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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reid writes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.