religion or political affiliation or height or weight or eye color.  This all seems so obvious as I write it, but from what I've read on the subject over the past few years I have to conclude that it's not obvious to many people at all.  Indeed the evidence is that it's really very difficult for many or most people to grasp.

Many people who cite the Kinsey continuum misunderstand it, and it's instructive to consider why that is.  It was supposed to help people visualize a non-essentialist model of homosexuality (though Kinsey wouldn't have used the word "essentialist," which wasn't in vogue then), by pointing out that many people have varying amounts of homosexual and heterosexual experience during their adult lives.  Yet many people, including academic and clinical thinkers, take the scale as a metric of "sexual orientation," even though there is no way to measure or quantify sexual orientation.  Arguably you can use it however you wish, as long as you're aware you're not using it as it was meant to be used, but it doesn't appear that such people are aware.  They equate sexual behavior with sexual orientation and even identity (though they also tend to confuse sexual orientation with sexual identity), even as they appeal to a device that was meant to uncouple the two, at least analytically.

One might ask at what point on the scale a person becomes "homosexual" or "heterosexual."  The answer would depend largely on what is meant by "a homosexual person."  It can mean a person with a homosexual essence, which stays the same whether a person has any overt sexual experience at all, and even when "a homosexual person" has considerable quantities of heterosexual experience (and vice versa).  Or it can mean that a person has considerable homosexual experience and decides to label oneself on that basis.  It needn't imply anything about one's biological (or spirit)* nature.  As the writer Marge Piercy put it, "There's no reason I shouldn't be a lesbian if I fell in love with a woman again" -- a lesbian, in this quite reasonable and idiomatic sense, is a woman who's "in love" with a woman at the moment, regardless of her experience with men at other times.  By contrast, the writer Kelley Eskridge wrote that "I don't even call myself a lesbian," despite her relationship of twenty-plus years with the writer Nicola Griffith.  But those who want to stress the "fluidity" of sexuality, to reject "binaries," and to trumpet their rejection of essentialism, should recognize that a label like "homosexual" or even "gay" doesn't tell us anything about a person's nature.

*I mention "spirit" here because the two-spirit model, for example, is thoroughly essentialist: it assumes that there are precultural male and female natures that drive people's behavior, but they are spiritual (whatever that means) rather than biological (whatever that means).  It seems to me that there's no real difference between "spirit" and "biology" in these conceptions.  In both cases, an inner woman is postulated though not defined or explained, who drives the male body she inhabits to seek penetration by other males.  This kind of idea is generally dismissed by scientists as 'mysticism' when the inner woman is a spirit, but not when she's a biological essence -- a concept that is no more rational as far as I can tell.

The Worst Tomboy in the Village

I finished reading Two-Spirit People Thursday night, and I'll have more to say about it soon.  But I noticed something interesting when I came to the final section, which is the transcription of a conversation among several of the academic contributors to the volume and several mostly non-academic two-spirit Indians.

One of the academic participants was Sabine Lang, whose paper I wrote about a couple of days ago.  She wrote, you'll remember, that "In Western culture, a homosexual relationship is defined as being between ... two individuals who are of the same sex and the same gender." I objected that there is no single definition of homosexuality "in Western culture," and argued that the idea of homosexuality as a relationship between two individuals of the same sex but different genders is prevalent in the West, as in much of the world.

At one point in the conversation, Sabine Lang says:

I am what my culture defines as a lesbian.  I do not think I ever had to cope with a lot of internalized homophobia; growing up as a child who was different from other kids in a number of ways.  When I was ten I read scientific books on human evolution and dinosaurs long before dinosaurs became popular; I was the worst tomboy in the village; when all the other teenagers were having wild parties, I devoted my evenings to the creation of watercolors and oil paintings and my weekends to the composition of short stories.  The discovery that I was a lesbian did not really come as a shock to me. It was just another aspect of being myself.  As it turned out, it was also no surprise to those close to me [305; boldface added].

Now, maybe I'm making too much of the words I put into bold type.  It might be that Lang meant to say that being a "tomboy" is merely one of the ways she "was different from other kids", and didn't mean to emphasize that one aspect of her difference as relevant to being a lesbian.  But it still seems to me that she thinks of gender difference as playing some role in her homosexuality, as many gay people do, no matter what their politics.  When Chastity Bono came out as lesbian and published her book Family Outing she wrote, "[A]s a child, I always felt there was something different about me. I'd look at other girls my age and feel perplexed by their obvious interest in the latest fashion, which boy in class was the cutest, and who looked the most like cover girl Christie Brinkley. When I was 13, I finally found a name for exactly how I was different. I realized I was gay."  (Later, of course, Bono came out as transgendered.)  The strongly feminist lesbian cartoonist Alison Bechdel, in her memoir Fun Home, wrote about her coming to recognize her lesbianism mostly in gendered terms: she was always a tomboy, in conflict with her feminine, closeted gay father, who wanted her to be the little girl he wanted to be himself.  Her boyishness is described in detail; her desire for other girls is simply there.

Once again: I have no idea what relation gender actually has to sexual orientation, partly because I don't know what "gender" is.  I'm just objecting when Western academics pretend that our culture defines homosexuality apart from gender, when in fact it mostly does not -- and their personal experience conforms to a gendered model.

And Never Mark Twain Shall Meet

I've finally begun reading Two-Spirit People: Native American Gender Identity, Sexuality, and Spirituality,* after owning my copy for fifteen years.  (I have other still-unread books I've owned longer.)  It's a well-known book, collecting work by Indian and non-Indian writers, most but not all of them academics, and it's often cited in other works, so it's long past time I read it myself.  So far it's interesting, but of course I still argue with some of the writers' assumptions.

Co-editor Sabine Lang's "Various Kinds of Two-Spirit People: Gender Variance and Homosexuality in Native American Communities," for example, draws on the literature and on Lang's own fieldwork.  She begins by disavowing the term "berdache", which was long used by anthropologists to refer to "alteratively gendered people of either sex" in favor of "two-spirit," and to her credit she announces her intention, that whenever "talking about gender variance in a particular tribe, the terms existing in that tribe will be used" (100).

Lang points out that, though "the role of womanly, two-spirit males in Native American cultures (i.e., American Indian and Inuit-Eskimo) has long been viewed as institutionalized (male) homosexuality", "quite a number of reports mention 'berdache' males living with women or who had sexual relationships with women," and these reports have "been downplayed or overlooked by most writers."  She reminds the reader that "(to my knowledge) most anthropologists who collected data on the lives and sexual relationships of 'berdaches' never talked to a two-spirit person but interviewed members of a given tribe who were knowledgeable as far as their tribe's culture was concerned and were willing to cooperate" (102).  (This failure to talk to two-spirit Indians was already changing by the time Two-Spirit People was published in the 1990s: Lang, Will Roscoe, Sue-Ellen Jacobs and other anthropologists met and interviewed two-spirit people.)

So Lang argues, for good reasons, that

the traditional two-spirit roles ... are apparently not defined in terms of sexual preference; they are defined in terms of gender according to the way a given Native American culture constructs gender and gender roles, as well as appropriate sexual behavior relating to those roles.  Cultural constructions of gender and gender roles varied, and still vary, widely in Native American cultures given the diversity among these cultures. ...

Thus, in many native American cultures there existed -- and in a number of instances still exists -- three or four genders: women, men, two-spirit/womanly males, and, less frequently, two-spirit/manly females.  In each Native American culture that acknowledges multiple genders there also exist specific words to refer to people who are of a gender other than woman or man. ...

These terms do not refer to sexual behavior even though certain kinds of sexual behavior may be considered culturally appropriate for an individual belonging to any gender category [103].

This is all good, and should be known by people of varying backgrounds who still, to this day, equate gender variance among American Indians with homosexuality or gayness, or who talk as though all Indian cultures had the same pan-Indian concept of two-spirit.  ("Two-spirit" is a new word, coined around 1990 by Native American sex/gender variant activists as a substitute for berdache.  Like any such blanket term, it has an unfortunate tendency in use to erase historical and cultural differences.)  But there are problems.

Lang implicitly contrasts the various two-spirit "roles" with other constructions of gender and erotic variance, especially "homosexual," "gay," and "lesbian."  But many of the terms used by European Americans to refer to people who relate erotically to others of their own sex do not "refer to sexual behavior" either.  "Gay" and "lesbian," most obviously, but also older terms popular and clinical: "invert," "pansy," "dyke," "fairy," even "queer."  The older terms especially are based on gendered behavior first, with erotic behavior at most implied, just as Lang says of the Native American terms she lists.  The pansy or fairy was characterized as an effeminate man, given to certain styles of dress (including but not limited to cross-dressing) with a tendency to work in certain occupations (hair-dresser, interior decoration, shop clerk, hairdresser, etc.) and a tendency to want to be penetrated by a "normal" male.  The dyke is a masculine woman, characterized by her manner of dress and her hairstyle, likely to work in male-associated jobs like truck-driving, and drawn to feminine women.  Even the cliched description of the invert, the soul of a woman in the body of a man, refers primarily to gender and not to sexual behavior, and has spiritual connotations not so different from those that supposedly characterize the two-spirit.

So, when Lang goes on to say that

In Western culture, a homosexual relationship is defined as being between two men or two women -- two individuals who are of the same sex and the same gender [104]

-- she's flat wrong.  Her use of the blind passive ("is defined as") is a giveaway: Just who is doing the defining?  I'd really like to know.  Just about the only people I know who define homosexuality in these terms are Western or Western-trained academics like Lang, and they do so solely to distance themselves from that definition.  She can't mean biologists or psychologists, since they overwhelmingly conceptualize homosexuality in terms of inversion.  At the grass-roots level, most American gay people I know of agree that there's some kind of connection between homosexuality and inversion.  The respectability-minded gay people I call Homo-Americans, when they're in public-relations mode, insist that we are and should be gender conformists -- but when they want to raise money for their organizations, they put on drag shows.  And remember the gay male clone who told the gay sociologist Martin Levine, "Darling, beneath all this butch drag, we are still girls."  So it's hard to be sure, when some avowedly manly gay men throw tantrums over figure skaters, that the same guys don't have a Dolly Parton costume in their closets for those private moments, or enjoy lip-synching with Dianna Agron.  William S. Burroughs "was notoriously dismissive of pansies, fags, and swish" and once raved to Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac that "All complete swish fairies should be killed, not as traitors to the cause of queerness, but for selling out the human race to the forces of negation and death"**  -- but in the 1980s documentary Burroughs Allen Ginsberg affably reminisced with Old Bull Burroughs about their youthful drag personae; I believe Burroughs was The Countess.  But maybe he wasn't a complete swish fairy.

So what could Lang have meant?  My point is not that homosexuality really, essentially does equal inversion, it's that there is no such thing as the Western definition of homosexuality: there are several.  They coexist, however uneasily, and interpenetrate.  But the inversion model is prominent among them, and probably dominant (or hegemonic, as they say).

A few pages later, Lang writes,

Because most anthropological researchers classified relationships between two-spirit males and men and two-spirit females and women as homosexual, when doing fieldwork in North American cultures they failed to look for relationships involving two persons of the same sex and the same gender.  Thus, hardly anything is known about the way homosexual relations in the Western sense were seen in Native American cultures at a time when two-spirit roles were still largely intact and about concepts of homosexuality that may have existed in American Indian cultures before the massive impact of Western influences.  It seems, however, that there was generally no way to acknowledge a sexual relationship between two men formally, or between two women formally, the way various kinds of heterogender relationships (woman and man, male two-spirit and man, or female two-spirit and woman) were acknowledged formally [106-7].

If non-Indian anthropologists defined homosexuality as sex between two individuals of the same sex and same gender, then why did they classify relationships between a two-spirit male and a social man as "homosexual"?  On Lang's assumptions, they should have regarded it as something totally foreign to their culture, looked (apparently in vain) for homogender homosexuality, and concluded that there was no "homosexuality" in American Indian cultures.  Instead, Lang says, they looked at two-spirits and classified them as "homosexual."  This makes no sense, on Lang's assumptions.  It makes plenty of sense, however, if we recognize that the dominant "Western" model of The Homosexual was the invert, and the model of "homosexual" relationships was heterogender.  Indeed, Will Roscoe has shown*** that the doctors who constructed the European medical model of inversion drew on American Indian "berdaches" as one of their historical inspirations.

Suddenly Lang is concerned to discover evidence of homogender homoeroticism among the Indians.  I think it is a safe bet that social males did sometimes have sex with one another and even form enduring bonds with one another, as did social females.  This also happened in the West despite the dominance of the inversion model.  But homogender relations were, as Lang admits, rendered invisible by a conceptual model that refused to admit their existence, and other writers in Two-Spirit People offer evidence that homogender sex was usually proscribed among the Indians, whether between social males/females or between same-gender two-spirits.

Lang herself writes that among the Shoshoni, "The only sexual relationship that is considered inappropriate is between two taina wa'ippe [i.e., two-spirits].  Such a relationship seems to be viewed as incestuous because male taina wa'ippe regard each other as 'sisters'" (106).  But the rejection of sexual relations between inverts is worldwide, with terms like "incest," "lesbianism," and even "cannibalism" used to express their abhorrence of the very idea.  Annick Prieur reports in her study of Mexico City vestidas that she has "also heard jotas comment with disgust at the sight of two mustache-wearing men kissing each other, seeing it as something "abnormal." ****  Yet Mexico is a "Western" culture.

Despite all the evidence of variety and difference within cultures, even dissident anthropologists and sociologists have an amazingly difficult time recognizing that societies aren't uniform or monolithic.  I don't know what to do about this resistance, but it's a problem: it distorts not only their understanding of other cultures, but of their own.

------------------------
* Edited by Sue-Ellen Jacobs, Wesley Thomas, and Sabine Lang (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997).

** Quoted in Barry Reay, New York Hustlers: Masculinity and Sex in Modern America (Manchester, 2010), 171-2.

*** In Roscoe, "Was We'Wha a Homosexual? Native American Survivance and the Two-Spirit Tradition," GLQ (1995) 2(3), 193-235, esp. 215.

**** Annick Prieur, Mema's House, Mexico City: On Transvestites, Queens, and Machos (Chicago, 1998), 149.