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Gay Cosmos

Black Ganymede

In the early 1970s, as I was an aimless undergraduate at the University of Texas at Austin, it was announced that the university's newly established (and hard won) ethnic studies program would be discontinued if more students did not enroll in it. The ethnic studies program consisted of Afro-American studies and Mexican-American studies. I had no particular interest in ethnic studies. But these were heady days when all things seemed possible, and it seemed to me that if there were ever to be a gay studies program at the university, the ethnic studies program would have to be securely established first.

How foolish I was in my youth. Of course there never would be a gay studies program at the University of Texas. But I signed up for the ethnic studies program, convinced that I was establishing a beachhead for gay studies. The ethnic studies courses then were a fairly ragtag collection, mostly previously existing courses in anthropology, sociology, and history, cross-listed as ethnic studies. As often as not, most of the other students in my classes would be prospective petroleum executives---this was the University of Texas---who wished to learn something of African customs in order to extract African oil as politely as possible. Later, the ethnic studies program was saved by requiring elementary education majors to take six hours of ethnic studies. This did not appreciably raise the level of scholarship in ethnic studies. At any rate, I was often the only declared ethnic studies major in an ethnic studies class. Partly for this reason and partly because no one yet seemed to be sure what ethnic studies was, I was free to make of these courses whatever I would.

One of my first ideas was that I might learn something of the American black civil rights movement with the object of applying some of these lessons to the gay rights movement. But almost all of the courses listed as Afro-American studies had virtually nothing to do with America, but dealt only with Africa. There were a couple of Afro-American literature courses, but on the subject of the struggle for civil rights none contained material more recent than Marcus Garvey.

Eventually I hit upon the idea of attempting to learn what I could of the history of homosexuality in Africa. A preliminary survey of the literature revealed virtually nothing on this topic. Indeed, I rather quickly found sources that claimed there never could be anything written on this topic because there was no native African homosexuality. I believed this was a lie, and I set out to prove that it was.

Although I eventually completed the course work for ethnic studies, I never completed other requirements for my degree. When my fiction began to be published, it seemed to me that finishing college would not be the determining factor in the success of my writing career. The elementary education majors had created a sufficient demand for ethnic studies courses that the program did not need another graduate to secure its place in the university. But I felt badly about the material I had acquired about African homosexuality. I thought there were people who might benefit from having this information, if only I could find the means of disseminating it. I wrote everyone I could think of in hopes of finding a student or a credentialed academic who might accept my research and publish it as his own. These inquiries eventually put me in touch with Black and White Men Together. In the fall of 1986 I was invited to address their Southeastern Conference in Atlanta, Georgia. This is that address.

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Euro-American gay people tend to look to ancient Greece for their cultural and spiritual roots. Homosexual women, from a Eurocentric perspective, have made a point of calling themselves after Sappho's island. References to Greek love are common both in personal ads and in elevated literature. An international competition for gay athletes naturally expects to call itself an olympics. Even though the lambda symbol came from physics, many people now believe it stands for one or another Greek word. The early rhetoric of the modern gay liberation movement is full of allusions to a Spartan army of lovers. Gay novelists turn out book after book with Attic settings. The Greek myth of the beautiful boy Ganymede who was carried off, seduced, and kept at Olympus as a cup-bearer by Zeus has often been used to signify, to explain, and to justify gay people and the right of gay people to live and to love.

The truth is, of course, that modern gay life has little to do with anything the Greeks did. The Greeks did not invent homosexuality, and it would seem they never got especially good at it. Every culture has its traditions and origin myth; gay culture is no exception. Traditions and myths give people a sense of identity and comfort in times of trouble---trouble such as European gays have had now for at least eight hundred years.

I am not here to knock the myth of Greek origin, but to answer the question: what does the black gay American have to call upon from his past? When he looks for the roots of his gay sexuality, often he finds nothing or worse than nothing. To often he finds what I found when I began this study. Too often he finds lies.

Many of you know the lies better than I. First there are the gutter lies, the stuff that is shouted on the street, obscene and vicious lies, repeated by hateful voices.

I'll read just a little of this:

. . . many Negro homosexuals, acquiescing in this racial death-wish, are outraged and frustrated because in their sickness they are unable to have a baby by a white man. The cross they bear is that already bending over for the white man, the fruit of their miscegenation is not the little half-white offspring of their dreams but an increase in the unwinding of their nerves---though they redouble their efforts and intake of the white man's sperm . . . The white man has deprived him of his masculinity, castrated him in the center of his burning skull, and when he submits to this change and takes the white man for his lover as well as Big Daddy, he focuses on 'whiteness' all the love in his pent up soul and turns the razor edge of hatred against 'blackness'---upon himself, what he is, and all who look like him, remind of him of himself. He may even hate the darkness of the night. (Cleaver.)

Of course, whites hear the "racial suicide" garbage sometimes, from the right-wing fringe, from people whose threats must be taken serious, but whose ideas can be dismissed. Blacks are as likely to hear such lies from the left, from people who want to appear to be progressive or even revolutionary.

Just a step above the gutter lies are the lies of liberal racists and homophobes like Beth Day. The title of her book was Sexual Life Between Blacks and Whites. She called her chapter on homosexuality "The White Man's Way." So it is no surprise when we read claptrap like:

. . . With the Africans, however homosexuality was primarily a story of seduction by whites, in which the blacks acquiesced out of fear or from a desire for money.

. . . In the black/white relationships that did develop into homosexual unions, the white partner appears to have been the aggressor.

Ms. Day's book was so well thought of by liberal elements that Margaret Mead wrote an introduction.

No doubt the abuse of black people by white people has included sexual abuse. What is untrue, the lie is that such abuse was the origin of black homosexuality.

The lies came also from Marxist Africans. This is from the official statement of Dahomey at the Algiers Festival of 1969: "The capital error of this older Négritude [an early Pan-African cultural movement], the great sin of négritude in general was to have been, at the outset, inverted love." And the statement goes on to equate "the present day apologists for modern sodomy" with "our ancestors who acquiesced in the selling of slaves."

The lies came also from scholars. In The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Gibbons expressed the hope and belief that blacks were exempt from homosexuality, at least in Africa. Adventurer Sir Richard Burton defined a Sotadic Zone and drew a line through the length of the Sahara, cutting black Africa out of the area in which homosexuality was thought to be indigenous (see Dynes).

The history of the lie in scholarship is what I am now studying, but it can be said to be based upon two false assumptions in anthropology: the false assumption that savage or primitive people know nothing about homosexuality and the false assumption that Africans were savage or primitive. Where there was clear and indisputable evidence of African homosexuality, anthropologists had to invent excuses in order to save these false assumptions, and that is what they did.

The first excuse was that Africans learned homosexuality from the Arabs. Then the excuse was that Africans learned homosexuality by hustling Europeans. Anthropologists said homosexuality was only a corruption practiced by the overly rich chiefs. Then they said that poor people practiced homosexuality because the overly rich chiefs had monopolized all of the women in harems. They said it was only youthful high spirits: the African was not really homosexual; he was just real drunk last night. Every excuse you are likely to hear from a deep closet case was used by Euro-American academics in the attempt to explain away the facts.

The facts were: homosexuality was found in almost every major African ethnic group that we know of, through all of the history we know of. Few of the societies of Africa could be called savage or primitive, but all over the world, those people who might fairly be called savage or primitive are perfectly familiar with homosexuality. Homosexuality is not the white man's way. It is the way of gay people of all colors and nations, of all places and times.

As I have indicated, I think it is most appropriate for me to study the history of the lies and liars, to try to untangle this web of deceit to discover what the liars thought they might gain by hiding the truth. I think I am beginning to see the outline of the explanation. But I know you are not so much interested in the story of these fools running around Africa with notebooks and pith helmets as you are interested in knowing the truth about African homosexuality. So, today I mean to share with you a little that has been discovered.

I have written in the Quarterly about Zande male marriage. I won't repeat myself here. But the Azande are a good place to begin the study of male homosexual traditions of Africa because the record is very clear and it indicates the kinds of mistakes and deceits that you are likely to encounter time and again if you study this subject.

One common mistake, made even by well-meaning writers, is that of confusing the popularity of homosexual activity with what gay people are doing and how they are treated. In Zandeland, just as in ancient Greece, most men---or at least very many men---had homosexual affairs. But in Greece and Zandeland both, most men were expected to marry women, father children, and so forth. In Greece, true homosexuals, what we would call "gay" men today, were still hated and despised and to some degree persecuted. But in Zandeland, Azande knew very well that some men preferred to have sex with other men. Although every man was expected to marry a women, Zande customs provided a man with an excuse to have sex with another man whenever he wanted, throughout life. Marriage between warriors and recruits was only a part of the Zande accommodation to male homosexuality.

Azande were not liberal people. They were the rare example of a society that punished female homosexuality while imposing no penalty on males. Because it was thought fatal to any man who witnessed it, female homosexuality could, in theory, entail the death penalty. But in fact female homosexuality was common and the public knew about it. In a Zande folktale two women conspire to fool a husband in order to get together.

The most common sexual activity between men was intercourse between the thighs---just as this was the acceptable form of homosexual relations with the Greeks. This sort of adaptation is common in cultures where homosexual affairs become fashionable among nongay men. We do not know what the gay---or preferentially homosexual---Azande did. We only know the Azande knew there were such men.

We know that Greeks did not approve of anal sex and despised men who enjoyed being the bottom in anal sex. That is the lesson we get from the comparison of the Azande and the Greeks: when some form of homosexuality becomes popular with people who are not basically homosexual, we cannot know from that fact what it was like to be a homosexual in that society.

In societies where homosexuality becomes popular across the board, it is usual to find that older men choose unmarried young men and that the older men assume the role of top in these relationships. So it is perhaps instructive to look at two groups in Africa that went counter to that tendency.

A good example of an African people with a tradition of male homosexuality between lovers of the same age was the Nyakyusa who lived north of Lake Malawi (aka Lake Nyasa).

When you first begin the study of African culture you hear a lot about the importance of family and kinship in the traditional societies. Family and kinship are important. But it is a mistake to think that the traditional idea of the family is like what Americans call "family." Certainly the traditional African family is not based on heterosexual romantic love.

However important the family was in Africa, you cannot form strong states and vast empires such as Africa had on the basis of family alone. Intermarriage helps some. But to build a strong state you must have forces that run across family lines, that hold the various families together, and that keep feuds and rivalries from tearing society apart. Various African societies have used various institutions to paste society together. There might be secret societies, like fraternities and sororities, especially in West Africa. There might be trade organizations or craft guilds. There may be dance associations or religious institutions. Very commonly, people are organized in age groups.

The Nyakyusa of what is now southwestern Tanzania and northern Zambia carried organization by age group to the extreme. They organized their villages by age group.

One of the first things young Nyakyusa boys did, to show they were becoming responsible, was to herd cattle. Generally a boy and his best friend would herd their families' cattle together. There was no danger of getting the cattle mixed up. Nyakyusa like cattle a lot---which is an understatement. Each cow had a name. Each boy knew the name and markings of each of his family's cows.

Pasturing the cattle gave the boys plenty of time to play around. And, of course, what they did was to have sex. They danced together, engaged in mutual masturbation, anal sex, and intercourse between the thighs.

Oral sex, whether heterosexual or homosexual, was not very popular in traditional African societies. Most of them thought it was very bad. Oral sex or rape were considered serious crimes which might entail a cattle fine. All of the other things the boys did might get them a tongue lashing or a minor whipping if they were caught by the adults. But everyone knew what was going on and no serious attempt was made to stop the boys.

At a fairly young age Nyakyusa boys had to move out of their fathers' homes. At first they were likely to sleep with other boys in abandoned huts or other bachelors' quarters in their fathers' villages. Boys slept together, and naturally had sex with each other at night. So long as force was not used, no crime was reckoned to have occurred when the boys had sex. For the boys, homosexuality was considered a perfectly normal, if not completely desirable, sexual outlet that required no explanation, supernatural or otherwise.

Eventually boys of the same age, perhaps from several parent villages, got together and began to form a village of their own. At first this was a boys' village. The girls remained in the parent villages until the boys reached a marriageable age. In a sense, Nyakyusa villages have life cycle from boyhood through manhood to old age. A village is child to some other villages, parent to some villages, and brother to yet others.

Now, what do I mean by boys? In Africa you are a child until you become a boy. You remain a boy until you of an age to have a house, a female wife, and children of your own. Nyakyusa began having homosexual relations at 10 to 14 years of age. The seldom married before they were 25. So for ten to fifteen years of the most sexually active part of life, Nyakyusa men practiced homosexuality.

Once they got married to women, and virtually all of them did, Nyakyusa men were supposed to stop having homosexual relations. Nonetheless, a few cases of relations between men and boys came to light. This was punishable by a cattle fine. It is said, however, that the men were not afraid of the fine, but of the shame of being caught in activity associated with witchcraft.

In any event, Nyakyusa men did not believe it sacrificed their masculinity to perform anal sex in either position. They did not believe they were castrated in the middle of their burning skulls just because they had sex with their friends. Certainly the Nyakyusa public though it peculiar if a man with a wife at home preferred to have sex with a man or boy, but that only raised questions of witchcraft, not questions of manhood. If anything, it is the phony-baloney European notion of manhood, it is compulsory heterosexual that is the white man's way. It is Mr. Cleaver, not Mr. Baldwin, who has swallowed a poisonous European lie.

A very exceptional case was provided by the Nkund¢, a Mongo people of what is now Zaire. Their tradition of homosexuality among men included the requirement that the younger men assume the top position. This is no mystery to us, for we say: today's trade is tomorrow's competition. But it is rare among those who anthropologists call "traditional" people. That tradition had died out by the time it was reported, but had been replaced by several others. One replacement was a game called yembankongo wherein younger boys pretend to be monkeys. Another replacement was the game of "playing parents," which is very commonly reported. Among the youngest children the game is merely imitative of adult sexual positions, but as the young people mature the game becomes perfectly conscious sex---and in the game not much attention is paid to whether the partners are of the same or opposite sexes.

Among the older boys, when they lay together, one would say to the other, "This is what I do to your sister." The missionary who made this report then suggests that the boys are not really doing anything homosexual because they say that stuff about each other's sisters. Female homosexuality was well known and was called ya¡kya bons ngo which can be translated very roughly as "bumping pussies." The missionary writes, "Homosexuality has been known among the Nkund¢ since time immemorial, among men as well as women." But then he tries to explain it away, saying it is difficult for the young people to get married (Hulstaert). This kind of doublethink is found over and over in the literature whether the writers are missionaries, colonialists, historians, or anthropologists.

A tradition is something that the average person in society knows about and reports. Since the average person in any society is nongay, traditions of homosexuality are filtered through nongay perceptions. Then when the traditions are reported, they are filtered again through the prejudices of the anthropologist or the colonial civil servant or whomever. Finally, before the report is printed, it often is edited or censored. Sometimes we end up with a few sentences in bad Latin, if we are lucky. Often we find only a reference to "unspeakable acts" or "reprehensible scenes." We have a good idea what is meant. But the details are lost.

Then we may find a later report that is more candid. We just have to suppose that the later report explains what the "unspeakable acts" were. Here, however, is an example in which the earlier investigator gave the better account.

The Fang live in the forest on the border between Gabon and Cameroon. The Fang were so-called Bantus or Negroes who replaced the original Pygmy inhabitants of this area three or four hundred years ago. One writer (Trezenem) reported: "Neither homosexuality or bestiality have ever been recorded, to our knowledge, among the Fang." That writer did his fieldwork around 1935. Writers who treat homosexuality and bestiality in the same sentence do not merit our trust. The Fang deserve a closer look.

Sure enough, a writer who did his fieldwork around 1905 recorded traditions of homosexuality among the Fang. First Gunther Tessmann gives the usual reports of younger people playing parents. He reports a game played by older boys among the neighboring Pangwe: one boy plays the wife of another and presents the play-husband with a mud pie. If the husband accepts, he pretends to eat the mud pie. They do not, however, pretend to have sex, but have sex in fact.

Adult Fang excuse this sort of thing by saying the children do not know what they are doing and that children have no sense of shame. Adult Fang imply that such things never happen between adults. Tessmann then writes:

We have spoken of homosexual relations among 'children.' In adults such conduct is regarded as something immoral and unnatural, simply as unheard of. In reality, however, it is frequently 'heard of' that young people carry on homosexual relations with each other and even of older people who take boys---who, as is well known, 'have neither understanding nor shame'---and readily console them by saying: [we are playing a game]. The children are excused with the well-know assertion, which in its deeper sense can rarely be defended: [they don't know what they are doing]. Adults are excused with the corresponding assertions: [he has the heart of boys], which is, of course, by no means flattering to them.

Publicly, of course, homosexuals are treated with the greatest contempt, and they were therefore forced, as a matter of course, to cast about for a protective covering to shield themselves from the attacks of those who are different, just as a hedgehog is protected by its covering of quills---a covering on which the attackers would cut their mouths and their caustic tongues. Such a covering was supplied by medicine---it was said that homosexuality is 'wealth medicine.'

Well, do you think that homosexuality among the Fang had completely disappeared by the Thirties, so that the writer who denied it was being completely honest? Or do you think it more likely that he was not sufficiently interested to ask the right questions of the right people. Certainly he made no great effort to survey the literature on the point. Clearly the Fang are as capable of being hypocritical as anyone. Perhaps by the Thirties they had learned to be more careful about what they said to Europeans. The Fang were not proud of their traditions of homosexuality.

Adult male homosexuality was not generally accepted by the Fang. Fang homosexuals had to have a cover story. They told the other Fang: we are not really homosexual; we are just making money. This, of course, is exactly what you might hear from an American street hustler, although he does not ask you to believe there is any magic involved in his way of making money. Perhaps the Fang, as much as any of us, realized it was just an excuse, but at least it was an acceptable excuse.

This is an example of a homosexual tradition and also an example of a tradition that not every in society thinks well of.

According to Fang belief, the bottom man has the wealth medicine and the top man acquires it. This too is coincidentally like American street hustling in which, contrary to what heterosexuals might expect, it is the insertive partner who expects to be paid. Tessmann writes: "In actual fact it might turn out the effect of the medicine consists in the mutual support the 'friends' render each other, based chiefly on the consciousness of common guilt and the endeavor not to let this guilt be known." The wealth medicine is called bian nkuma which is generally used as an euphemism for anal sex between men. There is also a down side to this. Fang think homosexuality causes diseases such as leprosy and yaws.

The Fang are great story tellers and you are likely to find some of their stories in any anthology of African folktales. One of the stories involves four suitors who arrive at Bongo's house to court his beautiful daughter. The suitors were Schok I, Schok II, Schok III, and Schok IV. The daughter liked Schok IV. The mother liked Schok III. The brother liked Schok II. Bongo, the father, liked Schok I. Night fell and when they laid down, Schok IV laid with the daughter, Schok III laid with the mother, Schok II laid with the brother, and Schok I laid with Bongo.

Schok IV tried to get romantic with the daughter, but since they were all in the same hut, the others made remarks to discourage him. Instead, he and the daughter planned to run away together, and the next day that is what they did. When it became apparent what had happened, Schok III flew into a rage, killed the mother, and fled.

But Schok II decided to stay with brother and be the brother's lover. Bongo wanted to make it up to Schok I, so he offered Schok I money and a wife. But Schok I refused, saying: "No, I don't want it. Rather, let it be that we shall always be together; when you urinate I shall urinate; when you defecate, I shall defecate; when you sleep, I shall also sleep with you in the same bed."

Those Fang! Such romantics! Anyway, that is the Fang pledge of eternal love. So Schok I stayed with Bongo and was his lover. They became quite rich. But this is, after all, a Fang story, and the Fang do not approve of homosexuality, so eventually one of the lovers died of leprosy and the other died of yaws, while the Schok who had murdered the mother got away scot-free. In stories, disease awaits all those whom the Fang consider to be sexual deviants, such as anyone who has sex in the daytime.

WaTutsi is probably the first African tribal name that many Americans ever knew. Traditional Ruanda was located in the area of modern Rwanda, Burundi, and parts of Uganda. The society was one, but it was composed of three ethnic groups in three castes. The short BaTwa lived in the forest and made pots, and for present purposes that is about all I have to say about the BaTwa, except that Twa is a name that is applied to short forest-dwelling people in various parts of Africa and does not always apply to precisely the same group.

The WaTutsi were warriors and overlords; they were a small minority but they ruled the state and they owned everything of value, which is to say they owned all the cattle. The BaHutu were farmers and raised the cattle. The BaHutu had limited rights in the cattle they raised, but these rights were ultimately derived from a Tutsi patron. The relationship between the WaTutsi and the BaHutu was similar to the relationship between the Norman nobility and Saxon peasantry of Twelfth century England, but it was cattle rather than land that was the basis of the Ruandan feudal system.

A Hutu man was easy prey and destined to be poor his whole life unless he had a Tutsi patron or sponsor. A Hutu man might work all of his life to increase cattle herds and end up with nothing to show for it. And on top of that, the BaHutu were regarded and came to regard themselves as ugly.

The WaTutsi, it must be admitted, are among the most beautiful people on earth, so beautiful that some Europeans wasted considerable effort attempting to prove that WaTutsi were some kind of dark-skinned Caucasians. The oppression of the BaHutu included not only economic oppression but the oppressive cultural judgment that they were ugly while the WaTutsi were beautiful. It was the tyranny of beauty. Today, of course, the Hutu majority has taken charge and is busy settling accounts. It is very possible that the last remnants of the WaTutsi will be wiped out.

In any event, homosexuality among the young Tutsi and Hutu men was describe as being very general and widespread. Anthropologists have tried to excuse this by citing a lack of heterosexual opportunity, but is hard to think of young men anywhere who had quite as much heterosexual opportunity. Both Hutu and Tutsi youth had the right to have sex with their own married cross-cousins, their brother's wives, and parallel cousin's wives. In addition, a Tutsi youth was often given a concubine, the wife or daughter of one of his father's Hutu clients. Moreover, the double standard existed in Ruanda and the male partner would not be blamed for his heterosexual affairs. Plainly, when Ruandan men had homosexual relations it was because that was what they wanted to do.

Two kinds of very close and secret relationships could be contracted between men. A Tutsi man and a Hutu man might have a patron-client relationship, which like feudal relationships elsewhere was not entirely one-sided. There was also a blood-brother relationship that could be contracted between any two men, regardless of their ethnicity. Partners in these relationships could not reveal anything that passed between the partners so it is impossible to say whether these relationships often had a sexual aspect, yet they were mechanisms that were available to men who might want to put their homosexual connections in a more enduring relationship.

African cultural themes have a way of turning up here and there, sometimes thousands of miles apart. The friendship pact is only one of those themes. The friendship pact in some places was well known to cover homosexual relationships.

The Nama live in and around the Kalahari desert in Namibia and South Africa. They are one of the so-called Hottentot people---"Hottentot," now regarded as offensive, is a European word coined to suggest the many popping sounds and clicks in the languages of these people. The special friendship pact of the Nama was called soregus and was contracted in a ritual involving the sharing of water---an act of special significance to a desert people. Soregus could be contracted by people of opposite sexes and even when contracted by people of the same sex, it did not always entail homosexual relations. But it often did join homosexual lovers. The most common form homosexual activity was mutual masturbation, but anal sex was not unheard of.

A world away, in the West African forest, a system of best-friendship also covered adult homosexual relationships in Dahomey, in the area of modern Benin. Dahomeans, after allowing free sex play among the small children, imposed a system of sexual segregation on adolescents that virtually guaranteed homosexual relations would occur. But Dahomeans strongly disapprove of adult male homosexuality. Adults had to keep their homosexual relations secret. Dahomeans had a well-organized tradition of "best-friendships," and since the partners could not testify against each other---and as it was well-known that best friendships were often based on youthful homosexual attachments---best friendships were the perfect vehicle for maintaining adult homosexual relationships.

Some secondary sources say that mutual masturbation was the only acceptable form of homosexual relationships in Dahomey. This is a misreading of the original sources. Mutual masturbation was the only acceptable form of masturbation---solitary masturbation being regarded as a sign of idiocy---but is was only one of the acceptable forms of youthful homosexuality. Female homosexuality was known to the earliest European visitors to Dahomey, several of whom supposed the Dahomey women to be the mythical Amazons.

Mutual masturbation, however, is another theme of homosexuality.

Colin Turnbull has written several popular books about Africa. Some mention homosexuality explicitly and others do not. Most of his books are best read between the lines. One of his books is about a people he called the Ik, who are better known as Teso, and the breakdown of their society in the face of famine. He records this scene:

. . . On one occasion I saw two youths on a ridge high up on Kalimon masturbating each other. It showed some degree of conviviality but not much, for there was no affection in their mutuality; each was looking in a different direction, looking for food; they were not, so far as I knew, even friends, and were no more frequently seen with each other than with anyone else . . .

Apparently Turnbull has missed the point. He wishes to show how hungry the Ik are and that the quest for food has undermined every social value. He thinks the young men are looking around for food, even as they get each other off, because hunger has displaced whatever regard they might have had for each other and even whatever enjoyment they might have derived from their activities. In fact, what Turnbull saw was one of the traditional forms of African homosexuality. C.A. Tripp explains:

. . . In several African tribes, it is all right for two men to masturbate each other in broad daylight, even while not particular secluded, provided they say not a word and are careful to avoid eye-to-eye contact during sex . . .

Anyone who has lived in a closeted athletic dorm is unlikely to require a further explanation of this behavior. The Ik men might have been happy to see some food, but they looked away from each other because that is the way it is done---that is the traditional form of this homosexual behavior.

Nowadays butch is in fashion. So I've mentioned a number of very butch African societies with very butch traditions of homosexuality. But seeing that was are among friends, I think we can let our hair down a little. How can I put this? Honey, if you The African Queen was just a movie with Bogart and Hepburn, you don't know the half of it.

The very first human beings on earth that we know of were African, but that is nothing. Somewhere, in the dawn of time, before taffeta, before chiffon, before Clairol and Revlon, the first queen put two brass rings on each of her fingers, made herself a miniskirt out of tree bark, swished down the main path of the village, and she didn't care what people thought because she knew who she was. Every one of us is better off today because of her and we would be better off yet if all the folks running around trying to look like lumberjacks had half her courage. I think it is very likely that the first drag queen in the world was African.

Drag has been noted in the following African societies: Gisu, Teso, Karamojang, Mbundu, Mossi, Nupe, Lango, Nyakyusa, Ovimbundu, Zulu, Ronga, Ila, Hausa, Otoro, Korongo, Mesakin, and Tanala, Bara, Sacalavas, and Tsecats of Madagascar. This list is by no means exhaustive.

But several things have to be said. First, anthropologists usually notice drag. A drag queen is relatively easy to spot, while respectable gentleman homosexuals are easily overlooked. In fact, many anthropologists don't seem to know what a homosexual is unless it is done up in drag. They may say there is one homosexual in the village. Now I ask you, how homosexual can you be if there is only one of you? The anthropologists meant the drag queen. They do not count the queen's gentlemen callers as homosexual. Or, if the queen is married to a man, the queen is the homosexual, but her husband is straight. Y'all have heard that one before, haven't you?

Second, some religious rites can only be performed by women. A straight man might get up in drag for religious reasons. It is a really good excuse, anyway.

Third, it is said that some impotent or cowardly straight men become drag queens. They understand what we have always known: it is better to be a first-rate drag queen than to be a second-rate man.

For many reasons, reports of drag may be out of proportion with reports of homosexuality in general. In any event, Africans appear never to have found drag as threatening as Americans today do.

Some of you have heard of berdaches, which were American Indian medicine men in drag. There are some such reports in Africa, but a lot of it seems to be that anthropologists look for berdaches in Africa. That is, they keep trying to apply American Indian ideas to African cultures, perhaps from the racist the notion that both were simple savages and likely to be similar. In only a very few cases in Africa is drag associated with special powers, although a drag queen might just happen to be also a witch or a witchdoctor.

In America toady, as we all know, transvestism, homosexuality, and transsexualism are three different things, and transvestites---who are likely to be heterosexual---are different from drag entertainers---who are likely to be gay---and both of these are different from what many of us are likely to do for Halloween or Mardi Gras. The situation is not always so clear-cut in reports from Africa. Sometimes the reporter appears to be ignorant of these distinctions. Sometime the African traditions do not fit readily into any of the Western categories.

The Lango were a people of Uganda. Among the Lango, the penalty for homosexuality was death. But there was a footnote. Here it is:

An exception is made in the case of a small class of men known as Jo Apele, referred to also as Jo Aboich, or the impotents. These men, being impotent from birth, are considered as the afflicted of god (jok obalog, god ruins them). They acknowledge a mortal father, but believe a divine agency operated at their fertilization (jok manywala, it was god who begat me). Being impotent, they have all the instincts and nature of women, and as such are recognized by men and women alike. They accordingly become women (dano mulokere, mudoko dako, a man who has become a woman). They wear the characteristic facial and bodily ornaments of a woman, the chip, the del, the lau; they wear their hair long, dressing it in ringlets like women's hair, and take women's names; they do all the women's work, observe women's clan tabus, and like women are debarred form owning property or from following men's pursuits such as hunting; they even simulate menstruation and wear the leaves prescribed for women in their courses. They appear in all respects to be mentally sound and are most industrious. Being women, therefore, in all except the physical characteristics, they are treated as such, and live with a man as his wife without offending against Lango law. Sometimes, but rarely, property passes on the 'marriage,' and their co-wives welcome him as a woman. The total number of such persons does not amount to fifty, but among the Iteso and certain Karamojan tribes such people of hermaphroditic instincts are very numerous."

Now, who were these girls? There were no more than 50 in a population of 17,000. That's far too few to jibe with modern estimates of the occurrence of homosexuality, even if we count their husbands---which of course the colonial administrator who wrote the report did not. And the number seems far too high to represent the occurrence of transsexualism as we know it. What can we make of "impotent form birth'? Do you suppose the Lango went around checking out infant hard-ons? Talk about your chicken inspectors!

Did you notice the gay consciousness? The other Lango call them the ones god ruined. But she calls herself jok manywala, god begat me.

Similar types of reports are found for many people of Africa, but especially for peoples of the Upper Nile form the Nuba mountains to Lake Victoria and of Madagascar. I know that a lot of gay people are ashamed of the unbutch aspects of culture and history, so I won't dwell on the queens of Africa, although I am proud of them.

Because I hope that many of you will be motivated to do some reading on your own, I will briefly answer some of the commoner excuses for African homosexuality that are found in the literature.

First, for the claim that Africans learned homosexuality from the Arabs or that Africa has been contaminated by Islam, the answer is: so what? Europeans often look for some kind of pure, timeless African culture. They suppose Africa was changeless and isolated until it was discovered by Europeans. But it was Europe that was changeless and isolated in the Middle Ages. Africa was always engaged in commerce and the dissemination of ideas with the rest of the world. Europe was the backwater and Africa was the cosmopolitan, sophisticated continent. Africans certainly could have invented homosexuality, and probably did so many times over. Or like any cosmopolitan people, Africans may have known a good idea when they saw it and adopted it as their own. Sure, Islam is foreign to Africa, but no more so than Christianity is foreign to Rome.

In any event, as Kinsey wrote: "The homosexual has been a significant part of human sexual activity ever since the dawn of history, primarily because it an expression of capacities that are basic in the human animal." The suggestion that homosexuality was foreign to Africans almost always contains the hidden implication that Africans were not fully human.

I have given a number of examples of homosexuality in cultures that did not approve of it because these examples are often overlooked. Nonetheless, by far, most African societies---like most societies throughout the world---were neutral or approving of homosexuality at least for some people at some times. It is not that apologists for sodomy are like slavers, but rather that compulsory heterosexuality goes hand-in-hand with colonialism.

Second, the suggestion that Africans learned homosexuality from Europeans is absurd for the reasons just given. Some of the "Bwanas" did keep houseboys, but so did many rich and important Africans, and many who were not so rich and important. The rise of the modern gay cultures in African cities is sometimes blamed on Europeans or Americans. The same thing has happened in Japan where many Japanese now believe that "gaibar" is a native Japanese word. The indications, however, are that gay culture is what it is because that is how homosexuality manifests itself in any industrialized, urban area. Certainly some details of fashion are heavily influenced by Americans and Europeans---but international styles of art an music just as clearly have African roots. Whatever the merits of the arguments about cultural imperialism, gay life is but a small part of the issue. I am not disposed to view the rise of an international gay culture as a bad thing.

If Kampala street hustlers pay particular attention to European and American customers, so do all African entrepreneurs, whatever they want to sell. Somehow the writers who are most shocked and distressed by finding African hustlers are the same writers who find nothing very disturbing about female prostitution.

Third, some writers in discussing traditional cultures, enter such remarks as: "Here there are no homosexuals; all of the men are married." Such a statement reveals that the writer has not inquired about homosexuality and knows nothing about traditional marriage. Traditional marriage has nothing to do with romantic love. If a homosexual man does not love his wife romantically, the same may be said for many of his heterosexual neighbors. Romance is reserved for the bush.

In traditional society, people do not have a free choice of marriage partner. The homestead is not just a residence, but is also the principal place of business. It is the office, bank, old people's home, place of worship, warehouse, theater, bar, and schoolhouse. In short, traditional marriages are business partnerships in which the whole community has a stake. The whole community participates in making the match.

Several societies of Africa provided a system of sexual privilege which ensured that women would produce children even if their husbands were impotent or sterile or simply not interested. Marriage between two females was widespread; those unions produced children to no one's amazement. In traditional society the contradiction between being a male homosexual and being a husband and father is very slight. In fact, until a few generations ago, the combination was common in Western society---as an analysis of any of the lists of famous or great homosexual men in European history will reveal.

Fourth, the excuse that the polygynists had monopolized all the women won't wash. Africa always has had an excess of women, such as we may see in America in the next twenty to thirty years. Some marriages by polygynists are to old and feeble women---sort of a social welfare system to extend to them the husband's protection. While there were some large harems, only a small percentage of men had more than one wife. In sum, the young man's potential mate usually was not in another man's harem, but was in her mother's hut because the young man was not sufficiently well-established to marry.

While the availability of women certainly influences the sexual behavior of some men---men in prison, for example---it has not been shown to affect the number of preferentially homosexual men in the population. But even if polygyny were the cause of African homosexuality, so what? Polygyny, even independent of the influence of Islam, is clearly an indigenous African institution and any homosexuality that arose from it would clearly be indigenous.

Fifth, when the anthropologist writes: "X says there is no homosexuality," that only tells us what X knows. We must then ask whether X would know if there were homosexuality, Kenyatta assures us that there is no homosexuality among the Gikuyu people of Kenya; that is, no homosexuality among his people. But if you read his book it becomes apparent that anticolonial hero Kenyatta may be, he certainly is a sexist pig. I don't know if there were any gay Gikuyu. But I know if I were a gay Gikuyu, I would have butched up my act around Kenyatta.

Many anthropologists rely on exactly one primary informant. Think of yourself as an African anthropologist, arriving in Washington D.C. in 1947, before the Kinsey report came out. You are there to study the natives. What will happen if you stop people on the street to ask if American men have sex with each other? Most likely, you will be punched in the nose. If you win the trust of an American informant, the information you obtain about homosexuality will be very much a matter of chance---before Kinsey few American, straight or gay, honest or not, had any idea of how prevalent homosexuality was.

Many of the African cultures listed as "no homosexuality" were reported by only one writer. In cultures with well-know traditions of homosexuality, it is usually possible to find at least one writer who denies it. This would pose a problem even if we could assume that investigators have always been entirely frank. But in fact, the record is full of deliberate cover-ups and admitted suppressions, which, as I have said, I mean to deal with more thoroughly at another time.

Meanwhile, there is ample evidence to show that---just as any fair observer might predict---that homosexuality is indigenous to Africa, just as it is indigenous to every other place that human society has been found. African and Pan-African homosexual people have not succumbed to the "white man's way," but express an entirely human and natural variation of human sexuality. Indeed, it is the black homophobe who has absorbed a false and hurtful European ideology.

Some African Societies with Traditions of Homosexuality.

Traditional name	Modern Name of Location	Principal Sources
Herero	NE Namibia	Dannert; Irle p. 58
Ovimbundu	S Angola	Mott (1984), pp. 15, 19
Mbundu	W C Angola	Hambly, p. 181; Westermark in Cory pp. 104-105 (Odongo=Mbundu subgroup); Mott (1984).
Kwanyama	SE Angola	Evans
Ovambo	N Namibia	Evans
Kongo	N Angola	Mott (1984)
Mongo	C Zaire	Hulstaert pp. 73, 87, 88.
Mpongwe	Gabon	Tessmann p. 105.
Fang	S Cameroon, N Gabon	Tessmann pp. 23, 131-135.
Banaka	Cameroon	Westermark in Cory
Bapuka	Cameroon	Westermark in Cory
Ijo	Nigeria	Rachewiltz p. 283.
Hausa	Nigeria	Abraham p. 624.
Dahomey	Benin	Herskovits
Mossi	upper Volta river, Ghana and Burkina Faso	Tauxier
Fanti	Ghana	Christensen p. 143.
Atonga	W Lake Malawi	Johnston p. 409, see also p. 404 of 1st edition.
Wolof	W Senegal	Gamble pp. 55, 80.
Nyakyusa	W Lake Malawi	Wilson
Plateau Tonga	Zimbabwe	Smith & Dale vol. i, p. 373; vol ii, p.74; Colson pp. 139-40.
Sacalavas	Madagascar	Lasnet
Tanala	Madagascar	Linton pp. 298-299.
Bara	Madagascar	Linton.
Tsecats	Madagascar	Westermark in Cory
Lango	Uganda	Driberg.
Iteso	Uganda	Driberg; Turnbull (1972); Lawrence pp. 23, 25, 31, 257-59, 283-84.
Gisu	Uganda	LaFontaine pp. 34, 60-61.
Karamojong	Uganda	Driberg.
Otoro	Nuba Mts. S Sudan	Nadel (1953).
Heiban	Nuba Mts.	Nadel (1953).
Mesakin	Nuba Mts.	Nadel (1952).
Korongo	Nuba Mts.	Nadel (1952),
Nama	Kalahari desert, Namibia and South Africa	Falk pp. 209-210.
Ruanda	Rwanda, Burundi	Maquet
Ronga (aka Thonga)	S Africa	Junod, vol. i, pp. 98, 492-495.
Zulu	S Africa	Krige pp. 276, 277. HRAF FX20 ZULU 2:NGUBANE, x, 88, 142, 143; HRAF FX20 ZULU 3:VILAKAZI, 126; HRAF FX20 ZULU 7:KOHLER, 78; HRAF FX20 ZULU 10:BRYANT, plate.
Zanzibar	Zanzibar	Burton vol. i, p. 419; Prins p.99.
Modern Kampala	Nairobi	HRAF FL19 NAIROBI 11:CARLEBACH, 4.
Urban Zaire	Zaire	Turnbull (1962), pp. 39-41, 43, 125.
Mombasa	Mombasa	Strobel, p. 166.
Nandi	Kenya-Uganda borderlands	Huntingford pp. 16 19, 119; Oboler.
Tswana (Kgatla subgroup)	Botswana	Schapera (1938) p. 278.
Nuer	S Sudan	Evans-Prichard in Radcliffe-Brown p. 390; Evans-Prichard (1951) pp. 108-109.
Nupe	NW Nigeria	Nadel (1942) p. 152

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