The Kingdom of Psychiatry Is at Hand

I've begun reading an interesting new book, Mad Science: Psychiatric Coercion, Diagnosis and Drugs, by Stuart A. Kirk, Tomi Gomory, and David Cohen, published this year by Transaction Publishers.  All three authors are academic, professors of social work, with backgrounds as mental health clinicians.  A major thesis of the book is that medical psychiatry has grossly inflated its achievements: that there is no evidence of biological causes for most mental illnesses, that drugs have not been effective as treatment, and that the concept of mental illness itself is incoherent. This is interesting, because I've recently been told the opposite by boosters of psychiatry and the medical model of mental illness, though I remained skeptical of these claims, so I'm looking forward to reading the rest of the book and seeing the authors' arguments and evidence for their position.

I'm sure I'll have more to say about Mad Science as I read the rest of it, but for now let me quote this passage, in which the authors discuss the assumptions and claims made by Edward Shorter, a distinguished historian of mental illness and psychiatry.  (Again, I've silently removed citations from the quotation.)

His uncritical commitment to the reality of biological causes of psychiatric diseases is illustrated by his discussion in A History of Psychiatry concerning the increases in the frequency of certain psychiatric illnesses during the nineteenth century. He names “in particular neurosyphilis, alcohol psychosis and … schizophrenia.” But the facts are that neither of the first two is a psychiatric disease. Neurosyphilis is a neurological disease with behavioral correlates, a brain infection caused by the bacteria Treponema pallidium, if untreated leading to death. Alcohol psychosis is caused by chemical poisoning: either too much alcohol consumption or sudden withdrawal from it. The historical record is clear that both these physiological disease processes, along with a few others, were analogically applied by nineteenth-century mad-doctors to explain the phenomena they came to call schizophrenia.  About the latter, some anonymous wit famously said that “unlike neurosyphilis it is a disease where the treating psychiatrists perish before the patients do.” Shorter’s silence concerning the hard empirical evidence for the reality of the first two entities and the absence of such evidence for schizophrenia (although he lumps all three together as “mental diseases,” having been demonstrated as biological diseases) can only be attributed to political calculation, not scientific judgment. What would be needed from him as an honest historical broker are the scientific facts of the matter both pro and contra, from the historical record, regarding schizophrenia. The current  [2000] DSM states explicitly that “no laboratory findings have been identified that are diagnostic of Schizophrenia.”  Of course Shorter knows this, as he explains in a later work when he concedes that “so little is understood about the underlying causes of psychiatric illness. Not having a solid ‘pathophysiolology’ or understanding of the mechanisms of disease, psychiatry cannot rigorously delineate disease entities on the basis of anatomical physiology, as other medical fields do” [69].

That quotation from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual IV is especially telling, when I consider how many people have told me confidently that schizophrenia has been identified as a physiological entity.  I was as skeptical of that, from what I already knew on the subject, as I am of confident claims that homosexuality has been established as a biological, probably genetic condition.

One more brief quotation:

Thomas Insel, the [National Institute of Mental Health]'s director, speculates that "abnormal activity in specific brain circuits" are the causes of mental illnesses.  Unfortunately, after a hundred years of these hypotheses, not a single biological marker for a single psychiatric disorder has been identified to validate distress and misbehavior as a medical disease.

Insel and other psychiatric authorities reassure the public, despite their continual inability to provide the evidence, that if the public is just patient for a little while longer and holds on to the descriptive DSM sydromes, diagnostic lesions underlying these syndromes will definitely be identified in the not too distant future, initiating a psychiatric utopia -- one in which psychiatric science will deliver specific cures for our behavior problems [69].

I've written before that confident claims for the medical model of homosexuality were made in advance of any real evidence for them; it appears that the same happened with psychiatry in general.  And the imminence of the kingdom of psychiatry on earth recalls themes from religious teaching about the End Times: though there be heretics and scoffers, True Science is not slow in keeping its promise, as some understand slowness.  But those that endure until the fullness of true Gnosis will be saved.  Meanwhile, just keep taking your Thorazine, Adderol, and Abilify; and have faith, the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen.

Surely I Am Coming Late

My friend the ambivalent Obama supporter sent me a link to a Facebook note by someone I take to be an evangelical Christian, arguing that when Jesus taught the nearness of the End (the final judgment, the Kingdom of Heaven, his own coming on clouds seated at the right hand of Power), he meant "near" to his own day, not two thousand years later.  He then faces the implication that Jesus and the early Christians were mistaken about an important teaching.  (You have to be logged in to Facebook to read the post, but come to think of it, most people nowadays seem to be on Facebook, so here's the link if you want to read it.)  I haven't yet followed the link to his next post on the subject, but my friend wanted my reaction to this one, so I stopped there for now.

My reaction, of course, was that the writer is correct: the New Testament writers were addressing their contemporaries, not people in the distant future. They believed that they were living in the last days, and that God, with Jesus at his right hand, would sweep away the world as they knew it and replace it with his kingdom on earth, as it had always been in the heavens. They believed that some of that first generation of believers, perhaps they themselves, would live to see it happen. Whether they accurately reflect Jesus' teachings, no one can say.  But the idea that Jesus and the New Testament writers mistakenly believed that the End would happen in their lifetimes is not this writer's discovery: all professional New Testament scholars are well acquainted with it, thanks to Albert Schweitzer's classic work The Quest for the Historical Jesus, first published in German in 1906, in English in 1910.  Schweitzer did a major revision, published in 1913, but that version wasn't available in English until 2001.  Much New Testament scholarship after Schweitzer's work was published was concerned with getting around its implications, by explaining it away or by offering an alternative theory, like C. H. Dodd's realized eschatology. 

(The most valuable thing about Schweitzer's work for me had little to do with its account of Jesus as an end-times preacher.  The bulk of the book is a critical survey of life-of-Jesus research from the late 1700s to the end of the 1800s, as shown by its original title, From Reimarus to Wrede.  Anyone who's interested in theories about the historical Jesus ought to read that part of Schweitzer's book, because most contemporary theories from The Passover Plot to The Da Vinci Code basically recycle ideas that Schweitzer described and refuted a hundred years ago.)

The writer whose post my friend referred me to never mentions Schweitzer or acknowledges that the problem he's confronting is well-known among scholars, probably because he wants to rely solely on the New Testament material he quotes, and not on scholarly interpretation.  That's reasonable, but it is worth asking why laypeople who study the Bible never seem to notice this material themselves.  It isn't because they don't rely on professional guidance: study Bibles with annotation and commentary sell well, and church-sponsored Bible study will provide you with professional guidance too.  Such commentaries will reassure the student that while there are troubling, difficult passages in Scripture, they're nothing to lose sleep over.  Churches want to build up their members' faith, not undermine it.  That tendency isn't limited to religion: most adults want schools to teach national history that will build up patriotic fervor, not undermine it, for example, nor are science courses supposed to dwell overmuch on problems with existing theories.  I've argued before that most people seem to stay in relationships much longer than they should, after it's clear that it is time to bail.  There are plenty of reasons why people behave this way; I'm interested here in a recent case.

I've often wondered how people can go on believing in prophets whose predictions have proven to be false.  The Hebrew Bible, after all, prescribes the death penalty for such a person, in Deuteronomy 18:20.  On the other hand, prophets are allowed to cover their asses. Ezekiel reported that Yahweh promised to hand the city of Tyre to the heathen King of Babylon Nebuchadrezzar (chapter 26). Later, Yahweh issued a correction: despite the hard labor of Nebuchadrezzar and his army, Tyre didn't fall, so Yahweh gave Egypt to Nebuchadrezzar instead (chapter 29). This isn't a well-known passage; I learned about it from James Barr's Beyond Fundamentalism (Westminster Press, 1984, 26-27). But Jesus' imminent return on clouds of glory is much proclaimed.

What would happen if someone's prophecies were falsified today?  We all heard about Harold Camping's humiliation by Jesus' failure to keep his rendezvous with destiny two years ago.  Camping fell down partly because he set a precise date, which the mainstream media obligingly publicized.  But let me tell you about a book called Saved by the Light: The True Story of a Man Who Died Twice and the Profound Revelations He Received, by one Dannion Brinkley with Paul Perry, published by Villard Books in 1994, with an introduction by Raymond Moody M.D.  (Remember the publication date: it's important.)  I heard about this book because Anne Rice was touting it, and had based parts of one of her novels on the author's experience, even citing him by name in The Vampire Armand as one of "the new spiritual explorers".  She continued to be a booster of Brinkley for years afterward.

In 1975, Brinkley says, he was struck by lightning and died, but later revived.  While he was dead he had what is now called a Near Death Experience, in which he was taken to a crystal city, where he was instructed by angelic teachers about the future.  The instruction included a detailed future history through the year 2000.  "Of the 117 revelations that he recalls," according to the book's dust jacket, "95 have come to pass."  "Revelation" is the meaning of the word "apocalypse"; Saved by the Light is an apocalypse like the one written by John of Patmos in the New Testament, or the book of Daniel in the Hebrew Bible, or the many non-biblical books of Revelation produced at around the beginning of the Christian era.

You can tell roughly when an apocalypse was written by noticing when its predictions stop being accurate.  Daniel, for example, purports to be the story of a Jewish youth carried away to Babylon during the exile of 586 BCE.  Like Dannion Brinkley, Daniel was given heavenly instruction about events to come, which paralleled actual history until the middle of the second century BCE.  His angelic teacher told him to seal up the book until the right time.  Most scholars today believe that the book was written around 165 BCE, and its predictions were backdated.  The same thing happens in the New Testament: in chapter 13 of the gospel of Mark, for instance, Jesus predicts what will happen after his death and resurrection, culminating in the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple and his return on clouds of glory.  Here too, the predictions stop being accurate after the destruction of the Temple, so it's most likely that Mark was written after that happened.  The gospel of Mark shows Jesus telling his disciples to keep his teachings secret, though there's a lot of disagreement about the significance of this.  In any case, we can again date Mark by the point at which his predictions fail.  The revelation of John is odd man out here: it takes place in the writer's present, and he's told not to seal the book, for Jesus will be returning very soon.  But that prediction, too, is false.

Dannion Brinkley didn't publish his revelation for almost twenty years.  During that time he got involved with Raymond Moody's research on Near Death Experiences.  Gradually, he says, he noticed that things he'd seen in his 1975 visions had come true: the nuclear power plant disaster at Chernobyl, for example (36), the collapse of the Soviet Union (37-38), growing conflict in the Middle East, increasing debt in the United States (40), the first Gulf War of 1991 (40-41), and more.  These predictions all refer to events that happened before the publication of Saved by the Light in 1994, or were vague enough not to require a lot of predictive power.  Once he turns his gaze to events after 1994, however, he's in trouble.

A second nuclear accident appeared in the box, this in a northern sea so badly polluted that no ships could travel there.  The water was a pale red and was covered with dead or dying fish.  Around the water were peaks and valleys that made me think I was seeing a fjord like those in Norway.  I couldn't tell where this was, but I knew that the world was frightened at what had happened, because radiation from this accident could spread everywhere and affect all of humankind.  The date on the picture was 1995 [36-7].

Oops.  No such nuclear accident happened.   The "bankruptcy of America by the year 2000" (40) didn't happen either.  Nor did "two horrendous earthquakes" that happened "sometime before the end of the century, but I couldn't tell where they took place ... The cost of rebuilding these destroyed cities would be the final straw for our government, now so financially broken that it would hardly be able to keep itself alive", leading to "the end of America as a world power" (40).  Nor was there "a submarine loaded with nuclear missiles" in 1993, when both "Iran and Iraq [were] in possession of nuclear and chemical weapons" (41).

I saw this submarine powering through the waters of the Middle East, piloted by people I knew to be Iranians.  I could tell that their purpose was to stop the shipping of oil from the Middle East.  They were so praiseful of God in their speech that I had the sense that this was some kind of religious mission...

Chemical warfare played a role in a horrible vision of terrorism that takes place in France before 2000.  It begins when the French [all of them? the government?] publish a book that infuriates the Arab world.  I don't know the title of this book, but the result of its publication is a chemical attack by Arabs on a city in France.  A chemical is put into the water supply, and thousands drink it and die before it can be eliminated.

In one brief vision I saw Egyptians rioting in the streets while a voice told me that by 1997, Egypt would collapse as a democracy and be taken over by religious fanatics [41].

That last one is particularly funny, because Egypt wasn't a democracy before 1997, having been a dictatorship under Hosni Mubarak -- you've heard of him, I'm sure -- since 1981.

Oh, there's more, but this is probably enough.  I don't know where the "95 out of 117 revelations" figure came from, but I'm skeptical about it.  But to repeat: like his predecessors, Brinkley begins to fail as a prophet in the early 1990s, when his book was being written and published.  It's probable, then, that the "predictions" for the years before 1994 were concocted after they'd already come true.

I looked at customer reviews of Brinkley's book on Amazon, and noticed that those who rated it positively ignored the predictions and concentrated on his account of his Near Death Experience.  That's probably why many Christians are able to ignore the New Testament's failed predictions: there's a lot more to the New Testament, and even just the gospels, than end-times predictions, so believers concentrate on what they find useful and edifying, and ignore the rest.

I also noticed that there's a new edition of Saved by the Light, published in 2008.  I can't tell from the Amazon description what, if anything, has changed from the original, and I'm not going to spend money to find out.  The customer reviews are instructive, though.  Some date from well before 2008 and so must refer to the first edition; the most recent, again, concentrate on Brinkley's Near Death Experience or on the depth of his conversion from an "S.O.B." to a New Creation in Christ.  There are some by conservative Christians who noticed Brinkley's false prophecies and are indignant that people are taking him seriously.  Only the Bible tells truth! they huff.  But the Bible also contains false prophecies, and that evidently doesn't bother them.

Evidently many people read Saved from the Light after the year 2000 without ever noticing that Brinkley's predictions hadn't panned out.  The fact that Brinkley is still out there, publishing books and conducting seminars, despite his failed predictions, is telling.  Christian apologists have often claimed that the New Testament writers must have been telling the truth, because there were plenty of hostile critics around who could have exposed them if they didn't get things right.  That's giving people too much credit, don't you think? -- especially in religious matters.  If someone exposes your falsehoods, you just accuse them of trying to undermine the faith of simple believers, you point out that Jesus was persecuted by the ungodly too, and otherwise change the subject.  People who want to believe will believe.

The Smart-Aleck's Tale

What does it say about me that among my favorite songs are three which express the point of view of someone who offers his love to someone smarter, despite his own lack of book-smarts? And I identify with him, not the person he's offering his love to.

I've been having some online conversations that have left me feeling a bit uneasy, with people I know from high school. As I've said before, I was an isolate in those days, partly because I was so closeted, but also because I seemed to have so little in common with my peers. Playing guitar was the first real connection I was able to make with them. I was also an intellectual who did well in school, and while I didn't look down on others, I didn't know what to talk to them about. This was partly temperamental on my part; the tendency to be a loner seems to run on my father's side of the family. It's more than shyness, but shyness is certainly part of it. Since I got onto Facebook and some of my old schoolmates contacted me, I've learned that there were more readers and thinkers (and even some atheists) in my small town than I realized.

But what about everyone else? A few of my classmates have told me that they thought I believed I was better than others, too good to be friends with them because I was smart. This is difficult to answer, because I didn't think I was better than they were, and I don't feel I'm that smart. I wrote "feel" there rather than "think" or "believe," because I know objectively that I am smart, probably smarter than most people, but most of the time I'm more conscious of what I don't know than what I do know. If anything, in high school I felt inferior to most people: fearful of what they'd think if they knew I was homosexual; ashamed of my family for various private reasons I'm not going to write about but suffice it to say I thought we were abnormal; ashamed of my own shyness and penchant for solitude. Books and music were a refuge for me, as they are for many awkward adolescents. It wasn't my own thoughts I communed with, but the thoughts of other people encountered in the books I read.

It was this shyness and insecurity that other people misinterpreted as arrogance. They still do sometimes, so when I have the chance, when someone remarks on someone else's perceived arrogance, I suggest that maybe that other person is shy and insecure instead. I suspect that many people like accusing others of arrogance, no doubt because of their own insecurities, which probably come from being taught by various adults to think of themselves as stupid. Among the writers I learned from in those days were Jonathan Kozol and John Holt, who taught me what a lot of other kids went through while I was coasting through school. If I had ever thought of my schoolmates as dumb, I got over that decisively. But by then I was out of school, and far from my home town.

It's also true that in my teens I exposed myself to a lot of writing, especially in science fiction, which espoused technocratic elitism, the idea that the more intelligent few should rule the ignorant many. This flattered my alienated adolescent self, of course, and it took me quite a while to learn better and get over it.

Two things have been helpful to me in figuring out where I stand. Several people have told me that I'm good at explaining things, clearly and without condescending to them. This is probably why so many people have used me as a resource over the years, a walking talking encyclopedia that shares what it knows but doesn't pretend to know what it doesn't. One of my high school classmates told me that I helped him with algebra, so this willingness to share knowledge goes back at least that far. But there are subjects that can't be covered in five or ten minutes; some of it involves worldview, and that's harder to get across. For example, you can talk about specific cases of American foreign policy (Vietnam, the Iraq War, Central America, and so on), but a lot of people reflexively resist the idea that the United States has ever done anything really, seriously, wrong. It's too disturbing, so they balk. This includes not just people with high-school educations, of course, but people with college degrees.

The other thing, probably more important, was learning to listen. In the Seventies I joined a local crisis telephone line and was trained in what they called "listening skills." It really just codified and highlighted things I already knew; I'd noticed almost as soon as I arrived in Bloomington that a surprising number of people found me easy to talk to about their lives. Reading is a kind of listening, after all, and books for me have always been a way to learn about the lives of people who were different from me.

[This post has been in my drafts folder for a year or more; time to get it out of there while I work on something else.]

What Is God's Last Name Again?

There's a person on Facebook who has the account named "God."  His or her postings consist of snark aimed mainly at conservative and fundamentalist Christians, who are excellent but easy targets.  The assumption underlying the account appears to be that this God is preferable to the God of the Bible thumpers; I don't agree, and I have my fun by posting my own snark at the Facebook God, with a good deal more hostility than I usually express in that venue.

I don't really have any idea who Amanda Bynes is.  But when did God, any God, help those millions of starving people out there?  He could help them and Amanda Bynes.  I'm constantly surprised at how shallow the critics of conservative religion are.  And yet, when they put on their God masks, they can't imagine anything but a lazy do-nothing slacker god at best, and a cosmic sadist at worst.  ("Yahweh, how many times I have told you to clean up your planet?"  "Aw, Mom, let me alone, I'm busy playing Grand Theft Auto!")

Why Johnny Can't Blink

But for the time being, the administration has blinked.

Oh, noes!  They've never done that before!  Well, hardly ever.  Well, usually.  Only politically naive professional leftists would have expected the President to do anything else.

Also from The Atlantic today, Republicans are indignant that Democrats are concern-trolling them, which the Republicans would never do, especially now that the party is "down-and-out" and the Democrats are "triumphant." A lot of conspiracy-theory mongering in there too, which is amusing when you consider how respectable politicians and pundits despise conspiracy theories floated by their opponents.  I guess there just isn't enough going on right now for people really to worry about.

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.

Hi, We're From ACT-UP, and We're Doing an Act of Civil Disobedience

I've been watching the documentary How to Survive a Plague, and I wish I'd seen it before, so that I could have put this bit in some earlier posts about freedom of speech and the First Amendment.  The film includes a clip from CSPAN showing Senator Jesse Helms denouncing the AIDS activist group ACT-UP, who had sheathed his home in a giant canvas condom.  Helms said that there'd be no problem if homosexuals would just keep their dirty business to themselves, and shut their mouths.  Another senator, who wasn't identified as far as I could tell but he was another old white guy, said to Helms:

Sir, when we started this colloquy, I thought I was on your side, especially the First Amendment.  And under the First Amendment people don't have to shut their mouths.  They have a right to speak.

Helms, evidently slightly nonplussed, responded:

Well, uh, they can speak, as long as they don't offend anybody else, I suppose.

So there you have it, all my fellow GLBTQs and all liberals everywhere who think that freedom of speech doesn't extend to offensive "hate" speech: you're on the same side as Jesse Helms.  He was all for your freedom of speech as long as you didn't offend anybody.  By "anybody" he meant right-thinking people who agreed with him, just as you want to shield yourselves and those who agree with you.  You see?  People can come together on contentious issues of civil liberties.